Roots Of Yggdrasil: The Valkyrie Scion Guide

The fourth scion in Roots of Yggdrasil is confusing to recruit. You can complete the game several times and find very few clues on how to obtain her, while the other scions will naturally appear in your early runs and don't require many special conditions to unlock.

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The valkyrie is unique in requiring a specific quest to be completed during a playthrough. To reward the added difficulty in unlocking her, she is perhaps the strongest scion the game has to offer, so here's what you need to do to find Eir and how to make the most of her unique abilities.

How To Recruit Eir, The Forsaken Valkyrie

The process for recruiting Eir isn't complex once you know what to do, but it can be challenging and does require a bit of early luck.

After reaching Asgard a few times you'll notice one event that consistently appears on the second set of sub-islands; a cave containing a caged figure that you are unable to explore before the darkness chases you out and onwards. This is where you can find Eir, but only if you can get the key to her prison.

The key itself appears as an artifact you can collect, but unlike the other ones found in the game, it appears in only one place. The Norns have a chance of offering you the Cursed Key at the start of each loop. It is the only artifact with an exclusively negative effect, adding the burden keyword to a card in hand each turn (reducing the cards drawn while you hold the card).

Your quest is to carry this key to the end of a loop. Once you reach that mysterious cave in Asgard, you can use the key to unlock Eir, and she will permanently join you. There's no randomness to this event appearing once you've unlocked it, so you don't need to worry about carrying the key all that way for nothing.

Recruiting Eir will also grant the ability to construct a market at the Holt, letting you trade surplus resources such as spare acorns.

How To Carry The Cursed Key

The cursed key makes the game more difficult, and you don't want the run to end early before you can use it. There are a few different methods you can use to maximise your chances of both finding the key and getting it to the end.

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Loop Early

You can end a loop early from the pause menu. This lets you reroll the gifts of the Norn repeatedly until they give you the key.

Trials Of The Gods

Setting the trials of the gods at a lower than normal level will keep you from being overwhelmed. Not only are you carrying the key, but you're also passing up on a more useful gift from the Norn.

Take Kare

Kare's passives and scion power all help with completing this quest. His might generation lets you explore islands quickly and his draw power offsets the burden imposed by the key.

Rebuild Your Holt

Changing up your Holt buildings can make the challenge easier. Avoid scavenger posts that give supply shortages, or Trader's Guilds that add retain to your cards. These will both punish you for having burden keywords in your deck.

Prioritise buildings that give you additional starting cards, such as Hero Statues. Watchtowers and barracks can give you additional starting might and might income, ensuring you'll be able to explore quickly even with fewer cards.

Focus On Clearing Islands Quickly

On a normal loop, it can be a good idea to stay late on an island to collect extra artifacts and acorns for later. When carrying the key, spare time is more valuable than an extra acorn and Eir's market can make up for any missed saplings in the long run.

How To Use Eir, The Forsaken Valkyrie

Once unlocked, Eir offers a rather unique playstyle that runs counter to the other scions. A cursory look at her powers and she'll appear weaker than the other cast members.

• Cursed Valkyrie appears to be a purely negative card for her scion power. It spawns a threat on the map and has the retain and burden keywords, reducing your drawn cards if you refuse to use it.
• Her first passive, War Cry, gives three might income when a threat appears. This includes those spawned by her scion power giving it a positive application.
• Her second passive, Valkyrie's Protection gives a point of population for every 40 might spent. This can be might spent on exploration, blooming saplings or fighting threats.

When compared to the starting abilities of Liv and Thrasir, Eir seems worse for resource generation but does produce the harder to obtain Might resource instead of supplies. The big difference between War Cry and the other scion passives is that War Cry's income persists across islands.

The general playstyle for Eir is to spam Cursed Valkyrie as often as possible to gain massive amounts of might from War Cry. This lets her snowball in exploration later on allows her to build a deck more focused on economy cards without a need for might generation.

Cursed Valkyrie can produce easily manageable threats like draugr towers but it could also be a more urgent danger like setting fire to your ship.

You don't need to have a smite card in hand before using her power, but its normally a good idea to have a might card you can use to clear roots or fires if needed.

Best Cards For Eir

Eir benefits from cards that respond directly to or exploit map threats. Raiding camps can be a good way of producing income against non-urgent threats like thunderstorms, while barbarian camps can be used to instantly clear out urgent threats or to save smite cards for later use.

The Fighter's Guild, which gives 50 supplies per threat you've cleared this island, can single-handedly hold up Eir's economy but requires nearby might buildings to be placed.

Eir has little use for cards that only produce might income, such as barracks or bowmakers. You'll often want to focus on other aspects of your economy, but you should still keep a few watchtowers and such to set up synergies, complete objectives, and put out fires.

Best Housing Type For Eir

The two best houses for Eir are the Heroic houses and the Nomadic homes.

Heroic houses generate population when using action cards. Since Eir likes to use her scion power on cooldown, and will often stay on islands well into the nighttime, you'll have a lot of Curse Action cards that generate population and give you new card drafts to use both in the moment and to prepare for the next island.

Nomadic homes make use of her existing might income. Nomadic homes generate population from exploration, letting her quickly get a decent population using the might generated by War Cry.

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