I recently played through Scarlet Keys with a Gray's Anatomy-focused Joe Diamond deck, dual-wielding Survival Knives. Is it efficient? Absolutely not, but it's fun.

In a vacuum, one click for +3 damage on the next attack sounds great, but considering most basic weapons (and certainly any you spend XP on) deal two damage per attack, you're netting out to spending the same two actions to deal the same four damage, but the first action provokes opportunity attacks, you're required to spend a second action to inflict anything, and three actions only nets you 5 damage instead of 6. You can alleviate these by combining it with weapons and upgrades, but you're going to be sinking a lot of cards and XP into something objectively less efficient and flexible than a big stick, and you've already sunk 5xp on the book itself.

So where does it shine? Testless damage. Blood-Rites and Ancient Stones as mentioned in the other review, but my favorite is Alice Luxley. One action to set up with Grays, one action to investigate, get a clue and deal four damage to any enemy at your location. No ammo needed, no engaging enemies, just mashing your best skill and blasting things while you do it.

The (currently) Joe-exclusive Survival Knife combo is also effective, but very niche. Using Gray's on the third action and triggering the reaction in the enemy phase nets you 5 damage for a single action, but the stars have to align to set up that scenario. More often you start your turn engaged and are left to the usual Grays > Stab two-action combo, which is frustratingly inefficient against common 2-health enemies.

It should also be noted, if pairing with the The Raven Quill, that the Supernatural Record ability is XP-cheaper and more effective than actually buying a second copy of Gray's Anatomy. You effectively get three copies of Gray's in your deck, as well as the ability to pull them from your discard in the event that it gets Crypt Chilled or similar. The total resource cost is higher, but you're already paying that for the ability to avoid AoOs.

This card seems pretty amazing, a +2 to evade in most characters who want to be evading enemies in the first place nearly guarantees success, and preventing the enemy from readying next upkeep seems like it would be really helpful for evasion, which is one of the most tempo positive but value negative basic actions in the game. However, this rubs up against the classic problem of middling cards in Arkham: the effect is nice, but not so transformative that it shakes up what your doing, and it is a nonbo with cards that do shake up what your doing, which means that it isn't exactly worth the deckslot despite having essentially no problems in a vacuum.

Specifically, a big problem with disguise in most characters who can take it is that rogues have other far stronger ways to counter the long term value problems evasion has, either via cards like Pickpocketing and Both of the Lucky Cig Cases to turn evasion into a value machine worth doing to the point you actively will keep enemies about to do it over and over, or cards like Dirty Fighting and .25 automatic to turn it into a very efficient kill tool. Or, even better, doing both.

Compared to drawing a bunch of cards and getting cash, or just nuking the enemy for 4 damage at a combat value of +4 for 1 action, exhausting the enemy an extra turn is... nice, but not exactly something you want to do in most cases. VS non-hunters usually an evaded enemy becomes irrelevant, and while exhausting a hunter for an extra turn is good, you need to use disguise at least twice with relevant exhausts and a relevant action you otherwise would like to take to see value for the action cost of playing it alone, forget about the 3 resources and a card, or the greater costs if you are using evade based econ which push the theoretical cost of this card very high indeed.

Usually, if your doing that many relevant evades, things are going so poorly disguise is probably not helping you that much. For the same reason, the tempo advantages of a longer exhaust are a bit questionable. While the exhaust lets you take heat off your primary combatant for longer by allowing you to evade more enemies if the board starts getting flooded (Ex: Using 2 actions to evade 4 enemies a turn instead of the 2 you normally could), if your combat potential is falling so far behind that you need to constantly exhaust enemies in a desperate bid to stay above water... it probably behooves you to just add more cards into your deck, such as good kill events or the aforementioned Dirty fighting alongside a .25 automatic and mauser, to ensure you don't get into that boardstate which is so poor that disguise, while theoretically helpful, probably won't actually get you to the point you win the game with.

