Greeting everyone, we’re back today with our first preview of one of the two new mercenaries in Buttons & Bugs – Pub Crawlers. Let’s take a look at the Fungal Monk!
Before we start, if you’ve missed our last update you can catch up here.
Get to Know This Fun-gi
(Get it? Fung-ai? Fun guy?)
As you can see above, the Fungal Monk is a Psilium – a form of ancient, wise fungai. The theme of “embracing death” comes through strongly in the mechanics of this class, as you’re about to see.
Before we go further, I want to point out that the Fungal Monk intentionally shares some similarities with a well-known and beloved locked class from the ‘Haven world. Now let me be clear – this doesn’t mean the Fungal Monk is a copycat, as it definitely has its own unique mechanic, as you’ll see below. I asked Isaac Childres about vision for the classes in Pub Crawlers (and beyond) and he told me
“Our goal moving forward is to re-interpret some of the existing classes in this new micro world, but make them distinct, as they are not just shrunken Gloomhaven classes. That said, the Whistlecry is an all-new design, so we have those too.”
So the Fungal Monk is a re-interpretation of a class from the ‘Haven world, while still being its own unique thing. Let’s take a look at how that plays out in the class mechanics.
Oh, and you want to know WHICH locked class it is a re-interpretation of? Nope, not going to tell you. And you definitely won’t be able to figure it out from looking at the class notes!
Go Berserk
Playing the Fungal Monk successfully is all about managing their health. Not only does it boast more starting health than any Buttons and Bugs class, it uses its health to empower some of its abilities. One time you will see this is when they are Berserk – their current health being half their maximum or less. A simple example of this is on the card Fungal Growth:
Healing, the antifungal treatment?
But that power comes at a cost – and a very thematic one at that – as the Fungal Monk is actually HURT by healing. Healing will still remove wound, poison, and/or rot from you, but unless rot or poison are present, healing yourself will reduce your health instead of increase it.
While the class doesn’t have much self-healing, it also means that you can’t rely on items or allies to heal you up either as each scenario goes on. So while you start with a lot of health, you’re going to need it! And considering you become stronger with your Berserk abilities as you get closer to death, you may even want to put a card like Accelerate the Cycle in play, boosting your attacks and bringing yourself down to Berserk status faster when you heal yourself (and thus reduce your health). Do you like living on the edge?
And when you’re near death’s door, you can use the top of Defy the Cycle to unleash a powerful attack on your foes. Until then, the bottom ability is a versatile action that lets you remove a negative condition from yourself or an adjacent ally, or remove a positive condition from an adjacent enemy. This action is handy to remove wound from yourself, which you really don’t want to remove by healing!
And since you can’t raise your health by healing, this makes damage prevention and mitigation very important for this class, whether it’s by using ward on Tireless Retribution or either half of Stinkhorn.
So that’s the Fungal Monk! This is a low complexity class – as each card on its own is very easy to understand – but it packs a lot of strategic depth as you go about managing your health from round-to-round. We hope you enjoy it!
That’s it for now, but we’ll be back next time to preview the Whistlecry. Until then, mercenaries!
Pete K. is a long-time member of the Cephalofair Community and now our Official Community Manager. Make sure you subscribe to the Cephalofair Insider Newsletter as he peeks behind the curtains at Cephalofair HQ and gives you all the deets.
