This is a weakness I let new players redraw if it's a starter (mid campaign is still fair). As a starting weakness, this card is absolutely crippling for most classes. If you are new to the game, itll wreck you for most characters. If you know what youre doing you can manage with a few.

Guardians are hit probably the weakest as they tend to play asset heavy and low draw. Survivors are probably next as they have high recursion. Mystics can also handle this ok.

Many seeker and rogue builds, or any fast draw, however are completely destroyed by this card. It'll not only destroy any momentum you have and make you dump your hand, but will also ruin combos and be back around to punish you once again when you get the draw engine going.

For that and in those classes, this is probably the worst starting weakness you can draw and isn't fun or thematic in the slightest. For that reason, I let most players redraw this one.

Now mid campaign... it's hilarious and often a damning and very Lovecraftian punishment.

Comparison between the leveled up dynamite

Pros: -Cheaper resource cost than Dynamite with more uses. -Doesnt hit you. -Same experience cost as that card.

Cons: -Does 1 less damage than dynamite. -Cost an action and requires a skill check. -Campaign specific. The amount of times you're going to be swarmed routinely in most scenarios that aren't Innsmouth or TFA make a regular use AoE somewhat pointless. -Can't be attached to Stick to the Plan.

Overall compared to the level 4 version of dynamite, this is far inferior. Compared to the level 0 version, it's just slightly inferior.

Tldr is dynamite sticks win.

I just realized how good this card is, it has so much depth and nuance as the game's core design depends a lot on encounter draws. The 4 phases are designed around reactively fixing unknown problems, then use whatever remaining actions left to go forward as much as possible. This card flips the phases around and now you are instead actively making progress that at the same time minimize the impact of now-known incoming problems.

Scrying is rather dependent on your team, so it is not commonly seen on decklists here that focus on card combos inside a single deck. I would like to review situations where this card gets good :

• Overlapping roles. (Should occurs easily on 3 players+) This is so you feel like using on Scrying is better than other things and the progress is still going forward by other players. It often won't feel convincing until you get to spend to see the result of it for a few times.
• A balanced party so you always have high affinity encounter assignment. This is mostly achieved automatically by not using the same faction and having 3+ players (I think 3 is the best as you know all assignment targets), for example :
  • Having 4-5
  • Having 4-5
  • A fighter with 2 damage weapon
  • Someone with clues (so they can drop/spend to get a milder punishment)
  • Mix of high health and high sanity
  • Someone that an entire card type (asset/event/skill) does not matter
  • Someone that don't need as much resources / cards on hand
• You should scry early in Investigation Phase so other players can change their course of action.
  • Many encounter cards can be nullified just by moving to advantageous location. (e.g. harder the higher shroud, you are going to drop clue, the location is going to get locked down)
  • Some other cards has condition that lands on the "worst" place judging from some value (e.g. most remaining clues, furthest/nearest location, empty location), and you can go do prep work to force ties so you can select a better one.
  • They can simply group up and try to gather commit icons ahead of time. I think this is one of the most elegant use of same location commit rule and it shows why this card is in a core set.
  • If enemy has Spawn you often can take advantage of it because you can choose engagement. For example, even if the fighter get arranged a treachery test, a Seeker that got arranged a Spawn enemy can group up with the fighter ahead of time and make it drop to engage the fighter anyway, appearing as if the fighter draws 2 encounters and Seeker gets none.
  • There are locations that the effect draws treachery inside investigation phase.
• You can disrupt "treachery combo" by rearranging. For example one treachery that adds doom to enemy, followed by an another that uses those doom for something worse. Or one that spawns an enemy, and the next one that forces that enemy to attack immediately. Usually you cannot do anything with this, and it often occurs on 3 or 4 players. You can also make some card Surge (and arrange what it surges into) or not Surge as you like as it often comes with a criteria you can play around.
• Improves the Resource and Draw action. This is not obvious to me at first that Scrying is an enabler of these actions, just like Fight / Investigate / Move gets better with other cards.
  • When playing with expensive Event (like Backstab, Will to Survive, etc.), chance that you are lacking resources to play while you already got them on hand. Normally, you would feel spending action to gather enough resources ahead of time, just in case, won't be the best course of action. Better to wait for Upkeep income drip feed.. or is it? If you know the future though, getting resources suddenly make a lot of sense sometimes.
  • If arranging an investigator's deck, likewise you can make Draw action more compelling for someone.
  • The same for someone needed to setup multiple Asset to get going, it makes priority clearer. e.g. If you have .45 Automatic and Beat Cop to setup and having 7 resources, with a strong enemy coming, getting 1 resource and play both to end your turn may better ensure swift dispatch of that enemy.
• You can talk about Peril / Hidden cards. (This is very thematic for having a Mystic in your team when it happens!)

