So first of lets get it out of the way...

Who's a good lil pack of puppies, you are! you are!

Okay now that is out of my system we have a card here that does a very very nice pair of things "handless 2+ damage attacks" and "high speed movement for one action" notice that both of these only actually require two dogs to be in play to be good, once you have three dog's in play you start entering sweet territory and at four dogs....well that's about 1 enemy per scenario survives you whistling to your dogs.

Getting 12 resources worth of dog into play while also having the ally slots to hold them is a big ask. it is made a lot easier by calling in favors (which also will probably grant you some amount of restored soak) and any other support cards we might see in the future for allies seems good.

Now I am going to say something shocking here, I don't think Leo Anderson is the best dog handler, that is to say, I don't think he receives the most benefit from having them in play, I foresee these dogs going a long way to supporting more non-guardian fighty decks, those that struggle with their class options weapons being too niche and too situational to be consistent enough to be worth running, you can use your dog's to fill in the gap you might be missing.

The other case I see the dogs being insanely good in are primarily or flex clue decks that have decent enough time with their fight stat, people who will use the dogs primarily to get them across the map and occasionally chomp on an enemy that would be too annoying for a guardian to come deal with. Minh has no issue boosting any stat to any number but she can't capitalize on that without weapons, now she can just run a bunch of happy doggies instead, I never found Minh dependent on any ally before so losing the slot isn't a major deal, she also draws at an obscene rate so getting to the two doggo minimum is pretty simple for her.

Can't wait to play with them and hopefully my theories to their usefulness don't fall flat on their face.

The last thing to highlight here is you CAN (with some great deal of luck) have 14 doggo's in play at the same time under your control, how you achieve this is left as an exercise for the reader, good luck! (bonus star for anyone who figures out how to get more, no matter how hair brained the method)

People would love a 5 Mystic, but I wouldn't be surprised if the Discipline is the way to go for her at the start.

EotE investigators all have the same deckbuilding tension: you have 5 slots to devote to Level 0 in your second class, but if you upgrade out or otherwise replace them, you don't get to backfill those L0 cards for free. So if you want a Survival Knife later on, it can feel wasteful to put the L0 version in your deck at the start - even if it might be helpful in that first scenario. Same goes for fighting staples like Beat Cop and Vicious Blow. Between working around that, and her refusal to pick up a gun, Lily has a hard time leveraging the 5 out the gate.

4, though, opens up some options. She can get that to 5 or 6 easily between Holy Rosary for soak, and David Renfield for soak and blood money, fueling a powerful suite of Mystic events like Spectral Razor, Read the Signs and Storm of Spirits, many of which end up replicating the effects of L0 Guardian cards, but ... better. More importantly, with 4-6, spells like Azure Flame basically become your guns - except unlike guns, they're just as good at blowing nasties out of the sky as they are putting ghosts to rest. Having that much gives you a resiliency many guardians would envy, and it helps that the associated Discipline offers some built-in healing, while being fairly easy to mend when broken.

Using spells-as-guns lets you run enough "weapons" to lean into the "I'll draw something, probably" school of deckbuilding so you aren't using your L0 Guardian slots on tutors like Tetsuo Mori and Prepared for the Worst like many Guardians do for consistency. This lets you run other L0 cards that don't have higher-level equivalents, like Steadfast, which is good for everything you do, or support cards like First Watch - cards that can keep paying off to the end of the campaign. And once you start entering the L1-5 Guardian territory, you can keep leveraging that with cards like Enchanted Armor and Enchant Weapon.

Also - Delve as deep as you want. You've got stats on the line, and if anyone complains, tell them you're the chosen one.

This Card is Jim Culvers new go to signature Ally. Making other bad tokens skull-zeros is incredibly strong with him and powers up other cards triggered by skulls like Jim's Trumpet or Song of the Dead.

A strong enabler.

Maybe pair with Protective Incantations to keep the other hard number tokens out of the bag.

Time for a 'highly practical combo!'

Get yourself a friendly Leo and equip an upgraded 45 Thompson

Slap two sets of Extra ammo in there, and then double that delicious 11 ammo twice with two upgraded Contrabands to shoot up to 44 bullets.

Then, just hold down that trigger and rake 30 resources in from your 7 card, 5 action, 16 cost combo by playing two Eat Leads. Bonus, you get to keep your gun with 12 bullets left on it, and you force two elder sign activations! What a steal!

I love this. This is such a clever, thematic, and uniquely indirect form of tutoring that's perfect for Survivors.

• Between Scrounge For Supplies, Resourceful, True Survivor, Scavenging, Chance Encounter, and Yorick (for whom this seems like a strict auto-include), you basically get a 10-card pseudo-mulligan after your actual mulligan.

• You can jump-start your discard-powered cards like Fortuitous Discovery, Winging It, Improvised Weapon, and Impromptu Barrier.

• You even have a solid chance of pre-emptively ditching weaknesses, even clingy ones like Caught Red Handed. Now, although this card alone doesn't technically change the overall odds of drawing your weaknesses during a game (you might ditch them, but if you don't then your odds of drawing them just went way up), it DOES give you precious metaknowledge every time that can reduce opportunity cost.

e.g. Imagine having Amnesia or Paranoia in your deck- basic weaknesses that are so brutal, you have to adapt how you play your entire deck until they're flushed. Now imagine that in ~30-40% of your games, you'll be freed of that on the first turn, and in the rest you're much more likely to hit them early and can prepare. Reliability- even for weaknesses- can be valuable in Arkham, just look at how many people deem Mr. Rook's ability to force weaknesses early to be a beneficial.

Downsides:

• Some cards, once in the discard, can't be easily recovered, even for Survivors. Items, Allies, Innate Skills, L0, and Survivor cards can be recovered, and Yorick can recover any asset. If your deck hinges on something that's not in those categories, you may risk burying it first turn.

• On which topic, remember, Signature Cards have no level... meaning they are NOT L0, thus not Scroungeable. So Silas can fish (heh) for Nautical Prowess using True Survivor, and Finn can Scavenge for his Trusty .38... but if Bob plans to be Shrewd or Minh plans to be Analytical, they may want to avoid this entirely.

• Do NOT use this if you're playing the Dunwich campaign. Trust me... your deck will be in the discard pile soon enough.