Positioning, tactical flexibility, and strategy is absolutely crucial with the Geminate, particularly at low level when you don't have much mobility in melee form and virtually no control over elements. Drag Down at it's very worst is a range 2, attack 2 + immobilize which is gonna do work against any melee type monster and gets much easier to hit 2 targets with at 3-4 players. It can force ranged attackers into disadvantaged attacks and punish spammy enemies like Abael and their allies. You can pair it with Hornbeetle bottom if you aren't burning it in the first cycle to get some extra security, Hornet bottom to get into position for your follow up attack in range form, or any basic move action to finesse the positioning for max targets. Your level 4 melee pick completely trivializes setting up targets for this and your follow-up in range form. I've had several opportunities to hit all three hexes with it or pull some crazy 'hit an enemy behind a door and prevent them from attacking because of line-of-sight' shenanigans. I ended up side-boarding Hornet Stingers long before Drag Down, especially with summoners on our team, and how easy it is to get poison on the targets you want, particularly at level 2 and 6. The 2x Brittle self modifier is a slam-dunk pick, imo. Its akin to having a permanent Bless in your deck and there are ways to mitigate the effects of Brittle. Your double-check effectively gives you an off-balanced hand when you've got a pair of odds, letting you squeeze out extra turns as well as replay stronger attacks or perform both reusable and loss effects of a single card. Its easy to write it off initially because it doesn't sound that great on paper but just having it gives you a 7 round first rest cycle every scenario. And the reality of the Geminate is that you need to be burning a lot of cards to keep up so you'll have many opportunities to proc this. Definitely worth trying to go for both masteries early on to pull this off. With Reshape bottom this is super doable at level 1 or 2 and just gets easier as you level. Some of those early scenarios are almost built for it. Corrosive Acids is just grotesque in what it can enable. Your 'ignore debuff once' perk can let you cleanse the Brittle right away with an item by ignoring the Impair. Pair it with Accelerated Metabolism bottom and play Hornbeetle top as your third action the following round, you get a Firefly Swarm, Hail of Thorns or Locust Host attack paired with Dragonfly Surge bottom. An aoe attack with +2 damage (before items), advantage and pierce against one or more targets that have Brittle and Poison, at 20 initiative in range form which has a lack of go-fast cards. Gross. Geminate was a weird one for me. I retired my first character right as the last unlock got snagged so I had to pick between Geminate and Drifter. Drifter is 10,000x more my style and looked like a lot of fun and this class didn't really click with me at all on a first glance. But I knew it'd be difficult to figure out so I decided to challenge myself and try to master it. Took a ton of work early on figuring this thing out. Initially it was probably one of my least favorite Haven classes that I've played but by the end it became one of my favorites and surpassed the performance of most of my best classes in Gloom. If you take the time to learn the fundamentals of this bug creature it can do work, it just has a much higher wall than the others. Thanks for covering this class! There's less info out there about it than the other starters so I'm glad people have another resource now.
Loved the commentaries card-by-card - there were several uses and advantages I hadn´t thought of in my own playthrough (now at lvl 7). Made me appreciate the Geminate even more! Thanks for churning out such quality content!
@@phoenicksgaming I find the balance of the Geminates flexibilities against the puzzles you need to get through to fully utilize it, really satisfying. But then again, I play with my husband and we play two characters each - and we tend to like a bit of "analysis paralysis" so my Geminate seldom get rushed by other players' haste.
@Ola Eldar Hoston-Tvinnereim had to hear you're enjoying it! Also if you are playing geminate and another class maybe you're actually playing 3 handed? :)
I am pretty sure that you can lose cards from either shape to prevent damage. All your cards that are in your hand are in your hand. The shape only limits which cards you can play when you choose your actions at the start of your turn.
@@phoenicksgaming From the Official FAQ on BGG: "General Note - Although it can be helpful to think of the Geminate as having two separate hands, they really have only one hand with restrictions on which cards they can play based on their current form. This may help if you’re wondering about losing cards to negate damage, or how rests work out. You still need to bring 7 cards for each form to every scenario." Please indicate this in the video (or use subtitles to indicate errors), because this is wrong and crucial information.
@@wovrente It's in the description and comments, but after several hours of trying to make TH-cam's "correction cards" work there just doesn't seem to be a way to make an edit directly to the video. If you know one please let me know!
