Jim’s weakness, Final Rhapsody, used to be a rough setback. Now, with the Innsmouth Conspiracy, you can mitigate it. Fill the bag with blessings and curses, draw five tokens, and take much less damage than before.

There’s not much else to say, except that Jim’s Trumpet scales well with more players. More players means more tokens, with four people out it’s likely that you’ll trigger every turn, especially if you bring Olive McBride on the road.

Don't play with Mandy on your team, because her weakness cancels the search. (For some reason a review must be 200 characters or more. So you didn't need to read this, but I had to write it. You can stop reading now. I'm serious, it's not necessary.)

Read this too fast and you’ll miss an amazing Nathan card. It’s that third word, “may“. So you can use your boxing glove bonuses and whatever else you have in order to lay the smack down on some weird fish creatures. Of course, there’s not much in your kit that generates those kind of tokens, but if you have a survivor or sister Mary going that route, there’s a lot of fun to be had. Holy boxing.

I may need a few more games with Jacqueline Fine under my belt, but I think this is the worst Mystic evade asset in the game. Let's start by comparing it to what it originally competed with: Mists of R'lyeh. Firstly, the action compression of the evade here is "do 1 damage", while on Mists it's "move". I think nine times out of ten, if you're evading instead of fighting, 1 damage is less valuable than moving away. Evade actions are almost always followed by move actions, so having both in one card is nice, versus 1 damage which is only nice if you're pairing this with a fight spell to close in some extra damage (on an odd health creature say), or if you have a fighter with who can close it out, or, ideally, it's that plus retaliate, so the evade cancels that retaliate. But those situations are all niche compared to the near universal truth that moving after evading is very helpful.

Now, it also costs 1 more and gives you 1 less charge, for some reason. Possibly because the devs overvalued the bits of 1 damage. Or maybe because they think the downside here is just that much less severe than Mists'. Now, in fairness, with Jackie you are more directly motivated to pull spooky tokens and avoid good tokens- cards like Dark Prophecy and Prescient show this pretty readily, but also her ability is to draw a card if you ignore her elder sign. So for her, there's at least a valid argument here that you would be falling into Mists' downside a lot more than Truth's. Except, I don't buy that that matters much. You don't have to use your ability on your evades, and, more importantly, you don't have to use your ability to dodge the good tokens. And if you do pull that sweet sweet and can still pass by ignoring it, and that forces you to take a spooky token, at least you can use that still as an opportunity to cycle a card out. I would also say, and this is just personal experience, that Jackie struggles way more with resource generation than card draw. Unless you draw Robes of Endless Night early, or get lucky with Voice of Ra, you're in for some hard times.

All of this is just brushing it up against the old Mystic evade spell, and, to be honest, I am a huge fan of Mists of R'lyeh. That card is dynamite in solo play especially. But there's a new option with The Innsmouth Conspiracy deluxe box: Sword Cane. First, you get compression here already just by virtue of playing it (you only play it the moment you need it). It costs 2, which is very fair for an evade. It also doesn't actually run out of charges. The only real two downsides I can think of is it doesn't offer extended compression (matters more as Akachi or if you're trying to add charges to spells) and it exhausts, but I think both of those things are fine in return for unlimited evades at your stat. It does also give you a similar option to Ineffable truth for pinging a single damage, which pairs well with your 2 damage spells, effectively conserving you a spell charge each time you do. And, one last big upside, it takes a hand slot, not an arcane slot. That's huge in my opinion, as Mystics rarely use their hands for anything.

So let's go through the thought process now. First, you are a Mystic, and you want some means of evasion in your deck. Okay, first justify why you don't want to use Sword Cane. Most obvious answers are: You can more easily draw a spell like Mists of R'lyeh using Arcane Initiate, or you're playing solo and want the move compression. Now, taking Mists, why would you take Ineffable Truth? You don't want the pinging damage probably, as, if you did, you should just take Sword Cane. So it must be because you're playing Jim Culver or Jacqueline Fine or some other Mystic who is worried about revealing too many spookies and losing cards. In which case, I think you just take Sword Cane- even without the Initiate synergy, and especially when you factor that many of the gators that reveal spookies more often run Olive McBride or some other ally before Arcane Initiate (you could take both to be fair), Ineffable Truth is too expensive and does too little to justify itself. It is an incredibly awkward card that I don't see myself taking ever again.

