A new fight spell, but also one that is much more flexible than Shrivelling. Shrivelling costs 3, and does a total of 8 damage, and has a horror downside to picking the wrong token. For 1 XP, Brand of Cthugha costs a bit less, gives a skill boost (necessary for avoiding the 'succeed by 0 clause'), but only does 6 damage. But you get to spend those charges as you need them, and none at all if you fail. Mystic spells that do 2 damage have always been in an awkward spot dealing with 3 HP enemies -- how do you do that last point of damage? Guardians with 2 damage guns generally have dealt with this issue with taking a basic fight action, maybe boosted with Overpower. Mystics can use Wither or Sword Cane, or worse, spend another charge of Shrivelling and waste the extra damage. Here you just need this one card, and only spend one charge. Granted, you will run out of charges quickly, but there are more and more ways to add charges these days or pickup Spells from the discard pile once you've pushed it out.

For Diana Stanley, this card's flexibility comes right in the "you MAY use" clause -- use your combat skill at the beginning of the game. You'll be fighting at 4 right out of the gate. Once you've cancelled a few more cards, switch to using your Willpower instead, without needing to switch Spells.

The "lose 1 action" penalty is a real bummer, though. If you're engaged with an enemy, you have to fight it right away, unlike waiting until your last action with Rite of Seeking. If you have another weapon or fighting spell in play, use that first to do one damage and finish the enemy off with this; if you don't, you'll need to get lucky. This is even more the case with the upgraded version, which has a penalty of losing TWO actions. Another good idea is to pack a few events or assets that deal testless damage, like Beat Cop, or powerful fighting spells, and use this card to do the last point or two of damage.

The lower level version has had some more attention since it was revealed earlier, and at level 2, has a lot more people able to take it, including any subclass Rogue, Akachi and Ursula. At 5, even Finn misses out on it, poor guy.

At 10 exp for one copy, it's hard to say what would be worth that. Even the Key of Ys doesn't really feel worth it at 10. But The clock does have one big advantage over the key; it can be upgraded from a 4xp card. So really, it isn't so much a question of "is it worth 10xp to buy?", but "is it worth 6xp to upgrade?", to which I think the answer is yes, if you can find the time, or afford it.

Compared to the level 2 version, it's the same cost, adds an icon, and all the numbers on the effects go up by one. +4 instead of +3, move 3 times instead of 2, and take 2 extra actions instead of 1. None of those are bad at all, but certainly wouldn't be worth 6xp, let alone 10. The big, hugely important change, though, is the timing point of removing charges. Instead of choosing to take or place, then checking, you get the option to take the charges, then always place. This means it ramps up to every effect one turn faster after the first cycle, and gives you an effect the turn you take its resources. These are pretty huge changes.

The Red Clock (2), if used for each climbing effect is essentially: Turn 1, get a +3, Turn 2, move up to twice, Turn 3, get an extra action, Turn 4, gain three resources. In comparison, this version is: Turn 1, get a +4, Turn 2, move up to three times, Turn 3, get two extra actions, Turn 4, gain three resources and get a +4, and continues so on. So if you use both in the simplest possible way, this version will give you a lot of extra value over longer games by simply getting the turn 3 and 4 benefits together. Is that alone worth the 6xp upgrade? Well, maybe. Generally would depend on how early you can get it into play, since you aren't actually getting much value on the first cycle, other than increased numbers.

However, the timing point changing offers a more versatile way of using the Red Clock. Instead of ramping it up, you could simply take the resource every time, giving you a guaranteed resource every turn, and +4 to the first test you make every turn. That's a very solid effect by itself. Or, you can intend to do that, and then on turns where you aren't likely to make important tests but need to move, take the move. Then after that, you can check whether you need resources and a test bonus, or extra actions. The point is, it's a lot of versatility, and you can pretty much always use one of the abilities.

