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As Chris Farley has commanded: a thread about Spirit Island
- Thread starter Kalir
- Start date
Here's the third Incarna spirit in the set, and the second really Strife-focused spirit after Grinning Trickster Stirs Up Trouble. Wandering Voice Keens Delirium leans way harder into the control aspect compared to Trickster's preference for topdecking and building a grab bag hand of Minor powers. Wandering Voice Keens Delirium is capable of outputting a massive amount of Strife each turn, and every Strife it adds to a non-City piece lets it move that piece for free, allowing it to easily and safely pile up a bunch of pieces into a single land that can't actually do anything to it.
This huge amount of Invader control is tempered by the Incarna, which makes it impossible for Dahan to cohesively respond to the Invaders if there is ANY Strife on them. Wandering Voice Keens Delirium is, according to the lore, indiscriminate in the same way as Ocean's Hungry Grasp or Volcano Looming High. The difference is that the Dahan know enough about how to avoid it that they don't suffer nearly as many of the effects as the Invaders do. It's remarked that Wandering Voice Keens Delirium's many disparate sounds don't stir the leaves or ripple the water, but that that just means the spirits residing there simply know not to listen to it.
The big weakness here is the presence tracks. Incredibly weak NRG gain and below-par plays serve as a hefty price for the sharp amount of control you can output, and your solid growth options don't do much to offset that weakness.
This is probably the spirit I've been least looking forward to covering, and that's almost completely due to my own apprehension about the subject. I'm not a very fearful person in this day and age, and generally, if I do enjoy a horror-themed game, it's in spite of the elements and due to the gameplay (Inscryption and Darkest Dungeon 2 are both pretty entertaining, and I've even been playing Baldi's Basics a bit lately. No I do not have to justify myself on that one).
If I do have one fear these days, it's of losing my mind. Not in the loose sense of just going ham at situations, but of the breakdown of the cohesion that makes me me. I could imagine any number of physical or social calamities to befall me, and while they'd all be unfortunate, I'd still at least know I could handle them. How can I handle something that completely subverts the "I" in that assumption?
So yeah. Anything that messes with cognition in games, whether my own or that of enemies? Not my bag. Even if it is really really good like this spirit.
With all the Strife you're throwing out (and how easily you can capitalize on it with Mind-Shattering Song) you don't want it all to vanish to no effect if you're near a land that's about to ravage. So hey, chuck this power out and you can keep all that delicious Strife to play with later, easy peasy. Not the first instance we've seen of a spirit keeping Invaders around if they're afflicted with something that would negate their action anyway, but probably one of the strongest ones (and for 0 NRG, dang).
Much like Eyes Watch From The Trees, Voice has a lot of ways to synergize with adding Strife, but is somewhat limited in how it can do that, mostly by moving its Incarna (which is definitely mobile enough). And since that same Incarna that's your main way of adding Strife also prevents Dahan from capitalizing, you are, by design, going to need to move around a LOT so that the Strife you have set down can do more for you. So naturally, any powers that let you add Strife conventionally (Fire In The Sky, Gold's Allure, Hazards Spread Across the Island) are ones you want to have on hand.
Oh, and this is your reminder that Strife tends to synergize REALLY WELL with Fear cards. A lot of them can do things with Strife that can really turn the tables squarely in your favor. Having teammates to capitalize on your Strife is always nice, and there's few better ways to do that than Fear-focused allies.
One of the most jankety support powers I have ever seen. Granted, if you use it on a spirit that's due for a reclaim, it doesn't hurt that much, and it's especially nice on spirits that don't usually need to play all the cards they have anyway, whether it's because they just hoover up power cards faster than they can play them (Grinning Trickster Stirs Up Trouble) or they just don't need all of their cards all the time for how situational they are (Fractured Days Split The Sky). It's nice and all, just kind of weirdly weak for reasons I don't quite get.
