Beautiful and Enduring – The Polishing Lantern (Patreon)

Society is now one polished horde, formed of two mighty tribes, the Bores and Bored.  – Lord Byron

I still remain with an overall negative opinion in respect to the Legendary Card Pack, but having such an opinion doesn't mean that all aspects of the pack are worthless. As we saw last time, the Scrap Lantern, despite its simple design, is a powerful and interesting tool for any settlement. This time we're going to explore its older cousin, the Blacksmith location lantern – The Polishing Lantern.

 This lantern has four relevant aspects to it:

• It is a Lantern for Late Game People of the Lantern campaigns
• It has a red affinity in the correct direction
• It has an activated ability that interacts with finesse weapons
• It allows for players to ignore Early Iron

Before we get into the nitty gritty of the possible builds, I think it is very useful to explore each of these four facets so you can see why they matter and how they all come together.

Before the 1.6 pack came out, players of the core game were very limited in their options for lanterns once they reached the stage where it was required that every survivor departed with a lantern. Gear grid spaces are at a premium; and in 1.5 the best choices were all located in expansions (i.e. Pulse Lantern – Gorm, Sunspot Lantern – Sunstalker). 

This is not a good way for a game to be designed because the core game experience is the first one that most players get, if you give a bad impression at that point, you're not going to get them returning for more games later on. Having effectively no decision space for lanterns while also forcing them to be used is not engaging for players. 

While the Survivors' Lantern did do work with its selection of affinities, this was not a satisfying situation because players had few choices to make. One of them had to take the Final Lantern (unless you somehow managed to get it archived) and everyone else typically took a Survivors' Lantern. Good affinities can help, and the Survivor's Lantern has three well positioned affinities – but it wasn't enough.

When life puts you through a tumbler, it's your choice whether you come out polished or crushed. – Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

The Polished Lantern has but one single affinity, but it is in the optimal position for its colour. Left facing Red Affinities are more valuable than any other direction because they interface with the Monster Tooth Necklace. While more affinities are always better than none, a well directed affinity is worth so much. Because the Polished Lantern connects to the Monster Tooth Necklace and gives 50% of the activation requirements for this item, you only need to secure a single additional affinity in order to get the full +2 strength bonus. As we've looked at in the past, +2 strength is often all many weapons need in order to allow them to become viable against a higher level of monster than they'd normally be used against.

In addition, this direction allows the Lantern to combine with Lantern Armor, and it seems clear that the main intent of the design is to force it as something that helps Lantern Armor activate its boots. Lantern Greaves + Polished Lantern + Monster Tooth Necklace/Scrap Shield activates the Greaves and that matters a lot for not just Lantern Armor, but also Warlord Armor (we'll look at that some time in the future).

This build is now so simple and complete that all you really need to do is slot in a Beacon Shield and your weapon of choice. It's more or less a plug and play build. Personally I'd be using the Skullcap Hammer, because given a choice I'll go for a weapon that has the club keyword, but with expansions that's going to be either the Riot Mace (taking the top position in order to remove the ear plugs ability) or the Gloom Hammer.

Despite Ear Plugs the Skullcap Hammer still ends up a (2/6+/5/Sharp/Perfect Hit) weapon and is an incredible choice for a tank (except for that heavy keyword).

But if you have access to promo content you can instead run the stronger Scoopy Club.

This time the weapon is a (1/3+/7/Sharp) Club that becomes a super version of the Skullcap Hammer if somehow it gets filled. This is one of the strongest set ups for the Scoopy Club (the other uses the Tool Belt from the Manhunter).

We also can't overlook that this weapon also has interactions with the Finesse Keyword and that it Cancels Early Iron. This means that the various Lantern Weapons become viable where as before they were not due to the high percentage chances that your attacks would do nothing at all. While the Early Iron patch is an ugly and crude fix for the problem, it can't be denied that it works, and when combined with the rest of the package it removes the need to run Rainbow Wing Belt/Lantern builds anymore.

