The level 5 Butterfly Swords are far more capable weapons than their lower level sibling. But as one of the most expensive weapons in the game (in terms of Xp), they better be. Let's have a closer look.

The Good

• The swords can deal three damage on their first attack (if you succeed at both tests and exhausts them).
• A three action potential of seven damage makes this one of the more dangerous melee weapons in the game.
• Three resources is cheap for a high-end weapon.
• Can be upgraded from (2) to (5), so can be paid for in installments.
• Each activation is split into two attacks, so missing one attack and hitting on the other will still do 1 damage. Having to test twice isn't always good though, but more on that later.

The Bad

• Two handed, so no Flashlights or the like.
• No Relic trait. It's a small thing but several of the cards competing with the swords are relics.
• Too expensive (in terms of Xp) to be a good backup weapon.
• The second attack is + , so it's better for investigators with a decent agility. Which so far means Lily Chen, alternately Mark Harrigan.

The Ugly

• What might sound good at first; "one free attack per activation! Woho!" is actually +1 damage with extra steps. But as SSW pointed out, there's a benefit to the extra step: You get two attacks each doing 1 damage, rather than one attack doing 2 damage, so missing the first and hitting on the second attack only subtracts 1 damage. But, in my mind that benefit is eclipsed by the disadvantage that is...
• ...having to pass two tests PER activation can be harsh. If you're aiming for the full potential of the weapon, that's six tests to deal seven damage. This is especially true on harder difficulties. You'll learn to hate high combat enemies with Retaliate and extra nasty special tokens.
• The swords are sorely outclassed by the Cyclopean Hammer they were released alongside. The hammer has +total to hit, which for guardians is at least +3, sometimes +4 or more. The hammer also easier to buff one or two attacks with skill cards and/or stat pumps than having to buff 4 to 6 attacks. Plus the situational but neat movement effect.

TL;DR There are two things I like about the Butterfly Swords. 1) You can deal 3 damage with your first activation each round, as long as you pass both tests. 2) you can upgrade them from level 2. Everything else are either mediocre or bad. The swords are hard sells at 5 Xp, and I would advice you to buy Cyclopean Hammers instead.

Maybe someday we'll get a card effect that will add +1 damage to each attack made that round - or something like that . That might make the swords worth your time.

This weapon is bad, and there are a few reviews that say it is, but it is hard to understand just how... amazingly terrible this weapon is. On first blush it is just not that good but it is actually far more insidious than that.

To understand why this is such an amazingly bad weapon, you need to do my favorite thing: Lots of math!

Drawing from the bag a lot of times to achieve an effect is, in Arkham, a bad thing to do. This isn't intuitive, there are many games where "Make 3 tests to do 1 damage 3 times" is actually better than "Make 1 test to do 3 damage." Arkham is not one of those games.

When making attacks with the swords, you test twice. One is probably an auto-success if the other has any chance of success, which means your expecting about a 7% to 4% autofail on one, and 25% fail rate on the other (say... you have 7 total combat strength vs a 5 fight enemy). This means your expected damage comes out to about 5 expected damage when swinging this thing around in a fairly standard situation to be in, which makes it not even a full +1 damage weapon. You are just flatly better off using a weapon with a stronger hitrate boost than a +2 in this scenario, as well as making your attacks hit harder than a mere +1, rather than trying to play into some weird sort of consolation prize for failing while also failing more. After all, you can make up for lost damage on fails way more easily by doing double the damage AND failing less, rather than attacking twice as often.

And your reward for probably being worse than a neutral 1 handed weapon in output is... producing more scenario specific negative tokens. Assuming there are 2 tokens you really don't want to draw for their own sake in a 15 token bag (which is pretty standard for arkham early to mid campaign), you will see one of those really bad tokens 43% of the time. This is probably the best you can expect, but it can get much, much worse.

Just a little example that minimizes spoilers: In Carcosa's first scenario, if you are trying to push past an enemy in a room affected by the scenario, you can expect to take 2 horror every turn you fight with these (not to mention it is a scenario with a -4 symbol). Obviously you can't have the swords at this scenario, but if you hypothetically had the butter knives right now, you probably would completely kill yourself from full health as most guardians after 3 turns of fighting.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg: Spawning enemies, placing doom, losing clues (though obviously that last one is less of a concern for guardians), losing assets, enemies healing, enemies damaging friends, losing actions, all of these things and more can happen on token draws and more! The terrors trying to do kung fu will bring you cannot be understated, and it is why this weapon is so amazingly bad: Not only does it make you worse at fighting than pretty much any other XP weapon that doesn't have a taboo (and probably most 0 XP in guardian) but it makes the game harder for everyone as your turn partially becomes Arkham Horror's turn.