Here's the other "patched" aspect, this time for Shroud of Silent Mist. And everyone I've talked to appears to think that it's a straight upgrade to the spirit, getting rid of the per-power movement that will usually be less than 4 moves anyway, especially early on. Personally, I don't agree that this is what the spirit needed as a "patch" though. As a more accessible playstyle, sure, Stranded is really handy, and the free isolation is a nice little treat. However, it doesn't really address the weaknesses Mist actually has, which is to say its weak presence tracks and its unique powers not having enough defense for the role it intends to occupy. And personally, I've never found the base Mists Shift And Flow rule to be that complex to wrangle, and I think it's potentially stronger than the Stranded aspect once you start accelerating your card plays and innates. Might just be something I'm more suited to. Ah well, it's still nice as a complexity reducer.
Most of the aspects we've seen either replace innate powers or special rules, with a handful also changing out your hand. This is the only one I'm aware of that messes with your Growth choices. Tactician drops the spike NRG option for the ability to grab new power cards without needing a reclaim, and throws in a bit of extra element support for funsies. Usually, my first turn approach is to take that spike NRG option, open up my second play, and drop Sudden Ambush and Manifestation Of Power And Glory to instantly clean up the biggest threats on my board, but Tactician instead supports a more flexible playstyle that still wants more card plays but can't go as explosively fierce on turn 1. Definitely a neat option for people who want more power card options on Thunderspeaker though.
Hey, you all like that funny Cast Down Into The Briny Deep major power that eats an entire board, right? Consider, though: sinking lands one at a time, as Ocean's Hungry Grasp gradually eats more and more of the board, pressing aggressively inward with each turn. This aspect grants you the exclusive Deeps tokens, used for progressing your Reclaimed By The Deeps power to eventually take down entire sections of land and turn them into Oceans. It's a much slower playstyle than vanilla Ocean's Hungry Grasp, especially since you sacrifice both innates to make it work, but it's also relatively light on elements and really only needs a buildup of Deeps tokens to manifest. Plus, the more lands you turn into Oceans, the more lands that become Coastal, and the further in towards the heart of the island you can advance.
Here's a very hard one to make use of. Heart of the Wildfire's strongest feature is their overpoweringly strong presence, often blowing out lands completely just by adding presence there, and even taking down dedicated capitals with a chaser of Firestorm. But since this aspect has Transform Rather Than Consume, your damage instead turns into downgrading and pushing, and is only able to destroy Explorers. Worse, you lose the easy way to heal up the excess Blight you'll still be adding due to your Blazing Presence. If you can handle all of that, though, Exaltation of the Transforming Flame is a very fun support power that can let you and everyone around you speed through the power decks for exactly the kind of draws you need.
Today's Incarna spirit is, rather fittingly, Lure of the Deep Wilderness, already a spirit that had a lot of incentive to make a danger zone to hang out in and bait invaders to. You lose a lot of flexibility on where you can establish yourself and how many explorers you can curtail, but you can accumulate a huge amount of Explorers and Dahan at your Incarna and use them to fuel a steady accumulation of every other piece on the board, then use Never Heard From Again to clean up the excess Explorers before the land ravages and puts you in serious trouble. Note that nothing can move out of the land where your Incarna is, so as fun as it is to just absorb everything on the island into one land, it might not be beneficial for spirits that depend on Dahan movement to have a bunch of their allies stuck in one spot.
This set's entry for indiscriminate high-powered damage is a neat one for a few reasons, but probably the coolest part is that it blends a bunch of elements from already-existing spirits that are relatively unique to those spirits, but in its own style. Like Volcano Looming High, it gets extra benefit out of stacking more than a Sacred Site's worth of Presence in a land. Like Downpour Drenches the World, its primary strength comes from spamming powers on a single land, rather than dealing with multiple issues here and there. Like Vengeance as a Burning Plague, it's fine with destroying Dahan in its path by default. Like Heart of the Wildfire, it's fine with adding Blight to the island by default.
The most interesting part here, of course, is the Consider A Harmonious Nature innate. Lorewise, Relentless Gaze Of The Sun is only recently coming around to the idea that there could be cause for a judicious approach to how it shines down on the island. This is represented by an innate that lets it work together with other spirits more, at a cost of not having any of the extra elements needed for it on its unique powers. You can just roll Sun and Fire and let other players clean up after you, and that's definitely easier for you, but it'll help everyone out more if you splash for some of those elements you don't ordinarily use. That Moon in particular is a tricky one to get, but extremely valuable given how overpowering your Scorching Convergence power is.
