A core set card with no review? Yummy.

Sneak Attack is a cool rarity, the testless damage trick! The funny bit is that you actually need to beat a test, the evade.

The upside to trading a fight test for an evade test is that evades tend to be easier, even so 2 actions for 2 damage is bad rate, so whats the angle? Sometimes you need to evade anyway! Retaliating enemies, perhaps the health pool is too damn big for you to deal with in one turn.

Sneak attack is not a strategy unto itself, it's an element in it, say you play Wendy Adams and don't intend to fight with anyway, Sneak Attack! Say you play in a 3 man team, you evade things and run away to deal with clues, why not soften up the bad guy to make it easier for your fighter to kill? Perhaps you "evade for money" via Pickpocketing and Sneak Attack is a natural combination of cards. Alongside Ornate Bow or Backstab you can deal 5 damage in one round, enough to kill off most foes in the game. Sometimes you just play two copies of Sneak Attack to finish something off, 4 damage for 3 actions, despite the cost and card expense, especially given that the damage is all automatic.

Sneak Attack is flexible, effective, and you'll be glad for it when you draw it, it might sit a bit in your hand and you'll be tempted to chuck it at a test, don't, save it and eventually it'll get you out of a heap of trouble. It slots into builds with many aforementioned cards, Backstab, Ornate Bow, Track Shoes, Peter Sylvestre,Pickpocketing, all the agility based stuff. Stay aware of your cost curve! You dont even need all of them, a character like Finn Edwards for example can supplement a big gun with Sneak Attacks and Peter Sylvestre, using the to pick fights and then tag teams the gun and Sneaks in tandem.

The characters who can use Sneak Attack at it's best and it's build-mates include Sefina Rousseau, Finn Edwards, Wendy Adams. Note that all of these have a special set of skill that makes Sneak Attack really shine, a free evade, repeat-use events, combining the evasion centric elements in the and pools. "Skids" O'Toole can do it but he might not afford it.

The upgrade is a tactical choice, it's lukewarm in solo bot it allows you to boop at enemies engaged with friends, freeing you from the evasion requirement, it is indeed an amazing upgrade, but only if you got friends!

Uber-Lucky!. The end-all be all switcheroo upset card that turns bad sitations on end and delivers unto you, salvation. This card is so good that a Taboo list appearance wouldn't surprise me in the slightest. For Silas Marsh i'dd take this even if it got the Key of Ys treatment.

First off, the requirement: Your total for a skill test must be 0!

This means that all of your skill value must be totally negated by a test, I.E, the effect is easier to trigger when your starting point is low, so that it might be negated by relatively mild negative tokens like a -2 or -3.

If you skill value is high, it becomes extremely unlikely for the requirement to trigger, attacking an enemy at +6 for example Yorick+Machete+Beat Cop, you'dd need a or somehow net -6 from the token draw, even on hard this is very unlikely! You'dd be much better served by a Lucky! that'd easily let you hit the required number (of probably 2-4) when your baseline is so high.

On the flip-side, if your starting point is +2 or +3, there are plenty of tokens in the average chaos bag that will totally negate that!

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This leaves you two main uses for Eucatastrophe:

1) A tool to force success through tests which you have no business beating, for example attempting 4 tests with just 2, a common case for a variety of characters whose give them automatic success or +2, I.E, success!

2) A ward against worst-case scenarios, where an or special token might negate your skill value completely. There are, in fact, a few scenarios where the complete skill negation is slightly more common, Forgotten age for example has a few places where there might be 2+ net autofails when certain circumstances arise and most campaigns have crazy tokens in the final scenario.

The characters for whom Eucatastrophe is best for, are therefor:

• Dudes whose effects are desirable, for example Father Mateo (its blessed!), Silas Marsh, William Yorick (He can recurse Eucatastrophe itself!!!), Calvin Wright.
• Dudes who might find routine use via a low stat, This usually means sneaking through successes on investigation or evasion, note that there needs to be a bonus on the and your stat still must be reasonable so that you might be able to beat a difficulty 2-4 test, for example Rita Young investigating at a difficulty 2, 3 or 4 location.
• Dudes who have a tendency to be making high-stakes tests, generally in the current cardpool that means while shooting an Old Hunting Rifle, Ornate Bow or during Waylay or Backstab.

All of the above considered, a few characters rise up from the pile as obviously great characters for Eucatastrophe:

• Silas Marsh whose is terrific, who needs clutch defense against treacheries and tends to be risking his life on major attacks with the biggest weapons the cardpool allows. Note that you can do the trick below with Drawing Thin if you add Resourceful to the combo.

• William Yorick whose again is awesome and tends to be making important attacks. Also he can combine Drawing Thin and Eucatastrophe to be a funny kind of efficient at 1-4 difficulty investigating, especially late-campaign (Effectively autosucceeding on 1-2 difficulty investigation, at no net cost other then drawing the cards and playing Drawing Thin!).

• Father Mateo, whose is literally a miracle and tends to be making lots of risky tests with Shrivelling and Rite of Seeking where a badly timed special token or can be lethal.

