The 10 BEST Cards in Finspan: A Wingspan Game | Strategy Guide

Hello, welcome to Quackaloup. Thank you for being here. Today we're talking about broken, busted, very, very powerful cards in Finsspan. I find that I struggle to win this game specifically when playing against my wonderful, highly competitive, very intelligent, beautiful wife, Shira. I have won like less than 10% of the games that we've played.

And we've played over a dozen games so far. And so I went through this deck to start deducing, to start pulling out the cards that should be grabbing my attention the moment I see them in my hand that I should start orienting my play around because they score a lot or they cost so little in relation to what they give you in potential.

Let's start with a card that is worth technically 20 points. If you happen to grab the Pale Chimera, you should start building your engine towards playing this card down. First off, goes anywhere on the board in these lower two regions, which is a limited location. I always find that I fill up the sunny, you know, sunny top portion quicker than these lower ones.

and it scores 10 victory points if you happen to have on it an egg, a fish, and a school. Well, you kind of want those things anyway. You want eggs, you want fish, you want schools. They give you victory points. It only costs a single card, which is what I think the cheapest resource in the game, isn't really worth anything.

You can always get many, many back, and the draw power in this game is is pretty powerful. and an egg, which does cost you technically one victory point, but it directs your attention towards building this. If you've built this, you'll score 12 points from the card alone, six points from the school of fish, an additional point for the single fish, and for the egg, meaning this is worth a total of 20 points.

That's how big that one zone, that one region on your board becomes. That's massive. That is worth directing your attention to. Okay, let's go over the other cards that I have pulled. We have the Faceless Cusk, we have the cookie cutter shark, and we have the angel shark. Now, the faceless cusk is what I think the most affordable, the the cheapest, most playable version of any of these trigger an additional card to be played game end abilities.

Like for instance, I have another one over here. This is the striped marlin. The striped marlin can go anywhere up in this sunny region. Again, a region that gets filled up pretty aggressively. It costs one fish, which is a victory point, so little frustrating. And it allows you to play another card up in that sunny region.

Okay, that's fine. I could see a reason to do that. But the victory points don't change between these two. And the cost to play it down is three cards, which again, I think you'll see a theme in this is the cheapest resource in the game. It's the easiest resource to get a hold of as the game progresses.

And depending on how you've built out your tableau, you're likely cycling a number of cards that you're just not concerned about playing down onto your board. So, costs three cards. You can save it till the very end and have it be triggered or trigger another playown ability. So, it's cheap to play down and allows you to put another card down here into the bottom row, giving you an extra action, meaning an extra opportunity to score, which can be massive.

The cookie cutter shark just requires you to go on top of another card. That is extremely cheap as long as you have cards that you've set aside for that. You of course don't want to swallow a card that's worth a ton of victory points, but there are a lot of cards out here that aren't worth that much that this would be perfect to cover.

Now, game end, you score five victory points if this is on the bottom row. So, one of the fun things that you can do if you happen to have this faceless cusk is play it down into a lower location down here and then go ahead and take the cookie cutter shark, utilize this ability, consume the faceless cusk, meaning you'd reduce it in value by only one victory point.

and suddenly you have a location on your board that's worth a total of nine victory points because you've played it down here onto the bottom and it's covered up a card being worth one and it's worth eight on its own. So, it's a simple little sequence that gives you almost a free play of uh of nine victory points for three cards.

Not too bad at all. And then the Angel Shark, extremely powerful card. This is another endgame scoring card. game end. 10 victory points if you're on top of three other cards. Now, the location that you should be aiming for this to go is over here in your green zone. Wait till the last round of the game or so because it it's completely free to play, meaning you can save your resources for some other big plays or postgame triggered plays.

You only have to cover up a fish in order to play it down. It has 240 on its wingspan or its fins span location. And so you're able to play this down. You're able to go ahead and secure 12 victory points in one region plus the three or more cards or fish underneath it. Meaning this could be worth about 15 points in and of itself just off a base.

Extremely good, extremely powerful. The long snouted Lancefish. This one covers up a card. That's the cost for covering up a card. you immediately get to draw three cards and you get to move a fish. It can go anywhere on your board. Meaning, if you have this early on in the game, this is a perfect one to unlock or trigger a brand new region of your board.

Sometimes I like sticking them in dusk just cuz that's like a region I don't find that I fill that often. 200 is its is its range, meaning it can cover any number of fish out here. and on top of that gives you three draw. Extremely powerful and uh extremely extremely cheap. Now again, you you could you can't play it out, I guess, to trigger a new location on the board because you do have to cover a fish uh when you I've made that mistake before thinking that I could just like stick them down and have a card for my hand be the thing that he ate.

Has to go on top of a fish that already that is already out there. But with these free fish here, that three card draw is extremely powerful. Let's look at a few things that are going to hatch some fish for you. We have the Pacific Sardine, the Abyssal Spiderfish, and the Speckled Butterfly Fish. The speckled butterfly fish is an endgame trigger only worth one victory point on its own.

