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.

TIMING QUESTION: Legendary Duke ally Ashcan Pete's inherent ability is, as a fast action, to discard a card and ready any card he controls. Nine Of Rods here is a reaction ability.

You can probably see where I'm goin' with this... can Ashcan use his ability to get 2 re-draws from this during the mythos phase instead of just 1?