Despite having excellent NRG income, none of Gaze's unique powers go any higher than 1 on their costs. The reasoning for this is obvious: between that and the plentiful "OR" effects on a lot of its cards, they're built to be repeated, extremely often. In isolation, Wither Bodies, Scar Stones is a weak card, but you're never gonna just use it in isolation. And remember: Badlands apply their damage boost only once per action, but repeating a power is a new action, yeah?
This is the best defense power you've got as Relentless Gaze Of The Sun, and honestly it's not bad. If there's any action you especially want to skip in your lands, it's Ravage. Builds pretty much just add more targets to wherever you're about to go solar, and any Blight you add from Scorching Convergence can't cascade, but Ravages in lands you've been shooting CAN. The threshold effect and option to fish for Fear are both really nice and will pretty much come about naturally through play, so even if the board is already well-defended for the turn you can still put Blinding Glare to some decent use.
Naturally, you want more powers that do big heavy damage, especially if they're relatively low cost so you can repeat them. The focus on Badlands certainly leans into that, and if you Consider A Harmonious Nature, you can even avoid some of the worst side effects of that single-minded focus on destruction. Plus, with how easily you can put destroyed Presence back on the board (yours in particular, but other spirits if you work towards it) even blowing your own stuff up isn't that scary! That said, all your starting powers do need Sacred Sites, and while that's not exactly a huge barrier for you, it does mean you'll have some trouble flexing to multiple lands, so any partners who can move Invaders or Dahan around to line up shots for you are highly desirable.
This is your only real repositioning power, and with that range, most of the time you'll use it to pile up more things in a land you already had the range to hit anyway. Don't discount the ability to also hit your origin land with the push effect, though, and DEFINITELY don't discount the ability to repeat it. Played smartly, this can corral a huge amount of Invaders and deny a massive amount of their actions for several turns.
You've heard of buff patch Aspects now get ready for nerf patch Aspects
Keeper of the Forbidden Wilds is, without question, one of the strongest spirits in the game. In exchange for a significant limit on where it can place Presence, it gets pretty much everything else that would be attractive to any spirit: high NRG income, double-placing presence every turn without sacrificing tempo, huge damage, enough Invader control to stake out an empty zone on the map... in short, it does its job very well and its shortcomings don't usually impact its game very much. Not that I'm saying that's a bad thing, and the balance of the spirits is tight enough that you never get anywhere in the same county as, say, D&D, but it's still a fact.
Now, does this Aspect nerf Keeper enough to be "balanced" while still being fun? Hard to say! Losing the NRG-costing growth option is less of a downside than it feels like because you also lose the NRG you would be spending on it anyway. It really just caps off one of the problems involved, that being the double presence placement, and honestly, if there was one problem to cap off, that's the one.
And then you can also kill a town during Growth because reasons.
Another aspect for Vital Strength of the Earth, now leaning even more into that "vital" part! Trading the timestop for Voracious Growth makes your Gift of Strength innate a little harder to hit, but you have a second innate now and a lot more reason to fish for extra card gain and card play thanks to Flourish with Nature's Strength. In exchange for a much weaker defense game, you instead get superior Dahan positioning, the ability to generate more Dahan, and also some fun Vitality tokens for the hell of it, allowing you to handle ravages by giving the Dahan and land a health buffer rather than outright damage blocking. Seriously though: you're gonna want buddies to help you get extra cards.
Welp, it finally happened. We bullied Lightning's Swift Strike about Raging Storm too much and now it's taking it out on everyone else. I accept at least 25% responsibility.
Shifting from Water to Sun as the tertiary element is honestly a straight upgrade in my book, Lightning tended to have to choose between Fire and Water on its infrequent card draws. Smite The Land With Fulmination isn't a bad replacement since you still have Harbingers of the Lightning to keep Dahan out of danger, and your innate works equally well as a support tool for buddies or a way to self-accelerate. Honestly, this one's solid.
