I love playing Wildfrost, but the mechanic Aimless can eat a triple dick, donkey shit sundae. I hate this shit so much. It doesn’t matter how many times I land a top 50 spot in the Daily Voyage, nor the amount of runs I finish successfully: Aimless will continue to be the monster that lives under my bed.

But why?

I’m glad you asked.

Before I get into my actual grievances with Aimless, it’s important to define what Aimless does for the 3 of you that are reading this article without having first played Wildfrost. Aimless is a card attribute that changes where the affected card can attack. Normally, minions will attack the first thing they’re able to in a lane. For those of you that like visuals, that looks like this:

Showing how normal cards attack in Wildfrost using arrows.

However, when a card has Aimless, they’re able to attack any of the spaces in the current row they’re targeting. Again, here’s a visual of what that would look like:

Showing how Aimless attacks work in Wildfrost.

I don’t believe, but don’t know for certain, that there are weighted odds for which target gets hit. As such, you’re looking at Aimless basically giving a minion a 33% chance to hit any target in a row, instead of a 100% chance to hit the first target in a row. Also, it’s worth pointing out that if there are only 2 targets in a row, then it’s a 50/50 split. Wildfrost doesn’t have a miss mechanic, so Aimless only works on applicable targets.

So that’s all of what Aimless is, but why do I hate it so much? Simple: variance. I am not a huge fan of games with high variance. I know that’ll probably sound ridiculous because Wildfrost is both a roguelike, and a card game. Both of those genres have notoriously high variance when compared to most other games. While I can appreciate that, when it comes to Wildfrost’s combat there tends to be very little variance. The outcome of combat each turn is very clearly telegraphed, and what cards actually do is communicated very transparently to the player.

EXCEPT FOR AIMLESS!

Aimless is the one time where Wildfrost isn’t totally transparent. That’s what drives me bonkers. Everything is so clear the majority of the time, but as soon as an enemy hits the field with Aimless all that clarity goes flying out the fucking window.

Now, there are a handful of ways to deal with Aimless, but I’m not a huge fan of most of them. That’s entirely because the most consistent way to deal with Aimless is to just kill the Aimless minion with extreme prejudice. That, or you can permanently lock them down with Snow so they’re not able to act.

Yes – you’ve read that correctly. The way to deal with Aimless is to simply not let any card with it do anything.

Well, ok. There is actually a third way to deal with Aimless, but it’s locked to Wildfrost’s third faction. There’s another mechanic called Ink which negates all of the bonus effects on a card. This turns the Aimless card into a regular card for the duration of the debuff. Ink is the one true counter to Aimless, though 2/3 of the game’s factions don’t have reliable access to cards that can actually apply Ink.

It doesn’t help that Aimless is also an ever present concern for players to build their deck, and strategy around. It has a chance to appear in half of the game’s 8 encounters. Statistically speaking, you can get an Aimless free run, but the odds are almost certainly stacked against you. Ergo, you’re going to have to plan around countering Aimless making it an ever present thorn in my side.

You can also be cursed with a leader card that has Aimless, which I just love! The different stats of leaders are all pulled from a table of potential options, and those largely fall into 2 categories. There are leaders that are good, and leaders that are simply okay. You could build a run winning strategy around the good ones. The okay leaders aren’t even remotely strong enough to bother with such things, but they can still get the job done provided they’re supporting a strong deck.

What about Aimless leaders?

Aimless leaders exist in their own forsaken third category of bad leaders. I genuinely don’t think any non-Aimless leader is bad. The Aimless ones are straight trash though. Most of them do not have any kind of huge positive upside to negate just how bad Aimless is. While it does allow these leaders to directly attack the enemy’s backline, they could just as easily accidentally hit an enemy with an on-hit trigger. Or an enemy with Teeth (Wildfrost’s version of thorns/revenge damage). Or they may continue to attack the least important target in the enemy’s lane. I don’t know? There’s no consistency to Aimless, so your strategy is entirely dependent on playing around that total lack of reliability. That’s super frustrating, and is something I don’t find particularly fun.

If, by some miracle, someone from Deadpan Games reads this, please don’t take it personally. I love playing Wildfrost most of the time, but if I found a magic lamp I’d use all 3 wishes to remove Aimless from your game forever. I just hate it so much. I was reminded of that hatred during today’s Daily Voyage (context: post written on 11/11/24) where I had to watch my dumbass Aimless-infected leader repeatedly attack the stupidest possible targets EVERY SINGLE TURN during the first major boss fight. I almost lost the run there, but managed to pull through despite all the terrible randomness.

Actually, unrelated side note: I found a bug during my Daily Voyage. Apparently when you use Blank Mask to duplicate a shade, Wildfrost uses the original card for the duplication instead of the shade card. This matters because I used Shade Wisp to duplicate the Frost Guardian, and then made a second copy with Blank Mask. However, because Blank Mask was copying a Frost Guardian with 3 Health, it had to drop the card’s health by 57 points after it created it. This triggered the Frost Guardian’s effect of giving everyone attack equal to health loss. Here’s a short video capturing the whole thing.

Please don’t remove this. It’s very funny.

Alright. That’s all. Fuck Aimless. Thank you. Good bye.