Knife has always been a bit of a black sheep in my collection. On the plus side, it's useful, cheap, and everyone can take it. On the other hand, the investigators with high have better weapons in-faction, and the investigators with low aren't getting enough of a boost from Knife to make a difference.

And then we got the release of William Yorick, master knife thrower. Recurring Knife was always a possible option with Scavenging, but Yorick doesn't require the setup of finding scavenging nor the need to investigate. Just pay one resource each time you finish off an enemy with a 6, 2 damage test. Compare this to the .45 Automatic, which gives you one 5, 2 damage test per resource spent, and also requires you invest the four resources up front.

Yes, Yorick can only only recur the Knife once per turn using his ability, but this is easily mitigated. Enemy has too much health? Wear it down with your gun of choice and finish it off with your Knife, conserving ammo (or, just have two knives!). Draw an unlucky and lose your Knife? Scrounge for Supplies to get it back, or if you have some XP under your belt play Eucatastrophe to land the hit and recover both your Knife and the Eucatastrophe. (or, just have two knives! There are very few problems that Yorick cannot solve with a second Knife).

Does all this make Knife a good card? No, not really. Guardians will prefer Survival Knife, Rouges will prefer Switchblade, other Survivors will prefer Fire Axe, Mystics will prefer Shrivelling and Wither, and Seekers will prefer another player some save them and their fragile tools.

But if you want to roleplay a humble gravedigger, a man who trained himself in the art of blade throwing over a lifetime of lonely cemetary nights with only headstones for target practice, a man who has no qualms retrieving his weapons from the withered corpse of his victim only to turn around and hurl it into the skull of a ghoul stalking him in the night... in that case, Knife is the perfect card.

Note that this card reads “instead of discovering a clue”, which is different from Burglary's “instead of discovering clues”. So your current location must have at least 1 clue to make this replacement effect work. And if you will discover multiple clues at your location, this card only replace one of them (Burglary, however, will replace all clues you discover).

This could be good for Rita, who in a larger party doesn’t need her hands for magnifying glasses or newspapers. And engaging another enemy means you can just evade and either do damage or move for free. Zoom around the map, rescuing other investigators and letting everyone else do their job. A brand Nubian way to look at the Khopesh.

Spectral Razor is great and provides exciting flexibility for Mystics who want to handle combat but don't want to stack up charge-based assets. My favorite experience so far has been running a single copy in Father Mateo as a tidy little insurance policy for when the Serpents of Yig eventually show up. And I built a Patrice Hathaway deck for a friend that included two copies of the whole cycle (this + Read the Signs & Ethereal Form).

There two major rules points that are important to playing this card correctly, and which sent me frantically googling the first time my group tried to resolve one.

First: the consequences of "add your value." As other reviewers highlight, Spectral Razor is different from many previous cards because it adds rather than replaces the base skill being tested. The most obvious effect is that you're able to get big fight values very easily -- adding and can get you to totals of 6, 7, or 8 very often. But it also changes how you can further boost that skill value. Specifically, you can't boost this attack with pips on committed cards (like Guts), because according to the) rules for skill checks, players can only commit "cards with an appropriate skill icon" which are "[ones] one that matches the skill being tested, or a wild icon," and doesn't match Fights. However, you can boost your with many actions like those on Arcane Studies. The timing) rules of skill checks give windows before and after committing cards in step ST.2, and the final value isn't calculated until ST.5, when you "apply all active modifiers" to the base skill...that's when you add your . And, as the FAQ to Lockpicks makes clear, there's nothing stopping you from boosting a skill other than the one technically being tested.

Second: interaction with Aloof. There seems to be significant disagreement about this in previous reviews, but as I read it, Spectral Razor can be used to attack and engage an unengaged Aloof enemy. The difference comes down to the difference between Fight, which is an Action Designator, and "attack" which describes a mechanical operation that is a part of the Fight Action, but can also be triggered in other ways (for instance, Enemies "attack" investigators without taking Fight Actions). In the rules) for Fight, it states: "An investigator may fight any enemy at his or her location..." and it is the specific) rules for Aloof that intercede: "An investigator cannot attack an aloof enemy while that enemy is not engaged with an investigator." The difference in wording between "fight" and "attack" in these two lines implies that one can trigger a Fight Action against an unengaged Aloof, but simply couldn't resolve the attack portion of the Fight Action. This is where Spectral Razor's wording comes into play, allowing the Fight Action to start and then engaging the enemy in question "immediately before" the rules would prevent the actual attack.

Rules questions aside, this card has over-performed for me, and is a great option for asset-averse builds!

The totem gets better with any upgrade of Dream Diary, as it gives the equivalent of Unexpected Courage or better for free each turn. This fixes seekers (who are not minh) problem that they don't have cards to commit for the totem every turn.

Combining that with Dream-Enhancing Serum means you can hold on the first copy of other cards for longer, having a bigger chance of triggering the serums reaction. The totems draw effect also makes it more likely to trigger the serums draw.

In total these assets are pretty expansive ressource wise. So you should also facter in some economy cards like Emergency Cache, Crack the Case or Astounding Revelation (if you have search effects).