This is the level 1 Will to Survive. It serves a very similar function.

• Rewrite any character's stat as a 5. This is obviously great for anybody starting at 1 or 2, note that all modifiers (boosts on weapons for example) stack on top. Calvin Wright and Preston Fairmont take note.

• A 5 for a round is most useful if you can leverage it, upping to 5 for example is useful all the time, but upping isn't great unless you've got a weapon to swing.

• Terrific in maps that require you to beat a specific test type on scenario cards, for example if you gotta beat x amount of tests or beat parlays.

• Benefit lasts until end of turn, thereby it will never help you in the Mythos phase.

All in all this is a great card, mandatory in Calvin Wright and damn-near everybody else can use it for something, at the very least 5 is never useless.

While there are no XP versions of Trial by Fire there is still The Red-Gloved Man who operates VERY similarly but has loads of other advantages. There's also obviosuly Will to Survive.

In a number of ways, this suffers from the same problems a number of assets do: the Hawk-Eye Folding Camera becomes a less useful investment for every turn the game lasts, because of the slow buildup.

If you have it fully powered up, it's not a bad package deal: +1 , +1 , and +1 sanity is about the same as St. Hubert's Key, at half the price.

But most seekers don't really benefit from said package deal. Between naturally high sanity pools, a surplus of allies with decent sanity soak like Dr. Milan Christopher, Charles Ross, Esq., Dr. William T. Maleson, and Mr. "Rook", and Higher Education, they can afford to take most tests on the chin, and spend their way past everything else. So, in practice, what they really want is that +1 .

How long does it take said +1 to come online? Well, to some extent, you can cheat around the condition. If you play it when a location has 1 clue on it, clear that clue, Pathfinder over to another location with 1 clue on it, then clear that location too, you could theoretically do it in three actions. However,this is both unlikely, and is discounting the prior effort involved in discovering clues at said location.

A more useful measure might be "how many investigate tests will this card help me with, if I play it the second I draw it?" The best measure for that would be the act deck. The number of clues needed in a given scenario tends to hover at around 5 to 6 clues. In turn, the minimum number of clues at a location is usually 1. That means if this is played in your opening hand, it will only help you for 2/3rds of the game. And if you draw it, say, halfway through, it'll only help you on the last 1 checks.

Let's compare with the venerable Magnifying Glass. Sure, you only get the +1 if investigating. But the list of things a raw boost helps with besides an investigate is actually pretty small, consisting of the following:

• "I've got a plan!".
• Hypnotic Therapy
• False Lead
• Lost Soul (sometimes)
• The occasional Parley option on enemies.

Most of these are rare enough that you can afford to commit to them instead, or pay your college debts to make them go away. And Magnifying Glass is fast, cheaper, and provides that key bonus to investigation attempts right away. Even if you draw it on turn 14, and there's two clues left to discover before the last act advances, it will still help you for those two clues.

For most seekers, the Magnifying Glass is a superior option, which competes for the same hand slots. In order to really make good use of this camera, that +1 boost needs to be meaningful, because it's the one that turns on first, and the one that offers a niche over other cards that would boost now instead of later. So, who wants it?

• Daisy Walker can use it for spells. But her hand slots are already highly contested by books and other tools, to the point where even Magnifying Glass doesn't always make the cut.
• Marie Lambeau has the right statline and cardpool to make use of it. But she also has in-class access to St. Hubert's Key, and with only 5 off-class cards to work, a card that duplicates benefits already available from other cards isn't high on the priority list.
• Carolyn Fern can also use it for spells, and likes the boost for Hypnotic Therapy. But she only has 3 base and no access to the 3+ XP spells or Spirit Athame. She's not going to be good enough at it, because she needs 3 or more boosting assets in play to have a reliable baseline.

Now, I'd say the one investigator who really likes this card is Norman Withers.

• His awkward card pool, with only 5 level 0 cards, sharply limits his access to the cards that would make this card redundant.
• His special ability heavily discourages skill cards in his deckbuilding, making him more reliant on consistent stat boosts.
• With his choice of XP cards being instead of , that +1 gets used for everything, instead of just treacheries.

In short, this card tends to be overshadowed by Magnifying Glass for pure seekers, while competing for highly contested slots in either deckbuilding or play area in other investigators.

So I haven't yet tried this card out. I'm planning on running it in a "Skids" O'Toole deck soon, and I definitely want to test it in Preston Fairmont since you can spend one FI resource on this card to turn into 10 resources later that skip Preston's ability by going directly to the resource pool (though I still debate the marginal benefit given that he gains so many resources a turn anyway). However, I am going to vouch for its usefulness given its rather polarized reception, and encourage you to test it out yourselves.

First off, this card is not Emergency Cache. The cards are both economy cards, sure, but they intend to do very different things. E-Cache is all about resources now to help you buy something now. It's a tripled resource gain action, which is very efficient. Investments is about resources later, and not all decks care about having resources later. Do you have expensive allies like Agency Backup or resource hungry ones like Lola Santiago? Do you have resource sinks like Streetwise, Higher Education, or Skids' action ability? These are things that Investments helps with.

Second off, I don't agree that E-Cache is a less useless late game draw than Investments. You either draw this early on and have significant late game sustain, OR you commit it late game for an on an investigate test, which is something that is, for the most part, relevant all scenario long. How often do you really need those extra three resources late game anyway? The majority of economy cards (Lone Wolf, Drawing Thin, Dr. Milan Christopher, etc) are best drawn turn 1, but you will still run them and will still play them mid game (I'd argue that's true for Milan even if he didn't have the +1 boost).

