EDIT: I misunderstood the card negatively, which is funny because I was very much pleased with it to start with! This should reflect how good the card is better:

I'm a fan of Wither, a cheap asset that can be used infinitely kill off problems that aren't worth charges from other assets, it's a great backup weapon, 1-off, or to dual wield with Shrivelling or Enchanted Blade or Ornate Bow or Timeworn Brand (I.E, a fight heavy whose role is to kill things, like many forms of Agnes Baker, Diana Stanley and Jim Culver). "Super archmage" builds with Sign Magick will also be interested. The -1 fight and evade trigger is surprisingly useful in making hits land or getting out of trouble.

So, the upgrade is worth it's XP cost because:

• The -1 health effect reduces the written HP total of the target by 1 and triggers whether or not you actually hit, this can create some funky circumstances such as:
  • You shoot a 2-hp foe a and get a token, killing it in one attack.
  • You miss a damaged enemy, but draw a special token, reducing their health total enough to make their existing damage kill them anyway!

• The +2 and special trigger combine to make Wither very, accurate. The largest penalties are often keyed on tokens and Wither innately resists those.

Layer all of this with Wither's initial ability to infinitely channel into damage and you've got yourself a very good attack spell, whether it's for the 5- juggernaughts who do everything via or the 4- midrangers who like to use their other stats for things and miss the occational spell charge.

This card stands out as being FAR more impressive than it seems at first glance, especially in the latter half of a campaign where special tokens tend to be much more numerous. Wither a very impressive attack spell that manages to stand alongside without replacing Shrivelling.

Edit 2: After now playing in 3 campaigns with Wither, I'll stand by it except in 1 circumstance. In a skillful and informed playthrough of Dunwich you might manage to not actually add any special tokens to the bag, in this case Wither looses much of its luster.

Excellent for any character build that stacks resources.

Well Connected builds with several resource cards to support it, based on Preston Fairmont's and Jenny Barnes's extra resource generation can routinely hit 20+ resources. While the resource mountains are primarily collected to channel bonuses on Well Connected, Money Talks is an excellent support card to slot in this archetype. It's just an extra lever for Preston Fairmont to pull to channel his vast wealth into test success.

This is a great card to beat key tests such as scenario specific ones (Talking to Lita Chantler(/card/05005)) or against key treacheries (Ridding yourself of [Frozen in Fear](/card/01164 or not dying to Rotting Remains).

Money Talks is terrific in the right deck, TERRIBLE outside it.

Investments is the most recent addition to the finance generation machine, it's very similar to the existing asset Lone Wolf. Evaluating Investments without alluding constantly to Lone Wolf is impossible, so prepare for some reasoning and math ahead.

Investments needs to be found and played early, this is not new by any means, but the real interesting bit is that Investments requires an extra action to cash in the money, until which point the resources are out of your reach, not to mention that if you trigger investments the money generation ends.

This is a hugely negative point in direct comparison to Lone Wolf where the gains are immediate and action free, stopping to cash in the investments can be hard! In the middle of a fight for example where 7-10 extra resources might be very helpful, you just don't have time and space to go get your money. This is very much the crippling issue that makes investments fall behind Lone Wolf.

On the positive side for Investments, Lone Wolf tends to go offline for 20-40% of the time in duo games, and the problem gets MUCH much worse in 3/4 player games, in this case Investments rises up the ranks and replaces Lone Wolf easily, but I'dd still go for Lone Wolf in duo rather then Investments.

So I broke down Investments versus Lone Wolf a bit, but what of other resource cards?

• Investments generates up to 10 resources for 2 actions, a resource and a card (and lots of time).

• Emergency Cache generates 3 resources for 1 action and a card (immediately).

• "Watch this!" generates up to 3 resources for 1 card and some risk (immediately).

An advantage that "Watch this!" and Emergency Cache hold over both Investments and Lone Wolf is the speed, a burst of cash that's equally useful in rounds 1 and 10. The speed thing makes it so that Investments does not replace Emergency Cache for me.

