When I first looked at Stella, I worried about being able to trigger her ability reliably with lower difficulty Chaos Bags. Then I fooled myself briefly thinking that her ability wasn't much help except as a bonus to the Survivor "win by losing" strategy (it feels really good to attack an enemy with .18 Derringer, miss, Use Oops! to hit another target reloading the pistol in the process, then shoot the original target with Stella's special action).

Now, while both of those are at least partly true, I'm beginning to see Stella's ability as "tempo protection." While a on a critical test will still ruin her day, Stella gets 3 successful actions in a turn far more often than other investigators. The versatility of that "failure insurance action" allows her to do anything, where most of the investigators with bonus actions (e.g. Ursula Downs, Finn Edwards) are constrained to one sort of action, and Stella is a lot more versatile.

Finally, a body asset, and a quite strong one at that!

First off, damage soak can always be appreciated by a faction that tends to be low on the health side, but for that alone it's fairly expensive. On that merit, it's hard not to compare to Trench Coat, which costs the same, but provides a bonus that most Mystics will find useless. There's also Leather Coat, which provides the same protection for free, and synergizes with recursion (if that's even something to consider in a deck).

But the true strength of this card is in its economy. After three rounds of playing spells--which is just what Mystics do--you break even, and from then on you're in the black. As long as you play this early and you're on a good curve, that's better than a 0 cost card.

How does this compare to the mainstay economy card Uncage the Soul? Well, the discount here is plainly inferior (on a per-card basis at least), but Uncage has a major downside: it's bad for playing events. Most Spell events are either fast (meaning they either can't be uncaged because they have a prereq, or you're trading an action), or are used to Fight/Evade which is bad to "play a card" over. The Robes, on the other hand, are a nice clean . Even the lesser discount can be good, as there are a handful of spells that are too cheap to waste an Uncage on. And, so long as they don't get discarded, the Robes can be used way more than twice!

I think Uncage is still better for most assets (and it's got that nice ), but running the Robes with it sounds like a great way to almost guarantee a strong economy for a faction that typically likes expensive decks.

A bit of an odd card for Rogues. Fast is really nice, but most Rogues don’t struggle with health much due to having high health values and high agility. You might consider this for Sef if it weren’t for Robes of Endless Night, which gives her a really nice discount on spells. For off class Rogues, this doesn’t do much for anyone except Dexter. Leo is built to be tanky with lots of allies, and Wendy can take Leather Coat if she really needs the soak. Dex can at least use this to effectively make something else fast with his ability, and the soak is very nice for him. He might want Robes instead, or he might want both.

You could also play this alongside Lonnie for a decent horror and damage healing engine, though 6 resources and 2 cards for that seems like too much.

Chainsaw Take Heart Dreams of the Deep Fail (1) Oops! (4) Live and Learn Take Heart Dreams of the Deep Fail (5) Oops! (8) Live and Learn Resourceful Succeed (11, return first L&L) Live and Learn Resourceful Succeed (14, return second L&L) Live and Learn Succeed (17)

Each L&L is triggering at the same timing sequence of 'after the first failed test ends', but due to the rules for Nested sequences must wait until the previous L&L is fully resolved.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

While I understand the logic behind this card as a down-leveled version of the popular classic. I believe printing this card was mostly a mistake. In most non-Preston decks, this card is just too expensive for what it does, and even in young moneybags, he has to boost on top of this to still succeed at something.

This card's natural home is in one main place: Jenny "Stop The Flow Of Time!" Barnes. It replaces the Premonition that tells you how much to commit/pay to hit your goal with... just flat out guaranteeing the (over)success in a very clean way.

Even outside the logical extreme, this thing goes best with big chonky Double or Nothing maneuvers, and its availability at level 0 means that even more rogues (or whomever) have access to it - and even more characters in general have access to it + Double or Nothing.

Maybe I'm wrong and there is a middle ground existence somewhere for this card, but I predict it will mostly be underwhelming or degenerate with little in between.