Of course, there's also the argument that the real exp cost is neither 10 nor 6, but 13 (or 9), since Relic Hunter is a very important consideration for the class with such great accessory slots, some of which you'd want to try and get the Red Clock as early as possible anyway. But then we can say it actually costs 19, since you want two Cigarette Cases alongside the Relic Hunter, and that's a whole Rabbit Hole I don't want to go down. (Speaking of which, it doesn't even save exp since you pay 5 then 5 instead of 4 then 6. How sad.)

EDIT: What a difference one word makes. Different fight actions really sinks this card in a lot of ways that makes a lot of this review make no sense!

In my opinion the best Discipline, but one you almost always take second.

Disciplines serve three functions for Lily: A slotless stat boost, a powerful 'supermove,' and protection from her weakness, which goes from being mid tier if you can't burn a discipline easily to trivial if you can.

The agility boost doesn't seem amazing. After all, Lilly is a guardian right? She should be killing things! But the thing is Lilly isn't actually super amazing at killing things with her kit, as being locked to melee limits her damage twofold: She can't get the literal 'big guns' that can push past 4 base damage with super amazing action efficiency, and she can't slot custom ammo (which tends to, late campaign, effectively just read "+1 damage).

Now don't get me wrong, I am a firm believer that you can still be a primary monster hunter with even a 3 damage weapon like a Cyclopian Hammer: Generally even in a 4 player game your not really expected to murder more than one monster a turn just because that is sorta impractical math wise or uhh... questionablly safe because your aiming lightning gun at your seeker's and mystic's general direction and if your blasting away for 3 attacks you have a 20% chance to just flat out kill a fellow investigator if they have less than the enemy's damage+4 health in that case on that turn, even assuming you only fail on autofail. Your flexes and even cluevers are going to need to be capable of making sure people don't literally die if you have to leave a monster on them for literally one turn, or else your team has problems way more fundamental than 'do I do enough damage.'

But lower damage weapons do make you a bit more volatile in other ways. Sure, its now generally more acceptable to shoot or stab in your friend's general direction, but now misses hurt more, because a higher proportion of your actions are likely required to kill the enemy. This means that teams with 'utility guardians' using stuff like Cyclopian Hammer or a Tommygun are going to need peel tools, and evasion is one of those. And hey, some of those 'chaos bag protection' tools your probably taking on Lily like your fancy candles can make it even easier.

But lets be real, your really taking this for the active and flip effect. The speed could literally not be there and this would be a highly competitive option, because the burn and flip effect on this combo just so well.

Guardians often aren't fighting literally all the time. Even in a 4 player game you generally have 'bursts' of activity, where 2 enemies are drawn at the same time or something where you and your flexes contain them and beat them down, and then a period of quiet. Boss fights tend to be short intense bursts of activity, rather than drawn out affairs: if your wailing on something for more than a few turns your either evade-juking it over and over to trivialize the fight, or your losing very badly. The ability to essentially get an entire extra turn allows Lilly to handle huge emergencies way better than her card pool may imply. Sure she doesn't have a flamethrower, but she can swing that cyclopean hammer 6 times a turn for a whopping 18 damage. And it can more easily be divvied up vs multiple enemies, making it actually easier for Lily to handle 2 enemies popping up solo than most other guardians, rather than harder. And, obviously, for boss fights, getting two entire turns of attacks, or 5 attacks plus an evade, generally sets you up to win: very few bosses can handle 8 actions worth of guardian attacks over two turns even before someone helps you evade tank or you start using things like Dodge.

But the flip effect also plays into this guardian loop of 'handle problems, prep for problems while also trying to help out in minor ways.' Because Guardians often will experience quiet moments (Unless, I dunno, your running with 3 Cluevers who literally can't even handle a rat in The Secret Name or something, in which case that is super not on Lilly) it is quite common to have turns where you just never encounter an enemy, meaning this is very easy to flip. Because the stat isn't super important to you, its also ok to let this sit unflipped if you constantly get a 'trickle' of enemies, which is sorta a nice place to be as a melee guardian. And because the effect is so easy to undo, it is fairly safe to let this flip when your weakness hits.