Serpent Wakes In Power was a cool innate that required flexing to an element you didn't begin with, but now we have an Incarna aspect for Serpent Slumbering Beneath The Island to play with. In exchange for the widescale defenses you began the game with, your fancy new Incarna now allows you to provide more longterm benefits for everyone wherever it is. There's a lot of creative stuff you can do here, but if there's any one element that I think needs to be pointed out here, it's that your setup allows you to add an extra presence from your tracks. Remember, speeding up the rate at which you can place presence is good, and you'll have some much easier thresholds and effects for buddies to use with Strength of the Waking Island, so Absorb Essence will feel less like a dead card play.
Did you ever want to do the ridiculous Fear shenanigans of Bringer of Dreams and Nightmares, but couldn't get over how weaksauce trash its presence tracks were? Here, have a way to play 4 cards on turn 1! Now, are you actually going to play 4 cards on turn 1? Hell no, you don't have the NRG for that, even if you get a Jagged Earth minor power to work with. You also lose the ability to forecast the Fear deck and give element buffs to allies, which can hurt if people are expecting that kind of support from you, and a lot of the complexity here is just from having so much possible card play right out of the gate. But hey, now you only have the one Innate and it only generates Fear! That's simple enough, right?
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Today's spirit is born from a SUPER early design for a major power that stole Invaders straight off the board and put them on the card while it was resolving. Obviously, that really didn't work out as a mechanic for many, MANY reasons, but here we are, three or four major sets later, and we have a spirit that actually does throw the Invaders into gay baby jail.
The fundamental point here is that you're basically doing a Dead By Daylight sort of deal, prowling around looking for isolated Invader pieces to capture. This, obviously, loses punch the more the game goes on, but Invaders you have Abducted are unable to do pretty much anything except be a Fear battery, and if they're the sole Invader in the land, even a single point of damage will do the trick. This means that abusing your innate to chip down the excess Explorers and get to key targets is pivotal, and it strongly incentivizes other spirits to clear up the lands your Incarna is in for you.
The Endless Dark, as a space, is simple enough. It's on the island for the sake of checking victory/defeat conditions (so, for example, if the islands are clear of Invaders but you still have a City in your pocket, no you don't win) but nobody except you can target it, nobody takes actions there, it pretty much cannot do anything whatsoever. Generally speaking, you won't always want to target powers there, but it can be handy if you're using a power that adds spirit tokens or Dahan, since your Growth choices force "pieces" to escape, which doesn't always have to be Invaders.
As part of your setup instructions, The Endless Dark starts with 1 Explorer in it, and because all your Growth choices let pieces escape, it'll be added to the board pretty much immediately. As such, Swallowed By The Endless Dark is a natural first pick for powers to play, so you can curtail that initial escape. Don't immediately go for that, of course, play to wherever the Invader deck has actually explored to. It's one Explorer, it can afford to sit around for a bit.
Oh, and this threshold is fun too. Abducting a City at fast speed is nice, it's pretty good.
Now, you probably noticed that the reclaim growth choice forces you to let all pieces out of The Endless Dark. This is your power you're going to play the turn before you reclaim, so that hurts significantly less than it otherwise would. At optimal play, this places 5 strife on the target for 1 NRG, which is phenomenal. Even without it, targeting The Endless Dark is worth a minimum of 2, and you have plenty of incentive to go Beast due to the above-mentioned rule that you just let "pieces" escape, not Invaders. Inflating The Endless Dark with Beast-generating powers is a pretty solid pick, and most such powers trend towards your favored elements of Moon and Animal.
Breath Of Darkness Down Your Spine has fairly mobile Incarna, due to Leave A Trail Of Deathly Silence, the Incarna itself counting as both a Beast (already pretty mobile) and a presence (which you can easily move around during Spirit Phase), and this power here. You're also going to need that mobility, due to your preference for lands with single Invaders. That is not as easy a requirement as you'd want it to be, especially later on as Invader capitals start piling up. The movement effects are nice as a consolation prize and can help to set up future abductions, at least.
Okay, situational but massive range buff, that sounds sick as hell, right?
Please scroll back up to the spirit panel and refresh yourself on the rules for pieces escaping.
Now, imagine you're in a game with Volcano Looming High. You've grabbed a bunch of their pieces and they're enjoying a range of +4 or whatever from the one Mountain they have left. Everything is awesome, everyone is happy.
