A Primer on Deck Scouting and Manipulation (Patreon)

For a fair while now I have been wanting to visit this portion of gameplay in extensive detail; but I have been putting it to one side due to the hope that we'll get the GCE shipping announcement. However, one cannot wait forever so I am going to simply pull the trigger on getting the first iteration of this out because it is still a deep enough topic to be worth diving into and then revisiting when we see what new options shake out of the tree with the arrival of the first meaningful new content from APG in years.

Scouting is a generic term for all ways that you get to inspect a deck in advance; in games like this information is king because knowing what your automatic opposition is going to be doing in their next act allows for a large range of options and control over the situation. The level of scouting can vary, both in the frequency and the amplitude. These factors are based upon what options your pool of cards; be they gear, fighting arts or other plus your personal knowledge and playstyle.

More than anything else controlling the monster with various manipulation and tools is a personal choice without a right answer. Some players are comfortable with extreme spikes in randomness and they will choose to go without any forms of scouting, intending instead to let power and efficiency rule the day. At the opposite end are players who obsessively need to control every single aspect of the showdown because they just cannot let go. Between that we'll find a huge variety of play styles; including people who are so familiar with some monsters that they do not feel the need to scout except for key purposes and people who are so determined to be a unique hipster that they eschew any form of scouting because of the perceived notion that it is 'meta'. There is no one true or correct path, success can be found through many routes and the important thing here is not justifying your particular style; but instead understanding the advantages and disadvantages that it offers. One can spend hours manipulating every single aspect of a monster's behaviour in order to farm every single resource they possibly can from a low level monster if that is what they find engaging, but equally as long as they are respectful about it; other players are welcome to call such activity as not engaging for them. Different hats, different heads.

I've written this before, but I do want to really stress that this is your game; it is out of the hands of the designer and what he envisions the game to be should not matter to you. You are crafting your own world through your decisions; once the Big Black Box shipped out to the players this game and its world was given to the players.

With that little diatribe over let us look at how the mechanics of scouting work in card deck games and understand why they matter!

In just about all modern (as opposed to traditional) card based games one of the key elements is drawing cards. The more cards you draw; the more options you have and the more power you can leverage. The monster machine (to personify the automatic AI decks here) typically gets assigned a random selection of cards it can used from a slightly larger pool that creates the overall species behaviour patterns. This selection is further randomised by shuffling and is then used as its “active behaviours”. However every monster also gets a Hit Location deck and this one is not constructed from a variable pool of options; instead it consists of the same cards with little variation outside of shuffling.

There certainly was an opportunity for KDM to have randomised hit location decks constructed from a pool of options in the same way as the AI deck; hit locations could have been assigned Basic, Advanced and Legendary options and specific numbers of each pulled together to create the deck. We could have even seen variable traps both in the same level of power (say you draw one of three randomised basic traps); a growth in the power of trap cards or even variable numbers of traps  as the monster's level goes up. But that is not the case here; once you learn a hit location deck you know exactly what goes into it; the only real question is the order they come in. The reactive behaviours that each member of a given monster species undergoes are less individual than the active ones.

When looking at a form of deck scouting the various key elements you want to absorb and understand are; the form it is packaged in, if it is active or passive, how deep can it scout and does it allow reordering or other forms of manipulation.

The Form of the Package

This one can be quite a significant matter; what the scouting comes bundled with can make a huge impact on how easy it is to justify as a part of your campaign. Scouting tied to armor pieces can force difficult decisions where players are asked to bring along outdated armor sets to fights where they do not provide sufficient protection. The Rawhide Headband is a prime example of this; so the community has figured out workarounds that include using Bows (as distance can compensate for low armor by reducing the odds you are targeted); beefing up the armor points it supplies via shields and rolling armor plates or using the aforementioned rolling armor as a vehicle to carry it into the late game.

Alternatively it can be built into a piece of gear that has the accessory keyword or is simply just an item. The Cat Eye Circlet, its bigger brother The Necromancer's Eye and the weird cousin Trash Crown all land within this (Trash Crown is a bit of a mechanical oddity as we'll discuss later) all land within this category.

Then we have other options; one of which comes in the Infernal Rhythm Strain Fighting Art – this is a little tricky because it requires tying to a specific survivor (and unlocking it in the first place) in addition to using a musical instrument. As the time of writing this article however you can use Sculpture to store strain fighting arts and ensure that you always have access to this powerful ability. The Harvester remains an ever present issue of course; but the Gorn and Grim Muffler can both solve the noisy keyword by not having and ignoring it respectively.

In the future we may see other possibilities where you can gain scouting; settlement locations, innovations, survival actions, abilities, armor set bonuses, weapons and so on. There's a whole host of potential design area that can be explored there and that's just the low hanging fruit I've described here.

As for how valuable the shell that the manipulation comes from; the order I would rank the current options from most powerful to least powerful are:

• Fighting Art
• Item Gear
• Armor Gear
• Weapon Gear

This is down to how easy they are to activate; how well they scale and how many slots you have available. There are indeed only three slots for fighting arts, but most survivors do not need all three of those slots to function; having one filled up with Infernal Rhythm is the lowest cost you could ask for – but it is difficult to unlock due to the randomised way that you draw fighting arts, Romantic can only do so much.