So this creates a very huge mid-campaign power boost for Lily: After 15 XP (generally 2-4 scenarios in, depending on how well you do and how much your mystic likes to delve) you suddenly get the ability to get double turns sometimes even every other turn. It is good enough I might consider it for my first snag for Lily, but I think she would much rather take Strength or Willpower depending on how you are constructing your deck

The following investigators with access to Guardian 2 have at least 3 agility and thus can reliably counter-punch out of the gate without too much assistance: Skids, Diana, Lola, Mark, Mary, Lily, and Yorick.

Of that list, Diana and Mark already run dodge as a pretty meta card, and I think that we may be seeing more characters joining in on Diana's shenanigans of 'just say no and get rewarded for it.' But I think the real winners here are Skids and Lily.

Skids really struggles to accomplish things. He can either build up a fortune with his parallel front, or get a ton of actions that do very little with his base front. This likely will play into his parallel front's sort of 'pseudo-testless' archetype, weaponizing low agility tests to force things like Lucky Cigs or Watch This to generate rewards for lowball tests. But more important than the low test value that Skids can easily pass is the fact that this is yet another 'ping' that parallel front, standard back Skids has access to, and as we know from Trish there comes a point where testless effects reach a critical mass and suddenly become an archetype. Skids already feels on the edge of that with cards like Dynamite Blast, Small Favor (Which is bad on most rogues but Skids has a lot of ways to get it to fire off between Dodging, Evading, or just spending the extra cash to 'snipe' with it), Delilah, and Beat Cop. Combined with Hatchet Man, Backstab, Sneak attack, and Cheap Shot, and we are starting to see a lot of ways for Skids to spam events and assets to do quite a bit of damage while keeping enemies exhausted and himself rich and full of cards. Maybe 2022 will be his year!

As for Lilly, she has a few things that make her want this wonderfully thematic 'counterstrike.' Firstly, she needs to spend a deck slot for base dodge, so this saves her a slot for another level 0 she may want more.

Secondly, her lack of firearm access locks her out of most of the high damage guardian weapons. She certainly isn't totally out of luck in that department, Cyclopian Hammer and, if your running blessings, Holy Spear can really mess someone up, but for the most part its hard to deal more than 2 damage with a melee attack base, and even the 'big melee' stuff struggles damage wise and are more utility options due to capping out at 3 damage and not having access to custom ammo for that late campaign damage push. So like most guardians who run the more 'utilitarian weapons' as their primary, she really wants pings, and a few of her really strong weapon upgrades (like Butterfly Knives and Survival Knife) already have synergy with dodge.

Finally, it is very likely, at least in my opinion, that Balance of Body will be the 'meta' secondary discipline you take at 15 XP, simply because it has the strongest 'burn' effect, and the easiest flip condition, which are both highly relevant for Lily. Upgraded Dodge plays into the 'super turn' ability well because the bonus agility obviously helps you out if your using this on a random lone enemy your not popping Balance for, but it also helps both in the context of needing one last bit of gas if your 'super-turn' doesn't take everyone out, or if your caught without access to it due to a bad draw of your weakness, which you likely took Balance of Body in part to handle due to how hard it can be to flip Persistence of Fate, and it being slightly tricky to flip Alignment of Spirit in some campaigns (like say.... Forgotten Age).

Those last two also synthesize into being a compelling reason to take pings in Lilly overall: Lilly is likely going to be doing 2-3 damage an attack, meaning your getting a lot of breakpoints where 1 extra damage will let you kill something big you otherwise couldn't quiiite get. A low damage weapon is more vulnerable to unlucky autofails, making the dual insurance of an extra damage and a guaranteed defense (potentially on a fellow gator even) to ensure you have a full extra turn to try again very powerful, and helps makes even your superturns more flexible with your low damage weapons.