Thank you for this! Picked geminate as my class and am going to retire next session at level 5. Took me such a long time to figure out the playstyle of the class because there were so few guides on the class, let alone good ones. I think there is a mistake in the beginning of this video in regards to hand size though. You can lose cards to negate damage from the form you are not currently in.
Great content as always. Interesting to see another person's take. I think with the Geminate, it's really important to mention how many players you play with and what the party composition is. It's very good at filling in party weaknesses, so I think that affects your affinity towards certain cards. For example, I played in a 4p party with boneshaper, drifter, and bannerspear, so leaned more heavily on killing the backline. In general, I think Geminate is stronger in bigger parties. More enemies for your many multitargets and higher value out of the "elemental reinfusion" cards (once it's played, you can keep remaking an element until you need it). I found draining pincers + chitinous horde on turn 1 into mind spike + smoldering hatred was my opener on many scenarios. Jump over the frontline late and then throw an early attack 6, attack 6, attack 4 on the backline is huge. Or if they're positioned right, firefly swarm for an early turn 2 attack 5, attack 5, attack 5, attack 4 trivialized a lot of rooms. Using the "prevent a negative condition to self" on the muddle is key. I played 2-3 losses per rest and rarely exhausted. Highly suggest doing the "burn a card every turn" mastery early to get a feel for it. You get WAY more rounds than you think when burning a card every turn (I didn't exhaust before the scenario ended!) I disagree on perks, but again I think there's so many ways to play the class. I found high variance super fun and always played an elemental reinfusion card, so never took the remove -1s. Brittle self x2 was my first pick. If you can't heal off the brittle, you can easily lose a card if needed on the next attack. Ignoring a self-inflicted condition was great too. I loved the double perk because of the flexibility it gave and because of how many losses I was playing. Regarding card loss -- the faq says "they really have only one hand with restrictions on which cards they can play based on their current form", implying to me that when losing a card from your hand, you can lose anything. Thanks for the great video!
Sorry for the late comment as I have only started playing Geminate recently. Party composition is potentially a game changer for the Geminate. There's a level 1 Shackles card that changes nearly everything discussed in this video. The core idea of the class flexibility remains but the execution options and synergistic benefits are a thing of beauty. Previously seeming "bad" cards become excellent non-loss picks with no downside and all upside. Building to specifically fuel shackles and finding timing windows for certain statuses becomes an interesting and entertaining challenge. I hope you get a chance to try this combo - assuming you haven't already finished Frosthaven (nor tired of it).
10:28 It may have been unintended, but the phrasing here made it sound like you only need to lose/burn Drag Down if you perform the disable ability. I'm pretty sure the only way to avoid such a loss symbol is to use the card as a generic att 2, or mv 2.
Important note on the double-box Perk: while it doesn't net gain a card, it let's you put an odd card of one form to use by the other! So if, for example, you had three range cards and one melee card in hand, you could play a ranged loss and, depending on whether you shift or not, discard a card to regain one so that you have two of the same form and get one more turn before resting!
One thing I feel that either wasn't mentioned or wasnt emphasised enough is that pretty much all of your xp gains are on burns so if you aren't burning your cards for their abilities you are going to level incredibly slowly. The person playing Geminate in our group realised this after about 3 or 4 scenarios, so now after 8 scenarios they have just barely reached lvl 3 (in two scenarios they burned their retaliate card that gives them an xp for every retaliation they do while its active, which for one of those scenarios meant they had earned more xp than the Drifter) whereas the Boneshaper is either a few xp from lvl 4 or is lvl 4 (which is around 55 xp more, which is a lot).
This is my starting class and I like it for the most part. There are a few things I don't care for about the cards for this class though: 1. Element generating is virtually non-existent. Only 4 cards from Level 1/X perform a standard element infusion and 2 others in later levels that are all loss cards. 2. Loss actions that include consuming an element are hard to maximize use because of the aforementioned lack of element generation. 3. Even with element usage, loss actions are weaker compared to other classes. It's a good class for longevity and decent balance between range/melee. But it's hard to use the loss cards to their fullest, meaning it's harder to build XP as a result.
Where is the rule about not losing cards from your off mode to negate damage? People on Reddit are saying the opposite and I couldn’t find it anywhere else.
You guys are underrating drag down. The red hex next to you is just extra. This card should really read attack 2 range 2 immobilize, and that's how you should approach using it. The value of "disarming" two melee attackers is so good.