So, Investments compares "poorly" to the classical Emergency Cache and looses out to Lone Wolf in many cases, is Investments just a bad card? No it isn't, no its not. It's a viable replacement to Lone Wolf in multiplayer and in a resource heavy deck, for example a deck that relies on Lola Santiago to gather clues, it's good for what ails you. It feels especially good to cash in the money, even if it's just 6 or 7 resources, to then go on and complete the last locations with a combination of Lola triggers and Intel Report, a big money move that only characters can pull off.

Anna Kaslow is the Tarot enabler, she's the linchpin that makes bulking 3-4 tarot cards a playable strategy.

• Her ability echoes that of the tarot cards, netting you a small 1 / 1 horror and health tank in addition to the tutor effect of searching your deck for a Tarot and playing it as well, all for free if she makes it onto your opening hand.

• When played post-turn 1, she's still a deck thinning tarot tutor, pulling and playing cards directly from your deck reduces the chance that you'll draw and get stuck with the relatively costly tarot cards. Get them out of the way so as not to dud your draws later.

• An additional 2 tarot slots means that you might see the dream of running with +2 to a stat and +1 to another, for free! Holy crap! This is a veritable magical Christmas land scenario though, where you're much likely to wind up with just 1 or 2 tarots at a time, probably paying for one of them. Some scenarios will have events that poke damage at an ally and sometimes, frankly, taking a hit on her is just going to be the best course of action.

• She occupies a hugely contested slot! With just 1 health and horror to survive by she has absolutely no tank. Given that she's in your deck you probably depend on and fill up those Tarot slots quickly so loosing her will probably start a chain-reaction of asset discards. With Anna Kaslow in your deck Charisma is very probably next on the agenda.

• Not a cheap asset by any means at 3 resources, not to mention the 4xp as well.

All in all, I think that Kaslowe's weaknesses make her a very iffy card, the dependency on being drawn in the first hand, the cost, the slot, the lack of tank, the XP. Despite the fact that I do like Tarot cards, Anna Kaslow has yet to impress me enough to be worth a whopping 4-xp a pop.

The top characters who might be interested in her are Diana Stanley, Joe Diamond and Sefina Rousseau, the former two because they benefit greatly from both their in-faction tarots so slotting 3-4 tarots isn't out of the question and the latter because her large opening hand makes finding tarot mechanics easier. Also there's always Lola Hayes.

P.S, this point is a bit unfair, but one of the worst feelings in the game has to be: Sitting around with 3 tarots in your hand, 1 on the table, and 2 Anna Kaslowe's laughing at you from somewhere in your deck.

Now unfortunately, as per the rules on Removed from Game, when Hallowed Mirror leaves play, the 3 copies of Soothing Melody are rendered totally inaccessible, since a card removed from game "has no further interaction with the game in any manner for the duration of its removal." However, there's an easy workaround for this.

Just buy 5 extra copies of Before the Black Throne. Each mythos pack comes with 3 extra copies of Soothing Melody, which would give us a total of 15 backup bonded cards. Remember, we don't have to find the 3 specific copies that came with this one specific card, just 3 bonded cards total. This should be more than enough to fuel whatever recursion games we feel like playing with Hallowed Mirror for an entire scenario.

Of course, if any 3 copies of Soothing Melody will do, why not just proxy them? It's definitely cheaper than buying whole mythos packs, and works just as well for filling out our collection with all the copies of Soothing Melody that we could possibly need.

But then, if we're not bothering to get extra copies of Hallowed Mirror, why even bother proxying? We only have 1 copy of Hallowed Mirror, so only 3 copies of Soothing Melody will ever be in use at a time. There's nothing stopping us from just pretending that, once they leave play those 3 copies of Soothing Melody have been replaced by 3 new proxies that happen to have been made with the exact same cards.

Of course, skipping all this, we can always just realize that if a rules discussion can be rendered moot by just buying 5 extra copies of a mythos pack that you then don't even have to bother opening, that maybe "Hallowed Mirror leaving play means you can't get back the 3 copies of Soothing Melody if you play it again" was never how that was intended to work in the first place.