Another item designed for Lily that she can't take. I'm going to say that Lily's deckbuilding parameters are a complete mistake and make her unfun to build. She's the only investigator we've just house ruled to be Guardian 0-5, Mystic 0-2. She's just a waste of potential otherwise.

Yet another good card for "Ashcan" Pete. Between this and Ice Pick from EotE, Pete and Duke are continuing to get nice support for both clueing and fighting with every expansion. 200 characters yet? Not sure....

I don't disagree with the reviewers above that there are very advantageous aspects of this card over the other Big Damage Mystic spells out right now, but my enthusiasm for the level 4 Brand is marred by the same irritation I have with many of the top-level Mystic spells. Namely, the ratio of benefits to consequences gets worse instead of better between level 1 and level 4 of this spell.

In this case: Level 1 Brand: you get +1 skill value and risk losing 1 action. Level 4 Brand: you get +2 skill value and risk losing 2 actions.

It superficially seems like you are getting twice the boost for twice the risk. The problem is that skill boost doesn't happen in a vacuum. It's a percentage of your baseline skill, so going from +1 to +2 doesn't double your chance to hit. And since the bigger modifiers are more rare in the Chaos bag, you have even more diminishing returns in terms of odds for each skill point you add. For example, if you have +1 over the skill test, your chance of success on normal is usually around 30%. If you boost by 1, to be +2 over the skill test, your chance of success is usually around 60%, a big increase. If you boost again, to be +3 over the skill test, your chance of success is typically around 75%--a much smaller increase as that first extra point was (even though you definitely want the increase!). The exact percentage would depend on the test, your stats, and your Chaos bag, but compared to level 1, you are essentially risking 200% as many actions while getting somewhere in the range of a 20-50% increase in your chance of success.

In many of the top-level spells, you accept that you are making a bigger bet in order to get a bigger damage payout all at once. Sometimes it's worth doing 3 damage at once so that monster can't hit you back. In this case, though, you can do equivalent amounts of damage with both cards, because the amount of damage is determined by the charges you spend, not the level. You do get 3 more charges to spend at level 4, but I'm not convinced that's worth 3 more XP versus running another recharge card in your deck.

Very tough card to rate as it's extremely scenario/campaign dependent before you even consider how it fits into your deck. Obviously strong when you can actually play it, but how often does that happen? How often is the scenario result decided before this becomes playable?

Personally, I think this card is a bit of a trap in most cases. In a lot of scenarios, the toughest part of the game comes early, and the result usually comes from which way the game started snowballing. Either you easily handle what the encounter deck throws at you, get your engine running, and cruise to victory, or you suffer some setbacks, waste resources, and get stuck until your doom is assured. This card isn't needed to win in the first case, and does little to prevent the latter.

To me, this card brings up an interesting question: is an encounter card balanced if it punishes certain playstyles disproportionately? For example, is The Tower • XVI unbalanced because of how severely it punishes skill-reliant investigators like Silas Marsh and Minh Thi Phan? Or, in the case of Dissonant Voices, is it unbalanced if it shuts down investigators that are reliant on playing events, like Nathaniel Cho?

Of course, as others have said, Dissonant Voices isn't a complete shut down; Nathaniel Cho can still punch monsters or Sefina Rousseau can draw cards, for example. However, the gap between those investigators' effectiveness when Dissonant Voices isn't afflicting them and when it is concerns me, similar to how some investigators (like Charlie Kane) become mere shadows of themselves during The City of Archives. Not being allowed to play what you intended to play with little room for countering strikes me as potentially poor game design; the "Yes, but..." design of most of the game's counters to player strategy (i.e.; Final Rhapsody: Yes, you can turn s into 0s, but those s are also time bombs when you draw your signature weakness) looks more interesting, and, to be blunt, more fun, than flat denial like Dissonant Voices.

TL:DR; This new user drew back to back Dissonant Voices with Nathaniel Cho and got salty about it.