Alternate Pete is the quintessential example of what I believe an alternate investigator should be; someone that is capable of harnessing a niche in a way no other investigator really can. To this end, Pete has 3 core elements that help him achieve this:

1. His Investigator ability is strong, but specific. It's free recursion, but only for cards attached to scenario cards, and only if they are discarded somehow. This means any card (Asset/Event/Skill) that is attached to an enemy, location, or a treachery if that somehow happens, can be sent back to your hand free of charge. Everybody already knows Barricade works with this. It's the most surface level use case, but it's also certainly one of the most powerful, especially when used in conjunction with element 2 (I'll cover that more in-depth further down).

2. The alternate card pool. I LOVE tag based card pools so much, and this one is excellent. Improvised 0-4 doesn't get a lot, but Tactics 0-4, my goodness, that's a buffet of high quality Guardian cards, as well as a few choice Rogue and Seeker cards (Barricade of course). This gives you a lot of options to work with that easily make up for the loss of level 4-5 cards from Survivor. Oh, and the five level 0 Guardian cards are also grand, they give a lot of potential as well.

3. The signature card, Pete's Guitar. It's maybe one of the strongest signatures I've seen in this game. You make an enemy at your location or a connected location move to any location connect to theirs, and then if there's so enemies at your location you get a dollar or horror healing, and all of that as a free action once per round. This is huge, giant, I feel like I don't even need to describe why, but I'll do it anyways; you draw an enemy during the encounter phase, you move them away, now you have money and don't need to worry about the enemy unless they have Hunter or Doom or something like that, which isn't uncommon. If you're playing solo this can be somewhat of an issue, and you will have to build towards dealing with enemies because often times that's just a necessity of certain scenarios. Kill a big guy, kill many small guys, it shows up pretty commonly. But that's easier to do when you can move them around and strategize your approach. Enemy in the distance? Move them towards you, save an action. Hunter on you? Move them out and drop a Barricade, assuming you haven't already. Enemy on your Seeker? Just move em away. It's a very useful and versatile tool, and it comes with free econ/healing for using it.

So what can you really do with this Pete? What can he do that others can't do nearly as well? We'll examine this by examining the primary method of interacting with the game: cards.

Barricade: Simple, easy, effective. Costs no resources, just an action, and it keeps non-elites from moving into your location. Great for dealing with pesky hunters, at least temporarily. If you are playing multiplayer, the Barricade makes you everyone's best friend. You'll notice people huddling around you at all times, looking at you expectantly as the Guardian digs around for their weapon that they SWEAR is just a few cards deeper. It's great, little else needs to be said about Barricade on its own. However, when paired with the Pete's Guitar you can use it to completely obliterate the threat level of hunter enemies. See, hunter enemies ACKNOWLEDGE YOU when looking for valid targets, despite the Barricade. This means if you're right next to a big pile of seven enemies looking to hunt, they just bang on your door. This pairs well with cards like On the Hunt (and its upgrade), First Watch, or even "Let me handle this!", as it means you can control the flow of enemies during a scenario.

The Book of War (4 resources, 3 uses, exhaust as you play a Tactic to return it to your hand at end of turn): This is a bit pricy, but if you're running high level Tactics it's good recursion for them, and there are a lot worth using. It's rather pricy though, so you wanna have a plan as to what you'll be using it for, as it's certainly not a "splash in" type card.

On the Hunt: This card attaches to enemies, so it synergizes with your investigator ability. It also lets you pick your encounter card, which is always nice. You can move enemies away with ease, so it's pretty much "free", though obviously if you're playing multiplayer you need to consider if you already have enemies to contend with before using this. Alternatively, if there are no enemies left, you get to just skip an encounter that round. I'd honestly never use it for that because I'd rather have the money, but typically you don't know there's no enemies till you fail to find.

