Wounded Bystander
On Death's Doorstep

Asset. Weakness

Ally. Bystander.

Cost: –.

Neutral
Health: 5. Sanity: –.

Revelation - Put Wounded Bystander into play in your play area with 3 damage on it. It cannot leave play while it has damage (unless it is defeated). If it has no damage, discard it.

Forced - When you take non-direct damage: At least 1 of it must be assigned to Wounded Bystander, if able.

Forced - If Wounded Bystander is defeated: You suffer 1 mental trauma.

Rafał Hrynkiewicz
The Scarlet Keys Investigator Expansion #7.
Wounded Bystander

FAQs

No faqs yet for this card.

Reviews

This signature weakness acts as more of a deckbuilding restriction: must include cards that heal Ally assets.

It's a very soft weakness if you have the tools to deal with it. It costs no actions, doesn't deal you any net damage, and doesn't ever cycle into your deck. You even gain an extra point of soak with it!

Needing to cure the the Bystander is the wrong mindset. All you need to do is to prevent him from dying. From that perspective things get a lot simpler.

At 0xp Bandages counters 3 instances of damage each and can be scavenged. Soothing Melody counters 2 instances of damage each. In a single deck cycle that packs Hallowed Mirror and Bandages you're already good for 12 instances of damage, which is far less than what most scenarios will throw at you.

B-tier options include Bizarre Diagnosis, First Aid, Emergency Aid and Medical Student, which are more action inefficient or will waste the horror healing.

With XP, you'd almost always have the Surgical Kit as a backup option, but you should rarely need it. Other very good choices include the Forbidden Tome, Call for Backup, and Manipulate Destiny with blurse support.


Note that with 3-damage burst heals like Bizarre Diagnosis and Surgical Kit, it's more efficient to let the Bystander go to 1 health and then heal back to 4 health than to discard it entirely. That way it can continue to soak damage for you, and you don't waste the heal.

yinwhite · 17
For me Forbidden Tome lacks the syngery with Vincent Lee here. It does neither trigger his ability, because it is not "healing damage", nor does Lee have any particular incentive to play with a big hand size. Also, you'd need to research that card first. — AlderSign · 290

Vincent Lee has a dark secret, he does not want to talk about. You know, how caring he is about any wounded bystander, he encounters? His mind suffers deeply, whenever he can't help, or at the very least keep them alive. This was not always the case. Once he visited Dunwich, and let somebody die, without regret. He blamed the Unhallowed Country for that.

Susumu · 366

I believe that this might be the worst designed signature weakness in the LCG because it is missing 1 line of text. The missing line "Damage on this card may be healed as though it was on Vincet Lee". If you want it to be worse, make it healable as though it were on a different investigator, and you don't even get to give out on the mend while still healing others.

So why is not having this line of text so bad? Because it forces a character filling a niche role into running an even more limited subset of their cardpool or just praying that they don't draw their signature. If you do a search for all arkham cards that heal damage, you'll find there is quite a large selection of (mostly bad) cards. If you search for cards that can heal your ally? The list gets a lot smaller and a lot worse.

So to get it out of the way Hallowed Mirror exists and gives you Soothing Melody. For 1.5 melodies you can handle the problem (or 1 upgraded melody I suppose). This does assume you don't take damage in between drawing them, but I'll be nice on that front. From there, cards that could be used to heal your ally slot are:

Surgical Kit - Enjoy spending 3xp and 2 actions to resolve your weakness. Obviously this card isn't bad in Vincent, but it feels problematically mandatory if you want to be able to resolve bystander reliably.

Bizarre Diagnosis - Does it in one card. Admittedly its 3 actions worth of card because you're drawing a card, playing a card and dropping a clue. My read is that you basically never play this card except if you are trying to deal with Wounded Bystander.

First Aid - 3xp and 3 actions (after its in play) will resolve the weakness. This is notable because it can deal with the problem, but its really bad.

Inspiring Presence - Heals for 1. Worth noting but not capable of handling the problem on its own.

