Treachery. Basic Weakness

Madness.

Neutral

Revelation - Choose and discard all but 1 card from your hand.

Wait... where am I? What was I doing?
Chris Peuler
Core Set #96.
Amnesia

FAQs

(from the official FAQ or responses to the official rules question form)
  • RRG entry for Weakness says: "A player may not optionally choose to discard a weakness card from hand". So if you have Dark Memory in hand, you must keep it and discard all other cards.
Last updated

Reviews

Playing Weakness cards in agreement with the rules is no trivial task. In my review i will try to explain the peculiarity of Amnesia.

When a treachery card, like Amnesia, is drawn by an investigator, that investigator must resolve its effects. Please note the wording. Some cards only let you search or look at cards from your deck, in these cases the effect does not resolve!

The effect is initiated by the keyword Revelation, which means "When a weakness card enters an investigator's hand, that investigator must immediately resolve all revelation abilities on the card as if it were just drawn."

So you follow all the steps in the rulebook under "Appendix I: Initiation Sequence".

No play restriction, cost is zero.

Step 1. No modifier applicable.

Step 2. No cost to pay.

Step 3. The card commences being played, or the effects of the ability attempt to initiate. This means the card Amnesia leaves your hand at this point.

Step 4. The effects of the ability (if not canceled in step 3) complete their initiation, and resolve. The card is regarded as played and placed in its owner's discard pile, and the ability is considered resolved simultaneously with the completion of this step.

The text of the ability states to "Choose and discard all but 1 card from your hand." There is a special rule which prevents you from discarding Weakness-cards, it says literally: "A player may not optionally choose to discard a weakness card from hand, unless a card explicitly specifies otherwise."

So if you have any Weakness card on your hand when Amnesia resolves, you have to keep it and discard all other cards!

Creating the weakness card pool

Because Amnesia is such a hefty Weakness, i would want to include a few words about the correct setup of the weakness collection.

There's a paragraph in the rulebook that states that "To select a random basic weakness, take a set of the ten basic weaknesses in this core set, shuffle those weaknesses together, and draw one at random to add to the investigator’s deck. Some Arkham Horror: The Card Game products add additional basic weakness cards to a player’s collection. Simply add these cards to the ten cards found in the core set when selecting random basic weaknesses in the future. For example: Stephanie owns two copies of the core set, one copy of the first deluxe campaign expansion, and one copy of the first Mythos pack. To create a single set of basic weaknesses, she takes all of the basic weaknesses in one core set, in one copy of the first deluxe campaign box, and in one copy of the first Mythos pack, and shuffles them together. Her basic weakness is drawn at random from this pool."

Amnesia can be two times (2x) at the most in your pool of weaknesses at the start of a campaign!

Recommendations

If you are new to the game, bend the rules and redraw another weakness if you play Wendy Adams.

Synisill · 783
Amnesia feels like the worse weakness so far, especially because you draw your weakness after building your deck - so you can't adjust your deck to focus on low hand size, except through XP. — jd9000 · 71
Depending on your deck, "Amnesia" or "Paranoia" (lose all ressources) are the most devastating weaknesses. When showing the game to new players, it's a good idea to not include these two, as the players may dislike the game because of these. — Django · 4859
Yep that is my Wndy deck weakness, I didnt redraw I kept it, but It didnt came out in the 1st or 2nd NOZ campaign. I can feel it in my fingertips it will show up in the 3d, unless Roland draws old book of lore. — sof.avger · 21

This is a weakness I let new players redraw if it's a starter (mid campaign is still fair). As a starting weakness, this card is absolutely crippling for most classes. If you are new to the game, itll wreck you for most characters. If you know what youre doing you can manage with a few.

Guardians are hit probably the weakest as they tend to play asset heavy and low draw. Survivors are probably next as they have high recursion. Mystics can also handle this ok.

Many seeker and rogue builds, or any fast draw, however are completely destroyed by this card. It'll not only destroy any momentum you have and make you dump your hand, but will also ruin combos and be back around to punish you once again when you get the draw engine going.

For that and in those classes, this is probably the worst starting weakness you can draw and isn't fun or thematic in the slightest. For that reason, I let most players redraw this one.

