"Highlander" decks in most games are interesting, because you are ending up with far more variance in exchange for some benefit.

This is an especially interesting highlander card because it is paying you off for rolling highlander... with consistency?

Lets take an opening hand mulligain, assuming a 33 vs 28 card deck with 2 weaknesses and 1 signature, where we ignore the weaknesses and are just trying to hit one, super specific card at all costs.

In a standard deck, if you 'hard mulligain' for the card, you have about a 54% chance of finding at least one copy.

In an Underworld Support deck, you only have a 35% chance of getting that copy.

This means this card isn't great for increasing your odds of getting your one specific card 'by default.' Deck thinning turns out to be fake, yet again...

OR IS IT?

Lets look for situations where it works better! Because this is not an unsalvageable situation

Firstly, there is the case where you have alternatives that are viable. Weapons are a great example. If your deck is normally running two copies of a weapon (As some of you psychos are!) and running Prepare For the Worst, and you happen to get the tutor rather than the weapon early, you have an 50% chance to find one copy in your 9 card search right away, and a 70% chance if you wait 3 turns (and draw 3 cards) before searching to see it in draws and searches, normally. But if you run both Prepare and Prepare with Health, and two DIFFERENT weapons, you have an 65% chance to find it right away, and an 80% chance to draw it 3 turns later.

Some pretty meaningful improvements, if not drawing your weapon in that scenario screws you, you will be salvaging 1 in 10 games that way, roughly. But you will notice the effect is more pronounced if you do it earlier. So as long as you can do this for most of the tools in your deck and bypass the highlander rule, you can get noticeably more consistent both draw to draw and for searches or other bulk draw scenarios.

Deck thinning is only fake if the cost is not worth the consistency, or if you are doing something dramatic and silly to get rid of the cards. In reality, deck thinning is VERY real (every card drawn is deck thinning after all), the question is 'does only running singletons of my cards noticeably make my deck worse more than it helps? It is going to be up to how dramatic the cost of running highlander really is in your classes. Mystic and Guardian Rogues have a lot of redundancy in their best tools, while a rogue hybrid (or anyone with access to level 0 rogue cards!) who have more specialized cards, like Survivors, may struggle to find alternatives for everything. It also limits more niche strategies: Sure guardians have a lot of weapons, but if you are going something more narrow like bless synergy it is harder to find replacements.

And, oh hey... wait a minute... isn't there a Rogue Mystic who doesn't mind having a diverse set of abilities because she can recursively play them as long as she can consistently get them into their opening hand, and who would love to more consistently nab one of her 3 copies of her signature?

Sefina goes from an effectively 38 card deck, down to a 36 card for the purposes of her opening hand. This means, despite her upshot of drawing 13 cards in her opener, her chance of seeing any specific cards she took two of is only 60%. But a lot of her staple tools have viable alternatives. Sure, everyone loves Shrivelling but would it really be such a nightmare to run armageddon in a non-curse deck if it let you ensure you open with a 'weapon' almost 20% more often? And that is just the really bad replacement! Sixth Sense and Rite of Seeking are downright fairly competitive with each other, and there are plenty of fantastic rogue and mystic event cards to populate your deck with to ensure you can cast your bag of tricks.

Sefina is probably most likely candidate for this card for that reason, though it isn't impossible for others to find value from it if they have enough fantastic options, and at the same time I am not holding my breath for this to be a "Sefina Standard" either.

The most 'valuable' aspect of this card though, is to do what Highlander as a format in MTG was originally intended to do: Force you to use more creative decks and explore more of your collection. While it is possible to really math out the benefits and say "Oh wow, a 14% higher chance to get the card I want in X situation" it is always going to be questionable if the increase in getting A tool for the job is better than always getting THE tool for the job.

The real value in this card, and why I suspect it will be popular no matter how good or bad it is, is that it is almost a voluntary taboo that forces you to really evaluate every funky 'offbrand X' in your collection, with juuuust enough reward behind it to make it a pleasant experience... and, maybe, just maybe, if you are a really clever deck builder, a card that can actually give you an advantage.

I'm a horrible numbers cruncher, I'm just here to say that I have been having a TON more fun with this card than I thought I would. I originally paired it with Short Supply in a Bob deck, but once I corrected that error it's been a blast. It adds a fun wrinkle to deck building and maybe offers a mathematical advantage? Who can say, that would depend on a number of factors. But it's certainly a tincture if you're having deck-building humdrums, and since you can take it from the start in many a investigator, it can really shake up an entire campaign (or two). There are also some particularly horrible includes for this card (Sefina comes to mind, considering it makes one of the worst weaknesses in the game even more difficult to deal with), and I do intend to give some of them a try.

Either way, I think you will find an unexpected smile on your face if you give this card a try, at least once you've managed to rack up the 40 experience points or so you need to make it worth it!

I was incredibly skeptical of this card.

To me it seems to say "draw more weaknesses and lose deck consistency" I am someone who is struggling to keep the other permanents out of my decks but this one I felt would never win my heart....until...