That's it. Those are the ways to heal your weakness. I'm not even discussing that thanks to encounter cards that hit all investigators (either in play or at a given location) for a small amount, you may draw this card and have it immediately pop in the same mythos phase. That bothers me less because sometimes weaknesses happen at the worst possible time. I get it. But of all the healing cards in the game, there should be more than 4 that "reasonably" resolve the damage healing character's signature weakness. I do want to acknowledge that Solemn Vow from another player can do work, but that feels almost like more of a problem than an upside. That's going to actively limit his deckbuilding even on the thing that he's most flexible for. And it didn't have to be that way. Both Foolishness and Rational Thought specifically avoid this problem with their effects, but it just seems to have been missed here.

And here's where my recommendation comes in and the real reason I think this is the worst weakness in the game. I think when you play Vincent, you ignore this card. You run the good cards that can deal with it, but you don't build your deck in bad ways otherwise. You don't run Bizarre Diagnosis just for this effect and you certainly don't go into First Aid (3). When you draw it, you either happen to have the limited number of good cards that deal with it, or you suck up the trauma. I firmly believe that the Doctor should just let the wounded patient die which is just a huge flavor fail, but I also think that its the best way to handle the situation by far. Again, if you have the upgraded Soothing Melody in hand, go for it. But otherwise, just accept that the Bystander is one more casualty of the mythos.

There are other ways to deal with it. Solemn vow can move damage from bystander onto other investigators. Bandages can keep this guy alive for quite a while, so can any other damage dealing (Even potentially bandages) with Grey’s Anatomy. If I draw this towards the end of the game, I usually just keep the guy alive and wounded. Marie and Agnes have much tougher weaknesses. — MrGoldbee · 1453
I just want to tell you that Vincent cant take upgraded mirror, because mirror itself doesnt heal, so it doesnt match the ,,heal damage cards" — Pawiu14 · 184
True, "Bizarre Diagnosis" on it's own looks like an expensive way to deal with the weakness. But the "drop clue archetype" was basically introduced in this expansion, and if you lean with Lee into that, with "Research Note", it looks like a card, I'd take, even if his weakness was something else. — Susumu · 366
I think your list of potential solutions is missing at least a couple of options. Emergency Aid is a level 0 card that heals damage from an ally (two at a time even) and it's a pretty good Vincent card even if he doesn't draw into the bystander. — Pseudo Nymh · 54
Or med student. — MrGoldbee · 1453
Bad take mixed with high levels of hyperbole... moving on — fiatluxia · 65
@mrgoldbee - I did acknowledge that solemn vow exists, but since it explicitly has to come from another investigator, it feels less like a solution and more a niche "vow is a weird card". @susumu - I do know the archetype was introduced, but if I don't want to play that archetype, I'd rather the one "healing" character not force me into it. @pseudo nymh - I did completely miss that, not sure how my search didn't find it. It is still excessively painful though since you need that + another effect to deal with the bystander. — scaredyshark · 7
I don't understand the problem here, he gets rewarded to healing damage, that's literally his job, if your not teching to heal damage, then why play Vincent? You might be shaky at the beginning, but that's EVERY investigator. — Therealestize · 69
Seems like there's plenty of tools available to address this card, and you even get a skill card every time you heal the Bystander, giving a potential upside to it. I can't think of very many weaknesses that can be dealt with using only a single card/action. Even if you wind up taking a trauma or two Vincent has plenty of ways to heal horror. I don't see this as 'the worst weakness in the game' or really even close. — Pseudo Nymh · 54
I agree with @MrGoldbee, this weakness is not a big deal for sure. Bandages can keep him alive, and Ever Vigilant just saves the action to replay them. Besides, with the help of First Watch (or some other cards to protect you from encounter deck, like Deny Existence(5)), you can control when and how to take damage actually. — Zweizergain · 1

If you compare this card to Carolyn Fern's Rational Thought this weakness is ridiculously soft. Yes, you can only heal the bystander with cards that heal Ally assets, but that's about it - the card neither blocks your ability (which Rational Thought does double), nor do you even need to heal it entirely. What's more, it gives you soak and another way to trigger the investigator ability!

I think cards that heal Ally assets need to go into a Vincent Lee deck anyway, since the whole group benefits from them.

Didn't research much into combos yet, but Protecting the Anirniq can get some value out of this card if you do choose to get rid of him, one way or another.

AlderSign · 290