Death Crown Inheritor Aya Review (Patreon)

DCI Aya is the latest incarnation of the Aya “clone” from the wordless cartoon in back of the rulebook. Her story has been flirting for a long time with the concept of the thirteen Death Crowns (more Christian references) and in this set not only do we get new game content, but we also get to see one of these Death Crowns, not worn by Aya, but carried by her.

I still do not appreciate 6 game content items being packaged with a large oversized miniature that has no game impact at all. But this one at least is different from the small size one and provides some never seen before in universe lore development. Aya is not wearing the Death Crown but she is carrying it while being carried herself.

The interesting details in this are mostly surrounding the hand; which has fingers tipped with heads reminiscent of the Lion God and appears to support itself using vines. This is not a dismembered hand either; it is a gigantic version of the Hand Parasites that appear elsewhere on monsters. Aya herself appears to now be somewhat vampiric in nature, with a single sharp incisor poking over her bottom lip. But I do want to point out that there is a stylistic difference between the way it is done on the art when compared to the sculpture. So the context of Aya's expression lays split between daydreaming and a blood driven hunger. This failure to match expressions is something that happens a fair bit; the sculptors that APG employ have a harder job when it comes to faces than the illustrators.

What we can somewhat conclude from this though is that the Death Crown in question here seems to be tied to the Hand Parasites. As a quick bit of speculation, perhaps Aya is destined to become an Entity in her own right? Seeing how an individual can progress through the world and be eventually turned into a power would be an interesting twist on Aya's story, especially because the expectation is Aya will die at the conclusion of her tale. Because that's the ending for everything Adam writes.

As such, I do think there is more worth in this large scale sculpt when compared to just about every single previous one we've had bundled into game content. It's got no intrinsic game value but it does have world building worth. Even writing that, I still firmly believe things like this should have their own release, not be bundled with cards that do not reference the giant miniature at all. I guess we should be grateful it's not like the Valentine's Day Twilight Knight cake miniature.

The smaller minature has Aya holding both of the new gear cards that come in this set; notably the base is “sculpted” and it has portions of Aya's old Vagabond Armor deposited on it. I like the reference, I think that it's a failure in execution because the rest of the base is plane and flat. Everything else about the model is excellent; it does provide a viable play piece to represent a user of the new gear. It is however not a good replacement for providing separate copies of the bow and quiver that can be fitted to other miniatures. I personally don't use them, but some people play with male archers.

So that's the miniatures taken care of, they're a little better than the normal 35mm + 50mm pairing that we often get in this style of content, but not enough to represent true value for players as opposed to collectors. Lets get to the cards.

This content is a selection of upgrades for the Phoenix Quarry. The simple version is this: You add the Eon Heart to the options that the Phoenix can draw in its Legendary AI card slots and put the rest into the Pattern, Rare/Phoenix Gear and Strange Resources archives (in the box). Then when you eventually draw the Eon Heart while fighting a Phoenix, if you beat it you also get the Undying Heart Strange Resource:

In addition to giving you the two patterns as per the card (Reading the Card Explains the Card, sort of), this is also a Perfect Organ, meaning that it can be used for any recipe that wants an Organ, a Perfect Resource or a Perfect Organ. So it's never useless; not even if you've drawn your third one in a campaign, there are still places you can use this.

That's one of the better places where design has improved in recent years, a lot of care has been taken to make sure that resources just don't become “useless” and pile up in the settlement until they're tossed away for generic uses. Let us quickly look at what Eon Heart does before we get to the pattern gear:

The first thing to note is that this is a legendary card that's not Deja Vu; which is huge, especially for those of us who lost Deja Vu down the back of the couch by “accident”. Jokes aside; this turns the legendary card pool from 3 to 4 (or 2 to 3 if you're a player who likes fun instead of having to bring Ageless survivors to Phoenix fights). It's very welcome and also a challenging card in itself as it makes the monster harder to wound, harder to critically wound and deliver a lot of damage through “uncancelable” reactions. I would have preferred a replacement Deja Vu that exorcised the previous card from the game, this is a substitute that doesn't solve all the problems Deja Vu causes to the game's mechanics, but it does at least make the card show up less.

The two pattern cards allow one to craft a bow and arrows. You'll almost always craft the bow first; the exceptions to that being if you hit a second Undying Heart before drawing two Perfect Bones; or if the Butcher is turning up and you are concerned about loss of resources. So we'll look at them in the preferred crafting order.

Heartbow

Crafting Cost: 1x Undying Heart, 2x Perfect Bone, 1x Phoenix Whisker

With three perfect resources required this an absolutely massive crafting cost; which means the bow has to be powerful so it can justify using three perfect resources and a phoenix specific resource. In order to figure that out we should compare it to other bows. Now lets get the obvious out of the way, this is not better than the Sunshark Bow with all its melee synergies or the Ink Blood Bow with its absurd Deadly. But is it better than its closest competitor; the Arc Bow?

Crafting Cost: 1x Phoenix Whisker, 1x Wishbone, 1x Scrap

We can see that these two bows share the following; a Phoenix Whisker in the crafting cost and cumbersome. The Arc Bow has a baseline statline of 1/6+/9/Range 6/Slow/Cumbersome; while the Heartbow is a 2/7+/7/Range 4/Cumbersome.

The largest deviation between the two lands in the activated ability; for a puzzle right red, puzzle left green and a blue affinity the Arc Bow gets +2 Range; putting it at 8 range which is a staggeringly important breakpoint for ranged combat. The Heartbow in contrast requires puzzle up and down red to gain Sharp as long as you have no (completed) blue or green affinities in your grid.  Sharp is on average 5.5 Strength (count it as +5/+6 strength if 0.5 that upsets you) resulting in a strength that is at a minimum 8 and a maximum 17. It also loses cumbersome, which helps make up for that short range and lets you be a more mobile close range archer, but then it butts up against the Sunshark Bow, which blows it out of the water completely. It's not even close; no bow comes close to how powerful the Sunshark Bow is at short range, just like nothing comes close to the Ink Blood Bow at long range.