Now say you have to let that presence escape and you don't have any presence in Mountains.
Use this power carefully, is what I'm getting at.
Another River Surges In Sunlight aspect, this one replacing the reliable Massive Flooding innate for a multipurpose ability that scales with your NRG income. The many disparate elements on here are outweighed by the fact that it only asks for 1 of pretty much everything it uses except Water and Plant, making it great if you want to have a lot more flexibility with your power picks. And fortunately, your powers already have basically all the elements you're looking for on this one anyway. It does only remove Invaders rather than destroying them, but considering that's after a fast Defend and Dahan gather? Yeah that's totally fine. Well worth it as a replacement for Massive Flooding.
This is a cool one. Effectively, all instances of Fire and Moon you have are now interchangeable, which not only does a lot to make your starting hand better (not to mention gaining Unquenchable Flames) it means you can be incredibly flexible when it comes to new powers for the sake of building towards your innate or any Major powers you get. You do lose the incredible range boosts of Shadows of the Dahan, mind you, and Frightful Shadows Elude Destruction is a poor consolation prize. Make sure to expand your territory fairly regularly, not that you won't already be doing that.
Here's the non-buffing aspect for Sharp Fangs Beneath the Leaves. Instead of moving your Presence with Beasts and using Ranging Hunt as a fast scalar for damage, you now get to keep your presence in Jungles (where it's happier anyway) and a range boost if targeting a land that has Beasts. Pretty excellent! The new power here, Encircle the Unsuspecting Prey, ends up lending a bit of the playstyle of Shroud of Silent Mist to your experience, with light bits of damage easily accessible as before (albeit now at slow speed) but a rapidly improving scalar if you can populate Beasts all around the target land. It's weaker than Ranging Hunt on the whole, but it can target Blighted lands, which is a nice way to deal with that problem.
Ehhhhh not a fan of this one. First of all, using two colors of pieces from the box for your presence feels like an awkward hack for how the game works, even if it's a good way to handle what they're going for here. Second, yeah, you can shutter a lot more Build and Ravage actions this way and can basically have Sacred Sites wherever and whenever you want (in Jungles and Wetlands). There is such a thing as too much presence though, and before long you'll run out of places where it's any benefit whatsoever to place presence down. And, naturally, adding destroyed presence doesn't upgrade your spirit at all.
Instead of not permanently forgetting powers when getting Major Powers, you now lose all choice when getting new powers, but instead get a second card free! This obviously synergizes with the new Share Mentorship and Expertise innate, where you're meant to pass off any powers you get but don't need to spirits that can make better use of them. However, that innate doesn't do anything unless you DO pass your buddy a card. As such, you'll constantly be wanting to gain new cards at all times, slowly milling through the deck and handing whatever works best to your teammates, making strong use of your ability to get discounted Major powers to that end. And don't forget that you'll be grabbing Elements from those cards as you go, so you can still play your usual game while you're going along with your teachings.
It's impressive that my favorite spirit of the set somehow isn't Hearth-Vigil, but the flavor/mechanics meshing of Wounded Waters Bleeding at every single level is just too powerful a draw for me.
A lot of spirits are built around the conceptual meanings of the elements they play. Sharp Fangs Behind The Leaves is the natural world of beasts at its most aggressive, so it blends Plant, Animal, and Fire together. Bringer of Dreams and Nightmares exists almost entirely in the mind of dreamers, and so uses Moon, Air, and Animal. Vital Strength of the Earth is slow to the point of inaction but sports incredible power, so it uses Sun, Earth, and Plant. And so on, and so forth.
Most of the time where the devs have to come up with a new spirit, they look through the existing powers to find elements that match the spirit's portfolio, to ensure whatever the gameplan of that spirit is doesn't run too counter to their preferred power draws. For Wounded Waters Bleeding, they looked at Water/Animal powers, and if you want to see a good highlight of the disparity there, I suggest scrolling back until you see the new majors introduced in this set. Specifically, Inspire The Release Of Stolen Lands and Plague Ships Sail To Distant Ports. There is a drastic difference of approach there, but both powers undeniably carry Water and Animal in their set, and for good reason both.
