The Bloodstone

Seven of the fifteen descents on record ran the Gathering to zero. Six of those were solo. Two of them won anyway, because Blood dragged the deck back from nothing at the last moment.

So the pile that actually kills you is the one nobody is rewarded for feeding.

What it takes

Put an entity down at full Dominion, exactly, in a single play. Not a clean kill: a clean kill with no blow struck first.

There have been 138 clean banishments across every descent on record. Twenty-one of them were one-blow. About one and a bit a descent, which is rare enough to be an event and common enough to go looking for.

What it returns, and when you say so

A stone worth ten for a Spawn, fifteen for a Herald, twenty for an Ancient. You hold it until you break it, and breaking one calls that many cards back out of the Grave into the bottom of the Gathering.

Choosing when is the whole of it. Break it early and those cards lie under a full deck where nothing will reach them. Break it when the Gathering is thin and they are exactly what you draw next, which is also the moment you most need them.

Nothing stops you wasting one. Break a twenty over a Grave holding three and you get three. The Grave’s count sits beside the stones and the call is yours, because the skill is timing and a guard would be the game deciding for you.

The arithmetic is Swarm’s

A Club doubles, so the Swarm of a rank is precisely that rank’s Dominion.

J♣ is twenty against a Spawn’s twenty. Q♣ is thirty against a Herald’s thirty. K♣ is forty against an Ancient’s forty. Exact, all three, and none of it was arranged either.

A Club can never double against the entity of Swarm, so J♣ can take three Spawn and never Shoggoth, Q♣ can take three Heralds and never Abhoth, K♣ three Ancients and never Cthulhu.

And the Rite does it with a pair

This is the line I like most, and neither rule was designed for the other.

The Rite of the Pair binds two cards of a rank into one card’s Ruin in a single Force. Bound into Swarm, two Jacks are ten, doubled, which is twenty: a Spawn to the point. Two Queens take a Herald. Two Kings take an Ancient. Two tens take a Spawn.

The Rite has no exception, because the pair supplies the Force rather than borrowing it. So where J♣ cannot touch Shoggoth, two Jacks can.

That is the pro line: the Swarm reading, and the pair, and the patience to hold them until something is standing at full Dominion in front of you.