This card is awesome in Joe Diamond's hunch deck! It immediately saves you an action, and then another action every time you use it again. It wasn't hard for me to place it on commonly tread locations when I used it.

Esoteric Atlas takes a hand slot, so to be usable and worth an XP it must be good. It gives you 8 moves for 3 resources, a card, a play action and 4 moves actions (9 clicks), so you lose -1 net economy overall (not worth using only to get more moves). If you use Daisy Walker’s free action, the math changes to +3 net economy, which is quite good, but only if you didn’t need to use her power for a different time. The major benefit it offers is it allows you to skip locations, thus avoiding enemies that are present. If you just want to turn resources and a card into moves, Pathfinder and Shortcut are more reliable way to get free moves.

Overall, I think only Daisy is excited about this card. It helps to balance her poor combat. Given relatively limited options for tomes, she may want to take 1-2 of these as early upgrades.

Just a great addition to the card pool. Guardians that were previously interested in "I've had worse…" now have a stepping stone, and Diana Stanley can also take this.

For most of our Guardians, this card can serve as protection against horror and economy, two things they really need. For Mark Harrigan, he might be interested in avoiding damage sometimes, just to make sure he doesn't flip Sophie.

For off-class Guardians, I've already mentioned Diana, who can use this as a canceling effect. Otherwise, "Skids" O'Toole, William Yorick and Joe Diamond can all take this. I don't think any of them combo particularly hard with this card, but I think all of them could take it and have some us for it.

Finally, as this is Spirit traited, Calvin Wright can take this... and that's amazing. From what I've seen, Calvin is all about riding the edge, pushing your damage and horror up high without dying. This lets you avoid two points of damage or horror, letting you stay alive for just a bit longer.

To analyze the skull, we consider the cost and the benefits. The effect of the skull is that each time you spend a charge, you gain a resource and a card. But anyone can spend an action for a card or a resource, so the real benefit of the skull is that it gives you the other one as well. This means the skull gives you one of whatever you least want at the time – if you really want a card, you could have spent the action getting a card even without the skull, the benefit of the skull is that you also get a money. If you wanted a money, it gives you a card, and if you really wanted an action, you aren’t going to spend that action on the skull, so the skull is useless. So the upfront cost of the skull is a card and an action to play now, and the benefit is to gain one of whatever you least want, in the future, for each time you use it. So using the skull 3 times is kind of breaking even, you would want to use it 4 times to feel excited about taking the card. And since the skull is useless when drawn late, if you draw it early you want to use it at least 5 times to think it is a good card.

In my experience, it is very possible for a combat character (in a 4-player party) who plays the skull early to pick up 5 charges – indeed, to pick up all the charges they can handle. The real limitation is the actions you have to spend to use these charges. The analysis above is that if you would have to spend at least 5 actions gaining cards and/or resources, after you start gaining charges, to be happy with the skull. And that assumes you would have been happy spending the actions even without the skull (otherwise the skull really isn’t practical at all). But in my experience, most characters are kept very busy, and don’t spend that many actions over the course of a scenario drawing cards or gaining resources – and when they do, it is often at the beginning of the mission when the skull wouldn’t have charges. It is a special sort of character who has that much free time during the mission.

The Decorated Skull isn’t the sort of card that is really going to blow anyone away with its amazing power, you aren’t missing much if you never use it. But it can be fun and useful for a very specific type of character – a dedicated monster killer (so you put yourself in the right place to get lots of charges) who can’t investigate (so you have free time) and who is in a party with plenty of ways to deal with monsters (so you aren’t under constant pressure to save your friends, and thus have more free time), and who doesn’t need the accessory slot for something else.

While Henry falls direly short of playable on his own, he's intended to synergize with Mystic cards that manipulates the chaos bag such as: The Chthonian Stone, Protective Incantation, and Seal of the Seventh Sign. You can potentially modify a chaos bag to have only a 10% chance or possibly 0% chance of drawing a symbol. Henry could, given the right circumstances, draw/gain 10 cards/resources in any combination of your choice. Henry's more of a theoretical 'this is very unlikely but amazing when it does happen' rather than reliable and generically powerful ally like Leo DeLuca.