Heavy Marks

The Heavy Mark family is six charms that fire on onWin and reward you for deliberately deviating from basic strategy along a specific compositional axis. They make the wrong play sometimes right, when held.

The cascade math is loud — 2-3× louder than the older mark-shaped charms (bus_ticket, oilcloth_apron, smashed_compass) — because they need to fight basic-strategy EV on the felt.

The catalog

Charm	Tier	Target	Payoff
Pair Hunter	mythic	winning hand contains a pair	×3 final mult (×2 after 3 fires/campaign, ×1.5 after 6)
The Long Walk Home	mythic	five-card-charlie win	×4 final mult (×2.5 after 1 fire)
Three of a Kind	mythic	3 matching ranks (post-split or post-Carry)	+50 chips, ×3 mult (×2 after 2 fires)
Seven Seeker	rare	each 7 in winning hand	+5 final mult per 7
The Court Calls	rare	2+ face cards (J/Q/K) in winning hand	×2 final mult
The Slow Bleed	uncommon	stand on hand value 12-15 and win	+8 chips, +2 mult

Why the tuning is loud

A player on hard 15 vs dealer 7 holds Pair Hunter. Basic strategy says hit. The cascade math:

• Stand: ~26% win × (15 chips × 1 mult) ≈ 4 expected score
• Hit chasing pair: ~38% bust + ~62% non-bust × ~25% pair-rate × (20 chips × 9 mult) ≈ ~28 expected from the pair branch + ~12 from non-pair wins = ~40 expected score

Hitting is cascade-correct against basic strategy by ~10×. The player can see why — the charm is on the felt.

Per-campaign rate-limits

Mythic Heavy Marks cap per-campaign so the dramatic moment stays dramatic:

Charm	Cap
Pair Hunter	full ×3 on first 3 pair-wins, then ×2, then ×1.5
The Long Walk Home	full ×4 once, then ×2.5
Three of a Kind	full +50/×3 on first 2, then ×2

Rare and uncommon Heavy Marks (Seven Seeker, Court Calls, Slow Bleed) don’t cap — their fire rate is self-limiting by hand composition.

Slow Bleed gates out doubles

The Slow Bleed is the only Heavy Mark that explicitly checks active_doubled and refuses to fire if the win came from a double. That’s deliberate — it rewards stand-and-hold deviation only, not doubles, which the Plunger build owns.

Composition with Long-Game

Long-Game scales archetype mult before Heavy Mark ×mult. So Pair Hunter on a hit-1 pair-win:

archetype 2.0 × 1.3 (long-game) = 2.6
× 3.0 (Pair Hunter)             = 7.8 mult
× 20 chips                      = 156 score

Without the Long-Game baseline, just 6.0 mult × 20 = 120. The structural and conditional layers stack into a single legible number.

Dealer’s voice on a Heavy Mark hunt

“You took the third card. You shouldn’t have.” — Pair Hunter fires

“You played for it. I noticed.” — Long Walk Home fires

“Tonight, you have been hunting sevens. Particular.” — Seven Seeker fires repeatedly across a night

The dealer notices the deviation. He doesn’t punish it — he marks it. The charm name “Heavy Mark” is Pale Jack’s mark; he is the one paying attention.

Where this lives

• lib/sim/arcana/arcana.dart — PairHunter, TheLongWalkHome, ThreeOfAKind, SevenSeeker, TheCourtCalls, TheSlowBleed.
• test/sim/heavy_marks_test.dart — 23 unit tests covering fire conditions, rate-limit shape, catalog integrity.