There is one character that springs to mind as a good disguise user, and that is Rita. While Dirty Fighting is FAR more her speed, the lack of pickpocketing, lucky cig case, or the ability to combine dirty fighting with .25 auto means that evasions for Rita are mostly just a free 1 damage ping if she intends to kill the enemy, and a turn free of attack when she doesn't. While Rita is proficient at killing things, higher health normal enemies can definitely strain her coverage in a way they don't for 'real' rogues. For example, on a flop where you and another player draw an enemy each, and one of you has a 4 health nasty, a .25 auto+dirty fighting combo lets a rogue evader just nuke the 4 health beast in 1 action, leaving them 2 actions to engage and evade, but Rita doesn't really have that option, as she traded her non-event nuke potential for the consistency offered by survivor cards. Like many survivors, Rita doesn't often fall behind but lacks many tools to catch up, and stalling one enemy for 2 actions legitimately can give her the window she needs to 'catch up' and do a full clear of all enemies. It isn't amazing, nor essential for the character, but its definitely a card that has helped a relatively flat character become a lot more dynamic.

As the two "draw, resolve, then immediately discard" weaknesses in the Core, Amnesia and Paranoia are obviously meant to be parallels. Their effects mirror each other, one discarding all but 1 card from your hand, the other discarding all your resources. However, this mirroring obscures the truth, that being that Amnesia is a far greater threat than Paranoia. Why? Because cards are, to quote a trend from 2020/2021, NFTs.

No 3 non-Myriad cards are the same; .45 Automatic is slightly different from .32 Colt, Dr. Milan Christopher provides resources where Whitton Greene provides cards, and Amnesia attacks the cards in your hand while Paranoia attacks the resources in your pool. What this means is that, technically, cards in your hand are non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, items that are not mutually exchangeable with each other. If you want Glory, a substitute won't work: you need Glory itself. Of course, cards can have similar effects and thus occasionally stand in for each other, like a deck running Enchanted Blade and Machete to provide a Melee weapon, but this only pushes my argument back, not defeats it; if the cards themselves are not, strictly speaking, NFTs, then the functions they fulfill are: if you want a Weapon, you need a proper Weapon, not something like Magnifying Glass.

Resources, by contrast, are fully fungible tokens; one resource is no better than any other. You don't need a Weapon resource to pay for Weapons or a Tool resource to pay for Tools; resources are resources are resources.

Therefore, while Paranoia clears your board of fungible tokens, Amnesia (almost) clears your hand of NFTs, something much more devastating. Losing 5 fungible tokens is bad, but possible to quickly recover from; the resources you generate in the following upkeep phases are functionally no different than the ones you just lost. With NFTs, though, if you lose them, you lose not just the tokens but the function they fulfill. You're not just discarding 4 cards, you're discarding a Weapon, a Tool, and 4 total skill icons, and if you want to recover those functions you need to find other cards that fulfill them; you can't just generate any random card during upkeep, you need it to be a card that does a specific (sometimes very specific) thing. And if one of the cards you discarded was a one-of, intended as tech against a certain scenario card, that can be very difficult.

I understand what Amnesia is trying to do, help slow players' card draw down. However, I believe that, as is, Amnesia is far too punishing and variable (the draw-heavy might never end up with this as their weakness while the poor gets it every single time) for it to be considered as fulfilling its purpose.

With Parallel Roland Banks this card is now looking pretty great as a fast self recurring 1 cost 1-2 dmg attack. ||Roland has enough card draw options to see this cycle a couple times and passive strength boosts to put the test at anything but tentacle territory too.

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Regarding the FAQs on this site, precisely the paragraph:

She uses High Roller on the test (it could be Teamwork'd over). [...] Adding High Roller’s bonus would only add +2 Willpower one time. She’d still test at 8.

That's not entirely true. There might be some card in the future are some cards in the pool, enabling that combination (although rather at random, see the comments below), but Teamwork is not that card. It allows to trade Item assets, Ally assets and resources. High Roller is none of the above, but a Talent.