The upgraded Peter Sylvestre is the best horror sink in the game, and comes with a double passive stat boost. For 2XP each, he is a priority upgrade choice for some investigators, especially Agnes Baker.

This is my review of this card. It inspired the above version of "Paint it Black," and I love this version. I sang it the whole way through and it was awesome, so this card is awesome.

[bonus chorus] It seems my review needs two-hundred words or more

I'll write this nonsense and I'll hope it meets the score

I bet you think this is not relevant at all

Well here's a quarter now go find someone to call

nah nah nah nah nah nah nah nah nah nah nah nah nah

...

First I just want to say I absolutely love the art on this card, maybe my favourite in the pack. The whole theme of the card is just fantastic all around.

That out the way, I think the most obvious comparison for this card is Logical Reasoning as they are the two cards in the game that can testlessly discard a treachery in play. I think when Alter Fate was revealed a lot of people saw it as a less flexible Logical Reasoning, due to them both being able to discard one of the worst treacheries in the game and Logical Reasoning having the added benefit of horror healing, but I dont think this is entirely fair. Alter Fate is fast, useable outside your turn and doesn't require you to be at the location of the player you're helping. Not to mention there are a fair few pretty nasty non-terror treacheries you can hit.

I think Alter Fate really shines in the second half of Forgotten Age where it can deal with Words of Power, Yithian Presence, Entombed, Creeping Darkness (surprisingly) and Frozen in Fear when you have 2 willpower, all of which can require a significant investment of action or cards to deal with otherwise.

I also think it does a lot of work throughout Dunwich where between Arcane Barrier, Locked Door, Cursed Luck, Beyond the Veil and the campaign's liberal use of the Striking Fear encounter set, every scenario has at least one target and usually several.

Ultimately the value of Alter Fate is very dependent on the campaign and the investigator choice. If you are playing through Dunwich with a group containing multiple low willpower investigators they are likely to thank you for running it. If you are playing Forgotten Age and some of your investigators are worried about the agility test on Entombed it may be worth it.

A few investigator specific notes:

Father Mateo can take this card, as it is Blessed, and since its a spell he can dig for it with Arcane Initiate. This is dubiously worthwhile as Mateo has lots to spend exp on and can already take Ward of Protection but it could be interesting in a very supporting control focused build.

William Yorick has only medium values for both agility and willpower, which makes him vulnerable to a lot of the treacheries that Alter Fate is useful against.

Calvin Wright may specifically find it useful for dealing with Curse of Yig and Dreams of R'lyeh which can be brutal for him, as a form of virtual damage that bypasses and soak he has in play, though he can also play Ward of Protection which does a mostly better job.

The long awaited final event in the Improvised cycle is here! And... its a little underwhelming?

In theory the advantage of the improvised cards is twofold: one they provide a "skill-bonus" in the form of a test difficulty reduction, and secondly they provide action compression when played from the discard by allowing you to double the action (gathering two clues for Winging It and dealing two damage for Improvised Weapon).

Impromptu Barrier does fine at providing a skill bonus, though there are very few evade 1 enemies and so you are pretty unlikely to get the "guaranteed success" that difficulty reduction can sometimes provide. A resource and a card to get effectively a +1 to two evade tests is probably a bit worse than the same rate on investigating and roughly the same as that rate on combat, purely based on how frequently tests come up. So on that front barrier isn't too much worse than the other improvised cards.

Where the card really falters for me is in the second effect. Doubling up on a combat test is frequently valuable, Improvised Weapon allows you to deal with a three health enemy in two actions, or split its effects and deal with a 1 health enemy and a two health enemy at one action each. Winging It lets you double the most important action in the game, working like a survivor version of Deduction. Doubling up on a successful evade action is simply less valuable than either damage or investigation as rather than requiring a two clue location or two health enemy (both very common even in solo) it requires you to have two enemies at your location, and for you to want to evade both of them.

If this card simply let you evade a second enemy at your location without the X or lower requirement, I think it would be niche but playable in investigators who like to evade a lot and can struggle to deal with multiple hunters. As is, not only do you have to want to evade two enemies at the same location but you also have to over-succeed by enough to evade both of them, otherwise the card essentially does nothing and you wasted your resource.

It's a real shame since I feel the other two are really home run designs and it would be nice to have a solid third to round out the set but, but I feel this falls more than a little flat.

I've found this card pretty useful with Norman Withers as I'm running double arcane research. I knew I'd meet the 2x mental trauma threshold form the start and i quickly upgraded into two copies of Shriveling(5) which has a decent chance of popping me for 2 horror. Thermos will undo that with one action. Lastly when thermos shows up on top of my deck I can get it out for 1 fewer resources which helps mitigate the high cost.