There's an obscure theorem that I feel I should bring to your attention:

Finn's Law

For any card in Arkham Horror CG, if the card's combo potential with Double or Nothing is part of what makes it exciting, then that card is actually very boring.

Double or Nothing depends on being played with just the right card in just the right circumstances in order to accomplish anything. The effects of this card can certainly be spectacular, but spectacular does not win scenarios - utility, efficiency, and reliability do.

I've built a fair number of high-XP Seeker decks and I've never been that tempted to include Deciphered Reality. Oh, sure, the peak performance of this card is bonkers. In some scenarios you could arrange events so that you pick up nine clues in a single action. The rewards for a successful investigation are so high that combining it with Double or Nothing is actually worth actively pursuing (whereas most reviews' mentions of Double or Nothing are more like a fun thought experiment than a practical deck-building consideration).

But I'm not sold on it, and I think there's an important philosophical point we ought to unpack, there.

Arkham Horror CG decks should be built defensively. The consequences of succeeding a scenario are huge compared with failure - it could mean getting powerful allies, avoiding trauma and extra weaknesses, or even tipping the balance of success or failure for the entire campaign. By comparison, the difference between succeeding at a scenario and succeeding at it very well is typically an XP or two.

Therefore, cards that help you not fail are more important than cards that help you win harder. Deciphered Reality is a card of the latter type. You can only really bring out its full potential when you're in total control of your situation, where you can afford to have you and your other investigators spread out and exposing as many locations as possible to maximize the yield. If that's the position you're in, then you were probably going to win anyway.

Sure, in theory picking up a lot of clues at once can tip the balance between a win and a loss, but honestly? This is more clues than you need. Bear in mind that averaging one clue per investigator per round is extremely fast, and most scenarios will let you get away with half that pace, e.g. six rounds to pick up three clues per investigator. Massive clue-vacuuming plays are less important for a Seeker than just making sure that they, or someone else nearby, can keep enemies at bay so they can zip around the map and investigate at a steady pace.

If you don't specifically plan to use Deciphered Reality to make a huge play, then it may not even be worth using. It's not cheap at four resources, and there are relatively affordable cards to help you rapidly collect clues, like Archaic Glyphs: Guiding Stones and both variants of Deduction. Moreover, Pathfinder or a well placed upgraded Shortcut are great ways to cut down on the number of actions in a scenario, which is similar in practice to the payoff from Deciphered Reality, but they're cheaper and they're easy to use well.

On top of that, this card is just begging to be autofailed. If that happens, then you're practically guaranteed not to have time to pick up clues at all the VP locations that you deliberately didn't finish up, and could be at risk of failing the scenario itself. This game is meant to randomly generate huge setbacks. For the love of Yig, do not put all your eggs in one basket, like Deciphered Reality is baiting you to do!

It feels like the 3XP cost of upgraded Expose Weakness has more to do with making sure that Roland Banks can't buy it than it does with the actual value of the card itself.

This card basically lets a Seeker fight an enemy with their Intellect. If that were all it did, then it would just be a weaker version of Mind over Matter.

The card's only two saving graces are the card-draw (which is fine, I guess), and that it lets another investigator take the shot. The clearest combo is Shotgun, for which Expose Weakness hugely boosts the odds of scoring the maximum 5 damage. If you throw Double or Nothing in the mix, you could be looking at 10.

That combo is all well and good if you can pull it off, but it comprises three cards across separate classes and, realistically, at least two separate investigators in the right place, and a total of 7XP. That's assuming your scenario even has an enemy with enough health to make it worthwhile.

If that represents the best case for Expose Weakness, then it's in trouble. For the same 7XP, you'd be far better off getting Acidic Ichor and 3XP Emergency Cache to refill it, and dealing with the enemies yourself. As a Seeker, you're also in a much better position to make sure you actually draw those cards, using e.g. Cryptic Research or No Stone Unturned.

Also compare with "I've got a plan!" - the other major card built around weaponizing your intellect. It's more costly than Expose Weakness and doesn't work if you don't have the clues (although for a Seeker that shouldn't be a problem very often), but it deals solid damage and you don't need anybody else's help to deal it. It's genuinely unclear whether Expose Weakness even represents an improvement, which has got to be a pretty embarrassing comparison for the card that costs 3XP.

I give this card a rating of "unpurchasable."