Item Gears come next in the rankings because they occupy a gear slot, but they are not bound to the extra requirements that armor or weapons have, both of which experience limitations due to their fixed statistics that need to scale with monster power. However Armor remains ahead of Weapons because there are ways to avoid damage that do not require armor points (survival actions, good positional play, dedicated tanking and similar); in contrast weapons often require the survivor to be very close to the monster, risk reactions and tend to need to Perfect hit or wound to be able to trigger their scouting abilities. There can be powerful weaponry options, but ultimately Perfect Hit triggers and/or Deadly are the biggest factor in how strong they can be because you eventually need to either scale with or bypass the monster's toughness in some manner. Because Luck Tokens do not land on monsters too often and the Lucky Charm is a cheap, generic source of +1 Luck. Deadly can carry a weapon a lot further than any other property on it.

It is worth briefly mentioning that Cycloid Scale Armor, Dragon Armor, Phoenix Armor and Lantern Armor (Clubs only) can all extend the lifespan of scouting weapons and a very high strength or high luck survivor can even use any weapon they desire. So there are always options if you have a freak of a nature in your settlement.

Active/Passive

There is no argument whatsoever that passive scouting is in every way superior to active ones. Active requires you to use an activation to get that value out of it, but passive just needs to be present during the showdown. Currently passive scouting is restricted by having smaller depth numbers than active ones, which is understandable because at the moment most individual survivors can only scout one or two times a round and there is such a thing as diminishing returns. You could theoretically have a group of survivors who all individually use their own scouting item before surging to attack and that will provide a lot of high quality attacks for certain, but at the expense of defensive options (Dodge, Dash, Surge to Block).

Depth of Scouting

The strength of scouting is based in information, knowing what order a deck is stacked in is an incredibly powerful tool even if you are not altering it. There's a lot of card based magic tricks that involve the order the deck is in. This is simply because knowledge is power, and knowing what your opponent is going to do before they do it gives you a huge advantage, especially in a turn based environment where you can take the time to consider the best options.

The deepest scouting card available at the moment is the Blue Lantern which when activated can potentially see the order of every single HL Card in the deck. It is limited with sentient, a once per showdown clause and it inflicts 2d10 Brain Damage when used, and lacks any affinities but that's a worthwhile price at times.

Note, if you have a bad memory there's nothing wrong with taking a note of the card order, or as a shortcut I sometimes flip each known card face up (maintaining the order), this means that I don't have to rely on the various memorisation tricks used by magicians and can instead concentrate on the part of the game I prefer to engage with. It's not Kingdom Death: Memory after all.

Reordering/Manipulation

Most of the time this is tied to the depth of scouting because one cannot reorder cards if they have not already looked at them. However, it is worth noting that there is always card 0 in the AI deck to consider. They're right over there with the labels “Basic Action” and “Instinct” on them and there are gear cards that can force monsters into not getting to draw and instead having to move straight to either of those two baseline moves. Sometimes this can be a scary moment, because some Basic Actions & Instincts are designed to punish players for not letting the monster get to harm them (This is a prominent and well executed feature in Aeon Trespass: Odyssey and it is well executed. I absolutely do not want to let the Primordials undertake their routine actions because they are very punishing.)

There are also other forms of Manipulation such as Persistent Injuries or negative attribute tokens and these tend to modify or blank monster actions instead of directly interfacing with the decks.

Last up we'll take a look at prominent examples of each type of Scouting package available in the game and highlight the goals of the given package to the strengths and weaknesses of each option. This will prepare us for a future with the Gambler's Chest in it where we will (hopefully) have other options to choose from.

Active Hit Location Scouting

Signature Card: Cat Eye Circlet – White Lion

Others: Infernal Rhythm (FA); Necromancer's Eye, Blue Lantern

As the face for this entire playstyle, Cat Eye Circlet garners both love and destain in equal amounts; however, there should be absolutely no disregarding what this style of item gives to a team. While it is completely true that the highest skill level of play in KDM revolves around knowing the hit location deck contents and odds of given types of hit location draw in an incredibly detailed fashion (or having great notes). However, for the cost of an action you can learn all of that information and have knowledge against a monster you've never faced before.

This kind of item can be a crutch, especially if you overuse it to the point where you end up farming all the resources from a given monster; but used as a tool for tactical attacks remains one of the best spots where this item sings.

I'd like to briefly note how interesting the Blue Lantern is, yes you take a massive amount of brain damage, but that's what Accept Darkness is for, and what you get in exchange is perfect information about the contents of the deck until the trap card is reached. It's a stupidly efficient option, if a little held back by variance.

