Backpack is literally made me play Emergency Cache again. Its such a good deck thinning and combo piece finder. I never not want to have it. That is all. Muahahahah. Favorite card. Kiss kiss me me. Hue hue hue. 200

Physical Training, Hyperawareness, Hard Knocks, Arcane Studies, Dig Deep are part of a cycle, and partly share a common review. These cards are really, really inefficient, yet they have unique capabilities and I at least consider whether to take them every time I make a character. They have two main purposes:

1. Making use of excess resources. Most characters are tight for resources early on, but many times a character will reach the point where they have what they need, or they can't afford the actions to play any more cards, and they start just building up resources. These cards ensure that you can never have too much money, because if nothing else your one resource per turn becomes a flexible, storable +1 each turn. If you really have run out of other ways to spend your resources, a card to turn resources into bonuses can become a very effective play. However, it is important to be aware that just because your character tends to have a few resources hanging around at the end of the game is no reason to take this card, you would be better off taking a skill card. Just playing the card alone will use up 2 resources before you even gain a benefit. You really need to have a character who would otherwise end up with at least 6 extra resources at the end of this scenario, before you start to get excited by this type of card. That is entirely possible for certain characters, but most characters won't end up in that situation. You need to be very aware of what kind of resource economy your character has, and that your character really does spend substantially fewer resources than they earn over the course of a scenario, before you put this type of card in your deck. (Some characters make money more quickly than one per turn, and have stronger reasons to take this card).
2. Flexibility. Sometimes you have other ways to spend your resources, but this card gives you the flexibility to spend a bunch of resources on two very different skills, in any amount and any way you choose. Normally skill cards are way, way more efficient than this kind of card, but a single skill card isn't going to give you, for instance, +7 on a test of your choice, and this card can. Inefficient though this card may be, if you have it in play and you are forced to make an extremely critical skill check, it is quite comforting that there is almost always something you can do to improve your chances – you can make the decision that a resource you otherwise would have spent on something else would be better spent giving you a +1 on this test. So you don’t really need to have nothing at all to do with your resources, in order to play this card. But you still need lots of available resources. A character who is tight on resources (which is quite common) just should not use this type of card; even though the flexibility might be useful, you can’t afford the action and 2 resources to play it.

If you do play one of these cards, when it is worth using? A really good situation is when +1 skill would turn 3 tokens (about 1/5 of the bag) from failure to success. So if turning a failure into a success isn’t worth 5 resources, you shouldn’t be using this.

I find Hyperawareness to be one of the more tempting cards in this cycle because it has an interesting ability to give evasion ability to a class without a lot of evasion options. It isn't usually practical for a seeker to play permanent evasion bonuses that will almost never be used, and putting a couple one shots kill bonuses into the deck may not be enough to get the job done. But with this card you are only committing half a card in your deck to agility (since the other half of the card is boosting intellect), but if you get into a desperate situation you can spend a whole bunch of money and suddenly become an expert evader. Or at the end of the game, if your seeker abilities have become useless because the goal is now to kill a boss monster, you can use all that money you've been building up from Dr. Milan Christopher to become the party evasion master and keep the boss occupied while your friends kill it. The intellect boosting side of the card is less exciting because it is usually more efficient to just retry a failed investigation attempt, but the scenario designers like to put situations in the game where that is not true and you really want to complete an investigation in a timely fashion, so boosting your intellect can still be pretty useful. Of course, this card is still far from an auto include, it is an expensive card and you still need to believe that your character’s deck design is such that you will end up with a bunch of money saved up by the end of the game (Dr. Milan Christopher helps with this).

This card isn't terrible, I have had some fun using it, but it is generally a bit disappointing.

The resource cost of two wouldn't be much for a permanent asset, but for a one shot event it is fairly expensive, compared to the alternative of a skill card which is free. And the restrictions on Coup de Grace are really pretty limiting, unable to be combined with a weapon and usable only as your last action. Lots of times it would just sit in my hand waiting for that perfect moment, while I wished it was a card better suited for the situation I was actually in. The advantage of this card is that it is a totally automatic success, and that is a formidable advantage, the reason why you might consider including the card in your deck. But once I have a character who is set up with enough strength to intentionally enter combat, a skill card like Overpower would do a pretty good job making an attack very likely to hit, while being a lot cheaper and more flexible.

The saving grace of this card is having two strength icons, so it is actually can be used in the same situations as Overpower. But the card draw from overpower is quite a significant bonus, and with the skill bonus being so much more flexible, it is pretty tempting to simplify things by just taking Overpower and skipping this card. In general, I would only put this card in my deck if I had some space and wanted to try something different in my deck construction.

When I first saw this card I was excited to see a big weapon that wasn't horribly short on ammo, but after making a flame thrower character and playing him I find this weapon very effective but rather boring to use. It seemed to take away all the interesting choices my Guardian had to make in combat. The insanely high hit bonus removes the need to decide whether to commit extra cards to the combat test, I was only worried about drawing the auto fail. The insanely high damage removes the need to decide how to finish off a photo with only one health left, the enemy is just flat out dead. The big disadvantage of the flamethrower, being forced to engage the enemy in order to fire, only makes it more boring by removing the question of whether to risk firing at an enemy engaged with an ally. You just calculate what you can do with your actions, and then you do it, and then you try to make sure your flamethrower doesn't run out of ammo.

By comparison, while I find the shotgun to be an overly flawed weapon, if you actually go to the trouble to create an effective shotgun character, it is way more fun to play.

This card is the core of a very entertaining deck type, the “saving money” deck. There are other cards designed to reward you for saving money (such money talks and cunning) but this one is by far the most impactful. It can give you a very substantial bonus on one test of any type each turn, which makes you a very flexible character. This card is primarily designed for filthy rich characters, I find it very difficult not to include it in any Preston Fairmont deck I make, and it is easy to make a Jenny Barnes deck that makes good use of this as well. It is quite practical for Jenny to be getting +4 on a test in the latter part of a mission, and Preston can do even better, and suddenly you are guaranteed to be able to do at least one really good skill check each turn.

Once you have this card it becomes really tempting to save money, so you can reach that point of easily doing one powerful thing each turn. and while spending 5 money to get a +1 bonus once per turn for the rest of the game is not, in theory, as efficient as other more dedicated cards, it is straightforward to do and the money isn't actually totally consumed, either. At the end of the game, in the last turn or two, you can suddenly burn it off on Intel Report or some other high cost cards.

It can also be useful in wealthy decks (typically Rogue decks) that are not quite so dedicated to saving money. If you only save 10 money the flexible +2 bonus is still quite worthwhile, and even the +1 bonus for saving 5 resources is not bad for a card that costs no XP and doesn't use up a slot, if the money was just going to be sitting around anyway. You are not really going to use this card in a deck with a more ordinary cash flow, though – it is not efficient to spend 7 resources (2 for the card plus 5 to power it) just to get a +1 bonus each turn, when resources are scarce and other cards are competing for those resources.