While Eucatastrophe is reasonable on the other characters who can take it, i feel that it's a lower priority, especially for Wendy Adams who has no appropriate stats to abuse and a +0 on her . Besides she excells at circumventing bad token draws to begin with!

The most ideal use for this card is for someone with access to with high (4 or 5) but mediocre (ideally 3) , allowing them to use their brains to evade. Until very recently, the only Investigator that fits that bill and can take this card is Rex Murphy, and Rex probably wont even take it because it's not the best use for his 5 off slots. Dream Eaters added Mandy Thompson, whose 3 and 1 means she's a prime candidate for what Slip Away provides. Her means of defense are quite limited, so Slip Away gives her solid defense, alongside Decoy and Think on Your Feet. So the next best thing is to think of Investigators who can at least use a high combined total to lockdown an enemy for an extra turn. This is Finn Edwards (8), Rita Young (7), Wendy Adams (7), "Skids" O'Toole (7), and again Rex Murphy (7).

The next question is what does this card let you do that normal evades don't? Well, it can lockdown a particularly bad non-elite enemy for an extra turn if you over succeed. In multiplayer this feels like a pretty big waste of a card slot, but in solo this can be quite useful if you play an evasive character who starts getting bogged down by continually drawing enemies. In that regard I think it works best for Finn, as the action is free anyway, and if he's running Pickpocketing he'll make up for the opportunity cost quite a bit. It's a good emergency card to have in your back pocket, though it's no Elusive. it's also still pretty good for solo Sefina Rousseau as you can lockdown several enemies in a short span of time with The Painted World, and she tests this card at a combined total of 6, which is still at least decent. Wendy Adams and Rita Young can use it to buy time to set up Waylay.

Overall a decent card, but one that's quite niche unless you're playing solo. If you're going with Mandy Thompson, I think this should be the first card you include.

Dario's stock has gone way up thanks to The Circle Undone's focus on giving Rogues cards geared towards hoarding and making tons of money. Before, the best strategy to get his stat bonuses required taking Lone Wolf, investing into Hot Streak and ideally playing either Jenny Barnes or Sefina Rousseau. The problem was that hoarding those resources for a small amount of stat boosts versus just throwing them into Lola Santiago, Streetwise, and Physical Training was just an all around worse strategy.

However, we've got a slew of amazing cards for encouraging you to hoard resources for consistent high stats in the midgame, before going all out in an endgame spending spree. First, we got Preston Fairmont, who can generate resources like no one else and can turn on the stat bonuses from Dario with relative ease. We got more resource generators like Investments and Another Day, Another Dollar. Most importantly however, we were gifted Well Connected and Money Talks, the former of which allows consistent stat buffing for tests, and the latter can be used for incredibly important tests. If you're playing Jenny Barnes or Preston Fairmont, you can even take two copies of TCU's best card Drawing Thin, the fastest resource generating card in the game.

Dario's +2 resources ability is much stronger on higher difficulties where you can't expect to succeed at a test without some significant boosts, and grabbing 2 resources to make your later tests better is a good move. I expect we're going to see a lot more of him from here on out. Plus he's good friends with Lola Santiago for rather Charismatic investigators.

.45 Thompson is, as another reviewer put it. The Dr. Milan Christopher of weapons. Talk about nailing it!

The thing that .45 Thompson does is create an extended capacity combat option with a large +, it is really good in the hands of dedicated fighters and 3 characters who grab it to keep their attack bonus high.

.45 Thompson is more of a niche, and it's a strong one!

As a weapon that pays for itself, it makes extended combat even easier! You can battle it out for rounds on end, you can use the extra cash to fuel hits via talent use like Physical Training or Keen Eye and/or the cash will let you keep the ball rolling by helping pay for the next gun. .45 Thompson is a good enough card in of itself to warrant a deck slot in dedicated fight builds, the kind of builds that shoulder the burden of taking on every single enemy that spawns.

In faction cards that synergize:

• Extra Ammunition pays for itself and nets you 1 bonus resource from .45 Thompson.
• Well-Maintained is a fine method to recurse the gun, it traverses the issue of cost thanks to the gun paying for itself.
• Reliable, as a gun that has lots of ammo and begs for more, Reliable is a good option.
• Other big guns! Weapons like Lightning Gun arent "banished" when you slot .45 Thompson, rather the self funding ability and great speed at which you spend ammo makes slotting other big guns a perfectly valid deckbuilding direction. All those ammo and gun-support cards you might slot alongside .45 Thompson will do the other big guns good too! Top it off with Bandolier to dual wield 2 big guns!
• Vicious Blow gains priority in a build that is limiting itself to 2-damage attacks.
• Venturer keeps the bullets flowing.

Out of faction:

• Act of Desperation can top-off the resource gain by refunding the whole damn thing! Style points if you then immediately re-equip via Well-Maintained.
• Contraband, obviously.

One important bit: You dont actually need all of those other cards, .45 Thompson by itself is a grease card thank makes your deck run more smoothly in it's enemy killing role, it doesn't need any combos to actually be good on its own.