Dynamite Blast: Survivor has great econ cards, from Take Heart to Nothing Left to Lose, and Drawing Thin if you're into that kind of thing. On top of that the guitar can earn you a resource each turn as well. Mix in the fact that with your Barricade you're likely amassing enemies outside of it, and the conclusion is obvious. Dynamite Blast is a great card to run, if a bit pricy. Its upgrades make it cheaper though, and even fast if you're willing to spend the XP. I always run Alt Pete with Dynamite Blast from the first scenario and always manage to play it multiple times. Now, on top of this, you know what else is a Tactic you can run? "Let God sort them out...".

Kicking the Hornet's Nest: A clue, money, and an enemy. The first two are great, and the third is secretly just more money. Definitely not an "always" card, and I have never failed to upgrade out of it, but it can do a lot when you have the wiggle room, and convinces people you're doing something useful while you sit in your Barricade and amass wealth.

Ever Vigilant (Multiplayer Only): Now, lets say your team starts complaining. Sure, you keep all the enemies away from them, but they notice you start dedicating a few turns to building up enemy piles so you can get right with god, or that you've been digging greedily for Pelt Shipment a few too many scenarios, and they realize you have 12 more XP than them. You need a method of making them forget this fact, and that's where Ever Vigilant comes in. An all-star econ card that gives your team actions (which avoid attacks of opportunity) and resource discounts. Now they can't complain, because you needed that XP to be a better team player. Of course, playing it once won't be enough to silence the braying of the jackals that wish for you to starve yourself of the XP you deserve.

Shrine of the Moirai: Recursion is supposed to be hard, because it's really strong. Shrine of the Moirai is one of the strongest recursion cards, but it also comes with a few hefty costs. Firstly, 3 XP. Secondly, when you play it it's bound to your location, not you, which means you have to stay in one place. Thirdly, it makes you draw an encounter card to activate it. In exchange, you get up to two cards with a combined total level of up to 5. Now, as I've covered, alternate Pete doesn't care about 3 XP costs, being bound to a location, and barely cares about drawing encounter cards. Enemies can be moved away, Horror can be healed, Resources regained. Your major weakpoints are damage, asset loss, and Doom, but after playing a few scenarios you'll be familiar enough with the encounter deck to know what you need to fear and how to guard yourself against it. Pete has access to pretty much everything you'd need to deal with those threats, so after a few purchases Shrine of the Moirai is just free. Also, it's unique, which makes it stronger for Pete than if it wasn't, because when you play your second one it discards the first, which you then recur. What can you do with all this power? Whatever you want.

The Future For Pete: This isn't really about any specific card, but more for the upcoming cards. I obviously haven't played with them, and for those who want to avoid spoilers I won't mention them specifically, but lets just say that Alternate Pete only stands to become more powerful with these upcoming releases, with cards that synergize rather strongly with his strengths. He gains more ways to deal damage and get clues with cards that fit him so well I swear the person who designed them must be an Alternate Pete main.

In conclusion: Alternate Pete is pretty good, at the very least okay, give Stick to the Plan the Tactic trait you cowards. Thank you for attending my TED talk, I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed presenting it.

A funny card for Patrice, as she is basically turning from 4-2-2-2 into another slightly weaker version of 4-2-2-2.

I am already waiting to play the homunculus himself, to see if he can manage the card pool with Forced Learning.

Hands down: to me, this is the coolest standalone reward of the bunch.

One issue Arkham had, is that the most common story reward of standalones, or even the campaigns in general is Ally assets. This leads eventually to diminishing returns, as you have only so many slots you can put allies in and each card makes your deck bigger.

Granted, Midwinter Gala is big middle finger to the criticism that Ally story assets are an uninspired reward, given you can choose between 12 or so of them. But I think the real gem, pun intended, of the standalone is the jewel

Winning the scenario lets you keep the item, but instead of being part of yoru deck, it has the encounter deck back, and you can choose to shuffle it in every scenario you play, and once somebody draws it as an encounter, they get control of it and it generates 3 damage and 1 Doom.

The Doom parts is obviously the scary part, but it only matters if it would make advance the Agenda early, if you get it during the Witching Hour, this is basically a freebie, and that's before its ability comes in!

You can, as a free action, do a trivial Will or Agility test to move one token on it on an enemy at your location, be that damage (which would hurt the enemy) or Doom (which would give you a chance to remove it by defeating the enemy).

