Initiative 101 - How to not die with Scoundrel / Mindthief

Welcome to initiative management 101 or better known as "How to not die as Scoundrel".

Isaac's design of this game is real neat.  Because of the way enemies focus players by proximity, melee characters naturally suffer the most pain. To deal with this, each melee class either has a large HP pool (ie brute), or is has cards with impressive initiative numbers (scoundrel, mind theif).

Cool a psychic rat! Wait it starts with how much HP? 6?!

One trap new players fall into is they optimize their move by how much damage they can do or how many enemies they can hit without considering initiative values. This leads to some melee classes taking damage they cannot afford to take. For example Scoundrel says "Woah that archer is totally on her own, I should move fast next round and get my bonus damage on it!". When this is done carelessly, soft melee characters end up taking alot more damage than they should be.

So how do you exploit initiative to avoid taking damage and nasty wound markers?

Let's illustrate this with an example.

3 Bandit Guards, a Kleptomanic and the Rock guy from Fantastic four.

This is a typical combat situation, kind of similar to the first room in Scenario 1. If this was a 4 player situation, just imagine the two other players fighting some bad guys elsewhere. You are the Kleptomaniac Scoundrel. Your teammate the Pidgeon poop covered rock dude signals that he's going to sit still and prepare to throw rocks at the bad guys next turn (Backup Ammunition). 

So what's the play?

First things first, check what the bandits are like. 

Lets assume these are normal bandits, at level 1 they move 3 and attack 2. If this was a higher player count, one of these would probably be Elite, so they'd actually move less. Great. So unless we pull a Move +1 card, these bandits normally wont make it to melee contact. 

So lets go late in the round. Let the bandits finish their move up, then attack them, but incase they decide to sit around, we'll play a move 4 card so we can get into their faces.

There are other cards you could potentially play, Single Out and Quick Hands also go relatively late in the round. In this case we want to go as late as possible so we play this hand with 93 Initiative. This gives us the flexibility to either move 3 and use the Venom Shiv attack or to move 5 and an attack 3 with Sinister opp (we wont get the bonus but that's OK). 

So what happens next?

I went to Gloomy Companion and flipped a card for a bandit. Sure enough they're not doing anything special.

So the bandits move up and focus the Cragheart (indicated by the red lines). Then we move up and Venom Shiv one of the bandits.

Round 1 is finished. What do we do now?

Your teammate signals that he's going to throw rocks at them and use the Backup Ammunition set up from last round. If you've played or played with a Cragheart before, you know they're almost always going late in the round. Which means you can't reliably count on him killing the bandits before they strike.

So whats the play?

Now you go fast. Really fast. You need to make sure you act BEFORE the bandits, hit them and make sure you have a move card that lets you get out of striking distance (or at least far enough they focus the Cragheart instead of you). It's almost always better for your tougher teammates to take damage then you taking hits. Your max hand size is a puny 9 and you absolutely cannot lose cards because one of the bandits flipped a lucky 2x crit. Your Cragheart friend has a larger HP pool and a 11 card hand to lose cards from. He'll understand.

A sample hand we can play is Flanking Strike and Swift bow. The intent is to move out of combat and shoot the bandit we poisoned earlier. Throwing Knives or a melee top will work fine in place of Swift bow and Backstab could work in place of Flanking Strike (initiative 06 is fast enough). We're playing as fast as possible with Flanking Strike's initiative at 04 (not Swiftbow's 36).

Once again I flip another card from Gloomy Companion.

So now they don't move as far but are hitting harder this round. Good thing we're getting out of here. We also want to leave the area because our rock friend is going to bombard it with massive boulders. So we simply move far enough so that we're no longer the focus of the Guard, then shoot the poisoned guy and hopefully kill it. 

Congratulations, you survived 2 rounds as Scoundrel and didn't take a single hit! All while dishing out enough pain to take out a Guard.

The same ideas here are also applicable to the Mindtheif. The Mindtheif is a little more forgiving because of the larger handsize, reusable invisibility and self healing. You go late, move in attack. Then go FAST, hit them again and get out of attacking distance. 

tl;dr Go slow, then go fast. Repeat.

Peace out,

May the birds you shoot out of the sky be actual edible birds.