I can hardly wait to start running this in Lola Hayes. It counts her permanents, like Shrewd Analysis and Adaptable! It double-counts multi-class cards like Enchanted Blade! She'll be able to get this thing up to 4+ wild icons easily! Wow!
The expected resources is about 5.0 resources, same as Emergency Cache, in standard token setup. Many "5" give slightly better result, but many above 5 (-6, -8) give poor result. In this reason, this card is not suitable for expert difficulty. If you consider "fun", 21 or bust is good choice unlike Henry Wan, since 21 or bust at least achieves E-Cache.
Additionally, if your deck has Prophetic, 21 or bust may be better than E-cahce. Since 21 or bust has fortune trait, you can play 21 or bust for free with Prophetic. Sadly, Prophetic doesn't have , so that only off-class investigators can do.
Note: additional -5 or symbol token slightly increases the expected resources, and -7 or -8 token significantly decreases the expected resources.
The below is my stratagy. I believe your intuition is better, so please refer this just for fun.
Here is my stratagy to achieve E-Cache. According to the combined value of revealed tokens,
Nevertheless, I believe many of you don't want to stop when the total value is 12 or 13 (including me) for fun. I also give the expectation value when you follow above stratagy but don't stop at 12/13.
NotZ Standard bag] ideal: 4.98, proposed: 4.96, proposed(non-stop): 4.86, 17-stop: 4.76
NotZ Standard bag + ] ideal: 5.01, proposed: 4.99, proposed(non-stop): 4.95, 17-stop: 4.85
NotZ Hard bag] ideal: 5.02, proposed: 5.00, proposed(non-stop): 4.97, 17-stop: 4.88
NotZ Hard bag + ] ideal: 5.07, proposed: 5.03, proposed(non-stop): 5.03, 17-stop: 4.96
Here, "ideal" means ideal stratagy. I reveal one additional token only if the expectation will be increased considering all cases. It's the upper bound if you don't know the future information.
With above stratagy, you can achieve below table in standard NotZ.
| name | 0 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
9 |
exp |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ideal | 3.6% | 58.1% | 9.6% | 13.6% | 15.1% | 4.98 | |
| proposed | 3.7% | 60.1% | 9.6% | 10.2% | 16.3% | 4.96 | |
| nonstop | 11.2% | 44.0% | 13.6% | 12.9% | 18.3% | 4.86 | |
| 17stop | 8.8% | 48.9% | 14.8% | 13.9% | 13.7% | 4.76 | |
| 12/13/17stop | 2.9% | 61.7% | 11.6% | 11.7% | 12.1% | 4.83 |
(modified Oct 8, 2021)
Let's evaluate two uses of Rite of Equilibrium.
Firstly, playing the second option with a full bless/curse deck can almost guarantee total horror heals. But is it worth the cost? While Horror is a problem in most games, this card seems unreliable if it was the only source of horror heal and normally, the game does not care if you finish with 1 sanity or full sanity so over healing is not necessarily the best use of the card. Choosing this option means you are playing with a blurse deck and this move tends to reset your deck (which is not good)
Secondly, the first option can be used to replenish your bless/curses. As others have mentioned, this can be paid cheaply with Tempt Fate so unless you use Dayana Esperence to squeeze more juice out of this single card, it is normally better to stick with tempt fate (having both to fill bag up faster is an option, but usually there are more things that need to be added to a blurse deck before this one)
Overall this card does not seem playable without Dayana, and if we look at the other spells cards that are 0-cost high xp cost that synergizes with Dayana ( Deny Existence and Recharge), Equilibrium seems to fall short of the other two of the effectiveness though (even Soothing Melody seems to do better)
It could be a niche card to take in Carcossa (or equivalent) campaign with more horror but little damage.
Overall, this card does have a unique effect and can be used in some cases (e.g Agnes Baker to continue her ability) or if there were better rewards for over heal. It might be balanced if the 1st option came with a card draw to at least be on par with Tempt and makes it worthwhile to combo with Dayana, and the second option included damage heal as well (or did not remove the bless/curse)
With the new erratum on Wendy’s amulet from FAQ v.1.9, do cards like Lure and Hiding Spot now go to the bottom of your deck instead of going to the discard pile? If not, then what events are discarded from play? I’m assuming you can still discard an event from hand to cancel a token and that card does go to discard because your hand is not considered in play.
How about Dark Horse deck? You could play 1-cost fast event card for free, such as Lucky!. You could play 2-cost asset with 1 resource from upkeep + Fool, or 3-cost asset with upkeep + Labranche + Fool. Similarly, you could play Will to Survive with upkeep + Fool + On Your Own, or 3-cost event, such as True Survivor, Waylay, with no cost.
One problem is that The Fool is 3-cost asset, which is hard to play Dark Horse deck in the middle of the game. Luckily, here is a solution; if you find Fool in your opening hand, you don't need to concern this. What you need to do is improving your drawing ability :) Of course, my drawing ability is too poor to find; my Fool always places among the bottom five cards.