If you’re willing to use up an arcane slot, this can be a tremendously fun weapon for a guardian to Enchant for Agnes. Between two and four damage for an alpha attack, depending on your starting horror and whether you want to take one and/or heal. Using a holy meat cleaver has a huge impact on your sanity!

I'm not sure why the designers are so dedicated to making it difficult to get an extra arcane slot. An extra ally slot is more powerful, yet Charisma is way cheaper and more efficient than this card. It is true that a lot of characters would really like to have an extra arcane slot, but that is because the arcane slot limit is kind of an annoying inconvenience that would be cool to circumvent, not because it is some vital part of game balance that would be super powerful to overcome. Yes, it would often be worthwhile and convenient to play a third spell, but not at the cost of nearly doubling the cost of a spell (is that third spell you are playing really worthwhile when it costs an extra three resources and a card?). And on top of that this card still has a significant downside that it sits in your hand useless until you actually need to play a third spell. Again, Relic Hunter lets allows you to break the accessory limit as a permanent (!) for no cost other than 3 XP, so why does this card have to be so expensive? I’d think it was still a bit pricey, but more reasonable, if it had a resource cost of 2. A resource cost of 3 just seems mean for a card that does nothing but permit you to then pay for another card which is probably not even one of your best two spells (since those are in your first two slots).

This is not just a good card when played in a specialized way to maximize its benefits. I want to make it clear that this weapon is also very useful as just a general purpose weapon in the Survivor weapon pool. At the time of this writing, survivors without access to weapon-oriented classes have a very limited selection of weapons, and this can be the most reliable available weapon if you don't want to deal with the weird limitations of the other survivor weapons. The Fire Axe is a great weapon, but it forces you to give up all your money when you use it, which is really annoying if you don't want to play that type of character. And the Baseball Bat is also a great weapon, but aside from requiring two hands, it can suddenly disappear at any time and leave you without a weapon. The Meat Cleaver may look like a weird weapon because the way it manipulates sanity, but it really isn't that difficult for a normal character to use. You do not actually need to reduce your sanity to three to use the weapon as a + 1 bonus is still just as good as a machete, and while your sanity does tend to go down when using the weapon, it is not absolutely essential to play with Peter Sylvestre; it is pretty common that it gives you back the sanity you lose, so your overall sanity loss is usually pretty slow, and survivors have lots of other ways to soak some horror if necessary. In any case, the reality is that if you want to be serious about fighting you normally need more than one weapon in your deck so you can actually draw one when you need it, so even if Meat Cleaver is not your very favorite weapon, it is still available as a perfectly functional weapon to round out your deck.

Too bad you can't discard Dissonant Voices with this. Yeah, I know, you could do it on somebody else, but not on yourself. Bummer.

Where it would be great, though, is with Farsight. Healing damage and horror is usually a hard sell because of all the actions it costs you...but a FAST heal of up to 6 horror among the whole team? Yes, please!

Best combo with Olive McBride. Olive helps to find both and and Covenant prevents Olive's penalty, resolving 2 tokens. Note that after you trigger Paradoxical Covenant, you don't need to reveal additional tokens for revealed & . Of course, you could trigger Paradoxical after you reveal all tokens; but, Paradoxical is auto-fail.

Here is probability table for Paradoxical Covenant. This table assumes that the bag has 16 tokens and no reveal another token effect. Row is the number of bless tokens, and column is the number of curse tokens (or vice versa).

Normal case (16 tokens) (%)

Olive case (16 tokens) (%)

J-Fine case (16 tokens) (%)

Additional note: Unlike Olive, Jacqueline Fine has less effective. This is because both & have "reveal another token" effect, and Olive resolves two tokens, so that Olive could trigger Paradoxical if she reveal both from first 3 tokens, but Jacqueline doesnot.