Mark may want it just because its a bit more extra damage he can push with Sophie late in a scenario, and the guy runs Dodge basically 24/7 anyway, so assuming there aren't any super spooky symbol effects in the campaign, why the heck not? Sister Mary is very physically fragile, so dodge isn't actually terrible on her despite the fact she has her own 'holy dodge,' and she often plays a more supportive role than most other guardians anyway, so her joining Diana in shouting "No no no no no!" isn't out of the question. But I don't think we will really see dodge+ in most guardians besides Lilly (and off guardians besides Skids and maybe REALLY late campaign Dianas who are comfortable with bad symbols) until there is either some passive agility boosting in guardian attached to a good effect (Which is essentially what Balance of Body is), or we see until we see more pings in guardian.

edit- Parallel roland only has 0-3 guardian access, which is silly, but this was silly sooo. Guard dog wins with 6/4? :)

I was preparing another run of RT TFA when I saw this card, and what a puzzle it always gives me. It's simple, if you fail, you either get poisoned, or you kill an ally, but it doesn't say, 'discard an ally asset you control' it says 'deal 5 damage to an ally you control.' Which for some reason gets me thinking.

"Is there a way for an ally assets to survive this attack?"

At the time of this treachery cards making? No. But it's been a few years,a few campaigns,a few hundred cards, can we do it now? Let's see.

I'm gonna see if we can, at lvl 0, just starting this campaign, survive this attack, because OBVIOUSLY we don't want to test agility, and OBVIOUSLY we don't want to get poisoned, so clearly this is the best route to take! :D

Now, looking through the cards, what ally asset has the most HP ~quick scan~.....guard dog. This good boy sits at a whooping 3/1! Sanity doesn't matter, but health does. :)

3,however, won't cut it. So the question is, can we increase this? YES! -Trusted- is a card, it was released with TFA.i believe we can stack two of these, I'm not 100% sure, but it doesn't say so on the card. So putting 2 of these bad boys down, guard dog goes to 5/3! NICE! here we go!

But damn, we got it to 5, but he still will get killed, we need one more. I dont think.... BUT WAIT......THE STAR! the star is a tarot card just added via RT TCU, each asset enter play with 1/1. That brings guard dog to 6/4 which is in the gree......

Oh shoot........3 Exp

If only there was a way we could start the game with 3 exp.....! Enter -in the thick of it- new shiny from EOTE, for the small,small price of 2 trauma(your choice of which bb) you can start any campaign with 3 exp. Pretty decent. So, sadly only guardians up to lvl 3 (sorry Daniela) can run this

But I'm not done. What if for some odd reason, you can't stack 2 trusted, well is there a way. ~quick scan~there is one ally that can reach the hp lvl without 2 trusted...enter ~agency backup~also from TCU, it's cool 4/4 with the above combo give it a whooping 6/6. Nice!........but damn, 5 exp..... what?

I don't think there IS a way, to start a campaign with 5 xp, we got away with 3, but ~in the thick of it~ is limited to 1 per deck. I wonder, the only investigator I can think of that starts with 5xp is father Mateo. But he can't run most of the guardian cards.....! ~quick scan~ ROLAND coughcough* I'm sorry, I ment Parallel Roland.

He can take all guardian cards, (on top of some tactics/insight) he also starts the campaign with 5 exp! Combined with lovely ~into the thick of it~ he can add trusted, the star, and agency backup, waste a bunch of turns to

-get resources

-draw all three cards

-play the star

-play agency backup

-play trusted

-and patiently wait for you to draw snake bite! With all of these cards finally out

-profit$$$$

If,however, you CAN stack trusted, Parallel roland can run 2, and get agency backUP to the largest amount of health/sanity an ally can have from the very first game.

7/7

That's the same health/sanity as most investigators(and more than calvin)

This was an interesting experience.it may not be exactly a lvl 0 deck, but it is legal....I think. It was very funny to play around with. But to be completely honest.... is it practical?

No,no it isn't. Because to be honest.... Snake Bite! Could of just said 'discard an ally asset you control'

edit

(Also, why does this version of the federal agent NOT have access to agency backup >:( oh well, this was still fun to think about)