Excellent for any character build that stacks resources.

Well Connected builds with several resource cards to support it, based on Preston Fairmont's and Jenny Barnes's extra resource generation can routinely hit 20+ resources. While the resource mountains are primarily collected to channel bonuses on Well Connected, Money Talks is an excellent support card to slot in this archetype. It's just an extra lever for Preston Fairmont to pull to channel his vast wealth into test success.

This is a great card to beat key tests such as scenario specific ones (Talking to Lita Chantler(/card/05005)) or against key treacheries (Ridding yourself of [Frozen in Fear](/card/01164 or not dying to Rotting Remains).

Money Talks is terrific in the right deck, TERRIBLE outside it.

Investments is the most recent addition to the finance generation machine, it's very similar to the existing asset Lone Wolf. Evaluating Investments without alluding constantly to Lone Wolf is impossible, so prepare for some reasoning and math ahead.

Investments needs to be found and played early, this is not new by any means, but the real interesting bit is that Investments requires an extra action to cash in the money, until which point the resources are out of your reach, not to mention that if you trigger investments the money generation ends.

This is a hugely negative point in direct comparison to Lone Wolf where the gains are immediate and action free, stopping to cash in the investments can be hard! In the middle of a fight for example where 7-10 extra resources might be very helpful, you just don't have time and space to go get your money. This is very much the crippling issue that makes investments fall behind Lone Wolf.

On the positive side for Investments, Lone Wolf tends to go offline for 20-40% of the time in duo games, and the problem gets MUCH much worse in 3/4 player games, in this case Investments rises up the ranks and replaces Lone Wolf easily, but I'dd still go for Lone Wolf in duo rather then Investments.

So I broke down Investments versus Lone Wolf a bit, but what of other resource cards?

• Investments generates up to 10 resources for 2 actions, a resource and a card (and lots of time).

• Emergency Cache generates 3 resources for 1 action and a card (immediately).

• "Watch this!" generates up to 3 resources for 1 card and some risk (immediately).

An advantage that "Watch this!" and Emergency Cache hold over both Investments and Lone Wolf is the speed, a burst of cash that's equally useful in rounds 1 and 10. The speed thing makes it so that Investments does not replace Emergency Cache for me.

So, Investments compares "poorly" to the classical Emergency Cache and looses out to Lone Wolf in many cases, is Investments just a bad card? No it isn't, no its not. It's a viable replacement to Lone Wolf in multiplayer and in a resource heavy deck, for example a deck that relies on Lola Santiago to gather clues, it's good for what ails you. It feels especially good to cash in the money, even if it's just 6 or 7 resources, to then go on and complete the last locations with a combination of Lola triggers and Intel Report, a big money move that only characters can pull off.

Anna Kaslow is the Tarot enabler, she's the linchpin that makes bulking 3-4 tarot cards a playable strategy.

• Her ability echoes that of the tarot cards, netting you a small 1 / 1 horror and health tank in addition to the tutor effect of searching your deck for a Tarot and playing it as well, all for free if she makes it onto your opening hand.

• When played post-turn 1, she's still a deck thinning tarot tutor, pulling and playing cards directly from your deck reduces the chance that you'll draw and get stuck with the relatively costly tarot cards. Get them out of the way so as not to dud your draws later.

• An additional 2 tarot slots means that you might see the dream of running with +2 to a stat and +1 to another, for free! Holy crap! This is a veritable magical Christmas land scenario though, where you're much likely to wind up with just 1 or 2 tarots at a time, probably paying for one of them. Some scenarios will have events that poke damage at an ally and sometimes, frankly, taking a hit on her is just going to be the best course of action.

• She occupies a hugely contested slot! With just 1 health and horror to survive by she has absolutely no tank. Given that she's in your deck you probably depend on and fill up those Tarot slots quickly so loosing her will probably start a chain-reaction of asset discards. With Anna Kaslow in your deck Charisma is very probably next on the agenda.

• Not a cheap asset by any means at 3 resources, not to mention the 4xp as well.

All in all, I think that Kaslowe's weaknesses make her a very iffy card, the dependency on being drawn in the first hand, the cost, the slot, the lack of tank, the XP. Despite the fact that I do like Tarot cards, Anna Kaslow has yet to impress me enough to be worth a whopping 4-xp a pop.

The top characters who might be interested in her are Diana Stanley, Joe Diamond and Sefina Rousseau, the former two because they benefit greatly from both their in-faction tarots so slotting 3-4 tarots isn't out of the question and the latter because her large opening hand makes finding tarot mechanics easier. Also there's always Lola Hayes.

P.S, this point is a bit unfair, but one of the worst feelings in the game has to be: Sitting around with 3 tarots in your hand, 1 on the table, and 2 Anna Kaslowe's laughing at you from somewhere in your deck.

Now unfortunately, as per the rules on Removed from Game, when Hallowed Mirror leaves play, the 3 copies of Soothing Melody are rendered totally inaccessible, since a card removed from game "has no further interaction with the game in any manner for the duration of its removal." However, there's an easy workaround for this.

Just buy 5 extra copies of Before the Black Throne. Each mythos pack comes with 3 extra copies of Soothing Melody, which would give us a total of 15 backup bonded cards. Remember, we don't have to find the 3 specific copies that came with this one specific card, just 3 bonded cards total. This should be more than enough to fuel whatever recursion games we feel like playing with Hallowed Mirror for an entire scenario.

Of course, if any 3 copies of Soothing Melody will do, why not just proxy them? It's definitely cheaper than buying whole mythos packs, and works just as well for filling out our collection with all the copies of Soothing Melody that we could possibly need.

But then, if we're not bothering to get extra copies of Hallowed Mirror, why even bother proxying? We only have 1 copy of Hallowed Mirror, so only 3 copies of Soothing Melody will ever be in use at a time. There's nothing stopping us from just pretending that, once they leave play those 3 copies of Soothing Melody have been replaced by 3 new proxies that happen to have been made with the exact same cards.

Of course, skipping all this, we can always just realize that if a rules discussion can be rendered moot by just buying 5 extra copies of a mythos pack that you then don't even have to bother opening, that maybe "Hallowed Mirror leaving play means you can't get back the 3 copies of Soothing Melody if you play it again" was never how that was intended to work in the first place.

Incredibly cruddy card.

Banish is an alternative Blinding Light, one of the top -worst- cards in the game. Banish is very fair compared to it's nephews at 0 and 2 XP.

• Damage is sacrificed to trade the negative token effect for a positive one.
• The cost is equal to or higher than the nephew cards.

If you haven't tried them yet, Blinding Light is a real chore, they are expensive, have a game-loosing token effect and a maddeningly high chance to just whiff without any in-built +. There's also the conditional element that even if you succeed, this limited and temporary a solution to an engaged enemy might just not yield the result you want, and they're right back in the next round (Rita Young very literally gets a free copy of Blinding Light every turn, except without the action losses, free of charge and some extra mechanics too).

Banish is almost as bad as Blinding Light, it's expensive and the lack of + is crippling for a one-off effect, no chance of lost actions however is a big deal and unlike Blinding Light the moved enemy will probably not be coming right back next turn, in some cases it might even be considered to be "defeated" because it lacks a hunter keyword or isn't a threat, for example if you send the humanoid enemies in Dunwich to finished locations. The nonelite mechanic is a big bug though, preferrably I'dd have liked to see the effect be able to target Elites, for that pinch-evade, just not move or extend-exhaust them.

Banish is, in the end, better than the Blinding Light duo, but that is by no means saying much. Grab it if you like the idea of getting enemies out of the way.