Five years into the game's run, Gregory is still the best rogue(0) ally. Leo and Lonnie both have amazing abilities, but they’re expensive. Probably not viable outside of big money builds or fighting. But anything a rogue might wanna do they can do better with Gregory. Lock picks, Mauser shots, funneling your money with hard knocks(4)...all fun.

There’s one advantage nobody’s mentioned, though. In scenarios that attack your resources, Greg keeps your money safe. He doesn’t mind if you only get a few bucks a turn all game, then call in favors to replace him with Delilah or Tristan. He’s a gambler, he knows how the game is played.

Art note: The letter Stella is carrying is addressed to Jacqueline Fine, albeit misspelled as "Jakueline" -- this is easier to see on her investigator mini-card (or, I imagine, on her investigator card in Arkham 3rd, since to my knowledge that's where the art is from). Useful info if you're looking for flavor justifications for card pairings (similar to the also-mail-related Indebted and Finn Edwards).

icon makes it easy for Dexter Drake to use this as another way to pay for cycling expensive assets (alongside cards like David Renfield and Faustian Bargain). Sometimes you have to work to find good or tests to use this on, but tests are trivial to both find and pass as a mystic.

Honestly just utterly confused as to why this was designed as a level 3 card rather than a level 2 one. Leo Anderson is THE investigator that would most love an upgraded Decorated Skull, and yet he can't play it. Has anyone playtested it in him "for science!" and found that denying him it was a wise design decision? I.e. would it just be too good for him? How about a hypothetical level 2 mutated version (e.g. where you can spend up to 2 charges instead, or is exceptional, or a similar variant)?

Obviously this card has some powerful potential for special characters like Calvin and Preston, but I have tried to use this card for normal characters (with a mix of high and low stats from 2-5), and it was not as great as I thought it would be. For a normal character the ideal would be to use this on a statistic of 2 and increase it to 5 for a turn, so it is giving you +3 on a statistic for a full turn. The problem is that it is actually kind of tricky for a typical character to use this on three skill checks in the same turn, and even harder when that skill isn't the primary skill that your character is set up to employ. I envisioned using it to plunder a site for clues with three back to back investigate actions, but it just wasn't very common for my non-investigating character to get into the situation where this would happen, I was usually out of position since I've been doing my primary purpose of dealing with monsters. In practice it was much more likely to use this card for no more than two actions in a turn. Obviously this card is way overpriced if you use it only on skill test in a turn, but really, it is still a fairly expensive way to get a bonus even on two tests in a turn. So what I ended up with was a situational card that would give a + 3 bonus, twice, only to one of my weakest skills, and cost a lot of money to play.

This is still a flexible card with a lot of potential uses and characters who might have reasons to use it, but I don't think I'll be just throwing this in, I will want to think carefully about why I am putting the card in the deck and whether the character has a benefit they are gaining this is worth the high resource cost of the card.