Just finished a run with the Geminate and played it all wrong 😀 Retired at level 5 and was just getting so frustrated with the Precise Range of the Ranged side that I was glad to get rid of him but after watching this and other Geminate videos, I will have to try him again one day. However you are really sleeping on Drag Down, the immobilize on the second and third hexes just make it so so good.
It’s weird that with the bottom double perk (the one with the lost mechanic) nobody knows how it really works. For example this is the third explanation video I have seen and each person has a completely different way it operates. Can we get a really explanation on how it works please?
The only way I've found to make the edit into the video would be to delete the whole thing and repost. I don't want to lose the comments so as it stands I've just decided to take this one on the chin and learn my lesson for the future. If you know another work around I'd love to hear it!
I enjoy your vids but there's info in here that is flat out bad or wrong. The Geminate plays so much better if you flip forms regularly, the trick to mastering this one is to get the right flow. It can be difficult, but rewarding. "The Duke" already posted some solid advice before me so the only thing I'll add is that as the Geminate; you have a card for everything. Read the room and plan ahead. Burn often and switch often. Initiative weaving is strong on this one!
Positioning, tactical flexibility, and strategy is absolutely crucial with the Geminate, particularly at low level when you don't have much mobility in melee form and virtually no control over elements.
Drag Down at it's very worst is a range 2, attack 2 + immobilize which is gonna do work against any melee type monster and gets much easier to hit 2 targets with at 3-4 players. It can force ranged attackers into disadvantaged attacks and punish spammy enemies like Abael and their allies. You can pair it with Hornbeetle bottom if you aren't burning it in the first cycle to get some extra security, Hornet bottom to get into position for your follow up attack in range form, or any basic move action to finesse the positioning for max targets. Your level 4 melee pick completely trivializes setting up targets for this and your follow-up in range form.
I've had several opportunities to hit all three hexes with it or pull some crazy 'hit an enemy behind a door and prevent them from attacking because of line-of-sight' shenanigans. I ended up side-boarding Hornet Stingers long before Drag Down, especially with summoners on our team, and how easy it is to get poison on the targets you want, particularly at level 2 and 6.
The 2x Brittle self modifier is a slam-dunk pick, imo. Its akin to having a permanent Bless in your deck and there are ways to mitigate the effects of Brittle.
Your double-check effectively gives you an off-balanced hand when you've got a pair of odds, letting you squeeze out extra turns as well as replay stronger attacks or perform both reusable and loss effects of a single card. Its easy to write it off initially because it doesn't sound that great on paper but just having it gives you a 7 round first rest cycle every scenario. And the reality of the Geminate is that you need to be burning a lot of cards to keep up so you'll have many opportunities to proc this. Definitely worth trying to go for both masteries early on to pull this off. With Reshape bottom this is super doable at level 1 or 2 and just gets easier as you level. Some of those early scenarios are almost built for it.
Corrosive Acids is just grotesque in what it can enable. Your 'ignore debuff once' perk can let you cleanse the Brittle right away with an item by ignoring the Impair. Pair it with Accelerated Metabolism bottom and play Hornbeetle top as your third action the following round, you get a Firefly Swarm, Hail of Thorns or Locust Host attack paired with Dragonfly Surge bottom. An aoe attack with +2 damage (before items), advantage and pierce against one or more targets that have Brittle and Poison, at 20 initiative in range form which has a lack of go-fast cards. Gross.
Geminate was a weird one for me. I retired my first character right as the last unlock got snagged so I had to pick between Geminate and Drifter. Drifter is 10,000x more my style and looked like a lot of fun and this class didn't really click with me at all on a first glance. But I knew it'd be difficult to figure out so I decided to challenge myself and try to master it. Took a ton of work early on figuring this thing out. Initially it was probably one of my least favorite Haven classes that I've played but by the end it became one of my favorites and surpassed the performance of most of my best classes in Gloom. If you take the time to learn the fundamentals of this bug creature it can do work, it just has a much higher wall than the others.
Thanks for covering this class! There's less info out there about it than the other starters so I'm glad people have another resource now.
Wow, awesome content here. Thanks for sharing your experience - you're making me excited to play this class myself!
Loved the commentaries card-by-card - there were several uses and advantages I hadn´t thought of in my own playthrough (now at lvl 7). Made me appreciate the Geminate even more! Thanks for churning out such quality content!
Glad you're enjoying the videos! How have you enjoyed geminate?
