Now that more time has passed, more games have been played, and the wider set of Blurse cards is up for consideration, I believe Tides of Fate has a slightly wider place in decks than first anticipated. It's still a finicky form of generation, and will only work when you have a reasonable amount of both generation and synergy, so it's unlikely to see much use if you're only going one way or the other. It will also be of limited use if you don't have a way to mitigate the aftermath, where things shift back to curses. However, if your entire team is playing into Blurse cards, there are enough powerful effects that can be timed such that you can take advantage of the benefits, and avoid the worse of the aftermath.

Getting into the bag is probably the easy part. There are a few cards that have powerful enough effects to warrant adding the odd curse or two into the deck - Faustian Bargain, Deep Knowledge, Stirring Up Trouble, Promise of Power, Ríastrad, Spirit of Humanity, and Justify the Means are all powerful cards that can be used to add a handful of curses. And, of course, a Blurse-happy team will tend towards plenty of Tempt Fate as well. There are definitely other ways to drop a lot of into the bag, but going that far is more likely to be the realm of full synergy, rather than just generation.

In fact, most bless-focused builds are more than happy to run Keep Faith in order to add blessings, and this is one resource cheaper and does more when there are 3-4 curses in the bag. Even combining this with a single Tempt Fate is comparable to that. To get reasonable value from this card, it's more important to make good use of the window of opportunity you have than to make it convert a lot of curses.

And how do you do that? In practice, I've seen three notable ways Tides of Fate can be used.

1. Power turns. Unsurprisingly, if you're near the end of the game, Tides of Fate is capable of helping to solidify the chaos bag. Some characters won't mind having a few more good blessing pulls, and all of the usual tricks can go with it - Ancient Covenant, Olive McBride, Blessed Blade, more reliable Unrelenting checks while drawing, attempts at setting up Tristan Botley or Jacob Morrison, more ways to avoid problems with Lucky Dice, and so on. This can be useful, but you often need to be lucky enough that I would not consider these alone to be worth adding Tides of Fate for. There are more reliable ways to mitigate the downsides, such as...

2. -Sealing effects. Tokens won't be replaced if they're not in the chaos bag, so you can always seal away the tokens to protect them or prepare them for future use. Favor of the Sun, Holy Spear, Rite of Sanctification, and Shield of Faith are all capable of sealing a bunch of tokens on demand. If you're willing to try riskier maneuvers first, you also have a reasonable chance of catching a few blessings using Nephthys, or with the parallel version of Wendy Adams. Some of these effects are strong enough to use on their own, while weaker ones can also be saved for future use by...

3. -Consuming Effects. These effects are expensive, but they're another way to remove tokens from the bag. Both A Watchful Peace and Hallow have been shown to be strong enough cards to warrant addition to the Taboo List. If your group is running these cards, there's something to be said about having a card which can help enable them. And to a lesser degree, even gaining a shot in the arm for a good Radiant Smite can be a reasonable use of your blessings.

Like most Blurse-focused cards, Tides of Fate won't see use in every deck, and will only be worthwhile if your entire group is buying in to the concept. It's also worth noting that many of the cards that synergize are high-XP cards, so not every group will be able to build towards them. However, groups with high-level access, Father Mateo, or parallel Wendy Adams with Blessing keyword access should give this a look. If the group has enough synergy that two -using cards or a single copy of Hallow will show up, this card can be a great way to clean up the bag and squeeze more value out on top.

Definitely has its merits IF you can pair it correctly.

I mean, maybe you could play this on its own as some sort of one-round Hail Mary where you don't have to fear all the curse tokens you ended up sinking into the bag, like some kind of weird, reversed Will to Survive, but then you have to deal with the fact that ALL of your blessed tokens are corrupted back to curse tokens, and NOT just the ones you initially converted.

However, even with just the base box, it really doesn't seem hard to fill the bag with curse tokens (Faustian Bargain, Deep Knowledge, Promise of Power, etc.), so I do think this can work really well as a combo card with cards that would spend bless tokens from the bag, maybe curse tokens if you're willing to wipe the bag of bless tokens. As of this review, only the base Innsmouth box has been released, so the only good combos I can think of is 1.) playing this immediately before playing Rite of Sanctification, especially if you pulled a nastily timed Crisis of Faith as Sister Mary, and 2.) use the Cryptic Grimoire's second action after the round ends if the curse+bless tokens in the bag = 10+ beforehand.

But honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if there are more cards that require large costs of bless (or curse) tokens down the line, so I'm anticipating seeing even more use for this in the completed campaign. If you think of any more combos (now or in the future), share them in the comments!