Ratings Scale:

5 – All-star. You’ll never be sad to open a deck with this. This card is good without any support.

4- Good/Great. Works in the vast majority of decks, provides good value and requires low support.

3- Okay. This card provides either low value or inconsistent high value. They need support but their high swings are important

2-Situational. This card requires a lot of setup, requires specific things to fire that are unlikely, or just isn’t very good.

1-Trash/Dead card. Also a 5 star card in Reversal.

*Note I am not reviewing reprinted cards

Shadows has bee dominant in the meta since Keyforge released over a year a go now. Stealing is just inherently the best amber control mechanic because it advances your gameplan while slowing your opponents. AOA saw a significant power drop in House Shadows but they proved to still be very impactful. Will the trend continue into World’s Collide? Let’s find out!

A. Vinda: 3

This is cute but It just isn’t reliable enough to be very good. Still it’s a 4 strength body so it’s possible she sticks around a while and breaks some wards or slowly pings something down.

Breaker Hill: 2

Does it feel like this guy should have deploy to anyone else? His ability is very relevant if he sticks around but he never does. Your best hope is to have a ready shadows creature to immediately steal 1. He even kind of got pre-nerfed by FFG ruling that you can only activate one action in the case that a creature has multiple actions.

Hit and Run: 3

There are a lot of powerful play abilities in World’s Collide so its reasonable for hit and run to be meaningful. Especially good with Ronnie Wristclocks who is making another appearance this set or Hugger Mugger.

Hock: 4

Destroy an artifact and get paid to do it. Seems like a great deal. There are quite a few impactful artifacts in WC so hock is pretty reasonable.

Hugger Mugger: 3

This guys value is kind of all over the place. He always captures one which is fine but not great. I appreciate that you don’t have to be behind in amber and just behind in keys. That said you’re going to draw this guy at the wrong time a lot. His steal ability is turned on for very few turns in the case of a close match where the 1 steal + 1 capture really matters. I’ll get blown out some game by somebody God drawing him at the exact right moment and have to remember I wrote this :p

Inky Gloom: 2

I feel like this card could have had an amber bonus and it would have been just fine. It’s just a strictly worse persistence hunting.

J. Vinda: 3

Even though the upside is higher than her sister when her ability actually kills something J is a two strength that usually gets removed before she does anything.

Kymoor Eclipse: 3

Another card which could have probably used an amber bonus. I think it’s pretty comparable to Lost In the Woods but is much worse because it has to hit exactly your flank creatures. You’ll be able to control what’s on your flank pretty easily but your opponent’s side of the board is another story.

Mug: 3.5

There’s a lot of capturing and exalting going in WC and Mug is a flexible option in that it allows you to steal a captured amber off of one of your creatures or possibly return your own amber and do a little spot damage to one opponents creatures.

Pestering Blow: 3

A question I’ve been asking my self “is enrage better or worse on average than a stun” and I think the answer is worse. This is a decent card but a lot of times your opponent can work around the enrage.

Symon: 1

I wouldn’t put much trust in Symon. He’s a non-elusive 1 strength creature with an okay ability. Also just to really pile on here I don’t much care for that art. I know the reason most of you read this blog is for how much you value my opinions on card art.

Trust No One: 3

I want to pose a couple scenarios for you.

Scenario: 1 You are behind on board so much that you trigger the steal 3. Then nothing you will play out of shadows is probably going to catch up even after stealing 3 Unless your playing exactly TMTP + Trust No One.

Scenario 2: You are ahead on board so you just steal 1 which is fine but usually not game changing.

Scenario 3: You play Trust No One after getting board wiped or and you still just steal 1. Basically this is just steal 1 80% of the time and when its not it probably doesn’t matter. I never thought I’d say this but I prefer swindle to this.

Chain Gang: 3 / 5

I try not to give varied ratings but I kind of have to for Chain Gang . How much value you get off of Chain Gang is pretty much directly proportional too how many Chain Gangs and how many subtle chains are in your deck. With 1 copy of Chain Gang and 2 copies of Subtle Chain your probably at a 3 in power. If you can get 2 copies of Chain Gang and 3+ copies of subtle chain your probably at a 5 rating in terms of how impactful that is.

Fidgit: 3

Not quite as good as Murkens because he only plays actions and requires a reap. Has a big upside compared to Murkens in that you can keep firing off his ability if for some reason he lives.