Only costs one card, which again is a free card trade. It, however, is going to allow you to hatch three fish and then get one free move. You pair this with another move or you have this hatch of fish in a location where there's already one fish there. You've prepped your board a little bit for it. This can hatch three fish and go ahead and move one of them to trigger it into a school of fish.

Meaning you'll end up with one victory point from him, two victory point from the individual floating fish, and six victory points from the school they created, giving you a nine victory point swing or nine victory point card. This game can be won or lost in 10 victory points. That's big. for two cards playing down here into the bottom zone, which is a pretty hard place to get cards in my opinion.

When played, this is going to go ahead and hatch three eggs. Very powerful. Uh triggering egg egg hatching is sometimes not so worthwhile when you're going up and down this green line. And so this is a fish that I'd love to get out early on, giving me a boost of hatching ability and allowing me to focus most of my dive actions over here on the card row and the lay egg row while relying on something like this to help push out those fish that I need.

And up top here, this one basically just lets you achieve it in and of itself. Pacific Sardine, three cards. Again, you'll get those cards back. It's not too hard to get three cards and and have them cycle through here. uh you're going to lay two eggs and you're going to hatch two eggs, meaning that when played, you could go ahead and lay two eggs and hatch the two eggs that you just laid down.

You won't have expended resources that fail you. And if you happen to already have eggs on the board, you get two fish, two additional eggs. That's really good for three cards that just come back into your hand with a couple turns. That's really good. All right, the last set of cards here that I think are extremely powerful.

We have the longspine porcupine fish, the pelican eel, and the yellowtail snapper. Yellowtail snapper is going to be the most affordable one of these game end lay egg triggers. The other ones cost things like fish, do things like uh share the burden amongst the players. They all have varying costs. And yeah, the victory points do go up for some of them, but I find this one to just be exceptionally powerful.

If you've placed it out, at the end of the game, you're going to play an egg on every purple, giving you the opportunity for 1, two, three, four, five, six locations to lay an egg. But it's not just that, because your endgame triggers can do things like hatch those eggs, maneuver those eggs, turn them into schools of fish or other little fish.

it really starts to chain and become more and more powerful. This is the most affordable one in there. Pelican Eel just has to sit on top of someone. It's a cheap card. Has a has a good fin span 100 cm. And when played, all players are going to play an egg down on your medium-sized cards. Very powerful, especially if you're paying attention to what other players have.

if they already have a lot of their medium-sized cards covered up with eggs. This is one that gives you a steep advantage while potentially limiting the advantage that you give them. And then we have the longspine porcupine. This is going to have you spend two cards. It's going to have you spend one egg alongside that worth five victory points, which is nothing to sneeze at.

And when played, again, you're going to play down on all your mediumsiz fish. Includes itself and includes any other medium-sized fish you have out there on the board. I find that the bigger fish are harder to play down. Little fish and medium-sized fish happen to come through my my pond uh pretty often.

And so this is just a resource uh rich or resource valuable card to play. A lot of the cards in this game really are fairly honed in and fairly balanced. I mean, the cards that I've pulled are the standouts, the unique abilities, the cards that are customized. When you have a list of cards through Finsspan, a lot of them are just a little variation on cost, on location, and on ability, whether it's shared, whether it's nuance, but these are the cards that change the game.

And I and I think if you get a couple of them through your deck and you orient your strategy around them, like something like this larger tooth, this large largot tooth large this large tooth flounder. Not that I was like I haven't played with it. something like this pale chimera. Uh this really this really directs your game but really can be the difference between scoring a victory at the very end and almost or kind of getting close.

I find a lot of the scores to be very close because a lot of these cards are very balanced and these I think have a victory point gift or a victory point threshold or a resource threshold. It's just slightly better than the other cards in the market. So, pay attention. Keep an eye out for some of these as you play.

Let me know if you think I overlooked anything. I'm extremely excited to see an expansion come out for Finsspan. Uh this is one that has just been very pleasant to get out and onto the table. I was skeptical of it at first. Um, but I'm glad that we've given it the time uh that it deserves so that now we're digging into some of the more nuanced elements like what cards am I hungrily searching for and trying my best to prepare my board to play?

Whatever the case though, whatever you do, remember to do the important thing. Always eat sardines on Tuesday. The omega-3s, the salt intake, and the fatty nature of them will give you a boost that really just carries you through the rest of the week. It will leave some residual scents on your breath that um might have people avoid you at work, which could be a a benefit if you really don't like interacting with people on Wednesdays or Thursdays.

You don't want to eat sardines on Fridays, though, because then they're going to ruin your weekend. So, keep that keep that in mind. Salmon on Fridays, sardines on Tuesdays, in between just tomato sauce. We'll see you next time.