Solemn Vow

Solemn Vow

Tommy Muldoon loves this. In a pinch, another investigator can free trigger this to heal some damage/horror, move it on to one of Tommy's allies to kill it, and Tommy can use his ability to take that damage as bullets for Becky. Even better if that ally is Tetsuo Mori, so you get bullets/resources, an item (maybe Becky or Bandolier if you already have Becky out), and your buddy got some healing, all without spending any resources or actions.

TartanLlama · 1

True Understanding

True Understanding

This is a top-tier card that continues to fly under the radar. For zero actions and zero resources this grants a clue. And in a game where every scenario is a race to advance the Act Deck via clues, it's hard to overstate how great that is!

Yes, you do have to pass a test on a "Scenario Card". But between location actions and treacheries I've never had this be a dead card.

If you're running Milan Christopher and have resources to burn, Working a Hunch with its $2 cost is just as good, but in decks without him I argue that True Understanding is the superior pick.

This should be a staple in every deck that runs Deduction, because it's essentially 2 more copies of Deduction. Happy hunting!!

An_Undecayed_Whately · 1444
While I will agree that this is a good card, it is often in my early picks, and always ends up being cut in profit of core elements to the build I am working on, or value cards (draw, resources). This card was better when it was published and now suffers from the overcrowdedness of the card pool, in my opinion. — Valentin1331 · 94769

Esoteric Method

Esoteric Method

This is part of my mass deletion for the reviews I have written as I am no longer proud of them of what I have wrote and I feel uncomfortable leaving them up for everyone to see.

The quick brown Duke jumps over the lazy fox dog creature.

fishingbrogl · 21
"Now, the Curses will inevitably have you fail a test at some point. That's just how it is." That's not quite true, if you play Mystic with taboo. Two "Ritual Candles" will make you literally fail no test, you would not fail otherwise. (And with "Occult Reliquary" you still have a third hand to hold the rod.) For the advanced "Final Rhapsody" Curse Tokens are quite the opposite, really bad. Elder Sign and Blesses are the only symbol tokens, that won't hurt you. — Susumu · 389
Thank you very much for bringing those points up! I've edited the review to reflect them. — fishingbrogl · 21

Geared Up

Geared Up

Note to all you new players out there who freshly cracked this card out of the box and thought, “Man, that’s lame. It’ll only play like 4 or 5 items most of the time.” The card does not read as printed. They wanted to let you have a little fun with it so they issued an errata to add the clause “One at a time, play …” to empower some degenerate combos.

Okay, wait, I see that little sinister grin curling the corner of your lips, but not so fast, Speed Racer. They noticed that some players were now abusing the card for degenerate combos. So they added another clause by taboo to fix the clause they added by errata. Got that?

So in short, you must add the clause that breaks the card, and then you may optionally add the clause that unbreaks it. What you may not in any circumstance do under rules as written, is play the card by it’s printed unbroken text, so don’t even think about that.

I hope this information was helpful.

Eudaimonea · 9
This was discussed ad nauseam 3 years ago. Some people said, the addendum "one at a time" was necessary, others (including me) said, playing cards is a sequential process, playing them simultainiously does not make sense, and this phrase was a mere clarification. But however people see it, the design team clearly meant the card to work like that from the beginning. And later reconsidered, that it potentially can get to strong, so they taboo'd it. Besides, this card gets really bad in "Hemlock Vale", with or without taboo. — Susumu · 389
Indeed, Geared Up is so absurdly bad in Hemlock Vale (it triggers at the beginning of Preludes, with the extra insult that you cannot transfer more than one played asset out of a Prelude) that we simply house-ruled that Geared Up triggers at the beginning of the ‘real scenario’ instead. There are a lot if mechanical annoyances for Preludes that I’d like the designers to have spent a bit more time thinking about :/ — anaphysik · 105
Yeah, it's no good in Hemlock Vale but way too good in its errata'd form. The notion I'll take strong exception with is that we can safely assume MJ Newman's original intent is reflected in Alex Werner's rulings. We can in no way assume the sequence of intent, realization, and revision @Susumu references occurred behind-the-scenes anymore than we can assume that the original intent for Backpack was that it would offer a timing window in-between the playing of each item and that Nimble would offer one in-between each move. I don't want to rehash original intent because it's inscrutable. All I — Holy Outlaw · 287
... intend to do is smirk at the way the clean-up occurred. There is both an errata and a taboo of the errata, rather than a removal of the errata so the card works as it reads. — Holy Outlaw · 287
Agreed, let’s not revisit the argument from years back. Susumu, you made some good points then and now. I can see I’m reopening an old can. I was just trying to be whimsical. — Eudaimonea · 9

Flurry of Blows

Flurry of Blows

While not for everyone, I've had great results with Sister Mary & Holy Spear You get 4 uses of the the +4 & +2 damage without needing to seal tokens. This is particularly great when there are already a bunch of sealed on Holy Spear or you don't have the bless tokens in the chaos bag. In this scenario, 2 resources & 2 actions can deal upwards of 12 damage!

While it's good at boss clearing & removing victory enemies, it can also be used when you get overrun with monsters. Each Fight can target a different monster at your location.

Overall, I was happy using it, but it's likely slightly overcosted in XP since you already need to buy the Holy Spear.

Calprinicus · 6962
ignore the action cost DOES NOT mean you can ignore other cost . You still — OnThinIce · 28
-- need to seal tokens — OnThinIce · 28