Into the Night: 1

Man this is worse than Inky Gloom. I like that they even added a situational part that makes it a little bit worse. Compare this to Fogbank and you’ll see why this card is pretty trashy.

No Safety in Numbers: 2

Reasonably hits one house most of the time. It sadly also hits your side of the board too though. This is just too situational to be really useful. You won’t even clear all the creatures of the house it hits which makes me really sad about this card.

Spike Trap: 2.5

Okay so I’m in danger of sounding like a broken record here but I don’t like things that hit my side of the board too. Though I do like that its omni at least. I think I prefer Kymoor eclipse to this because it 100% removes my enemies flank creatures.

Subtle Chain: 4

It’s just shadows Mind barb and just like Mind barb it’s better in multiples. One random discard is and you gain an amber. Gets kind of scary if you have 2-3 of these in hand at a time.

Whisper: 3

I talked about this in the Saurian review but a creature on average is probably worth 1 amber. So Whisper like stomp allows you to trade a creatures average value for to kill it in fear that its going to get over the average amount of value. I’m tempted to rate Whisper a little higher because they do help you get rid of some of the really sticky or big minions but it all evens out because your opponent gets to respond to the creature before you can use it.

Finch Cloak: 4

There’s moments where Finch Cloak can’t be used as it will useless because you cant afford it’s ability to trigger as it will put your opponent in check. That said I think that most of the time your probably pretty happy to let your opponent gain 1 and you gain 2 or even better reap 1 steal 1.

Gambling Den: 3

There’s a creature in Star Alliance called Navigator Ali who lets you set and set the order of the top 3 cards in your deck who this cards pretty amazing with. But in all honesty there aren’t a lot of ways in the game to ensure what card is on the top of your deck and so this is pretty risky unless your on 0 amber in which case why not!?

Hunter or Hunted: 4

This card’s awesome. I really love the sort of predator vibe of the art. A+++ flavor. The ability is pretty solid as well. You always get to ward a creature and sometimes you get to steal a ward of an opponent’s creature.

Keyforgery: 5

This card is fun. I used to play a lot of Android Netrunner and it reminds me of that game a lot. Probably one of the few times in the game where having a diversified hand is better than having most of one house for you. A real skill tester when your playing against this.

Manchego: 2

Man it’s hard to make this ability go off and that’s kind of a bummer because its pretty interesting. It seems like mechanics which care about how many cards are left in deck/discard are something we are going to be seeing more of based on this card and Grim Reaper which I will talk more about when I review anomalies.

The Quiet Anvil: 2

Worse than Universal Key lock because it’s easier to ensure making your opponent forge for +3 cost than get your opponent to ignore that your going to forge for -2. It’s very good if your opponent only has amber control that cares about you being over 5 or 6 though.

The Shadow Council: 2

This is the worst leader by a large margin. If you don’t draw them early they will 100% be dead by the time you get them to the center. They are really scary though so can cause your opponent to possibly take sub-optimal lines to remove them.

Weasand: 1

Man…this cards bad. They appear determined to not let Shadows be good this set. You’ll be really lucky if you ever get a single trigger off this guy.

‘Plant’ Procedural: 2

You can randomly receive a ‘plant’ of any house featured in your deck with Shadows. They all do the same thing just the house and art changes. I really don’t like any of the procedurally generated cards they just aren’t very interesting. Even in the best case in which your plant manages to live to fire you just get 1 amber for that house being called. The payoff just isn’t there.

House Shadows Final Rating: 2 crying elves

Man am I surprised by this. I understand wanting to make Shadows not quite so dominant but they took the nerf hammer to them pretty hard. I want to clarify with my rating of 2 its still possible to get a decent Shadows pull its just relatively unlikely in comparison to the other houses. The stars of WC Shadows are definitely Ronnie, Brend, and Too Much To Protect if you get mostly cards from COTA and AOA you’ll be all right but the vast majority of the WC Shadows is just extremely situational or low value. I think one of the biggest problems is a severe lack of good board control options in Shadows. You need them to be paired with something that can keep board to even have a chance.

Honestly in general you’ll be much happier to see just about any other house. That doesn’t mean every Shadows deck is inherently bad I just think you’ll have to get fairly lucky to pull a top tier deck that also has a top tier shadows package.