This is why 'purely benign' skill cards like Alchemical Transmutation are considered bad if their upshot isn't strong enough: Merely drawing from the bag for a skill test is a downside even if the listed consequence for failure is 'nothing' often enough. Even rogues don't generally set themselves up for lowball 'nothing' tests.

"But what if the first attack would generally hit?" If the first test would generally pass anyway, you absolutely should be using a different weapon. The only advantage of the swords is to make it virtually guaranteed you will do 1 damage vs enemies you have a harder time hitting. If you are fairly sure you will hit anyway, you hurt yourself any time you are not stabbing a rat because now you fail to do 2 damage 10% of the time (assuming the bag is fairly mild that scenario), compared to the 5% of a normal weapon. Doing more than 1 damage an attack is why you bring weapons in the first place, baring some very specific exceptions, and this just made you WORSE at it than a 2 XP weapon. And, obviously, this gets worse the worse the bag is for you, and it causes worse things to happen to you over the course of a campaign. If even 3 'really bad' tokens are in the bag, you actually will expect to see more than one a turn on average. It gets really terrible for you, really fast.

"What if they release a card that rewards you for spamming attacks?" This is called Custom Ammo, it is fantastic. They will probably never release a version of this card that would work with a machete, and building around 5 XP card using an equivalent event or skill in guardian is obviously a non-starter: Yes you could with a hypothetical full turn +1 event do 13 damage on the turn you play it... or you could just use a lightning gun or flamethrower every turn, and just use the support slot in the deck for ammo. This card will probably never get support because any support it does get would be too dangerous to game balance in the context of other, better weapons. We might see it on something like a character power, but if it was gunna happen it would probably have happened on Lilly Chen. Maybe a scenario specific asset, but obviously that is of very limited general deckbuilding utility and even a damage boost of 1 probably isn't good enough to overcome the 'you are drawing bad tokens every other turn with this and your team is begging you to stop' problem. Either way, if they were gunna print that and intended for it to be used with this weapon, wouldn't it have been in this set?

"What if I am Lilly Chen, or don't want to use ammo synergy cards?" Timeworn Brand exists, which out preforms this card in basically every way as well as freeing a hand slot for a useful tool or backup weapon. As does Cyclopean Hammer, which usually radically out preforms either as long as you build around it even slightly.

The cruelest thing about this weapon is that it came out in the EOTE box, which is probably the worst campaign to use it, because it will probably actively kill you there on your first playthrough if it gets even remotely cold, but there are a few other campaigns this weapon is very bad, such as Carcosa (where in some scenarios skulls are effectively autofails, meaning you will have 4 autofails in a 17 sized bag and thus you will be doing an average of 1.2 damage a swing with these even assuming you are otherwise good on the bag), TFA (Speedrun killing yourself!) and TCU (where pretty much every scenario past early game has really bad token effects).

We could also get into all the anti-synergy with any sort of temporary boosting effect (like 'pay to pump,' exhausting boosts, or committed cards), or the fact these are a nightmare vs any retaliate enemy (again, have fun in Carcosa where you will statistically take more damage than you deal vs some enemies just from the skulls+autofail problem!), and how these are not technically a strict upgrade on knives 2 (they have overall better potential damage, but if you care about having a very 'sure thing' 2 damage they are worse for characters with good speed), but the fact these are low damage weapons with a big downside is already enough to sink them as a concept: You want your low damage weapons to either have the potential to do more than high damage weapons, or come with some big upside that overcomes the fact they don't do the primary job of weapons as well. You don't want them to have a special gimmick that just makes them worse.

This weapon could be named 'Cursed Butterfly Swords' and it would make more thematic sense, the effect of drawing lots of tokens will cause so many bad things to happen it feels like it should be a "I gain radical power in exchange for this benefit." effect. But in reality it promises, at most, just 1 extra damage on top of what a Timeworn Brand (already not exactly the highest damage weapon in the game) does if everything goes perfectly, and has a lower average expected damage output than it in reality. It is deeply in need of some sort of help to make any sort of sense to take in any deck.

edit This card is ridiculously good in the scarlet keys campaign, because of the Concealed mechanic.

