Feast of Hemlock Vail launches with one of the most restricted and the least restricted investigators in the game’s history. Kate Winthrop gains, outside her class, access to first aid(0 and 3), emergency aid, and survival technique from her science keyword. If it wasn’t for her access to insight(0-1) she’d be Mono-Yellow.

But this isn’t a Kate review. I say all this because Narukami gains access to more than 110 Blessed/Cursed cards, with a spread across all five classes. And his ability means you can’t ignore the good tokens and let them be a passive benefit (The way Sister Mary could theoretically.)

All previous bless/curse Investigators had an issue: making sure they got their tokens out to power their effects. Favors of the Sun and Moon only went so far to guarantee results, the same with Olive or Jaqueline’s ability to look at more tokens. Narukami’s sig ends that. Do you want to use Fey once a turn for the rest of the game? Sure. Need to trigger Beloved to pass an agility(6) check? It's on tap.

The perils of his deck building are more subtle. First, he only gets Mystic 0-3, so his high-level spells need to be blessed or cursed. Second, you’re not >forced< to make everything blursed. The temptation is to try and cram every single traited card in the deck, without a thought of economy or flow. There’s an opportunity cost to making the chaos bag even more chaotic. If you’re playing in a group, make sure everyone else is capable and eager to ride the tides of fortune.

As a card, not bad, Guardians do love economy cards and his can be a great way to get a weapon in hand while engaged with an enemy. Somewhat niche usage, but any item heavy deck will find a use.

What I am curious about is the wording. "Take a fight action" does not specify a basic action. So I believe a fight action on an asset or a fight event could be used. Of course this balanced by it doing no damage. So using ammo on this seems foolish, same with an event. But, it only cancels the damage. So is Leg Sweep or Cheap Shot is used, it would still evade the enemy. There are probably other combos that I haven't thought of where you can take a secondary effect still. Blessed Blade could add blessings. Rita can take this, do an attack that also evades, play an asset and deal damage with her effect since it is separate from the fight action damage. I don't know if One-Two Punch (0) would count the second fight as outside the event. But if it doesn't, could you get two cost reductions? Or you can get crazy and have Skids or Leo use Cheap Shot or Leg Sweep, evade the enemy, tap Dirty Fighting to do a fight action using the asset you just played. Since the order of operations has the playing an item and the evade triggered simultaneously, so the item can be played, then the evade triggered thus making the Dirty Fighting attack triggered in a separate window (After the evade as opposed to after the fight.)

TL:DR - A useful economy card for certain specific builds. But potentially an engine for shenanigans, whether they are particularly good shenanigans or not, I don't yet know.

(Update form The Feast of Hemlock Vale Investigator Expansion) Cleaning Kit + Emergency Cache (3) = Unlimited Arrow Works. Especially for Skids who can double it and got a good . Good to see this old cards being useful once more.

Darrell Simmons players may want to consider this skill as it is very easy to turn on in most decks built around Darrell's strengths.

Darrell begins every scenario with a Tool in play (Darrell's Kodak), so this almost always commits for at least

In addition, every other asset that generates evidence is a Tool or Science asset, like Hawk-Eye Folding Camera, Empirical Hypothesis, and Research Notes. So are all of the assets he has access to that lower shroud, like Old Keyring, Matchbox, and Flashlight.

If you're planning to run assets to enable evidence-generation or 0-difficulty tests, Well-Funded is a powerful effect to help you or your team pass important tests while you gather evidence.

I suspect Parallel Jim Culver is going to be a fan of this. When you need you can tap for four resources and some extra fuel for your shenanigans. That much compression also makes your economy elastic enough to install any of the Cursed spell suite (Armageddon, The Eye of Chaos, Shroud of Shadows) to your rig from near-poverty. Bonus points if you're Fast sealing them on Favor of the Moon for even more payout over time. You can afford to give up some of the usual -boosting accessories on Jim with allies like Granny Orne or David Renfield in your spirit deck.