I slept on this card for too long. 4 resources just seemed like a lot to pay for a cancel, when most other cancel events cost 0-1, but when I thought more about it, I realized it's a pretty good rate.

Sure, this costs 3 more than Ward of Protection, but you get to draw a card and avoid a horror. Considering that rogues tend to fear treacheries in general and horror in particular, isn't that a good deal? (If you imagine that the card drawn is Emergency Cache, then the total cost to use this is 1 resource +1 action) Most cancels actually do have a significant other cost, or limitation, whether it's dropping clues, fishing for tokens, or being very delayed.

I don't think of this as a "big money" card, a phrase I now associate with hoarding. You probably don't want to spend 4 on this if you're trying to turn on The Black Fan or if that could be spent to crush two more tests with Well Connected. Instead, this is a classic "medium money" card.

Since this card's release, rogues seem to get richer every set. They've got tons of ways to generate resources passively while they are playing to win. This means that once they've set up, they're likely to accumulate a stash of 6-8 extra resources by the mid-late game kind of by accident. This isn't necessarily enough to make buying all the big money payoffs a priority, or you might just have other plans for your XP. But it makes running some Counterespionage totally reasonable.

I've always been skeptical about the tri-color talents. The idea of a card that makes resources and boosts any skill sounds great. But 3 XP and 3 resources is a lot of up front investments for an untutorable card. If you're trying to make a resource profit, it takes 3 turns to outperform Emergency Cache, and then only if you play suited cards on the correct tempo. If you want +2 to a skill test once per turn, there are many High Roller, other assets that will get you there, and that's before we consider the passive +1 stat cards or the +1 Lucky!-likes to be competition. The dream seems to be that you find it early and mix and match the two uses until it becomes basically a free to play skill booster in the long run. Nothing has changed my fundamental doubts here.

That said, with The Drowned City, prospects for Sleuth are looking better than ever. We got powerful new tomes in three non-seeker classes, including both the other classes on Sleuth. One of those tomes can bounce tactics back to your hand, letting your replay a One-Two Punch 4 times if you can pay for it (which, with Sleuth, you can!). We got a guardian who loves playing events. Even Agatha Crane has a very slight synergy, since she can replay ["I've got a plan!"](/card/02107) from the discard.

Boosting skills bores me because so many other cards do it, so let's look more into what expensive tactics we could look with The Art Of War. A support Marion could spam Task Force to give her team loads of movement and let someone else swing a weapon around, or she could just chuck tons of dynamite. Someone with two hands might instead hold Blessed Blade in one hand and Sun Tzu in the other, and zip around with free "Get over here!" every turn. Bonus points if it's someone who can throw one copy of the book away to get around the unique rule.

But the funniest answer is probably Rex Murphy using Sun Tzu to loop "I've got a plan!"s when he's not busy memoiring.

When Katana came out, I speculated that it was meant for a future Guardian investigator. This is a weapon for characters who are comfortable attacking with it only once per turn, and either good with agility or with success manipulation. It's also two-handed which means you usually can't be planning to spend the rest of your actions swinging other weapons, nor investigating with tools. Thus, it seemed like a card waiting for a high-agility fighter who liked playing combat events. Or, perhaps, a token-manipulating fighter with extra arms.

Well, Drowned City indeed gave us a high-agility Guardian (3 is high, right?) who likes to play fight events. And she's often played with a once-per-turn weapon and then follow-up events. There's just one problem -- She doesn't have two arms!

It's not all bad for the weeaboos, though. Artistic Inspiration is probably the best way to control your success margin we've seen so far. And they even introduced a new way to get more arms, though it seems quite overpriced. So if you really want to make this work, it's more workable than ever.

But there's still no actual reason to try beyond morbid curiosity or sheer stubbornness.

TLDR: The dream weapon for Dirty Fighting Lucius or a berserk Amanda. Probably otherwise useless.

This is a really weird card.

• As a 4xp researched card in the increasingly-valuable accessory slot, you want to get really quite a lot of value from it. They even printed it right alongside Antikythera, so everyone who might look at this does have a compelling other option.

• This card does a whole bunch of stuff, including stuff Seekers have never done before, but it doesn't seem like a cohesive package. And I'm not sure any one of its functions justifies running it.

• It can be a weird pseudo-weapon that spams unlimited 2 damage attacks. But they're made with combat skill, at no bonus. There are only 3 characters with more than 2 combat who even can play it: Joe Diamond, Parallel Jim, and Kohaku. All of them have access to some guardian melee and two of them have mystic combat spells, so I don't see any of them going for it unless Joe really needs a hands-free attack cause he's juggling too many investigation tools. Speaking of hands, while other Seekers could certainly find ways to pass these tests, they'd probably rather run Timeworn Brand if you own it. In a big collection there's also lots of events or charged assets that let Seekers deal good damage. Only Amanda seems likely to actually want to spam attacks.

• It can manipulate tokens. This mitigates the auto-fail, and you can make up for the lack of skill bonus by testing at low skill and fishing for good tokens. But if you do this it rapidly gets used up, in which case we must ask why you're not running events or spell assets instead. Because it manipulates tokens, it can trigger Agatha Crane's ability. But she has 1 Combat and access to Shrivelling and Spectral Razor so who are we fooling?

