Card of the Week: Gone Fishing

As one of the few cards that allows you to search your deck for a specific card, Gone Fishing can be very valuable in pulling off a more involved, combo-intensive deck strategy. It's also very flexible among these "deck searching" cards; where other cards like Ill-Gotten Gains or Mala are limited to specific card types (gear or character cards), Gone Fishing lets you search for any hero card you like. So whether your plan is to use the Healing Device in combination with Harlan (to keep copies of characters from being destroyed), Turn the Tables in combination with Finishing Blow (to destroy any ready adversary), or something even stranger, Gone Fishing can help make it happen.

Even if your deck isn't heavily combo-based, Gone Fishing is a way to "cheat" around the limit of three copies of a card per deck. If a specific hero card is vital to your plans, Gone Fishing can give you a total of six different ways to draw that card -- three naturally, and three by way of the event.

Somewhat less obvious, however, is simply using this event to generate what some players call "throughput." Many players believe that a key component to winning a game is to see as many cards from your deck as possible -- draw more cards than your opponent does, and you'll have a greater variety of strategic options. Playing complications as the villain player is one way to generate some of this throughput, because each complication played makes for an extra card draw at the end of the turn. For the hero player, however, options on generating this throughput are more limited. Which is where Gone Fishing comes in. You can discard any or all of the hero cards in your hand when you play it, so you not only get to search your deck for an especially valuable card, you get to draw several new cards at the end of your turn to replace your unwanted discards.