As a 4 resource-cost, 4 ammo firearm, the .25 Automatic immediately invites comparisons to its classic big brother in Guardian, the .45 Automatic, and this is a comparison that doesn't do the .25 any obvious favours. In exchange for a single additional point of accuracy on each shot over the .45, the .25 is fast, and green, and... loses both its accuracy and its damage altogether unless the target is exhausted... something that usually takes both an action and a successful test to achieve, and not even the same attribute of test that you need to successfully hit with this gun. This gun in fact does nothing at all unless the target is exhausted!

A fast, do-nothing weapon in Rogue immediately evokes the spectre of level 0 Switchblade, a card with a less than stellar track record for most of the game's history. .25 Automatic then goes on to fail to flatter itself in this comparison, too... at least Switchblade's fast ability meant that it could, potentially, help you in a situation where you could land the over-successful fight check while threatened by an enemy; .25 Automatic's fast ability is useless in this regard, since .25 Automatic will never help you fight unless you successfully evade the enemy first, and if you successfully evade the enemy then (barring weird edge cases where you're engaged with multiple enemies at once) you're at your liberty to play a non-fast weapon without fear of retaliation. Switchblade's other benefit over .25 Automatic was that it provided cheap protection against asset hate, which the Automatic doesn't really do, since 4 resources is a bit too much to pay for good Crypt Chill fodder. You might want level 0 Switchblade in Tony Morgan; you probably don't want this.

So, is .25 Automatic just a bad card that can't compete? I'd argue that it's not. I think it actually serves a niche that has existed in rogue since the game began: it's the gun that can get evasion-capable 3-Fight rogues to the place where they can shoot testing at 5, for 2 damage, without breaking the bank and while leaving them a hand free. Even the upgraded Derringer doesn't quite meet this threshold, since you're really only shooting at 4 in terms of hitting for 2 damage.

Why is testing at 5 with your investigator plus weapon so much better than testing at 4? It's hard to quantify, but from Roland with a .45, to Jenny with her Twin .45s, to Mark with his .32 Colt or Tony Morgan finally making that Switchblade sing, it seems to be something of a golden breakpoint that delineates when a basic weapon and investigator pairing starts to feel good. If you're "Skids" O'Toole, Finn Edwards, Jenny Barnes or Wini Habbamock, then the .25 gets you there, and you should have the evasion chops to make it work. "Skids" will appreciate the fact that it's compatible with his strong parallel card back, and for Finn it looks a lot like extra copies of his Trusty .38, albeit less cost efficient and with a more restrictive use condition.

It's in those two investigators that I feel the .25 Automatic is at its best, since they're likely to appreciate it being fast purely for the sake of saving an action and maintaining strong play speed, and are able to add in the extra evade action to set up their shots without losing undue time. They're also the types who could want to keep a hand free for lockpicks or other investigation assets. The requirement of evading first helps delineate "Skids" gunplay from the hip firing of more dedicated combat characters, and is somewhat reminiscent of machete's "drawback" of getting a guardian to sometimes spend an engage action before attacking - it encourages good practice. Evading enemies is more work, but when an enemy has retaliate or might swing at you for big damage if you miss a shot then needing to evade it beforehand can stop you from getting greedy, and it feeds into a playstyle that could feature cards such as Sneak Attack. It's a silver lining to a fairly demanding play restriction.

In conclusion, don't be put off this weapon by the shadow of its big brother. If you're willing and able to work the evades, this card can be the basic, scenario one weapon you've always needed to leverage a moderately good fight score into a reliable source of two damage hits, and it won't even slow you down during set up.