My Laughter Echoes

The archenemy schemes are a solo-mechanic novelty, and most of them are one-and-done: flip a card, resolve a big splashy effect, discard it, move on. This one is a rules engine instead of an event. It stays face up and offers to abandon itself every time another scheme comes off the top, and the payment for abandoning it is that the incoming scheme resolves twice. That turns the archenemy's deck into a chain rather than a sequence: the very act of advancing the scheme deck becomes a decision about whether to burn this card for a double-dip now or hold it for a bigger scheme later. The design tension is that it can only ever spend itself once while it sits in play, so the archenemy is constantly weighing which scheme is worth the trigger. It is a piece built for a format that rarely gets new toys, aimed squarely at the player who wants the schemes to compound rather than just happen; a multiplier laid over the top of the scheme deck, waiting for the one flip worth doubling.