This card is nasty. It's an obvious substitute for crypt chill, but is so much worse.

With crypt chill, you can plan ahead and have a sacrificable asset queued on case you draw it.

Not so here. Being an agility check it's going to be hard enough to pass this, but once you fail you're going to have to discard a high cost asset. And if you only have 0 cost assets up, you're going to lose all of them.

This card is so bad it must be cancelled. Luckily, almost every class has access to some type of cancelation or another. But yea. This is an awful draw and one of the many reasons why return to Circle is so punishing.

Just wanted to point out something that I didn't see anyone mention in other reviews or comments yet--

The higher bonus of +3 is not merely useful for coming back from harder checks. You can now turn a fail by 1 into a succeed by 2. Rogues and others who care about "succeed by X" take note!

Due to being level 3 there are only a few investigators who would care about this interaction in their own decks--but wait, you can now play this on your friends! If there's at least one deck at your table that wants to oversucceed, consider this upgrade.

I think that my group will change this card to just deal +1 dmg for the remainder of your turn whenever you evade an enemy, and add little clause that your investigator ability is not once per round this turn so you can evade whole turn and deal 2dmg each time. Because this card is soooo bad that it just gets commited, i have never even seen it played which is insane considering how Hoods is one of the worst weaknesses in game. I do wonder who balances these things out, when you look at Stella Clark and see her weakness is nothing, but she also gets 3x Neither Rain nor Snow i wonder what are they thinking

Question (minor SPOILERS): The rules say that after an enemy is defeated, it is "placed in the encounter discard pile (or in its owner’s discard pile if it is a weakness." However, in the first scenario, The Man in the Pallid Mask has no owner, so where does it go the second time it's defeated?

I'm pretty sure this spell has the best "charges-to-price" ratio at 10-2 for Akachi which makes it sort of a Swiss Army Knife for her:

Better than Hot Streak with Spirit-Speaker: For the same 4 xp, Akachi nets 8 resources for 2 cost up front.

Cheapest way to pay off Angered Spirits: Each charge paid is "worth" only 1 damage, compared to 3 damage for Shrivelling (5), plus you still have 6 charges left afterwards.

For the same reason, you don't feel as bad sacrificing charges for Torrent of Power.

Of course you can still attack with it. Finish off whatever health remains after a Shrivelling attack (especially with Sign Magick (3)). Or if you've loaded up with Shrivelling (5), use this to pick off 1-2 health enemies.

Mix-and-match the above. Pay off Angered Spirits, pick off an annoying 2 health enemy, then convert the rest for a 2 resource gain. Or better yet, use up all the charges, then recall to your hand with Spirit Speaker and play it again to reload 10 more charges.

This probably shouldn't be Akachi's main combat spell as the extra charge from her innate is worth less than Shrivelling (not to mention the action loss risk). But it's a great "side arm" to Shrivelling or its equivalents, and is more efficient to use for the other purposes above. In this way, there's a natural upgrade pathway from Obfuscation to Brand of Cthugha (1) to Brand of Cthugha (4) for her "jank spell" slot.