@@phoenicksgaming I find the balance of the Geminates flexibilities against the puzzles you need to get through to fully utilize it, really satisfying. But then again, I play with my husband and we play two characters each - and we tend to like a bit of "analysis paralysis" so my Geminate seldom get rushed by other players' haste.
@Ola Eldar Hoston-Tvinnereim had to hear you're enjoying it! Also if you are playing geminate and another class maybe you're actually playing 3 handed? :)
@@phoenicksgaming Ooooh, that's right! I surely am!
I am pretty sure that you can lose cards from either shape to prevent damage.
All your cards that are in your hand are in your hand.
The shape only limits which cards you can play when you choose your actions at the start of your turn.
I'm seeing that my friend has been playing on hard mode! I can't tell if he will be happy or annoyed to find out :)
@@phoenicksgaming From the Official FAQ on BGG: "General Note - Although it can be helpful to think of the Geminate as having two separate hands, they really have only one hand with restrictions on which cards they can play based on their current form. This may help if you’re wondering about losing cards to negate damage, or how rests work out. You still need to bring 7 cards for each form to every scenario." Please indicate this in the video (or use subtitles to indicate errors), because this is wrong and crucial information.
@@wovrente It's in the description and comments, but after several hours of trying to make TH-cam's "correction cards" work there just doesn't seem to be a way to make an edit directly to the video. If you know one please let me know!
Thank you for this! Picked geminate as my class and am going to retire next session at level 5. Took me such a long time to figure out the playstyle of the class because there were so few guides on the class, let alone good ones. I think there is a mistake in the beginning of this video in regards to hand size though. You can lose cards to negate damage from the form you are not currently in.
On their FAQ page it suggests otherwise, but I agree with you that RAW it seems the way you said it is
It's looking like my buddy and I may have misread the FAQ so he's been playing on hard mode
Great content as always.
Interesting to see another person's take. I think with the Geminate, it's really important to mention how many players you play with and what the party composition is. It's very good at filling in party weaknesses, so I think that affects your affinity towards certain cards. For example, I played in a 4p party with boneshaper, drifter, and bannerspear, so leaned more heavily on killing the backline. In general, I think Geminate is stronger in bigger parties. More enemies for your many multitargets and higher value out of the "elemental reinfusion" cards (once it's played, you can keep remaking an element until you need it).
I found draining pincers + chitinous horde on turn 1 into mind spike + smoldering hatred was my opener on many scenarios. Jump over the frontline late and then throw an early attack 6, attack 6, attack 4 on the backline is huge. Or if they're positioned right, firefly swarm for an early turn 2 attack 5, attack 5, attack 5, attack 4 trivialized a lot of rooms. Using the "prevent a negative condition to self" on the muddle is key. I played 2-3 losses per rest and rarely exhausted. Highly suggest doing the "burn a card every turn" mastery early to get a feel for it. You get WAY more rounds than you think when burning a card every turn (I didn't exhaust before the scenario ended!)
I disagree on perks, but again I think there's so many ways to play the class. I found high variance super fun and always played an elemental reinfusion card, so never took the remove -1s. Brittle self x2 was my first pick. If you can't heal off the brittle, you can easily lose a card if needed on the next attack. Ignoring a self-inflicted condition was great too. I loved the double perk because of the flexibility it gave and because of how many losses I was playing.
Regarding card loss -- the faq says "they really have only one hand with restrictions on which cards they can play based on their current form", implying to me that when losing a card from your hand, you can lose anything.
Thanks for the great video!
Wow, thanks for sharing these thoughts! I think if I play this class I will try to "burn bright" as you do - that sounds like a lot of fun
Большое спасибо! Рад был услышать мнение о данном персонаже, сам сейчас им играю.
Sorry for the late comment as I have only started playing Geminate recently.
Party composition is potentially a game changer for the Geminate. There's a level 1 Shackles card that changes nearly everything discussed in this video. The core idea of the class flexibility remains but the execution options and synergistic benefits are a thing of beauty. Previously seeming "bad" cards become excellent non-loss picks with no downside and all upside. Building to specifically fuel shackles and finding timing windows for certain statuses becomes an interesting and entertaining challenge.
I hope you get a chance to try this combo - assuming you haven't already finished Frosthaven (nor tired of it).
We're on a bit of a break but I am LOVING the idea of what you're suggesting. Really fun idea that I'll have to try out
10:28 It may have been unintended, but the phrasing here made it sound like you only need to lose/burn Drag Down if you perform the disable ability.
