A new niche to the Cat could be Butterfly Swords Lily Chen.

Why her?

The reason is rather simple: the Swords make pull 2 tokens per attack and therefore this is that many more chances to pull a Symbol token that often results in very sad outcomes especially in Hard/Expert.

The cat mitigates this risk.

To make the best out of it, attach 2 Trusted to the cat, if you're really pushy you can get The Star • XVII and let the cat do his job. Then with all these tokens, you will eventually find the that you probably wouldn't have used as most of the time your Disciplines are Unbroken.

Finally a card to dump an otherwise unused . How often did I draw an when playing Zoey Samaras and felt betrayed by the chaos back, because I was testing on a Willpower treachery and not on a fight check. Countless time I drew the when playing Ursula Downs and quitly thought "Okay, I have a free move, if I would only need to move right now, which I don't". Any Investigator with a pretty situational effect should consider this. It is Chaos Bag control at its best. It is absolutely worth 5xp to me.

Expensive, but absolutely worth it. Jim Culver in particular loves this cat, as it provides protection against a good chunk of the chaos bag when combined with his ability (plus his elder sign isn't so hot anyway). At 3/3 health/sanity and only two resources it also works well as a sturdy shield that has the potential to heal itself.

Every investigator can try to pet The Cat. Who does not appreciate a 3/3 soak, especially by the end of a tough campaign? But the XP cost is too high for just a soak and some, rather random, help on the road. If only you could mess with the chaos bag enough to take advantage of the upgraded modifiers The Cat brings?

Enter Jacqueline Fine. Even without Olive McBride and Charisma, even without Grotesque Statue she has much bigger chance to draw one of the tokens The Black Cat cares about.

A psychic should run a Sixth Sense, trying to fish symbol tokens (fish for a squid?) - but by the end of the campaign, these happen to be quite ugly and sometimes force you to make unpleasant decisions - The Cat fixes the problem! Even when Shrivelling someone, it's better to take a horror while passing a test rather than wasting a charge, failing a test, being punched back AND taking a horror.

Jacqueline's is something you like to ignore if you can, but if you need to use it, at least it can do something charitable - like healing The Cat!

Furthermore with The Cat by her side (on her shoulder?), Dark Future is much less of a problem, significantly decreasing the risk of Jacqueline's ending in fails with terrible consequences.

I ran the Black Cat with Charlie Kane and had some fantastic moments. The double Wilds give a +3 to any 1 test, possibly another with inspiring presence or Bonnie. Here are some more words to complete this review.

Black cat suffers from the fact not all campaigns feature both a tablet and an elder sign token at once in the chaos bag, especially those with branching paths... But if they do have them, the value of the car goes up considerably beyond being just very well-priced soak-per-resource asset, only behind Lita

But I think there is a particular Investigator that makes the cat shine: Hank Samson!

Hank's ability is fairly situational given he is prettty squishy himself, not always present in locations with other Investigators and cannot auto-catch up with them and many allies of his class are made to tank for him. You can get some mileage by having him close to Beat Cop or Grete Wagner or call them back with A Chance Encounter, but that requires another party member and some coordinaation, it's not something Hank can do on his own.

However, with this Hank can more or less use the Black Cat's ability forever! Is the kitty down to the last point of health and sanity? Just take the damage and horror for the feline until you reveal an Elder Sign and fully heal the Black Cat! Even better, if Hank is resolute, he can use this as a controlled source of damage and horror to put on himself to draw cards or gain resources (depending if he is in his "Warden" or "Assistant" from", and if you don't need to heal the cat, you can use Hank's Elder Sign to dump damage or horror on him or something else!

So Hank gets the ability, for 5 exp to get an ally that can basically treat 2 out of 4 of normal symbol tokens as -1 forever basically: honestly, that is a pretty sweet deal in my opinion, at least in standard/hard!