This card is worse than The Necronomicon to be sure, but Daisy's Tote Bag is worth it. But no need to spend 5XP on a cat for protection, when Heavy Furs does a better job at 0XP. I doubt that card was designed with cancelling tokens in mind, but it works perfectly well.
Brutal treachery.
In this scenario, you may easily find yourself carrying 3-4 keys around (especially in low player count), and there might still be one on your location, which means that you could be testing against 6-7. This should give pause to even high mystics, and the odds of failing by 3 even worse for low investigators.
Pray that the same investigator does not draw all three of these...
If Charlie Kane succeed at 3 Parleys on these cards and removes them all from the game, does he become Mayor of the City of the Elders Things ?
Joke aside, I both love and hate these little guys.
Love them, because the concept is thematically awesome. They are strange monsters, but they are as much victims of the madness as you are, and killing them is not the solution. Very much in line with the original story.
Hate them, because since they spawn in "any empty location" in a scenario with 17 (!) locations, they often place me in an "analysis paralysis" situation : where do I spawn them, to avoid wasting actions on useless movement, while progressing the scenario without dooming out ? Trying to find the "best" location might be the road to insanity...
This card is a perfect example of how a treachery can shape the entire campaign. Dunwich has many cards that force you to discard undrawn cards, and although this can normally be bad enough (especially if it pushes cards you need into the discard pile) this card makes it a punishing, deadly mechanic if not built for.
Anyone playing Dunwich needs to build their deck with this card specifically in mind. There are several counter options for it, though some investigators really have no counter and should not be picked for Dunwich because of that.
For All -Consider resigning if running low and this is up. It is better to fail the scenario than take trauma, most times. This card gives you plenty of warning that it is going to kill you.
Survivor (can deal with this card) -Devil's luck: Straight out cancels the card if you can't counter it by other means. -Alter Fate: Get rid of the card from yours/an investigator's play area.
Rogue (will probably die from it) -No easy counter. Either tank it, run versatile with Deny Existence (keep in mind the extra cards you pick for versatile should have draw on them or you're going to run into deck dilution easily), or dump points into Cheat Death.
Guardian (will probably eat this but be fine) -No easy counter, but can stack a ton of mitigation to take the hit (I've had worse, just straight out tanking it, etc). Also guardians tend to have slower draw and even with the forced discards the event probably won't trigger.
Seeker (no direct counter but can probably cancel this) -usually very squishy and can't survive the hit once it goes off and also cycle their deck fairly rapidly. They are definitely at a higher risk from this card. However with abilities like Forewarning they can cancel it. Many of them also have access to the mystic card pool, in which case Deny existence or Quantum Flux can help tremendously.
Mystic (makes this card their bitch) -Having a high amount of cancels, deny existence (especially level 5), slow draw and quantum flux, this class is not in the least bit concerned by this card.
TLDR If your character can pull from the level 1 survivor pool or any cards from the mystic pool, they will likely be just fine. If they cannot, consider versatile for deny existence.
Seems like a pretty decent upgrade in certain contexts. Reduces cost to zero and if you attach this to SttP it prevents the card from sitting dead if you already drew the weapons you needed in your opening hand by helping your other fighting investigator friends find what they need.
For 2 XP I do wish instead of the cost being reduced it was either fast or searched 12, then I think it'd feel like more of an across the board upgrade and would see play outside of larger multiplayer campaigns or traditional 1 cluever 1 fighter investigator groups.