I'm pretty sure the only way to avoid such a loss symbol is to use the card as a generic att 2, or mv 2.
Agreed! I think it's just clumsy phrasing
Important note on the double-box Perk: while it doesn't net gain a card, it let's you put an odd card of one form to use by the other! So if, for example, you had three range cards and one melee card in hand, you could play a ranged loss and, depending on whether you shift or not, discard a card to regain one so that you have two of the same form and get one more turn before resting!
Interesting trick!
One thing I feel that either wasn't mentioned or wasnt emphasised enough is that pretty much all of your xp gains are on burns so if you aren't burning your cards for their abilities you are going to level incredibly slowly. The person playing Geminate in our group realised this after about 3 or 4 scenarios, so now after 8 scenarios they have just barely reached lvl 3 (in two scenarios they burned their retaliate card that gives them an xp for every retaliation they do while its active, which for one of those scenarios meant they had earned more xp than the Drifter) whereas the Boneshaper is either a few xp from lvl 4 or is lvl 4 (which is around 55 xp more, which is a lot).
Interesting, you're right that I didn't notice or consider that. Thanks for the heads up!
This is my starting class and I like it for the most part. There are a few things I don't care for about the cards for this class though:
1. Element generating is virtually non-existent. Only 4 cards from Level 1/X perform a standard element infusion and 2 others in later levels that are all loss cards.
2. Loss actions that include consuming an element are hard to maximize use because of the aforementioned lack of element generation.
3. Even with element usage, loss actions are weaker compared to other classes.
It's a good class for longevity and decent balance between range/melee. But it's hard to use the loss cards to their fullest, meaning it's harder to build XP as a result.
Where is the rule about not losing cards from your off mode to negate damage? People on Reddit are saying the opposite and I couldn’t find it anywhere else.
Reddit folks are correct and we were wrong in this video :/ I did pin a comment about it
You guys are underrating drag down. The red hex next to you is just extra. This card should really read attack 2 range 2 immobilize, and that's how you should approach using it. The value of "disarming" two melee attackers is so good.
I hear you! I may not have implied it heavily enough in the video but it seems quite good to me
I'll give it shot in my next game and see how it works out! 🙂
@@hungn3definitely do! It's one of my mvps (mvcs?)
Seems to me the main reason to burn cards isn't tempo but just scoring xp.
Fair but you can do that as the scenario is coming to a close but with this class you can do that earlier on!
I wish y'all clarified thee mechanics first and then the personal anecdotes later
Just finished a run with the Geminate and played it all wrong 😀 Retired at level 5 and was just getting so frustrated with the Precise Range of the Ranged side that I was glad to get rid of him but after watching this and other Geminate videos, I will have to try him again one day. However you are really sleeping on Drag Down, the immobilize on the second and third hexes just make it so so good.
Im eager to try it out one day myself!
It’s weird that with the bottom double perk (the one with the lost mechanic) nobody knows how it really works. For example this is the third explanation video I have seen and each person has a completely different way it operates.
Can we get a really explanation on how it works please?
Which card are you referring to?
On Locust Host (lvl2, top) if you take the curse, does this eliminate the range restriction?
I believe it still has the range restriction, but I'm not entirely sure
I don't think so. If it did then we would be asking what is the range of it?
When your ally wants negative effects... *spoiler* cough cough. Then this is the best 👌
Spicy combo *wink wink*
There are some volume issues, really hard to hear the interviewer.
Yeah I need to figure out my settings for two person videos. Audio tech is a weak spot for me
You really must correct the 'burn to negate damage restriction' comment. The Geminate is hard enough as is it.
The only way I've found to make the edit into the video would be to delete the whole thing and repost. I don't want to lose the comments so as it stands I've just decided to take this one on the chin and learn my lesson for the future. If you know another work around I'd love to hear it!
I enjoy your vids but there's info in here that is flat out bad or wrong. The Geminate plays so much better if you flip forms regularly, the trick to mastering this one is to get the right flow. It can be difficult, but rewarding. "The Duke" already posted some solid advice before me so the only thing I'll add is that as the Geminate; you have a card for everything. Read the room and plan ahead. Burn often and switch often. Initiative weaving is strong on this one!
I think folks play differently and figure out ways to make things work for them.
LOL! THATS the one you have trouble with? Try snowflake "s" attack
XD