Two-Fisted Tales of the Secret War: Unaligned

Part 1 of a Shadowfist set review

Overall score:

Two Fisted Tales of the Secret War is the latest Shadowfist Set. It is the so-called Pulp set, featuring detectives, damsels, poison, and such other 1930's delights. Overall, it’s an excellent set: each faction is balanced in the number of new cards it gets, and most of these cards are good and useful. Rather than just repeat minor variations on old cards, many of these new cards offer entirely new abilities. We get a lot of utility characters rather than strong hitter characters, and a lot of funky new abilities on the hitters.

This is the first review of many, offering in total a card-by-card rundown of the entire set divided by faction. For copyright reasons I won’t be printing the text of the cards, just the titles--it may help to have a second browser/tab with the spoiler in it--there’s one on the official site, www.shadowfist.com, in the spoilers/card lists section.

Unaligned: General

Not a lot here, but Spear of Destiny makes up for that. Otherwise, cool, but nothing amazing.

Lateral Reincarnation – The new promo, I didn’t know where to put this entirely. Guess we have to wait for the new set to find out what it does.

Public Enemy No. 1 – An offensive state that gives your characters ambush against the subject. Looks like a handy way of getting rid of a big hitter in the absence of something like a Nerve Gas.

Spear of Destiny – I didn’t get the deal with this one, it seemed over-costed. Then, my friend pointed out to me it didn’t end at the end of turn. Although it requires four of any one resource, making it hard for duel-faction or peacock decks, it let’s you pretty much devastate one location for two power, turning and cancelling pretty much everything there. Yep, blanked rules text, which makes this the ultimate counter to everything. I expect it to start shaking up the game soon.

Tommy Gun – Similar to the old Sub-Machine Gun, but with a more awesome chrome, this is anti-weenie stuff that’s good in gun decks. Line them up, and watch as it unturns and turns repeatedly, taking out a weenie each time.

Unaligned: Site

The new sites seem to mostly revolve around traps and hidden tricks. This might shake a metagame up a bit. Aztec Pyramid works well with the set, but I can’t see any of these shifting old favourites for long.

Aztec Pyramid – A very odd site, with a rather weak body, is made better by the large number of coin-flipping events in this set. Using this site as a base, it’s probably rather possible to create a coin-flip based deck that deals a lot of damage with the Jammers “Are you Feeling Lucky?” or makes invincible attacks using the new Dragon’s card “Tough as Nails.” Tricky, and hard to make powerful, but it could be fun.

Booby-Trapped Tomb – A decent front-row site that’s very in-theme for the set. Would be fun in a theme deck, otherwise, just a generic front-row.

Casbah - A Non-Feng Shui site with limited usefulness. It does allow you to steal power in response to a frequent occurrence, but at the cost of two power and having a weak front row site. Plus, players often spend all their power leaving none to steal.

Hidden Tomb – Not a particularly useful front row site unless used in conjunction with the right cards--then it rocks. Decent body and the ability to play cheap or free defensive states on the site makes for a very defendable front row site so long as you can keep the states coming. Synergises well with a lot of the Monarchs cards in the set.

Seedy-Dive – A weak non-Feng Shui Site with the ever-useful ability to unturn characters. This one works on Hoods, so worth considering in a Hood Deck

The Blue Moon Club – A fairly all-round site that is overall quite good. Its body is ok, it has a deterrent effect in the front row that can kill any weenies thrown against it, and it has a special ability letting it generate extra power for a total of 33% extra each turn (and more if you can fiddle with the mechanics). I like it.

Unaligned: Tech

Tech users get some neat stuff here. A few new guns that like to toast and stuff, and a handy utility character protection card.

Disguise Kit – This has a cool theme, and basically turns any Foundation Character into a poor man’s Scrappy Kid. There’s bound to be a combo in there (such as giving the foundation character a Boundless Heaven Sword, turning into a difficult to intercept hitter, and a perfectly possible combo for the Architects). At the same time, limited usefulness unless you build a significant portion of a deck around it.

Disintegrator Ray – One power for one Fighting isn’t a good deal, so the real point of this card is toasting characters. It’d be a bit difficult to shut down a deck with it, but you might be able to hose a mid to late game splash of another foundation. Also can prevent Dragon’s character recursion, which is nice.

Electro-Gauntlet – A fun state let down by the inherent vulnerability of states. If you can get it to stick around long enough to build a decent charge, it can be quite a damaging shock to sites or a big character, but it still takes at least a couple of turns to equal the power of a Pump-Action Shotgun.

Invisiray – Paying one power to prevent a character from being attacked may sound like a bad deal, but then you put it on a utility character with a useful ability. The result is a character that can be as difficult to kill as an edge. Pity it’s both rare and requires tech, though I can see it well in a Reascended deck with the new utility characters.

Tesla Lightning Blaster – Free to play, costing one to invoke, this card has a double use, not only for destroying big characters for cheap, but also as effective punch-through. Character intercepting? Blast him.

Tesla Lightning Cannon – Put on a site, and blast away at anything that comes close. A deterrent as long as you have power, and works best with a lot of tech in your pool.

Unaligned: Chi

Only two cards for Chi users. Like most chi cards, they can be tricky to use most effectively, but they have their uses.

Fortuitous Chi – Most useful in a theme deck with lots of characters sharing Designators. Comes with a mixture of Drawbacks and Advantages--it might be useful on either your own Characters or your opponents.

Secret Wisdom of the Ancients – I like this card. It’s an edge that lets you put Chi cards on the table and play them from there. It’s useful to keep a range of options available while still keeping other stuff in your hand, but at the cost of other players knowing what you have.

Unaligned: Magic

Only two cards for Magic users as well, though one is quite powerful and the other may be very useful.

The Ivory Goddess – This is pretty cool. Put it on a character, and you get minus one site to win and plus one card in your hand. Excellent for as long as you can keep it around, since states are rather volatile, and whatever you put this on is going to become a target really quickly.

The Ruby Eye – Defence against having your attacks messed with, but requires an upkeep cost. I’m not a big fan, but add to your decks to taste.

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Written by JamPaladin on March 11th, 2005