Now mid campaign... it's hilarious and often a damning and very Lovecraftian punishment.

drjones87 · 163

As the two "draw, resolve, then immediately discard" weaknesses in the Core, Amnesia and Paranoia are obviously meant to be parallels. Their effects mirror each other, one discarding all but 1 card from your hand, the other discarding all your resources. However, this mirroring obscures the truth, that being that Amnesia is a far greater threat than Paranoia. Why? Because cards are, to quote a trend from 2020/2021, NFTs.

No 3 non-Myriad cards are the same; .45 Automatic is slightly different from .32 Colt, Dr. Milan Christopher provides resources where Whitton Greene provides cards, and Amnesia attacks the cards in your hand while Paranoia attacks the resources in your pool. What this means is that, technically, cards in your hand are non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, items that are not mutually exchangeable with each other. If you want Glory, a substitute won't work: you need Glory itself. Of course, cards can have similar effects and thus occasionally stand in for each other, like a deck running Enchanted Blade and Machete to provide a Melee weapon, but this only pushes my argument back, not defeats it; if the cards themselves are not, strictly speaking, NFTs, then the functions they fulfill are: if you want a Weapon, you need a proper Weapon, not something like Magnifying Glass.

Resources, by contrast, are fully fungible tokens; one resource is no better than any other. You don't need a Weapon resource to pay for Weapons or a Tool resource to pay for Tools; resources are resources are resources.

Therefore, while Paranoia clears your board of fungible tokens, Amnesia (almost) clears your hand of NFTs, something much more devastating. Losing 5 fungible tokens is bad, but possible to quickly recover from; the resources you generate in the following upkeep phases are functionally no different than the ones you just lost. With NFTs, though, if you lose them, you lose not just the tokens but the function they fulfill. You're not just discarding 4 cards, you're discarding a Weapon, a Tool, and 4 total skill icons, and if you want to recover those functions you need to find other cards that fulfill them; you can't just generate any random card during upkeep, you need it to be a card that does a specific (sometimes very specific) thing. And if one of the cards you discarded was a one-of, intended as tech against a certain scenario card, that can be very difficult.

I understand what Amnesia is trying to do, help slow players' card draw down. However, I believe that, as is, Amnesia is far too punishing and variable (the draw-heavy might never end up with this as their weakness while the poor gets it every single time) for it to be considered as fulfilling its purpose.

What on earth are you talking about. — fiatluxia · 63
Discarding resources isn't as impactful as discarding cards because resources are freely interchangeable (one resource is exactly the same as another resource) while cards can only be substituted in a limited way (if you want a Weapon, you need a Weapon, not just any old card off the top of your deck). Paranoia targets something that can easily be replaced, Amnesia targets something that requires a lot more work to recover. — NightgauntTaxiService · 265
Firstly, the metaphor falls apart because NFTs are essentially all interchangeable becauss they are all equally worthless. Second, this isn't really how it plays out in practice. While two given cards aren't the same barring specific decks you can't fully build around a single specific card, and even if you do it's unlikely to stay in your hand for a turn. Important cards naturally self select out of your hand because you play them. Amnesia IS worse, but its because cards are harder to get than resources and you tend to lose more cards (even before factoring that cards are more valuable) than resources. — dezzmont · 199
I will grant that you're right about NFTs in real life, and that the example I gave wasn't the best. Let me offer another one, one that hopefully does a better job of illustrating my point. You're playing a scenario with Ancient Evils in the encounter deck. In your hand, you have Ward of Protection to cancel Ancient Evils and Spectral Razor in case you draw an enemy. During upkeep, you draw Amnesia. Which safety net can you safely get rid of? Yes, if you had Paranoia as your basic weakness, you'd be in the same situation, but only for the next turn; you would be able to rebuild your board state to what it was pre-weakness quickly, whereas with Amnesia you would either have to get lucky with your draws or cycle through your whole deck. You’re right in that Amnesia doesn’t (or at least shouldn’t) hit your crucial assets, but it can still cripple you by forcing you to get rid of your very helpful or niche skills and events. If you’re Preston and you draw Amnesia while you have Alter Fate in hand, do you lose the Alter Fate even though it’s your main defense against Frozen in Fear or do you sacrifice the rest of your hand for a “break glass in case of emergency” button? Of course, I understand that that’s what a weakness should do, disrupt a player’s turn, but I personally feel that Amnesia’s disruption is a bit too much. Even if it were just changed to “Choose and discard all but 2 cards from your hand,” I would be much more positive towards it. — NightgauntTaxiService · 265