So time may tell but for now Calvin just seems horrifically underpowered. The idea is cool - you can happily fail early scenarios to gain trauma which increases his skills which means you can spend those scenarios trying to grind XP instead of making progress - but the payoff really isn’t there to make up for him having such awful base stats.

Let’s compare him to Mark Harrigan, another investigator who uses something bad happening to him (taking damage) to boost his skills. Using Sophie he can boost any skill by 2 for a relatively low cost of taking one damage. Sure, this doesn’t apply throughout the whole game like Calvin’s ability, but Mark easily makes up for this by a) having good stats to begin with, b) being able to boost a stat more than once for a critical test and c) being able to heal the damage to get further uses of his ability. Calvin has awful stats unless he is close to death, cannot naturally boost his base skills above 5, and gets weaker if you heal damage or trauma from him. Mark even benefits from taking damage whilst Calvin gets nothing other than approaching having a decent stat value.

Calvin’s weaknesses are pretty glaring. He is awful at the beginning of a campaign (or any time he has less than 3 damage/horror on him) as he can’t do anything effectively. With 0 in everything he has almost no hope at fighting or evading enemies and he can really only discover clues by using Flashlight to make locations 0 shroud or via events. He can use enemies that deal damage to boost his physical skills, but when stuck with an enemy that only deals horror he is going to be in trouble. Even 2 is a bad number to have in a skill and 3 is still poor, so he really needs at least one other investigator to kill enemies that he cannot handle early and another one to discover clues. However, this goes against his desire to fail scenarios in order to gain additional trauma as the other investigators are not likely to want this to happen, leaving him in an awkward position early in the campaign. Once he gets some trauma he starts to become okay, but then a lot of his deck needs to be devoted to keeping him alive and becoming merely ‘okay’ is not worth the annoyance of being useless for a long time.

So all in all he is definitely interesting, but I can’t really see him being anything other than awful unless some amazing combo comes out that only he can use.

Up until Forgotten Age, this had been relegated to the back of my stack of Mystic player cards. With the Player Card options included with Forgotten Age, though, I think this may see play. Between Dark Prophecy, the new "Seal" mechanic, and the upcoming Olive McBride, I'm thinking that Jim may see Song of the Dead as carrying a lot of potential.

Rule from Matt:

Q: How does Grotesque Statue + Dark Prophecy (or the upcoming Oliva) work?

A: "Yes, you can use Grotesque Statue and Dark Prophecy (or Olive) during the same skill test. When you use multiple effects that replace “revealing a chaos token” with something, else, you must first declare your intention so you are reacting to what you draw from the bag, because each of these effects are meant to be triggered before you draw tokens from the bag.

If you say you’re going to trigger Prophecy's ability first, you should then say which of the 5 tokens you’re about to reveal from Prophecy's ability will be turned into 2 tokens from the Statue (For example, “I’m going to reveal 5 tokens using Prophecy, and for the first token, I’m going to reveal 2 instead of 1 using my Statue). Then you’ll ignore one of the 2 statue tokens, and be left with 5 total tokens, which you’ll then choose 1 to resolve (with a bad symbol on it). Because all of these tokens are considered to be revealed simultaneously, what you are not allowed to do is reveal the first few tokens with Prophecy, and then decide whether or not to use the Statue — by then you are committed one way or the other.

If you trigger the Statue’s ability first, you would do the same thing, declaring your intent. (For example, “I’m going to reveal 2 tokens using my Statue, but for the second token, I’m going to use Prophecy's ability to reveal 5 instead of 1”.) Then you would choose between resolving the first token or the 5 Prophecy tokens. (Here this is a little strange, because Grotesque Statue says "Choose 1 of those tokens to resolve, and ignore the other,” which implies that you only get to resolve 1 token and ignore 1 token, but for the purposes of resolving these types of effects, the 5 tokens revealed from Prophecy's ability should be treated as 1 revealed token). If you decide to resolve the 5 Prophecy tokens you would then choose 1 to resolve with a bad symbol on it and ignore the rest, as usual.

I hope this helps. I know it’s a bit complex, but it’s all optional (and of somewhat limited usefulness, in my opinion), so I don’t expect it to come up too often. That said, I will make a note to add this to next iteration of the FAQ. "

A very exciting card. This fills a long-time void in the Guardian class. Ever since the game was released, the best Guardian builds have revolved around Machete (excepting certain late-campaign, XP-intensive, two-handed weapon builds). But if Guardians have a Machete in one hand, what are they supposed to do with their other hand? They could hold another weapon like the .45 Automatic, but that's (mostly) redundant with Machete. They could hold some investigatory asset like Flashlight or (for Roland) Magnifying Glass, but for a multiplayer Guardian who just wants to blow stuff up, that's not a satisfying answer.

Dunwich and Carcosa provided our first two "off-hand" Guardian weapons with Blackjack and Trench Knife, respectively. Unfortunately, both of these cards are terrible. So for three whole campaigns, Guardians had no good options in the secondary weapon department.

But now, Survival Knife is here. And it's a wonderful complement to Machete. It provides a very powerful new ability and lets you do something Machete can't. A free +1 damage attack with a generous to-hit bonus is not to be underestimated. I'd say you only need to trigger the Knife a couple of times a game for it to justify its cost.

Survival Knife is also a good complement to the .32 Colt, if that's more your style. With this setup, the Knife will even be helpful in the player phase, because it's better than the Colt at dealing the last point of damage to odd-health enemies.

Whether Survival Knife can cut it as a primary weapon is another question. I kind of doubt it, as I think you will just struggle too much against enemies with 4+ health.

Survival Knife synergizes with other Guardian cards that encourage you to take attacks, e.g. Guard Dog. But I don't think such cards are needed for Survival Knife to be good. One problem with any Guardian build that plans on swallowing a bunch of attacks is that most enemies deal horror, and Guardians have no in-faction, cost-effective horror soak right now. Hopefully, the Guardians will get some help in that department sooner or later. That will make all these Guardian cards that revolve around taking attacks, Survival Knife included, that much better.

This looks like an excellent Guardian upgrade. It's kind of similar to Magnifying Glass, in that it costs 1 resource, is Fast, and gives you +1 to your staple action for the rest of the game. That's great. Assuming you play this pretty early, it's going to way outshine what a skill card could accomplish.

The best use of this card, of course, is going to be sticking it on a Machete. That's the best level 0 Guardian weapon, and it works particularly well with Reliable since you can use Machete all game long, provided that the encounter deck doesn't discard it (something you should have been taking precautions against anyway). A multiplayer Guardian who specializes in monster killing (that is to say, most Guardians) can easily use a single Machete 10 times or more over the course of a scenario. That's a lot of value for 1 XP. If you don't draw your Machete, Reliable is also pretty good with the .32 Colt, or, for Skids and Leo, Switchblade II.

The doubled to-hit bonus is much appreciated on high levels. On Expert, you really want to consistently hit +4 (or sometimes +5) on your Combat checks. Prior to this card, that was quite difficult for most Guardians to reach. Now, it should be much more easily achievable. For Skids, who needs to overcome a mediocre base 3 Combat, this is an even bigger boon.

The fact that Reliable gives you a bonus to all skills, instead of just whatever you're testing, is intriguing. As the card pool currently stands, I don't think this really matters for any card except Lockpicks. But it's something to keep in mind as new assets come out.