So for Wounded Waters Bleeding, they strove to highlight that almost paradoxical disparity. This is a spirit that used to be Peace-Waters, a small brook equivalent to Erana's Peace from the Quest For Glory series; a place of safety where you may rest, but not stay, and partake of the water freely. Even the Invaders knew they were somewhere they should respect and abided by the rules. Except afterwards, they went upstream. And there they built tanneries and slaughterhouses. And all the runoff from those places ended up almost killing Peace-Waters, forcing it to reconcile its new nature on a fundamental level. As such, it starts out with a drastically limited kit and some painful upkeep with destroying Presence every turn.
To drive this danger period home, Wounded Waters Bleeding can eventually "heal" to a full-strength spirit once more, codifying its nature in a way that looks extremely like Trials of Mana's class-change system but thats cool I love that system. Effectively, you lean towards either Water or Animal in your healing path, representing whether you try to hold to the old ways of Peace-Waters, or take up the mantle of vengeance for all the blood spilled, literally, into you. If you start early on focusing on Animal, you branch from your default skillset of light control to also get some damage, borrowing from the skillsets of Sharp Fangs Behind The Leaves and Thunderspeaker.
Should you instead maintain the focus on Water, your control game gets more codified and incentivizes Gather abilities with powerful downgrade effects. Both healing cards here are still about getting extra benefit from moving pieces, which is a key component of both Animal and Water powers. If you heal into Serene Waters Bleeding (note how the healing cards can change the spirit's name) you have a more peaceful and long-lasting effect on the Invaders in your lands, but are also more restricted in how you can affect them compared to Roiling Waters Bleeding.
After claiming your second healing card, you not only avoid the constant destruction of Presence, but also swap out one of your two innate powers for an extra-spicy fast innate that rewards focusing more on one element than the other. Naturally, you can go with any combo of stage 1 and stage 2 healing cards here, so you can either play Roiling Waters Taste of Ruin for easy and deadly token-focused damage, or Serene Waters Taste of Ruin to play a more insidious game of softening up the Invaders by weakening them in your lands, then finishing them off with more damage (or the other way around, your call).
Note that all combos are very much built to be viable, even if you have to swap elements along the way. However, like Starlight Seeks Its Form, you may want to consider the rest of the game you're playing before committing to one path or another. In the first game I tried, I initially wanted to go for Roiling Waters Renew (and look at this power, can you blame me). Then I remembered that I was in a two-player game with Towering Roots of the Jungle and realized that if anyone was gonna do damage here, it was gonna be me, so Roiling Waters Taste of Ruin it was. With your free Water/Animal element each spirit phase, you have plenty of room to shift the build you're aiming for as you go, unless your power card draws are extremely hostile to you.
Moving on to the actual power cards for Wounded Waters Bleeding, they do have a special rule for a few of their starting powers that require them to target FROM Blighted lands. This can make teaming up with aggressively-healing spirits a little trickier since you kind of need that Blight around, but it's less overwhelming than it would be for, say, Vengeance As A Burning Plague. Simple reason, really: you ARE pressured to forget power cards as you go. So if your team's kit and playstyle leans towards healing the land, heal with them and ditch these cards as you pick up new ones, no big deal.
But still, you do want to have some Blight hanging around, because damn these effects are NICE. Strong movement and token generation is a very tasty kit indeed.
Naturally, your boon power goes full edgelord and lets your allies channel the same pain you're feeling, complete with a cost to their presence. You all know the drill by now: use this on spirits that have the ability to restore destroyed Presence for maximum efficacy, but don't disregard the power a fast 2 damage can do to help a spirit that was already gonna lose that Presence during Ravage anyway.
You might think that being forced to gather both pieces here from a single land would be a drawback, and you'd mostly be right. Then you realize that you're still pulling two Towns at fast speed, which is an excellent way to shutter a Build that would otherwise output a City.
Only the one adversary this time, and curiously, it's a nation we've already seen, but with a different type of colony. This isn't really a surprise, mind you, there's only so many colonial powers to grab from alternate history. I think this is a good style to take it in though, to point home that the different colonial powers aren't homogenous to each nation, just like the island, the Dahan, and the spirits aren't homogenous either.
