This card is insane in Mystic Agatha Crane.

If you've met the condition for Agatha's ability in your first two actions, you just play this as your third action and add 10 curse and bless tokens to the bag. Then your turn ends, you play it again from your discard, remove all 10 curse and bless to heal 10 horror from cards at your location.

This can be investigators, allies... even cards that can't normally be healed like Keeper of the Key.

All for 0 resources, 1 action, and 3xp!

I'm a newer player. A friend and I are playing through every campaign in a row. So far we have gotten to Dream Eaters, which needed us to make secondary characters. We both included this card in our decks for those characters (our "interns").

I found this card to be seriously mediocre on first reading, but after thinking about it more there were some situations where taking it makes sense. I will agree with the other review that the "correct" use of this card is to make swapping out to another investigator mid-campaign less painful, but I think that isn't the only use. I would not use it for every character or every campaign, but there are a few situations I think it is worth using even from mission one.

What does this do? In essence, it significantly front-loads your character's power curve. Your character goes into the campaign significantly more powerful than they otherwise would, at the expense of not having as much experience available at the end of the campaign. If you take this and In the Thick of It you can start the game with 13xp, not even counting any other shenanigans involving characters that start the game with xp, or other ways to upgrade cards without paying experience (for example, my character for Dream Eaters uses this and Down the Rabbit Hole to start the game with some unspent experience, then gets more value for it over time).

That seems like a bad deal initially. Campaigns are usually easiest in the beginning and get harder over time. Why would I want to make the already easy part even easier at the expense of making the hard parts even harder? Since this card significantly distorts the difficulty curve of a campaign, let's think about campaigns with weird difficulty curves.

Some campaigns start very difficult, then ease off for most of the rest, so being stronger at the beginning is actually helpful (Forgotten Age springs to mind). Some campaigns are very short, or otherwise don't give much experience, so you aren't really losing that much with this card (the intro campaign, or one half of Dream Eaters). Lastly, some decks just don't need all that much experience. They're fully functional at ~15 experience and don't get significantly better beyond that. In any of those cases this card is mostly upside.

Another hidden upside to this card is the simple fact that you no longer have to care about gaining experience. For us, that has definitely changed how we play the game, and can be surprisingly freeing. Victory locations are meaningless to you so there is no need to try and investigate them unless it contributes to completing the mission. Same with victory enemies. Don't even try to fight them, just evade them or otherwise go around. Heck, Unsolved Case, which taunts me every time I play my main character of Joe Diamond, is a completely dead card in a deck using Ascetic.

I have found this lack of care about experience to actually make the game easier, which is a potentially hidden upside.

Anyway, I hope that made some sense to you and may have encouraged you to take this card in a situation you otherwise wouldn't. I'm sure there are many things I haven't thought about, so please feel free to point them out in the comments. Have a great day and thank you for reading all this!

In essence M1918 BAR's meaner big brother with a prison record, the Gatling Gun is one of the best weapon assets in AHLCG. As it stands, I would say it's a game changer. My thoughts are in a few sections below:

Pros:

• Able to deal 6 damage in a single action, which is unrivalled across all weapon assets. A fair number of Elite enemies have 3 health, so these can be killed in a single action – tremendously valuable.
• Can have a staggering +6 on attacks, largely negating the need for other boosters or skills to commit.
• Starts with a good amount of uses. For example if just dealing two damage per action and so using two ammo, you could take 6 shots before needing to reload.
• Can kill groups of enemies, which is a massive boon for action economy.

Cons:

• When facing large groups of enemies (especially swarm enemies) the difficulty for the fight action can become very high.
• Failure on 6 ammo tests is punishing, as it wastes a lot of resources.
• If you're using multiple ammo on tests regularly, you need ammo support events in your deck.
• Sits in the class, and so is inaccessible for Guardians.
• The 5 resource price tag is on the costly side.