This is great, because not only the test has only a difficulty of 1, but also let's your choose between 2 different skill, and statistically, an Investigator will have an adequate amount of either stat you can test. And even if you fail, there is no drawback beside any effect outside of the jewel, like weaknesses or symbol tokens, it just fails to trigger. The Jewel gives you basically 1 free action damage in 3 different rounds: that is really damn good on its own, and can help finish off enemies with odd health or take out annoying aloof enemies like Whippoorwills without spending an action

Even the free action test is a benefit on its own, because it can be used as a "safe" test to trigger effects related to taking tests, like Drawing Thin or "Watch this!" or cash out on big rewards by passing a trivially easy skill check, like with Lucky Cigarette Case

If that was all the Jewel had going for, it would already been a fantastic high-risk/high-reward tool, but it also has the forced effect of getting shuffled back in the encounter deck when it leave play. That means the Jewel makes for a fantastic dummy target for discard assets effect like Crypt Chill, as that means you can recover it later, fully refreshed (albeit also with Doom as well, but given how easy is to work around the drawback, it's still much better to deal with that than most other encounters).

That's not even going over the great synergy it has with player cards: Doom Mystics can just Moonlight Ritual the Doom away to not worry about it, or even ready the jewel to use it twice with Sin-Eater. Seeker can just Eureka! at will on that. Survivor can similiarly use Resourceful to recover stuff. Guardians have arguably the least amount of direct synergy, but enjoy the main effect of the asset the most.

But by far the most broken combo comes with Rogues: anyone that can access upgraded Joey "The Rat" Vigil basically completely negates the drawback of the jewel, as he can just sell it away whenever the Doom would be a threat to anyone, or send it back to the encounter deck to refresh it with more damage tokens, while giving 2 Resources at pop. Joey can make it so the Jewel could replace not just one bad encounter, but multiple ones, per scenario. That is significant.

I love this thing: it's always a joy winning the scenario and bringing it to some campaign to spice things up, I honestly like it more than the standalone it comes from. The Jewel of Sarnath does bring some real risks, but overall the benefits far outweight the harm it may cause.

An awesome card that the previous review gave me the idea to play alongside Purifying Corruption, Deny Existence and Ward of Protection in a Lily Chen deck, a combo also available for Zoey Samaras, Carolyn Fern, Sister Mary, Lola Hayes, Carson Sinclair and Amina Zidane. As i have to admit that i don't think it would be good to much of them, especially Carson and Zoey, i'll say that i didn't really study all possible combos with those guys, so maybe there's something to make of it?

As for this Lily deck, i also included Girish Kadakia, Spiritual Resolve and Hunter's Armor which in our four-player setup made wonders, and even more knowing one of my pals was playing Shrine of the Moirai regularly allowing to take back some useful thing, like Wards, Resolves or some Drawn to the Flame who were rendered totally inoffensive as soon as the combo was set. Damage and horror points were drowned in the amount of life healed without losing any actions, Ancient Evils and other usually bad news were ignored for the most of them, and enemies were still pulverised by the rest of Lily's capacities (in this place, a combo using Dragon Pole with Enchant Weapon and the echanted upgrade of the armor)

The way it helped Lily be more that the monomaniac fighter that she usually is was all alone a good enough reason to play it.

With the upcoming Collector permanent card, allowing any investigator to add a Relic/Charm asset of level 0-3 in his deck, i'm curious to see if and how it can be included in many other combos in the next months, and how much worth it can be.

The Sacrificial Beast only prevents you from gaining resources. So you can still move them. Here is a list of all cards allowing you to circumbent your weakness :

Bianca "Die Katz"
Investments
"I'll Pay You Back!"
The Red Clock (2) or (5)
"You've had worse..." (4)

Out of class solutions are not recommended, i would advice you to use your 5 out of class slots (if you use standard back) for better cards than those :
Archive of Conduits (bad idea, don't do this)
Ravenous Myconid
Forbidden Knowledge
Teamwork

You can also use resources from assest, for example an Antiquary or a Crafty will still resplenish their resources each round.