Introduction
Similar to the Crimson Rogers, Sea Dogs are high on story significance but low on competitiveness, so they also are receiving additional attention in Cabora’s Coast. The identity of the faction is having crew that have below average stats, but make up for it with tricky interactions. These interactions revolve around conduction boards and cannon attacks in the same turn which is a lot of work for a payoff that is less effective than if they just had a more focused niche from the beginning. Let’s take a look at the Cards in Cabora’s Cost for the Avalon Crew!
Berek's Destiny
The first Sea Dogs card is Berek’s Destiny. Starting a Captain Attachment is obviously powerful, and this card helps give strategic direction right out of the gate. Sea Dogs are notoriously short of flexible crew with adventuring; want a strategy that requires some? Now you have access to “Captain”. Do you want to complete a lot of adventures? The Word of the Vagabond is a great option. Want to double down on Berek’s card advantage? Letter of Marque begins the game in play. You can even pull one of the many Secret Society Memberships to go for something really outside the box!
Enchanted by the Sidhe
This card was originally designed specifically as a helper for Captain Bonnie McGee. The final iteration isn’t exclusively usable by her, but still makes a lot of sense to introduce with the Sea Dogs specific cards. Bonnie occupies a weird design space. If the opponent doesn’t have a villainous captain, she is worse than almost every other captain in the game. If the opponent is playing a villainous captain all of your crew get a massive stat boost, which is great, right?
The truth is, just having slightly bigger stats isn’t enough to win games on its own, and the value of stat bumps varies wildly depending on the stat. For cannon and swashbuckling, more is obviously better, you can inflict more and absorb more hits. However, the impact of increases to the other three stats is not a clear cut.
Hiring crew is one of the most important parts of most matchups, and if your crew can afford to hire more with their existing Influence and Bonnie helps smooth that out then great. On the other hand, if you can’t reliably afford your crew without the increased influence your deck won’t function for some significant portion of time.
The same granularity applies to sailing and adventuring; is your plan to play a bunch of crew that have 1 less Sailing than your ship’s move cost? Are you playing a bunch of adventures and actions that will always require multiple crew to pay for? This decrease in efficiency is bad news throughout the game. This is exactly what Enchanted by the Sidhe is trying to help, by giving your deck consistency. Bonnie can reliably do her thing, and you can deckbuild with that in mind.
However, Enchanted by the Sidhe isn’t just a Bonnie aid, this card can be played by any heroic captain to enable a variety of strategies – cards like Another Betrayal, A Killer Revealed have text in every matchup. Enchanted by the Sidhe can even mess with opponents cards like Stand Together! The secondary text on Enchanted ensures that, even in matches with a naturally villainous opponent, you have your very own copies of flogging to keep the punishment flowing.
Aindriu McKenna (Experienced)
Last but not least for Sea Dogs, we have an Experienced persona of Aindriu McKenna. Typically experienced crew have a large stat increase from their inexperienced versions. Aindriu McKenna skips this increase, and instead gains a very strong ability. This card was designed to give Sea Dogs a unique, focused, strategy different from other factions. While they have fantastic options for mitigating hits and stalling the game, they lack a strong way to close out the game. If your sea Dos deck is having that same problem we’re hoping that you will give Aindriu McKenna Exp. a try!
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