Fantasy Flight recently created a Taboo list for Arkham Horror: The Card Game. In the words of latest FAQ, the Taboo list “is designed to craft a healthy balance between investigator power and scenario difficulty, and to enforce shifts in deckbuilding environments over time.”

There has been much discussion on the community about the rights and wrongs. I wanted to know just how “popular” the Taboo cards are on ArkhamDB.com.

As you can see in the list above, only 3 of the Taboo cards appear in the Top 20 most popular cards: Machete, Dr Milan and Elusive.

Where are the others?

Quick Thinking is ranked 52 (1.07 decks per day)

Delve Too Deep: 62nd (0.98)

Sleight of hand: 127th (0.55)

Streetwise: 140th (0.49)

Higher Education: 155th (0.43)

Key of Ys: 171st (0.37)

Switchblade: 226th (0.25)

Scrapper: 240th (0.22)

Ace in the Hole: 298th (0.13)

Below is a chart showing how much all the Taboo cards are used:

Of course, looking at all the card pool hides much more interesting insight. For example, what if we just look at the XP cards. Where are they?

Ah ha – now this is interesting: three of the most popular XP cards are now Taboo-ed. Clearly players who adopt the Taboo list will be looking further down the list to make great new decks.

There’s more to find, and I’ll continue to dig into the data and see what happens over time with the Taboo cards.