Atmospheric Change/Lump of Atnas - Christmas Satan Game Content (Patreon)

So over on the discord the first pictures of the promo in Christmas Stan have dropped and it's a strain card with a new basic resource. Here's the pictures:

(The back of this card has the basic resource back).

So, the strain event triggers off either the Flower Knight Vespertine Bow 'punishment' event, or Story in the Snow (which is the Christmas Nico promo content) and it permanently changes your settlement deck by removing Heat Wave, which is the following card:

Here are the strain rules as a reminder:

So that's a permanent change.

On one hand, I'm kind of happy that this card gets archived because it's a rather annoying one that just makes heavy armor such as White Lion Armor weaker. On the other hand, Heat Wave is actually more interesting than the other heavy armor punishment settlement event 'Cracks in the Ground'. 

The thematic change of this strain is absolutely fine, but the permanent removal of heat wave leaves me a little cold about it. Kingdom Death was not designed as a legacy game from the start and the strain system at the moment does not mesh well with the rest of the game. Permanent changes like this one, that remove content forever, are not super engaging without the rest of the strain system to judge them by. So my feelings are slightly negative, but that's tempered by the knowledge that we're not seeing a complete system here.

The Lump of Atnas, is interesting. But there's one thing which is already an issue, the art clearly shows that this is a cube, the card text refers to having 5 Cubes of Atnas - and that would suggest this card should be called 'Cube of Atnas' but we can't be sure. Things like this are very frustrating to deal with and if I could actually manage to have a dialogue with Adam instead of constantly being ignored, well I could find out if the cube is an upcoming Atnas specific resource or if it does mean 'Lump of Atnas'. At the moment I'm going to assume that it's the latter, which means that the resource does something if you choose to collect it.

This new basic resource is very interesting, it's super flexible, covering all generic crafting categories apart from scrap and it also has a mechanic that helps out settlements that are struggling with population. You can sit on 5 of these cubes (which you can only gather once per year at the moment) and then if you don't spend them, you get a new survivor each year who's only slightly damaged. I think that's a pretty cool trade-off and design, plus I also imagine we'll see that this has integrations with Atnas when that nemesis monster is released. 

All in all, it's a pretty cool promo, not perfect, but a lot more balanced than the previous Stan promo 'Hope Stealer' (which I have STILL not received).