For the mining expedition, rather than building up huge colony capitals, the aim they're going for is to simply strip-mine the island of all its valuable minerals. To that end, they're going for width over depth, and putting out a lot of Explorers in all sorts of lands to track down deposits. Once they've gotten entrenched in a land, they stop Building there on their own but instead Ravage more often. Similarly, they output a lot of Explorers and not many Towns or Cities, but the Invaders can then upgrade pieces in their lands through multiple means, but most notably through cascading Blight.
More than any other adversary, for the Habsburg Mining Expedition, you want multi-land effects. You can still use Gather effects to pull a bunch of Invaders to one land and then dogpile them, but the alternate win condition makes this something that's very timing-dependent. Also valuable are any effects that either prevent Explores or destroy Explorers. All of their best effects depend on upgrading pieces, and you can cull the most common pieces to leave them with nothing to work with.
Last one for this expansion, and we're going back to Very High complexity here. See, if you play Spirit Island
Now, for me, a very reactive player, that sort of longterm planning is extremely difficult to pull off, but I do have one bit of advice for people aiming to try Dances Up Earthquakes, and that advice is this: when queuing your powers up for later turns, try to get them all to go off on the same turn. Among other things, this boosts Earth Shudders, Buildings Fall for that turn, but it also gives you more elements (and you're gonna want to run Major powers with this spirit) and having lots of impending cards boosts your first innate to at least get little Defend effects as you go (and lets be real, how many of you end up fishing for at least one Defend effect anyway).
It doesn't make things easier to learn that you have an entirely unique token type just for this spirit, but Quake tokens don't have any ingame effects save for being used for your powers. You can basically treat them like reminders for where you're going to go ham on your payoff turn. Resounding Footfalls Sow Dismay is a very nice way to get that going, especially since it can be played on the same turn as everything else with Earth Shudders, Buildings Fall being a slow power.
There's a subtle balancing act you have to do with Dances Up Earthquakes (as there is with any good dance). Too much focus on impending cards, and you obviously lose the ability to affect the island in the here and now, forcing your buddies to pick up the slack. Too little, and your innates can't do what they need to do, and your growth tracks just aren't good enough for you to ignore your core mechanic for long. So it's nice to have cards like this that support blending impending and current card plays. It's cheap, and you'll easily have the room and reason to chuck it out just before your big damage turns.
Or cards like this, for when your big turns do happen. You can spike someone's NRG to as high as 6 at fast speed, and technically it can happen for free, which is a very comfy safety net for the Event deck or for spamming heavy Major powers. Granted, not everyone bleeds their NRG dry like I do every turn, but this can give you a LOT of wiggle room.
Dances Up Earthquakes is, obviously, a very destructive spirit, because it causes (or is) earthquakes. However, it's also a spirit of dancing, and dancing is almost intrinsically a partnered activity, and no good dancer would harm their partner. The Dahan, recognizing this, did their usual thing of trying to bargain with the spirit, and figured out that while it does cause hellacious quakes where it dances, the actual spot it dances ON is less affected than everything else around it. So this card is an encapsulation of that: the Invaders get the hell out because OH NO GROUND SHAKY and the Dahan get in there because it's better to dance with the spirit than mosh with the land.
Dances Up Earthquakes has a lot of stuff it can do, and it starts with 6 unique powers, but it's seriously hungry for getting new powers as much as possible. Not only is it custom built for wielding expensive Major powers, but it also wants Minor powers to play during turns where it's queuing up a big slamdunk of a turn. It doesn't have very drastic thresholds on its innates, even for starting with only 2 card plays, but it gets a LOT of impending plays, and it would be a shame to let those all go to waste, y'know?
That's kind of the duality of the spirit, from a mechanics standpoint. When it's building up for a future turn, its gameplan is defense, control, lining things up for other spirits but not making big plays for itself. Then, when its turn does roll around, it drops Earth Shudders, Buildings Fall (plus this power and probably a Major or two) and completely upends the game state. There's a lot of satisfaction to be had here if you can plan around its mechanics.