The set up activation using the Polishing is actually worth it a great deal, this ability is one of the best things that came out of the 1.6 Update Pack not just because of its interaction with Finesse, but because it ALSO allows survivors to polish each other's weapons in a sort of 'Knight/Squire' style interaction. This means that you don't need the Polishing Lantern on your build to take advantage of this, another survivor can do the polishing for you and you can use the pure accuracy buff that comes with the Scrap Lantern. There needs to be far, far more gear cards like this, we have insufficient direct interaction between survivors – there's Spear/Shield Master, Sunspot Lantern/Ink Sword, Gloom Hammer/Blue/Green Ring, Gorn, Infernal Rhythm and a few things like Bandaging other survivors, but on the whole we're starved for this kind of team play in KDM.

Fire burns brighter in the dark -- The Hunger Games

If the game had more of this stuff, more things which interacted with other survivors in a meaningful manner, then I think the game would only be deeper and richer as a consequence. Honestly if you get the opportunity, you should absolutely praise APG for the design of this finesse ability on the Polishing Lantern. This is the kind of thing that they should be making more of, the entire lantern is an object lesson in how support items should be designed and we need to encourage more of this kind of design (and less of the Scrap Rebar or Scrap Bone Spear designs). If KDM was filled with designs like this lantern I'd be critiquing less and instead we'd be discussing not just single survivor builds, but pairs and even full teams.

So, to finish up, lets take a look at some builds which use the Early Iron and Finesse parts of the Lantern. We'll start with one of the weapon types which benefits the most from the Polishing. Daggers.

The entire goal of this build is to stick in the blind spot and surge to polish before attacking with the Lantern Daggers as a (4/6+/7/Sharp) pair of weapons, with this playstyle you'll also be able to take advantage of the Dagger Mastery when appropriate. You can be a bit conservative and run just one dagger in order to have a shield, but if you do that, you should probably Oxidize it first.

Leather Armor is the choice here because you want to slink around near the monster and the armor points it gives should be sufficient for most mid/late monsters if you're not the target most of the time.

The unfortunate side of this build is you can see it's not doing much except attacking, but that's the breaks when you need to run not just the Polishing Lantern, but also the Monster Tooth Necklace and a Paired set of weapons. There's just no room for anything else, which means we need to ensure that our tank and tank gear like Monster Grease is elsewhere in the hunt party.

The Lantern Sword version of this build looks a little bit like this.

Before we finish I'm going to share three other builds which use expansion/promo material. The first is probably the fairest and most fun swordsman in the game, the second is the hardest hitting powerhouse you can get and the third is I think the best all round damage dealer available.

The affinities are again an absolute mess here, but that's because of the constraints put on the build. The important thing however is that this build not only uses the Scrap Shield effectively, it's also a build that doesn't care how skilled your survivor is, they're always a Weapon Master (and it's not broken like the Black Sword version of this build). This is what I'd use the Erza 10 Year survivor miniature for.

This build hits like an absolute truck. Its main issue is that it is using Phoenix Armor and the affinities on that thing stink. But the goal here is to have the highest possible strength in the game.

Assuming that you have Harvestman (which can be gained through the Spidicules/Music Innovation); this 9 move survivor is able to polish with a surge and then charge 9 spaces to attack a monster up to 11 spaces away. It will then hit with a weapon that has 21 baseline strength (plus sharp and a potential for Barbed 4) which puts it at close to the peak of strength in this game – only the Sunshark Bow and Black Sword can compete with those kind of numbers. It is however a very clumsy build and loses a lot of its strength when it can't charge. So it's best against monsters that like to flee and it wants a deep pool of survival.

The more reserved and sensible version of this build uses Dragon Armor and it'll look a little something like this.

Dragon Armor's Leap only has a 5 space range when compared to Phoenix's Charge, and it only gives +5 strength, but it also provides +2 accuracy and that is a huge benefit. One of the scary things about both these builds however is you can't fit the Beacon Shield in without disabling the Barbed 4. I think that is actually a fair trade-off and I'd be doing it because of how weak Barbed actually is – but for demonstration purposes I wanted to leave these builds at peak power.

And that's a brief exploration of the Polishing Lantern, a card that demonstrates sometimes APG are capable of designing exactly the right card for the situation and one that should be praised and elevated wherever possible!