Here are some more minor combos, but they should not be the main criteria whether to take this or not, this is still good even if you don't have any of these :

• You can take advantage of (cheap) Spell Asset. (Dragon Pole, Summoned Servitor sacrifice, Meditative Trance, Arcane Initiate, Heirloom of Hyperborea, playing with charges, bump away doomed spells, etc.)
• Ease the encounter drawing card like Drawn to the Flame or Delve Too Deep.
• Obvious combo cards like : Foresight, Written in the Stars, Gloria Goldberg. Even someone unexpected like Lola Hayes will appreciate knowing the future so she can use this round's unused free role swap to prepare.
• Someone with cancel ability (Ward of Protection, Deny Existence, Alter Fate, Counterespionage, etc.) or forwarding/helping ability ("Let me handle this!", "You handle this one!", Brother Xavier, True Grit, Obsidian Bracelet, Martyr's Vambrace, Bestow Resolve, etc.)
• Having someone with spawn techs (e.g. Ambush, Disc of Itzamna), location techs (e.g. Barricade, Hiding Spot, Makeshift Trap, Map the Area), or multiple enemies techs (e.g. Power Word, Storm of Spirits, Dynamite Blast, Makeshift Trap Explosive, etc.) They worked out like happy coincidence if you know what's coming and you do it ahead of time!
• You can indirectly farm more XP with this card. Often near the end of scenario you are deciding whether to stay one or two more rounds or finish the scenario but enemy spawn or added doom would fail the scenario. You have no fear if you reveal the future with this card. (You may even see remaining random VP enemy and arrange to kill it.)

My friend is playing Akachi Onyele with Dragon Pole and is only including this for slot filling and Angered Spirits fodder. We were pleasantly surprised each time he decided to drink some tea, entire encounter draw is mostly neutralized using just 1 action of 1 player... This is a game with high chance of spiraling down, when you did not get spiral down, the situation at the end looks very different from the other sequence of treachery drawing. Fighter just fight. Seeker just clues. Any dump stats of anyone gets promptly patched up with grouping up and helping commits. Unspeakable Oath we just cleared was noticeably unlike any other plays without Scrying I started wondering if I missed any rules, there are so many rounds left!

An interesting card in Edge that was completely decimated by the release of Scarlet Keys.

The initial choice is whether you want to lower deck consistency to increase deck consistency. I'm not going to pretend to have run the numbers to see whether it's worth it for that, but Rogues' specialisation in Exceptional cards adds some amount of efficiency for finding those.

But then, rather than supporting the 'highlander' archetype a little more, Scarlet Keys came very close to destroying any reason to run this card at all.

A consistency tool like the similarly-named Underworld Market comes close to blowing it out of the water. It isn't hard to stack 8-10 weapons in that deck and focus on economy or niche cards in a fighter. It's a little harder to do so with investigation tools or evasion tools, but not impossible. And you can mix and match any of the three. The problem is that this is very hard to reconcile with Underworld Support, which would make your Market deck far, far less consistent.

Then we have the other Rogue consistency tool, Friends in Low Places. As a customisable, running a single copy makes it considerably less cost-efficient, costing 10 to fully upgrade one copy rather than two. On top of that the card itself benefits from running multiples of the cards you want to catch with it. As it only digs six (or nine) cards, if you can run two copies of what you're searching for, you're much more likely to hit it. Even in the best case of using it to dig through a smaller, Underworld Support deck, for exceptional items, you've still made it much less efficient to upgrade.

There's also the other two inefficient upgrades, Damning Testimony and Honed Instinct. While Damning Testimony isn't especially bad with Support beyond the inefficiency, using Support completely locks you out of what's probably Honed Instinct's best upgrade, letting you run it as a pseudo-myriad card.

On top of that, there isn't a single card in Scarlet Keys that makes you look twice at Underworld Support positively, except, perhaps, the limit-one Dirty Fighting, or wanting to quickly cycle Clean Sneak and not waste a whole 8xp on two copies. The only exceptional in the set is the Market itself. Even the high-cost ally is non-unique, so there's little reason not to buy two of him if you want him. Something like Embezzled Treasure is much better if you can manage to stack two copies.

It's especially a shame because the other permanents from this cycle got at least a small boost. Down the Rabbit Hole is great with customisables. Salvage is a pretty considerable boost to Short Supply decks. Guardians at least got a handful of interesting items which you can consider with Geared Up, and Vincent is an excellent new user of it regardless. Though there's little for Forced Learning decks, you can at least make the case that an extra investigate tool or a way of searching for your key cards can add some consistency to such a large deck.

I really would like to see a card or two boosting the 'highlander' archetype, perhaps even explicitly, in the next set. So here's hoping.

Darrell's Kodak is the only singular signature item bearing the investigator's name that is not unique. Is this difference from established precedent an oversight in development or is there a thematic reason?