• It can give you evades with +1 damage. Plenty of seekers have good base agility, so this is less of an uphill battle. And evade with damage is an okay effect, potentially. Historically, we've seen that effect a bunch of times and it's rarely been played much. But then, the old versions tended to have serious problems, like being expensive, requiring multiple tests, or having really bad random backlash effects, or being stapled to a mediocre character. How much better is an asset that lets you do it as much as you want, with no downside, and auto-fail insurance?

• If you were going to take basic evades frequently, this is probably enough of an improvement to be worth playing. It looks especially good on Ursula Downs, who is more likely to go off alone and get engaged on, and of course on Lucius Galloway, who can evade for clues and use the token redraws to fish for "succeed by X". You will frequently get to ping something with a damage just for doing what you were already going to do.

• But, how often does that really benefit you? Spaming 2 or 3 evades in a row to kill one guy doesn't seem efficient. When you wipe a 1 HP opponent with it, that's great. It's also good if you drop an enemy's health enough that your team's fighter saves an attack. But sometimes the enemy had even health and the 1 point doesn't matter. So I think in most cases if you have a conventional fighter on your team, this damage matters only 2-3 times per scenario, despite being unlimited use.

• This card's downfall is that while it's better than basic evasion, I think it compares unfavorably to other evade cards you could be running instead. Getting extra actions from Blur or Eon Chart or Pendant of the Queen, or keeping the enemy down longer with Disguise or Slip Away, or even getting free movement from Nimble or Mists of R'lyeh, all seem like better payoffs than 1 damage, in yellow.

• In conclusion, you might run this just as an evade boost for Lucius in Core+Drowned limited. With a full collection, I don't think this is good unless you're planning to both evade and fight with it. Being able to two-shot 3 health enemies all day while gaining all the benefits of evasion is pretty good, and you can probably manage to pass one combat test when you need to. As I mentioned above, Dirty Fighting with Lucius Galloway would probably be the combo. That free action attack comes in at a respectable ... 3 skill, counting Dirty Fighting, but at least it's free and you get some re-draws. He could run Michael Leigh if he really wants a passive combat boost and another damage source? You could get more Dirty Fighting value by running some parley events? Sounds jank as heck but maybe solo-viable.

We all know Michael McGlen is going to be very good at fighting. I will leave it to someone else to figure out the exact mix of one-handed guns, two-handed guns, and melee weapons that optimizes his kit, whether to use the "Viola" Case or not, etc.

My interest is: what else can this guy do? Compared to other Rogues, the solid 3 willpower gives him some uncommon resilience. But we've had Guardian fights for ages, many with 4/2 or 3/3 willpower and agility, and plenty of potential to carry a team through combat. The guardian card pool gives them a variety of team support options, from treachery cancelling to healing and shareable soak, plus a pretty good suite of clue events. Most guardians also have some off-class access. If your team doesn't need you 100% devoted to murder, there's no shortage of ways a guardian can contribute in downtime.

Michael McGlen's got some of the most restricted deck building ever, with only 0-3 in his main class plus trait access to the firearm trait, which is extremely one-note. And his 1/3 Intellect/agility split makes a lot of rogue staples staples hard for him to exploit. So what can he do with himself when there's nothing to kill?

Big Money Things: From a little bit of playtesting, I immediately noticed that Michael can get really rich, really fast. Most guns have ammo roughly equal to cost, so his ability looks like it just pays back the otherwise crushing cost of fighting with multiple guns or expensive reload events. But in fact, Michael can easily make a profit doing it. The Luger P08 can be reloaded with 2 bullets for 1 resource over and over. The .32 Colt is an emergency cache if you can spend bullets one by one. And the Mauser C96 and .45 Thompson already paid you for shooting them, letting you double your money on Michael. Even if you only break even on .45s and .41s, making your weapons free means you save the 3 someone else would have blown on a machete.

• Michael can easily float 10+ resource for Well Connected, bringing him up to 5 on any skill but intellect. If the scenario has many will or agility tests to progress (discarding treacheries, parleying NPC, etc.) then Michael might your guy.

• With Money Talks he can even pass book tests. It's not a great way to get clues, but it could solve other problems. The upgrade lets him bail other people out of their treacheries, too.

• If you're willing to spend down there's always Counterespionage and Intel Report

Raw Action Spam

Some scenarios have lots of straight-up action taxes. Michael probably wants at least one +combat ally, and is bullet-constrained, so I don't expect to see Leo too often. But you can make it work. More likely, Quick Thinking, Swift Reflexes, Haste, or Ace in the Hole will give him extra actions to discard weaknesses, visit distant locations to cash in objectives, and so on. Bound for the Horizon and Scout Ahead also offer ways to get lots of bonus movement, specifically.

Support the team with resources, soak, and pseudo-draw

Michael gets so rich that he can easily funnel Faustian or Bank Job money to his friends, if they need it. This can then set them up to pay for "You've had worse...", if they need it. Black Market is another easy pickup that's actually much better than No Stone Unturned when helping a friend dig for key cards.

Pre-empt the encounter deck If there's anything scary, kill it proactively with Kicking the Hornet's Nest and "Where's the party?". The former even gets you a clue. Sadly, even on 2 player, gaining only one clue usually isn't a difference maker. I'd really like to find this guy a good way to get one more clue, so he can clear a location by himself. Maybe the answer involves using a rogue parley event so a friend can commit Contemplative.