Lastly let's talk about the opportunity cost of this card- again, in regards to its most comparable replacement, Emergency Cache. E-Cache is 1 action for 3 resources. Investments costs an action and 1 resource, and doesn't pay off net the way E-Cache does until you hit 5 resources (5 - 1, and another -1 for the extra action), and that takes 5 turns. Yes, it's slow. But again, it's not about raw power or efficiency, it's about flexibility. If you're reluctant to take the resources off this thing just because it feels bad to make a play that is objectively less efficient than just having played E-Cache, you're not using the card right and giving in to sunk cost fallacy. Let's think about this card at every resource quantity, and what it actually provides you given that you're willing to trigger it at any point, from a piloting standpoint:

• 1 Resource - You will never do this because it's objectively worse than a 'gain a resource' action.

• 2 Resources - You probably wont do this unless you really need two resources right now. Most people are willing to wait an extra turn if they can't get all their resources now.

• 3 Resources - This is now an interesting card. From this point forward you have at least an E-Cache on demand for the rest of the game, similar to having an E-Cache in your hand, except it gets stronger if you do choose to wait. Yes, you already spent 1 action to get this here and you could have drawn E-Cache instead, but ignore the sunk cost. If you need those 3 resources, crack it. Don't be afraid. You would just as well have played E-Cache if you needed to, don't be reluctant to crack this.

• 4 Resources - This is where I personally believe the card gets good. Again, ignore the sunk cost, this card now lets you afford just about any card in the game for 1 action (given that you got a resource last turn as well). 4 turns into the future isn't even necessarily bad late game, but if it isn't worth the net 3 resources, go and throw this onto an investigate test.

• 5 Resources - Net 4 is now more potential than E-Cache. You still spent two actions to get them, fair enough. But you spent that extra action for the flexibility of cracking it earlier or later than this if you need to.

• 6 Resources - I think this is where a lot of players feel the card becomes "worth it", in that its raw power or efficiency beats playing E-Cache. Mathematically this is probably true, but again, don't wait 'till 6 to crack this just because it feels more efficient. If you need it at 5, or 4, or 3, go for it. That extra action you paid allows you flexibility, that's what you're paying for.

• 7+ Resources - The question at these quantities becomes what you can even spend these on. Obviously if you have resource sinks you don't have to worry about that- again, something I think you need in your deck to run this card well. The question of whether sinking 7 now vs 10 late (or something in between) depends heavily on the scenario, the deck, and the amount of time you think you have left. How much is that one extra resource later worth? How much is impacting the board state now worth? Do you need to pop out a Lightning Gun and take care of a monster now, or do you need those resources to invest into Lola Santiago later?

So in summary, I think people are understandably reluctant to run Investments because, for a lot of decks, it will just be a worse choice than Emergency Cache. But as I said at the the top, the cards function differently. Anyone who can take advantage of waiting for these resources to accrue will run this over E-Cache ten times out of ten. Investments is a terrifically powerful card, but it demands to be used in a very particular kind of deck. I am personally excited to try it out with a couple of Rogue decks I'm brewing, but if you need some current proof of its usefulness, jamjams32 swears by it for his Leo Anderson deck: arkhamdb.com

If nothing else, Rogues have never been afraid of trying 'iffy' cards just to see if they work (this is the faction with Double or Nothing after all). I say if you're on the fence to give it a go and see what happens.

Note that the taboo'd version now adds "Max once per round." to this card if you're playing with those.

200 characters 200 characters 200 characters 200 characters 200 characters 200 characters 200 characters

The worst card of the service series (Intel Report, Decoy, Small Favor).

To start, the big problem with Small Favor is the lack of bold text, playing this provokes an attack of opportunity. Then there's the fact that it won't hurt elites. These points combined makes the card near-unplayable solo.

So, the unique abilities.

• Dealing 1 damage to an enemy can be done with regular fight actions. This card allows you to secure a 1 damage hit (for 1 action, 1 card, 2 resources), but unless you've spent another action to evade then you're gonna get punched. The usefulness of this shoots up when you need to guarantee a hit on something but the non-elite rule might get in your way in a big way in these cases. Slightly better in multiplayer.

• 2 damage is much more impressive, still the opportunity attack issue persists. Most of the time you play this like an over costed Sneak Attack. The vast majority of characters will prefer using this money for a weapon.

• The range potential is the saving grace for this card, and even then it's undercut by the non-elite moniker. The actions saved by sniping a 2hp enemy 2 locations away can be tremendous. Great for enemies who behave like an Acolyte or Whippoorwill.

The best case scenario for Small Favor is a multiplayer game in scenarios where enemies tend to spawn at a distance, you play it to kill or finish enemies who spawn around your buddies or enemies who play hard-to-get. This card is very expensive for what it does, 2 damage is something you do in one action with just about any common weapon, sure the range aspect is nice but you really pay through the nose here.

All in all, A weapon will probably serve you better than Small Favor.

I cannot help but think that Small Favor should have broken ranks and had different costs or even dealt a maximum of 3 damage somehow. The other service cards are both pretty useful for their ability to give you a "double success", evading 2 enemies in one action is a useful rarity and discovering 2 clues in one action is desirable in any class, dealing 2 damage in one action is something every single class can muster with ease (except ), this means that the 1-2 damage you deal for 2-6 resources is just incredibly inefficient.

Obviously, 2-6 resources are no big deal to Preston Fairmont, I'll struggle to justify it for anyone else.