Been a while since the core was released so lets make another review for this "Queen of crunch-time" card.

The essential effect is: For the rest of this round your skill attempts go up against the difficulty tests with no token-middle-man, this means that there won't be any , no massive penalties, heck so long as you just ever so barely skirt the required minimum you will pass the test.

This means that, if you can just match the skill checks for a round, this card will turn all your unlikely attempts into guaranteed successes, with absolute flexibility! Finish off a victory location, kill an enemy threatening a wounded ally, kill a boss, remove or complete a location/scenario based issue, do any of the above in any combination. The only downside is that these actions need to be all clustered in one spot.

There are some disadvantages to this card, the massive cost will keep this in a hard-to-reach spot for Dark Horse decks and every other deck will still have to fight for the resources to play this in a timely fashion. The heavy investment requires that you adjust your deck, it'll be hard to afford Aquinnah, Peter Sylvestre and Yaotl are expensive enough already, you might not be able to fund Scrapper.

Don't forget that every card needs synergy to pull it's weight, even cards as powerful as this one. Baseball Bat for example is one great synergy card since it grants an attack bonus and there is no chance of whilst Will to Survive is in effect, this is also the time to play Double or Nothing or Resourceful, you could also try to land a card like Waylay or Backstab. Speaking of Resourceful you can re-acquire Will to Survive with the recursion from Resourceful (Automatically mind you!) and play Will to Survive over and over (So long as you can keep mustering the cash).

Since this card's release several alternative options have been released, all the desperate cards that greatly enhance your ability to beat a test and Fight or Flight that similarly explosively boosts your success chance for an entire round, this causes "Compound efficiency". In layman terms: by including all of these complementary cards in a deck you increase the odds of drawing at least one of them and gaining the desirable effect, alternatively you can include the weaker cards in a starter deck and then naturally upgrade them into the superior card.

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TL:DR.

Since it's release, this card has gained:

• Recursion via Resourceful.
• Complementary cards and early placeholders via Fight or Flight and Desperate cards.

However:

• It hasn't gotten any cheaper.
• Still cannot be tutored. If this thing winds up on the bottom of your deck it will stay there.
• still haven't gotten any movement cards printed for them yet that'd get you around to put this to use in more then one spot. "Ashcan" Pete currently has the closest thing thanks to Duke's move+investigate compression.

I took this card with Mateo's opening experience for a forgotten age campaign (standard difficulty, we're not fancy), two moonlight rituals, and have not looked back.

As other commenters have pointed out, the cost to this card is completely prohibitive. It never makes sense to trade an entire turn just to get +3 to a test.

Except sometimes the cost is actually just nothing. Either because you have (a sufficient) amount of doom left on the agenda, a ritual in hand, or you definitely know that the agenda is going to advance this turn. In those cases this card has actually just saved my bacon (-5 you say? pfah, nothing).

I'm not here to claim it's higher education good, but I'm not sure I would play a Mateo deck without one...

One card for two XP is not that great, right? Might as well stick with Lucky0, right? This changes when recursion joins the mix. Lucky is on of your top cards, and will be a prime target for Resourceful recursion. True Survivor can bring back Resourcefuls for even more Luckies (and Silas can make sure those Resourcefuls land, or even play them again with his Elder Sign). With the right north wind, you could find that 2 XP netting you 3 or more free cards. Suddenly, this seems like a better deal...

Maleson is most useful for investigators that have EXTREMELY lopsided ability to deal with certain encounter cards over others, so that it's actually worth dropping a clue in order to swap a "ruinous" encounter for a chance to draw a "breezy" one. It also helps if the investigator is likely to have clues to spare, and can pick them back up in a hurry.

Therefore, Maleson is suited to two investigators in particular:

Minh Thi Phan:

• uniquely vulnerable to Enemy cards:
  • 2 Combat;
  • 2 Agility; and
  • no Mystic cards to weaponize her Willpower;
• strong against Treachery:
  • 4 Willpower;
  • crazy skill card combos.

Finn Edwards:

• uniquely vulnerable to many Treachery cards:
  • 1 Willpower;
  • One. Willpower.
• strong against Enemies:
  • 4 Agility;
  • free Evade action, and;
  • some decent weapons and attacks.

Crucially, they both also have the four Intellect they need to pick their clue back up from most locations with reasonable odds.

Ultimately Maleson is a stronger choice for Finn. Minh Thi Phan will usually do better with Dr. Milan Christopher, and a well placed Level 2 Shortcut will let help other investigators come to her rescue more efficiently in addition to its other benefits. Her special ability also means she'll be sharing space with other investigators a lot, so she can often just foist her Enemy encounters on whoever is nearby. Conversely, rescuing Finn from a Treachery card isn't even possible for a lot of fellow investigators, so giving him the ability to mulligan the cards himself can change a scenario-breaking debacle into an inconvenience.

I might even consider including it over Leo De Luca for Finn, because it's one of the game's few repeatable cards that protects against encounter-draws. Between Maleson's ability as a first line of defense, "You handle this one!" as a second, and Maleson's damage-soak as a third, Finn can largely insulate himself from his main weakness, and thereby dedicate his remaining 26 cards to grabbing clues and murdering or exhausting enemies.

Of course, Leo may also be too good to pass up. Charisma may be in order!

Edit: I'm actually downgrading my assessment of Leo De Luca (see my review there for an explanation), so Dr. Milan Christopher is the more relevant anchor comparison.

As Synisill remarked in his review, this card does not see a lot of play. Why is that? Certainly, the level 0 Emergency Cache is a pretty playable card. It provides useful resource acceleration, which lets investigators get expensive cards into play much more quickly by sparing you the need to use multiple "take a resource" actions. Some investigators have access to superior cards for this role (e.g. Mystics with Uncage the Soul), but for a lot of investigators, Emergency Cache is still the best level 0 resource acceleration available.

So if Emergency Cache is pretty decent, and Emergency Cache II is clearly even better, why do so few people make the upgrade? The answer is twofold. First, it is important to note that although Emergency Cache II is clearly a better card than Emergency Cache, it is not actually better at the core mission of the card, which is to provide resource acceleration. Both the level 0 and level 2 versions get you more resources with equal speed.

The second reason, and the more critical one, is that paying two XP for +1 card is a lousy deal. This is because, at this point in this game's development, every investigator has access to a huge number of cards that can simply trounce that. Take Beat Cop II. That's also 2 XP. Compared to its level 0 version, you basically get two successful Fight actions that you can use whenever you want. A successful action is much more valuable than a card, and Beat Cop II gives you two of them! Or take Pickpocketing II. You get the Fast keyword, which is almost always better than +1 card (consider that you can use the action saved to draw a card, if you want to), and you get a substantially more powerful effect. Or Deduction II, which gives you +1 clue (and +1 to a skill test). Again, far superior to +1 card.

And, of course, spending 2 XP on a measly +1 card will also slow down your progress toward the high-XP game-changers--you know, the stuff like Lightning Gun, Key of Ys, Shrivelling V, and Will to Survive--the cards that can just dominate scenarios. Those cards are absolute bombs, and there is no way that a slightly more efficient Emergency Cache is going to justify delaying them.

I won't list all the XP options that trounce Emergency Cache II in terms of efficiency because it would just be a list of most of the XP cards in the game. The fact is that spending two XP for +1 card is simply behind the curve. XP is precious and immensely powerful in this game, and spending two to get an additional draw isn't worth it.