The Heartbow also has the otherkeyword which keeps it away from saviors, a minor issue, but there was potential to use this with Red Saviors; but that's not the case now which is a genuine shame. Red affinities have a very weak design space when compared to green and blue, but this doesn't help that situation much at all. Honestly, Red needs some new portion to its identity, not just gaining strength/sharp/auto-wounding/bleeding (three of these are basically strength). How about accuracy APG?

The 2 speed does make a difference here; 2 speed is absolutely as good as 1 speed at worst and in most cases it's superior (However I'd take 1/6+ over 2/7+ in most situations, 6+ accuracy matters a lot). So the Heartbow does deal more damage if it is activated. However; I've tested this out against the Arc Bow and the truth is that the Arc Bow isn't much weaker than the Heartbow; it's certainly not so much weaker that you would hunt the phoenix over and over for the Heartbow when you've already got what you need for an Arc Bow.

If you land in a situation where you've got the Perfect Bones saved up and you get the Undying Heart this is a good weapon to craft, but the substitute Arc Bow is good enough that unless you're still missing Phoenix resources for something like Phoenix Armor you should just make do with the Arc Bow which is still one of the top 4 bows in the game (behind Sunshark Bow, Ink Blood Bow and Heartbow which I think takes the number three slot now).

In short, the juice is worth the squeeze; but only if circumstances favour you and give you this bow, normally the Arc Bow will do everything you want, while also giving you access to a bow that can 'Dash Cancel' traps due to its long range.

Heartstop Arrows

Crafting Cost: 1x Undying Heart, 2x Leather, 1x Phoenix Eye

That exciting new ability Campaign Limit means this arrow may only be fired 5 times during the entire campaign. That's right, say hello to an even worse version of Limited Ammo!

The arrows themselves are a 1/4+/9 affair that cause a knock down if you wound the monster. The huge issue here is they don't have Sharp, they can't get it from a bow, that's not how ammo works. So what we actually have here is a scuffed Pulse Lantern on a stick.

On paper the statline looks like it works, but in practice what you have here is something that's not really viable without a lot of support and the monsters you want to use it against? They have Indomitable; so the Knock down is even less value. There's no Deadly, no Sharp, the trigger is on wound rather than on hit. This is just something you're going to pass on crafting a lot of the time unless you have a second, spare Undying Heart kicking about and think 'what the heck'. But even when crafted it is going to be hard to find room for this without the Sunstalker's quiver. Which means you already have access to two excellent bows; so there is less value involved in hunting the Phoenix. 

I do see one area where the Heartstop Arrows can work alongside the Sunstalker expansion and that is where you ignore the Heartbow and are collecting Phoenix Armor in order to use it with the Sunshark Bow. The Heartbow (and Arc Bow) do not synergize with Phoenix Armor; but as the Sunshark Bow does; you may want to get the Heartstop Arrows for a build using Phoenix Armor, Sunshark Bow and the Sun Quiver. You have the spots to spare and you don't mind that the Heartstop Arrows have a lack of affinities. The thing is; you'd be better off hunting the Dragon King in tandem with the Sunstalker (if you own both) and there is the Dragon Bite Bolt which can cancel attacks in a similar fashion to the Heartstop. Speaking of which...

There are a few neat tricks that this can pull; because it isn't cumbersome you can use it with a surge to knock down a monster during a flow step on their AI card. But that is contingent on wounding, which is a tall ask for a 1 speed weapon that doesn't hit 90% of the time.

If there were affinities on this ammo; especially red ones that connected to the Heartbow and Arc Bow I would be able to assess this one a bit better. However, as it stands, its performance just isn't great because of that low strength, you really need the Death Dice to make good use of this (Retinues help and are quite fun, but that's just one specific showdown out of three campaigns).

So yeah, I'm not very high on this one when I could instead use the on hit Claw Arrow, the ridiculous Dense Bone arrows (even the updated, nerfed version is powerful), the potentially broken if abused Hollowpoint Arrow, the Deadly Vespertine Arrow or the reliable “We have sharp” Sunshark Arrows. It's better than the Dragon Bite Bolt I guess? But the Dragon Bite Bolt can do a similar trick to monsters by wounding them to inflict knockback 5 – pushing them out of range of their target. Sure this bolt has a lower strength, but it's unlimited use.

As such I think the best part of this entire expansion is the new Phoenix AI card. The Heartbow is in truth held back by its weapon keywording; if this had been a whip, dagger, axe, sword or club then it would have really opened up the game a great deal, especially as a whip. Instead it's forced to compete with three of the best general weapons in the game (Arc Bow, Sunshark Bow, Ink Blood Bow) and it doesn't carve a niche out for itself due to its tremendously generic design - it is a good allrounder, but this is not a game with space for an all round jack of all trades because there are just nine slots on a gear grid and most of the time five of those are occupied by armor. You have to be a big heavyweight 'best in class' weapon to shake things up; another bow just doesn't do that.

Final Verdict

If you play this game on a moderate budget I think you can safely pass on this one; as it does not represent good value for money. However, if you do not own the Sunstalker expansion; you might find a home for the bow if you enjoy a more mobile short range shooting build over the reliable, static long range sniping one that the Arc Bow offers.

Final Score: C+

As a brief aside; DCI means Detective Chief Inspector in the UK, and abbreviating Death Crown Inheritor to DCI is very amusing. I am very tempted to play a police station settlement in the near future because of this. Also thanks again to timberwolfl for ensuring I can review this content as fast as possible.