Deckbuilding Tips:

• Ammo support is almost certainly needed to keep you testing at high values. In this regard cards such as Contraband, Swift Reload and the off-class Extra Ammunition are all worth a mention. Contraband in particular doubles ammo on an asset.
• Tutoring cards can be beneficial to find it fast. Backpack •• does a deep deck search while also finding Supply ammo cards such as Contraband and Extra Ammunition. The off-class Prepared for the Worst is a good level 0 option for further tutoring. Underworld Market (even with the taboo) and Dirty Deeds present alternatives.
• Heavy Furs as well as the off-class Custom Modifications (EDIT: Strong-Armed doesn't work here) can all help against bag chaos bag pulls and so wasting large amounts of ammo.
• Cards such as Crack Shot which offer large boosts for when you're facing off against big groups of enemies can be useful.
• Healthy resource economy to afford the gun plus ammo support makes sense, such as Faustian Bargain, Bank Job, "Watch this!" and Easy Mark.
• Extra actions from Leo De Luca and Haste substantially increase damage output as long as you have enough ammo remaining.

Investigator Pairings:

• Tony Morgan was made for Gatling Gun. He has a of 5, is able to access Guardian cards such as Extra Ammunition and Prepared for the Worst, and often gains an extra action from Bounty Contracts.
• Michael McGlen similarly has a of 5 and "Viola" Case to find it, however you will need to manage Confiscation as this leads to Gatling Gun being reshuffled and so losing excess ammo. Friends in Low Places can be used to draw Confiscation early with a small gun in play and so get it discarded.
• Finn Edwards (depicted in the artwork) is a reasonable fit and he has Smuggled Goods as a tutor card for both the gun and support cards like Contraband. Dirty Fighting and Finn's free evade mean he can test at the same levels as Tony when the enemy is exhausted.
• "Skids" O'Toole has Guardian access and so can make use of many cards which work well with Gatling Gun, plus he can buy an extra action when needed.

Overall Gatling Gun is a very powerful card if properly supported, combining a massive boost with very high damage and the ability to kill groups of enemies like the Flamethrower. I'm not sure if it will remain un-tabooed for long, currently 5 XP is well worth the price of admission. I posted a Tony deck with Gatling Gun just before this review, so feel free to check it out for inspiration.

They were so careful with the limitations they put on Protective Incantation ("Group limit 2 copies of Protective Incantation in play.") and The Chthonian Stone/The Chthonian Stone (being unique) and then they print THIS?! I can even replenish this with Uncage the Soul!

With changes like these you can really see they want the game to go in a different direction.

EDIT - explanation: I indeed think this card is too powerful, especially with interactions like Akachi Onyele and Uncage the Soul, and that is also what the direction the game moves into is: Power creep, as what happends to every expandable card game at some point. With cards like this I just think it's becoming more and more obvious.

Until you realize the auto-fail is also a symbol this sounds like an amazingly good card. The insanely increased odds to just fail the test, no matter how many Ritual Candles you pack, make this card hard to play, I'd argue.

But who knows, maybe you don't wanna pass the test (survivor tech, anyone?), or just fire Agatha Crane's ability, or have Seal of the Seventh Sign out (although it won't last long if you play this card)...

EDIT - Fun fact: In theory, you could be stuck in an endless loop if you put Katarina Sojka together with Seal of the Seventh Sign and people sealing the other symbols via Protective Incantation, The Chthonian Stone, The Chthonian Stone, Bulwark, Crystalline Elder Sign, Day of Reckoning, Dial of Ancients, Serpents of Yig, Sign of Xelotaph, The Codex of Ages, and/or Unrelenting. This is also a great example why knowledge should be made easily accessible to the players in any game - because I am not even sure if being stuck in an endless loop counts as "having the potential to change the game state" and therefore would allow triggering Katarina's reaction ability or not. Yeah, the chaos bag is not endless, but it is at least undefined, if not an unreachable state. So what happens when you do this?