Black cat suffers from the fact not all campaigns feature both a tablet and an elder sign token at once in the chaos bag, especially those with branching paths... But if they do have them, the value of the car goes up considerably beyond being just very well-priced soak-per-resource asset, only behind Lita

But I think there is a particular Investigator that makes the cat shine: Hank Samson!

Hank's ability is fairly situational given he is prettty squishy himself, not always present in locations with other Investigators and cannot auto-catch up with them and many allies of his class are made to tank for him. You can get some mileage by having him close to Beat Cop or Grete Wagner or call them back with A Chance Encounter, but that requires another party member and some coordinaation, it's not something Hank can do on his own.

However, with this Hank can more or less use the Black Cat's ability forever! Is the kitty down to the last point of health and sanity? Just take the damage and horror for the feline until you reveal an Elder Sign and fully heal the Black Cat! Even better, if Hank is resolute, he can use this as a controlled source of damage and horror to put on himself to draw cards or gain resources (depending if he is in his "Warden" or "Assistant" from", and if you don't need to heal the cat, you can use Hank's Elder Sign to dump damage or horror on him or something else!

So Hank gets the ability, for 5 exp to get an ally that can basically treat 2 out of 4 of normal symbol tokens as -1 forever basically: honestly, that is a pretty sweet deal in my opinion, at least in standard/hard!

As mentioned by @pestis above, Parallel Pete is very good with Makeshift Trap. With the updates of Improved Timer, Simple, and Net, you basically have a trap that costs 1 resources every 3 turns with no enemy can do AoO or movement within it. That means, as long as you moves out from that location at the end of your turn, those enemies are just a bunch of harmless toys to you.

Additionally, since he has access to 0-4 Tactic cards and level 0 Guardian cards, the new combo The Book of War + On the Haunt (3) works perfectly on him. Though Makeshift Trap can't reliably kill the enemy every turn to earn 3 bucks, the most important part here is On the Haunt (3) does not require you to draw another encounter card when there is no enemy in the encounter deck. Combine with First Watch, we can cancel the most dangerous encounters at the beginning of the Mytho phase.

Now the stategy is simple. Once you find your Makeshift Trap and The Book of War, dry the enemies as soon as possible with "Where's the party?", Kicking the Hornet's Nest, and On the Haunt (3). Once no secret on The Book of War is left, drop it with Unconventional Method or Act of Desperation, then use your familiar Survivor recursions to bring it back to the table. For any chance you have some nasty enemies to kill in the encounter deck, draw them out as late as possible, then sweep them off with one Dynamite Blast.

Since Pete has a low , at first glance Scavenging does not seem to be a valid option for him. Fortunately, there is one tool in the pool to address this problem: Hyperphysical Shotcaster. With Telescanner, we can sit at a low-shroud location nearby your trap to get clues from any revealed location with ; Combine Translocator with the Guitar, we can kick multiple enemies into the Makeshift Trap in one single turn, or get yourself away from an elite after a successful evasion. The oversuccess requirement on Scavenging is cancelled out by Empowered Configuration. Finally Hyperphysical Shotcaster self-discards, so we can just apply Scavenging without the need of extra discarding events. Costs are not a problem here thanks to Schoffner's Catalogue and other economy cards in the deck.

Combining all above, now you have an investigator that: protects everyone from any non-elite enemies, never draws any treacheries, earns an extra dollar or heal one horror every turn, and consistantly grabs clues when sitting on top of your puppets!

I stumbled upon this card talking about binder-fodder and I was thinking
If this were a 0-cost asset with

"Fast. Play during any window.
You get +1 , +1 , and +1 .

Forced - At the end of the round: Discard Intrepid."

Would I play it?
Maybe. It's a generically ok card but most gators that can take it don't really care for all 3 stats, and assets that give a static bonus give some sort of other effect or advantage other than having more staying power. I don't think anyone would find the deckspace to run it.
This is the same, but you can't play it when you want and when you play it there's a chance that it'll whiff.
I guess there's some synergies to consider with skills and assets (Silas can recur this if it fails, for example, but has way more interesting cards to put in his deck).
I reallt don't know how to make this half-decent.

look how they massacred my boy....From one of the most interesting investigators in the entire game with his hunch deck, they made him the most generic investigator ever. Not very innovative for a 10 year old game if you ask me

Actually combos nicely with Sleight of Hand in Michael McGlen's deck. Pull this baby out, splatter someone, hide it again. This little trick, however, is not really worth the 5 XP this card is asking. And Michael likes smaller guns anyway.