Bob Jenkins

Playing bob you realize just how many good cards for him are either limit 1, unique, exceptional or just don't stack, reducing your deck to 25(or 28) doesn't seem like a lot but then you look at one other card he can take, short supply, after your opening hand you have 23 cards left in your deck, ten go straight to your discard pile, what are the odds you get items (for scavenging), improvised events or Weaknesses in there (a weakness you see in your discard pile is one you don't have to fear).

you lose 1 rogue slot, but you gain the ability to double the value of the other 4, so that feels like a win.

your deck consistency goes way up (scavenging, resourceful, scrounge, Lucky Cigarette case all benefit from this set up)

so anyone like me who couldn't see the value in this try it in bob with short supply, and don't think of the one game you end up seeing your signature in the discard pile, think of every game where you got to add 10 more clever tools to win the game with and not compromise your deck consistency to add them.

For beginners wanted to try this card without mathing out probabilities, see if your deck's starting cards are :

• Missing a few or even a single big, expensive piece, that would instantly make everything shines. (As opposed to missing multiple smaller pieces, that gradually adds up over multiple scenarios.)
• Depending on seeing your 1x signature card, which there may not be many search tools to get it.

If so, this card can be thought as early campaign upgrade booster just like Down the Rabbit Hole. That key card maybe so expensive (exceptional or not), probably right after the first scenario you can only purchase that one, it may not be enough to feel like you have changed the fate of your deck. It is until the 2nd or 3rd scenario that things started to finally click.

But with this card, you can really feel an impact of your big purchase early even if it is a single card added.

My solo Monterey Jack deck really needs Michael Leigh (high 5 XP cost) to make his whip deal a potent 3 damages, and there are other whip supporting tools available already. I am just waiting for this Michael Leigh guy.

After the 1st scenario I got 5 XP minimum and purchase Michael Leigh. I have been managed to consistently see this 1x copy of Michael Leigh before trouble comes and in turn it helps me get much more XP in the 2nd scenario onwards.

It may lose out an advantage compared to decks without it later on, like Down the Rabbit Hole. (Other decks gets better than you when they started purchasing 2x of leveled cards), but since you get good faster than others, you are already useful to the team to help them through early scenarios.

An interesting card in Edge that was completely decimated by the release of Scarlet Keys.

The initial choice is whether you want to lower deck consistency to increase deck consistency. I'm not going to pretend to have run the numbers to see whether it's worth it for that, but Rogues' specialisation in Exceptional cards adds some amount of efficiency for finding those.

But then, rather than supporting the 'highlander' archetype a little more, Scarlet Keys came very close to destroying any reason to run this card at all.

A consistency tool like the similarly-named Underworld Market comes close to blowing it out of the water. It isn't hard to stack 8-10 weapons in that deck and focus on economy or niche cards in a fighter. It's a little harder to do so with investigation tools or evasion tools, but not impossible. And you can mix and match any of the three. The problem is that this is very hard to reconcile with Underworld Support, which would make your Market deck far, far less consistent.

Then we have the other Rogue consistency tool, Friends in Low Places. As a customisable, running a single copy makes it considerably less cost-efficient, costing 10 to fully upgrade one copy rather than two. On top of that the card itself benefits from running multiples of the cards you want to catch with it. As it only digs six (or nine) cards, if you can run two copies of what you're searching for, you're much more likely to hit it. Even in the best case of using it to dig through a smaller, Underworld Support deck, for exceptional items, you've still made it much less efficient to upgrade.

There's also the other two inefficient upgrades, Damning Testimony and Honed Instinct. While Damning Testimony isn't especially bad with Support beyond the inefficiency, using Support completely locks you out of what's probably Honed Instinct's best upgrade, letting you run it as a pseudo-myriad card.

On top of that, there isn't a single card in Scarlet Keys that makes you look twice at Underworld Support positively, except, perhaps, the limit-one Dirty Fighting, or wanting to quickly cycle Clean Sneak and not waste a whole 8xp on two copies. The only exceptional in the set is the Market itself. Even the high-cost ally is non-unique, so there's little reason not to buy two of him if you want him. Something like Embezzled Treasure is much better if you can manage to stack two copies.

It's especially a shame because the other permanents from this cycle got at least a small boost. Down the Rabbit Hole is great with customisables. Salvage is a pretty considerable boost to Short Supply decks. Guardians at least got a handful of interesting items which you can consider with Geared Up, and Vincent is an excellent new user of it regardless. Though there's little for Forced Learning decks, you can at least make the case that an extra investigate tool or a way of searching for your key cards can add some consistency to such a large deck.

I really would like to see a card or two boosting the 'highlander' archetype, perhaps even explicitly, in the next set. So here's hoping.

Cons:

• Some cards that you would want 2, like permanents: Charisma, Another Day, Another Dollar.

Pros:

• Parallel Skids and his 20 card deck.
• Exceptional rogues as mentioned earlier.
• It doesn't limit bound cards (Hallowed Mirror, Occult Lexicon)

Other:

• Interesting that using In the Thick of It+Versatile+Underworld Support nets you 2 traumas and nothing else.
• Rogue - Survivors can start with 15 card in deck, but as all card is limited to 1 instance and 10 are discarded don't know if there is a good combo for this. (Underworld Support+Short Supply)

Might be a stupid question, but does this affect Myriad cards as well? I see no reason why it would not do so, just wanted to check if someone knows something I did not consider...

---Fill the stupid 200 characters limit ;)