Bank Job

As noted by Valentin1331 in one of the comments above, Bank Job's innate strength is in card compression, not action compression. This card nets you two emergency caches for one deck slot, which gives you more space to pack non-economy goodies. The big opportunity cost here is that Faustian Bargain--a card that's probably a little too good--can pull in nearly the same number of resources for a single action (and the same number, if you're willing to spend a second action on a regular resource action), so there's stiff competition. There is the curse cost, of course, but a couple curse tokens floating around in the bag isn't generally too threatening (though they can wind up costing you actions or other tempo in the future, which I think our present-oriented brains tend to dismiss a bit too cavalierly).

All that said, Bank Job does shine in a few situations:

  1. Fence decks, where this is suddenly one action and netting you nearly as many resources as Hot Streak (4). There isn't a Fence deck around that should fail to include this. Bonus points for attaching both to an Underworld Market to consistently go hog-wild early on in a scenario.

  2. Big money decks, where your number one goal is accumulating as much money as possible as quickly as you can.

  3. Action-generating decks and/or characters, which minimize the opportunity cost of playing this.

The more of these you're aiming for in a single deck, the more powerful this card becomes. So while it's not going to find a home everywhere, I think this is still a solid addition to the card pool.

Sandmole · 36
Beguile

As long as you're wearing some Fine Clothes your new friend will happily bring all the Flashlights that you could ever want. But just because they listen to you, it doesn't mean they aren't a hassle to be around. Make sure you send anyone that might run in for a hug a bit further away to make sure they never get in arms reach. The clothes must be filled with some sort of pheromones because that friend of yours knows if you take them off, so make sure to not let them get torn!

kamiidude · 27
Confound

Obviously a very powerful combination of effects here, but unless I'm mistaken the "then" clause after discovering 2 clues is kind of a big deal. My understanding is that if you can't fulfill the conditions before "then" in full, then the rest doesn't happen.

So in this case it means if you can't discover both clues from your location then they are not automatically evaded, essentially turning into this a testless Followed. That's not awful... but not worth 3xp either most likely. Was thinking this would be huge for Allesandra as it's exactly what she wants, but not being able to rely on the effect to double evade the enemy really hurts.

Vlishy · 1
Providential

Literally unplayable

Providential might easily be one of the worst Skill cards in the game, and I'm not being hyperbolic in the slightest: I can see things like Leadership and Intrepid actually seeing more play than Providential, if only because they have no exp cost attached

About the only good thing I can remotely say about this Skill is that it has a decent commit for +2 will, +2 fight or +1 to everything else, but guess what? Dauntless Spirit on average will give you a bigger stat boost than Providential, with the only drawback of being limited to Willpower and Fight, and it is one exp cheaper

There is no way, anyone that isn't doing something with blessing would take this card for the commit alone...

Then what about the bless-related effect, is that good?

HAHAHAHAHA

Of course no, it sucks!

First off, you need to pass a test in order to actually trigger the effect, which is a bit of an oddball decision in the Survivor's card pool given they usally benefit from their cards indepedently if they fail or pass or ONLY if they fail. Given the very volatile nature of the Chaos Bag, that is a serious point against this stupid card as failing the test means you get nothing out of it. And unlike Scavenging this card does NOT have a strong enough effect to justify this clause

Second, you add 1 bless token for each damage or horror you have, now an effect that would have been somewhat decent is completely ruined by the fact you don't get to choose which type of harm scales with the token generation: you only can scale with the lesser amount of the two

This design choice is what makes this card useless

Because imagine you are playing Silas to gurantee triggering its effects with his special ability, and you have 8 damage on him and no horror (somehow, maybe you screwed the pooch with Dreams of the Deep), and you commit this card and pass a test.

Guess what?

You are generating zero blessing, because 0 is less than 8!

That also means, for characters that have very unbalanced spread of Health/Sanity this card gets worse as it can only truly scale most of the time with their weaker endurance pool, so at most Silas would be able to generate 4 blessings, that is literally the same of flipping Keep Faith!

This card can ONLY maybe work on character that have "balanced" endurance, so we are talking about Investigators like Wendy, Preston, Minh and Calvin and even then, they need to be literally on death's door and almost out of their mind to use this card to its full effect and maybe generate 6 bless tokens: it is stupidly designed!

The best user for this is without a doubt Calvin if he is doing a "Blessed Survivor" because he is encouraged to keep, his health and sanity low, but even the Calvin can instead use Signum Crucis to take advantage of the fact his base skills are all 0 to generate tokens equal to the test difficulty.

And mind you, Signum is not only on average a better burst bless generation than Providential, it is also currently the ONLY card with exp cost that is considered not good enough to justify having to spend exp for it in the first place, so it was buffed to cost 0 exp and let you include it in your deck as part of your level 0 pool at the start.

Providential is the proof FFG does not learn from their past mistakes, because something like this wouldn't have been printed as a level 2 card if they took just a minute to look back at the Survivor card pool.

My group already decided that we will either make it 0xp or make so if you have 0 dmg/horror it ignores that value and gives the other one. That way if you have 4/ for example, you always ignore that 0 and put blesses equal to the other value. We will see, but it really does suck lmao — Blood&gore · 352
@Blood&gore Honestly, that is how Providential should have been: if this was a level 0 card, then maybe Signum could have gotten untabooed as an "upgrade" to it — HeroesOfTomorrow · 34
Literally unplayable? You can play it, but it's bad. — MrGoldbee · 1391
I mean, how literal are we being here ? It's a skill card, it is literally unplayable in that you can't play it, only commit it .... — aurchen · 1
...Damn, true. — MrGoldbee · 1391
To play devil’s advocate for this one. First, it’s pretty flexible in allowing you to UC for fist or head icons, which is better than crucis. It’s also a red skill that adds bless, meaning it’s recurrable- crucis is as well, but finding a test to use it on may not be as feasible as using this in the right investigator. I could very easily see this work well in a Bless Tommy deck alongside Spirit of Humanity. That said, 2xp does seem overpriced. — StyxTBeuford · 12918
@StyxTBeuford How is this even good on Tommy? Tommy tanks everything on his assets, most of the time Providential won't generate anything — HeroesOfTomorrow · 34
Torrent of Power

Has a niche interaction with Runic Axe which can regenerate charges, potentially 2/turn. Gives you a hefty skill boost on turns when you don't need to murder something.

Can also be used with Living Ink for 3 zero-cost charges, if you really want to spend an action and two cards to get that bonus.

The problem remains, several years on, that no one that can take it really needs a 7-willpower card that requires setup to play. Mystics generally have good enough willpower already, and those charges are usually better spent doing the thing the asset does.

CombStranger · 240