The Fighting Art Infernal Rhythm is the other super interesting member of this list. It is however somewhat weaker than the other options because of the issues surrounding instruments. On hunts you are forced to either risk being deleted every basic hunt roll (1% per roll, which is a lot higher than it sounds when you can't reroll a 10), or you have to use the Grim Muffler Pattern card in addition to an instrument or you have to run the Gorn (which is an instrument but not noisy). That results in the compression that you gained from having your scouting in the fighting art slot being lost because you still need a gear card (two if you don't use the Grim Muffler). There are side benefits to the various instruments and muffler though, so it works out in the end and the additional actions that Infernal Rhythm provide ends up being valuable enough that I'd take Infernal Rhythm every time despite being locked into certain builds for it.

Passive Hit Location Scouting

Signature Card: Wisdom Potion – Gorm

Other Cards:

It seems that in design passive scouting was weighted against slow; and as we've discussed before it is clear that slow was costed as a downside, which is why the Wisdom Potion is so cheap and easy to gain. However, its combination with slow weapons is amazing, and even two speed weapons really appreciate it. It also makes a mockery of the Butcher's “Fast Target” trait, which is a great bonus given that it is possible to craft this before the Butcher's first appearance.

On top of that, Passive scouting gets better when combined with active scouting, which means that there is no redundancy with having both this and the White Lion's CEC. It's just one of the best items in the game.

Hit Location Filtering

Signature Card: Trash Crown – Dung Beetle Knight

Others: King's Step (vs. King's Man)

This is something that can look really scary for newer players; but trust me, when you learn to lean into this and/or also employ heavy spear use there is little to be concerned about where increasing the velocity that the deck depletes. The trap is just a price to play for reshuffling and if you are skimming your way through the deck in order to hit the juiciest hit locations for your crit resource farmers then it's worth that price.

Filtering is different from scouting because it sends some of the hit locations to the discard pile; this ensures that you can completely ignore some of the less desirable options and just deal with the prize targets. This style of play works even better when combined with the next category and it's an excellent alternative for hipsters or players seeking to broaden their playstyles.

Hit Location Shuffling

Signature Card: Crest Crown - Phoenix

Others: Scythe Specialisation

Always remember that unless a card's text specifically states otherwise, when you reshuffle the Hit Location Deck the discard pile goes back into the deck before making that shuffle. Which means a full refresh on juicy resource hit locations plus a reduction in the odds of hitting the Trap for the reshuffle. Nice and powerful, which is why this is only on mid to late game options, but things may break wide open if we get access to a reliable early game Scythe.

Self Hit Location Scouting

Signature Card: Telcirc Eye Tac - 10thAnniversary Pattern Gear

Others: Crossarm Block

The Telcirc is little more than a meme at this time; but it is absolutely worth mentioning it because the mechanic itself has some real potential due to how it smooths out the hits you will be taking and cancels terrifying monster abilities like Headhunter. However; needing to activate it and getting zero other benefits from the Telcirc outside of a decent blue affinity leaves it in an awkward slot. I appreciate the joke design of this one, but outside of being amusing it's currently a waste of cardboard and ink. Crossarm Block has a bit more utility when combined with Gloom Bracelets – however because the Gloom Bracelets can be destroyed from damage this is a tricky act to succeed with.

AI Deck Scouting

Signature Card: Rawhide Headband

Others: Frog Doggles, Blue Ring (Passive), Rooted to All (Passive – People of the Stars only)

In war information and logistics are the key indicators of success; in KDM gear, innovations and survivors are your logistics; Rawhide Headband is your best source of information. Not only does it let you see what the top two AI cards are; but it also lets you reorder them. This has both defensive and offensive applications; you can use this at the end of the survivor's round in order to make sure the monster's act is as beneficial to the survivors as possible. Alternatively you can use it to “prune” the AI deck by placing undesirable AI cards to the top of the deck before attacking to remove them with wounds. It is this second method that makes self healing quarry monsters so vulnerable to being farmed for their resource decks; but even without that boring playstyle it's incredible at neutering the danger a monster represents by the time they reshuffle their discard pile ready for the second pass through the deck. Most AI deck scouting requires activation, but the Blue Ring is an exception to this – it presents a huge amount of damage mitigation when used. The difficulty with this mitigation is that it is hard to quantify, the ring is also prohibitively expensive, requires three blue puzzle affinities and is only triggered on the turns where the Blue Ring's bearer gets to be the monster controller. This all means that it is usually only used in tandem with the Gloom Hammer or the Green Ring (where you run it on a hybrid tank/dps in order to get benefits on 2 of the 4 survivor turns). As for Frog Doggles, we've not seen much of them so far, but we do know that they scout the Frogdog's stinky smell deck.

AI Deck Denial

Signature Card: Riot Mace

It should never be overlooked that all monsters have one additional card “in” their AI Deck; the basic action/Instinct card, and some basic actions are so awful for the monster (i.e. Screaming Antelope) that locking them into it can break a showdown right open. Riot Mace is not reliable at doing this, but with sufficient luck it can contribute a lot by “scouting” the deck into reading as if it was empty for a turn. The Riot Mace also benefits from being a club so Lantern Armor is always available to synergise with it and it also has a blue affinity that slots onto the Lucky Charm. It is absolutely the current pinnacle of active AI control.