This guide is built from the official site, Steam and store listings. Advice about priorities is editorial judgment, not a measured test; confirmed systems are described as such.
What the official page actually confirms
Twelve skills. That is the number the official system page gives, and it is the only hard figure attached to them. They are powers, not equipment slots. The description adds two things: they support gunfights, and they can serve as a powerful trump card.
What you can plan in advance is the shape of the toolkit. Twelve options, each able to do two jobs at once, in a game where your gun runs out before your problems do. Twelve is also small enough that none of them should be dead weight, and large enough that nobody holds all of them in their head on day one. The list is a plan, not a memory test.
Attack and defense in one means tempo
A skill that both hurts and protects is not two skills stapled together. It is a way to buy time: time to reload, time to move, time to leave.
That changes the useful question. Not how much damage does this do, but what does this let me do next. A skill that creates a few seconds of space can be worth more than one that shaves a second off a kill, because the space is what you spend on everything else. It also explains why the official text calls these skills support for gunfights: the gun is the plan, and the skill is the interruption that keeps the plan alive.
Sort by moment, not by strength
A dive has three moments that matter: the opening, the middle of a fight you did not choose, and the retreat. Assign each skill you trust to one of them.
A toolkit with three answers to the same moment will fail at the other two. Redundancy feels safe when you are learning, but twelve slots are enough to cover all three moments and still have room for something strange. Two close-range escapes and one long-range opener is a toolkit. Two of each is a coin flip under pressure.
The card you do not spend
The phrase trump card implies scarcity. Whatever the resource behind the skills turns out to be in your own playthrough, treat one of them as untouchable until you are carrying something home.
A trump card used on the way in is just a strong attack. The same card used on the way out is the difference between a dive and a loss. Decide which one that is now, before the dive starts, so you are not making the call while retreating.
Skills cover what ammunition cannot
Guns solve distance and damage. Ammunition limits how often they solve it. Skills are the layer that works when the gun cannot: too many targets, no line of fire, nothing left in the magazine.
Build the two together rather than separately. A close-range weapon and a skill that creates space are the same answer applied at two ranges, and knowing that keeps you from carrying two tools that do one thing. If a skill only repeats what your gun already does, it is occupying a slot that could answer a case your gun cannot.
Test one at a time
Change one skill per dive and keep the rest fixed. You will learn what it actually does far faster than by rotating the whole set and guessing which change mattered. Run the same room twice if you can; the difference is the lesson.
Twelve is a small enough number to know by name eventually. The order you learn them in is yours to choose, and choosing deliberately is most of the skill.
Sources
Anomalith Archive. “The 12 Anomalization Skills: How to Read an Attack-and-Defense Toolkit.” Last updated 2026-10-29. https://anomalith.net/guides/anomalization-skills/