This card is very similar to Working a Hunch - they both do the same thing for the same cost with a few differences:

• Working a Hunch is fast.
• Art Student has 2 horror soak and 1 damage soak.
• Art Student takes up an ally slot.

So, Art Student effectively costs one more action than Working a Hunch, provides some soak, but takes up a slot that could be prohibitive to playing other useful cards. In-class, I don't know if Seeker investigators will take either, since I think they'd rather put their resources towards playing assets that will let them gain clues over and over again rather than getting a one-time clue. Sure, Working a Hunch will help you get one clue from a high-shroud location... but how are you going to get the rest of them?

I think most Seeker investigators are not going to be interested in Art Student as an Ally option. Dr. Milan Christopher is generally the preferred choice for clue gathering as a flat +1 with resource generation is overall a more useful set of effects than gaining a single clue.

However, I think Art Student is a good ally for Roland Banks. Roland's is lower than most main-class Seeker investigators, so he likes having the testless clue option to crack high-shroud locations. He also has low sanity, so the 2 points of horror soak are welcome, especially in an ally that can be discarded without too much consequence. Roland's other main ally, Beat Cop, definitely adds a valuable +1, but it's twice the cost of Art Student and Roland is usually spread pretty thin on resources.

I think there's a good way to build a Roland Banks deck without Beat Cop, and I think in those builds Art Student is one of his better choices. There is some minor synergy with Calling in Favors and Laboratory Assistant where you can use the allies for their "entering play" effect, have them soak one horror, then return them to your hand so that you can use their "enter play" effect again. Roland Banks likes these smaller, cheaper Seeker allies for horror soak.

So, while Art Student isn't necessarily the best card, it definitely has its uses. In decks that count on the occasional testless clue and want cheap Seeker allies for horror soak, I think it's a reasonable choice.

You know, the "14 resources to get going" may actually be worth it, in this case. The way I see it, the Unscrupulous Investor has four especially important interactions right now:

• Jenny Barnes's unique ability plays well with Dario, and I would especially recommend Dario for a Jenny deck. Raising her willpower and intellect from 3 to 4 significantly boosts her resilience and investigative ability, and Jenny's Twin .45s can make excellent use of a giant resource pool.
• Streetwise is a reliable and efficient way to ensure that double-digit resource pools can be used to full effect. For Rogues who can buy it, Physical Training also deserves a mention for, alongside Streetwise, letting the investigator buy their way to the top of any skill check.
• Hot Streak allows you to get Dario's stat-boosts as quickly as possible.
• Now for the non-obvious one: Lockpicks. When you're early in the scenario, Dario and Lockpicks provide a useful turn-loop, where you take one action to investigate with lockpicks (almost certainly successfully), one action to get resources with Dario, and one action for miscellaneous purposes like moving or putting other cards like Lone Wolf into play. Reliably getting one clue and three resources per turn makes it fairly painless to hit the magic 10. (Admittedly, many things can disrupt this loop. Welcome to Arkham Horror!)

It's worth noting that 10 of the resources you're committing to Dario aren't actually spent, so they're more like a war chest that you can sit on until the endgame, and then spend on a final flurry of Streetwise-based investigations and evasions.

My point is that, provided that you have Lockpicks, Streetwise, and Lone Wolf in your deck, Dario actually has a very nice tempo in most scenarios:

• in the opening, when there are less likely to be dangerous enemies to deal with, he's an effective way to build up your war chest while still getting some things done;
• in the midgame, he's a persistent and boost, which is a top-tier bonus from the ally slot, and provides the occasional extra resource-bump when you happen to have a spare action at the end of your turn; and
• in the endgame, he's the reason that you have like 20 resources to buy your way out of trouble, plus some much-needed damage-soak.

You can get Streetwise and two Lockpicks for just 5XP, which is often feasible just one scenario into your campaign, so this is a very attractive starting point for leveling up your Rogue.

If Dario had been available when I played Jenny Barnes, I expect I would have settled pretty early on a Dario/Hot Streak/Streetwise/Lockpicks deck, resulting in an effective, Treachery-resistant clue-gatherer who just happens to be able to transform into an unholy murder-machine with Twin .45s, when necessary.

The deck-building lesson here is that the best way to compensate for having actions that can only trigger once per turn is to get additional once-per-turn actions. Dario is there so that you have something useful to do when you can't use your Lockpicks; your Lockpicks are there so that you have something useful to do when you can't use Dario.