As a card on it's own it's great. A 2xp permanent with pure upside is unlikely to be bad. As long as you have some bless token generation in your team pulling one during a test will almost always result in a success and you'll never need to use up more bless tokens than necessary.

However, alongside Favor of the Sun this card becomes game breaking.

This mini combo is available for just 4xp and is currently available to all Survivors , Agnes Baker, Father Mateo, Tommy Muldoon, Preston Fairmont and Minh Thi Phan.

With a single fast action and +1 resource play of Favor of the Sun you get 3 turns with a guaranteed +2 skill test.

This is a hugely powerful affect, +2 should usually translate into an auto success for most attempted skill tests. However, even if +2 isn't enough you'll know exactly how much you'll need to boost/commit.

It's also immensely flexible. You can pick the exact tests you want to succeed and the test doesn't even have to be on your turn:

• Guarantee success against dangerous and difficult tests in the mythos phase
• Guarantee success on an important investigate/fight/evade
• Guarantee avoiding a disastrous cultist, skull or elder thing token in the last turns of the scenario
• Guarantee a big combo/commitment play (less relevant in Survivor but huge for the Survivor secondaries)

Survivor has great access to easy generation with:

• Keep Faith (0)
• Predestined (0)
• Signum Crucis (2)
• Spirit of Humanity (2)

and also the neutral:

• Tempt Fate (0)

This combo is incredibly easy to pull off and requires no slots or build around, 2 x Tempt Fate is more than enough to keep the chaos bag stuffed full of bless tokens. With some reasonable card draw you can keep up Favor of the Sun the entire game.

I've play tested this in Preston Fairmont and it's degenerate and triviliazes the game even at expert difficulty. Comboed with the success / over succeed mechanics in Rogue this effect is far too powerful. While occasionally being able to cheat the bag is fun, being able to reliably do it once every turn takes away a lot of what makes Arkham the experience it is (the chance of drawing the ).

Rogue is the most able to abuse this with big all in plays, see my Preston - The Favoured Sun Over Succeeds deck for an example of what's possible.

Survivor is the only class that has a somewhat hard time abusing it and even then it's way overtuned. I would suggest that Ancient Covenant needs to be tabooed to only be usable on natural bless token draws from the chaos bag.

Between this and A Watchful Peace I think the Innsmouth playtesters forgot to turn up to the Survivor balance meeting!

Summary

• Great on its own
• In combination with Favor of the Sun absolutely game breaking and deserving of taboo, especially in Survivor secondary classes

This card requires:

• 3 tokens generated (although can be used with less, for less payout)
• 2 resources

In return it gives:

• 3 x Unexpected Courage you can commit to future tests

Not a huge cost but a fairly mediocre pay off for the investment. For similar affect you could just run Unexpected Courage without the need for the setup.

However, alongside Ancient Covenant this card becomes a powerhouse.

This mini combo is available for just 4xp and is currently available to all Survivors , Agnes Baker, Father Mateo, Tommy Muldoon, Preston Fairmont and Minh Thi Phan.

With Ancient Covenant instead of 3 x Unexpected Courage you get 3 x guaranteed +2 tests.

This is a hugely powerful affect, +2 should usually translate into an auto success for most attempted skill tests. However, even if +2 isn't enough you'll know exactly how much you'll need to boost/commit.

It's also immensely flexible. You can pick the exact tests you want to succeed and the test doesn't even have to be on your turn:

• Guarantee success against dangerous and difficult tests in the mythos phase
• Guarantee success on an important investigate/fight/evade
• Guarantee avoiding a disastrous cultist, skull or elder thing token in the last turns of the scenario
• Guarantee a big combo/commitment play (less relevant in Survivor but huge for the Surivor secondaries Minh Thi Phan or Preston Fairmont)

For more power combine with Unrelenting (1) to seal the good tokens to get the draw 2 card effect knowing you're going to pass.

The only real limit is the exhaust stipulation so you'll have to pace out your successes over several turns.

Survivor has great access to easy generation with:

• Keep Faith (0)
• Predestined (0)
• Signum Crucis (2)
• Spirit of Humanity (2)

and also the neutral:

• Tempt Fate (0)

Summary:

• Underwhelming card in isolation
• Alongside Ancient Covenant and even a modicum of generation this card is a monster in almost any deck and is worthy of a taboo

P.S. I've now play tested this in Preston Fairmont and it's as degenerate as I expected it to be. Comboed with the success / over succeed mechanics in Rogue this effect is far too powerful. While occasionally being able to cheat the bag is fun, being able to reliably do it once every turn takes away a lot of what makes Arkham the experience it is (the chance of drawing the ).

