My god get this travesty off of the Arkham page. What’s next laser blasters held by goblins? HP Lovecraft is rolling in his grave - all for modernisations and modern world sensibilities but this fanfic stuff brings the game down.

The magnifying glass has one interesting interaction with recursive decks - it allows you to pop used up hand items to the discard for 0 cost.

It plays wonderfully with the The Necronomicon when you have an additional Hand item in play - like Fingerprint Kit or Grim Memoir.

One Necronomicon is drained of charges you slide the Magnifier in play for 0xp 0actions, discarding the Necronomicon. Then investigate at +1 and if you succeed with 2 difference immediately put Necro back into play via Scavenging

If you took the last clue you can take the magnifier back into your hand and free the slot. Alternatively you can get rid of the other hand asset if its out of charges. Or just discard the magnifier and dig it out later.

So I'm sorry if I missed this in the discussion but I felt like an aspect of this card was sort of overlooked. In the scarlet keys there are attacks that can be made against things that are not enemies (trying to stay very away from specific mechanics discussion where possible as I don't know what would be considered a spoiler here). So I wouldn't categorize inscription of the elders as a lesser/Roland as I've seen discussed. Roland has to defeat an enemy to trigger his ability. I'd look at it more as having the possibility of replacing what I'd call "off spec helper" cards for guardians in conjunction with Bandolier.

As an example instead of having sixth sense as a method to get clues you could use inscription of elders and hunt to efficiently move and reveal cards at low shroud locations since one use could potentially net you a move a fight and another card flip (or clue) for one action and would serve as a good guardian backup weapon either with low xp investment or late campaign if you felt like upgrading that trusty backup Cyclopean Hammer or something. Hopefully that's a new perspective to look at it from? (This occurred to me in my now 3rd playthrough of scarlet keys)

Crazy good in Innsmouth, especially in Horror in High Gear with Net. Enemies get stuck at a location for so long you have time to get to Falcon Point. One of the main ways the Encounter deck makes the scenario hard is by triggering Hunter abilities during the Mythos. When they're trapped in a net, they still don't move. Thus, even the Encounter deck is mitigated by this card.

As of writing we have only seen one other mask with its boost and replenish condition (Cat mask, mystic, boosts Willpower/Combat, and replenishes both offerings on doom being placed on a card that doesn't have any).

I think Sparrow Mask will likely be the best, or most universally useful. Willpower and Agility are not the 'do something' stats, when you need to pass a test for these it's often critical for an encounter/scenario card. +2 can push a coin toss to very likely to succeed, and I think this will have wide play for investigators who need it. Bob (especially), Darrell, Rita and Daniella can probably all use this to shore up some of their weaker side (HP for Darrell, Sanity for Rita and Daniella) by shoring up their defenses, while Bob can hand out masks to others.

With respect to the masks in general, they are all (likely) level 0 so they can be used by the Dunwich investigators which also seems strong for Pete (boosting Duke's tests if there is a combat/intellect one).

Edit: How wrong I was, these masks are all insane. Getting primary stat boosts multiple times per scenario is incredibly good, and at only 1 resource even getting the effect twice is fine. Guardians get combat, seekers get Intellect, rogues get agility AND intellect. These are possibly what the talent cards in the base set should have been.