Soooo everytime I play lily chen, I take this weapon. And I think these swords our pretty good, and I always enjoy using them. That being said. They are bad to the alternatives that she could take.cough hammercough but I always take these knifes. And I like to talk about why.

I have used the cyclopean hammer many times, and I enjoy, just like many, the effectiveness it brings to the table. I wrote a little review talking about how it should be tabooed, it a pretty hard card from all fronts. Why build for weapons that requires ammo, and special attachments, and resources to pay and the actions to spend trying to get set up, to do half of what the hammer can do. And that's without all of the attachments. Sure it's 5 resources, but that's on par the lighting gun, bar, and flamethrower. All prevalent weapons for guardians........ but Lily can't take any of them.

That leaves the hammer, the best of them all,the holy spear, which you could muster up a bless-ish build with lily, and these butterfly swords, objectively the worst of the bunch, but I still would rather take the swords over the hammer, when I play Lily.

The main reason is that it has an interesting take on using Agility, as apposed to using more strength. Which typically guardians have around 2-3 Agility. So it makes for a pretty 'okay' boost,But compare to the hammer, there isn't a single guardian that has lower then 3 will.(except Carson:/) So it usually boosted to the same, or more, for less test taking. To do the same damage once, requires 2 test, while the hammer can do the same 3 damage a majority of the time. For less test. This is why people want the swords buffed.

The problem is, that I think this card is in a good place, and we really shouldn't push for this card to be like the hammer. Because if this card was like the hammer, we would need to taboo it, but if the hammer was like this card, we would also want it buffed as well. That is the awkward state of the hammer. It's just so good.

The swords, while not as good as the hammer, I think are fun to use. The whole point of this game is taking test, and while less is more with the hammer, It's just too good, and leaves other weapons wanting. Lily can, especially with her strength and Agility disciplines, work wonders with this weapon.

But I think that really says more about lily, then theses swords. But I will always play these swords on her, rather the hammer.

Has an amusing interaction with Lifeline, a combo which currently only Tommy can use (and who would never want to run butterfly knives). You can swing six times in a round, fail all of them, get six additional actions, and swing twelve more times. Throw in Keen Eye for the comeback round.

As dezzmont said, this weapon could be on the anti-taboo list someday, hopefully.

I think the intent of the Game Designers was to force Lily Chen to invest in multiple stats over the course of the campaign, first with Spectral Razor, Brand of Cthugha and of course take advantage of your Spells used to boost the Dragon Pole. Then transition to that helps for every attack, and end the campaign with for all the upgraded cards.

Butterfly Swords, Defensive Stance, Sweeping Kick, Dodge, Fang of Tyr'thrha, Combat Training are all focussed and this all goes to "Sounds good but I will most likely never use it" area as there is literally no reason to use any of these when the Cyclopean Hammer is better on every aspect and doesn't require you to transition from to .

So I was thinking of leaving a review about how I wish to make this weapon better, while still fair.

The Combat bonus:

When comparing to the Cyclopean Hammer, the Flamethrower, the Lightning Gun, Shotgun, the combat bonus of +2 on a Hand x2 lvl 5 card seems a bit minimal for a basic attack.

The exception is the Holy Spear but it comes in a deck that is suppose to pull a lot of to compensate for the low bonus.

Suggested Fix:

It would make sense to have "Add your " This would make it more balanced maybe in that sense, especially as only Lily Chen, Sister Mary and Mark Harrigan have 3 .

Synergy with Balance of the Body:

I like the idea that lvl 5 weapons are "tailored" for the they are released with, like the Holy Spear and Sister Mary and here, the lacks of synergy with Lily is striking.

Suggested Fix:

So how to make these Butterfly Swords more adapted to Lily Chen? A lead could be the Balance of the Body that allows you to make 3 different attacks, meaning use 3 different ": Fight." triggers.

If the swords would for example have the non-exhaust attack as a different trigger than the exhaust one that deals 1 more damage, that would allow us to use the 2 actions of the Discipline activation only with the Butterfly Swords, leaving us only with the 3rd attack to fill in our deck, with Sweeping Kick for example, that would find a good use here (when I would not add it to my deck otherwise), or Spectral Razor that I probably started with.

Let me know in the comments your suggested fix and I'll try to keep this updated!

Last little comment for anyone wondering: you can exhaust the Butterfly Swords on the 1st attack and keep using the normal attack for the following attacks. The only restriction is that you cannot exhaust them twice (unless you use Galvanize).