Rogue is the most able to abuse this with big all in play, see my Preston - The Favoured Sun Over Succeeds deck for an example of what's possible.

However, it's way overtuned in any class and needs to be tabooed. I would suggest that Ancient Covenant needs to be only be usable on natural chaos bag draws.

Holy Rosary is a true classic, easily one of the best Mystic cards in the Core Set and still a top performer many years later. So when Crystal Pendulum came out, I was initially a bit resistant to switching over to this. Sure, for Jacqueline Fine with her built-in token manipulation and 9 Sanity, the Pendulum seemed like a slam dunk. But elsewhere, was it really worth giving up the concrete benefit of 2 Sanity soak for unreliable card draw? Most of my Mystics don't run a lot of token manipulation at lower XP levels. And this is the same class that must start every single campaign with 2 mental trauma (it's in the rulebook.)

But the more I weigh the Rosary and the Pendulum, the more I've found myself swinging in the latter direction, if you know what I mean. Practically speaking, even without any support, the Pendulum represents something in the neighborhood of 25-30% of a card every round. And the thing is... that's good! That does add up over time. I think it's at the least highly competitive with 2 Sanity. And that's just the floor for the Pendulum. Factor in the random token manipulation effects you may have wanted to run anyway (Diana likes her Dark Prophecies, for instance), and the Pendulum does better.

Moreover, the Pendulum tends to scale really well into the late campaign. Most Mystics want to pick up the really powerful token manipulation effects like Grotesque Statue and Seal of the Elder Sign because, well, those are great cards. And they certainly lead to more draws from the Pendulum. And in the mid-to-late campaign, you'll miss the 2 Sanity from the Rosary a lot less, because you'll have options like Deny Existence V, soak-heavy Charisma builds, etc.

So I think it's very close between the Rosary and Pendulum in the early campaign, and then as the campaign progresses, the Pendulum tends to get better and better. So I've found myself tilting that way recently, and I've been happy with the results.

A final note. The Pendulum is a fiddly card and does have the potential to seriously slow down the game in multiplayer. If you're going to run this, I recommend memorizing the contents of the chaos bag (which is helpful for good gameplay in any case), so you can be quick in making your predictions. Be mindful of your pace of play here. No amount of extra draw is worth dragging the game to a halt!

As far as I know, this is the best place to identify your Ancient Stone! How you pass a difficulty 12 intellect test on scenario 2 (which doesn't even have any clues on it, so you're truly just swinging for the fences) is left as an exercise for the reader.

I would caution outright buying this on Yorick (unless you are using a boring Flare deck). At first this appears to be a great card for William as it makes Leather Coat(1) and Cherished Keepsake(1) seem like a no-brainer as the fear of them being used up and exiled goes away with Déjà Vu. However you're less likely to actually burn through an entire upgraded Coat(1) or Keepsake(1) and need Déjà Vu on Yorick than you think. You should totally buy the Coat(1)/Keepsake(1) upgrades, those cards are amazing, but hold off on Déjà Vu on Yorick unless needed. Let me explain:

If you have a basic 12xp drawing/cycling engine on Yorick with Emergency Cache(2) and Lucky(2), and Resourceful (to pull back Lucky) and use Cornered (2) to let you commit any item from hand into discard pile, then you will probably see two of either the 0xp Coat or Keepsake. At this point I would upgrade to Coat(1)/Keepsake(1). If you play smart asigning damage to your assets (like Guard Dog and Peter), you can easily cycle between each copy of your Keepsake/Coat by killing monsters and installing the other already discarded copy of Keepsake/Coat from your discard using Yorick's fast character ability. You would be surprised how long you can keep this loop going on Yorick. Sure, you are not getting the entire 4 soak out of the Coat(1)/Keepsake(1) upgrades doing this, but 3/4 aint bad for a 0 cost install item. You shouldn't need to soak more than 3points before you kill a monster anyway (unless it is an emergency).

So when should you buy Déjà Vu on Yorick?

Well, Déjà Vu can be bought after a scenario in which you just exiled cards (to free-buy them back), so you should only really buy Déjà Vu AFTER you exile cards. So Déjà Vu becomes a backup plan. However I've found on Yorick you don't actually get around to exiling cards that often (unless you have a Flare deck - then you'll need Déjà Vu!). If you are mid campaign and just exiled 2 soak cards, re-buying those exiles is still cheaper than outright buying Déjà Vu. For all you know the next 2 scenarios you might not exile any cards, so your total rebuy of exiled soak cards on Yorick can often work out cheaper than 5xp to buy Déjà Vu. Also exile cards can be sort of cheap gap filler cards to get through particular tricky scenarios - you may revert to the 0xp versions even, as 2 soak cards often do enough most of the time for Yorick anyway!

Things to ponder!