This card is very similar to Working a Hunch - they both do the same thing for the same cost with a few differences:

• Working a Hunch is fast.
• Art Student has 2 horror soak and 1 damage soak.
• Art Student takes up an ally slot.

So, Art Student effectively costs one more action than Working a Hunch, provides some soak, but takes up a slot that could be prohibitive to playing other useful cards. In-class, I don't know if Seeker investigators will take either, since I think they'd rather put their resources towards playing assets that will let them gain clues over and over again rather than getting a one-time clue. Sure, Working a Hunch will help you get one clue from a high-shroud location... but how are you going to get the rest of them?

I think most Seeker investigators are not going to be interested in Art Student as an Ally option. Dr. Milan Christopher is generally the preferred choice for clue gathering as a flat +1 with resource generation is overall a more useful set of effects than gaining a single clue.

However, I think Art Student is a good ally for Roland Banks. Roland's is lower than most main-class Seeker investigators, so he likes having the testless clue option to crack high-shroud locations. He also has low sanity, so the 2 points of horror soak are welcome, especially in an ally that can be discarded without too much consequence. Roland's other main ally, Beat Cop, definitely adds a valuable +1, but it's twice the cost of Art Student and Roland is usually spread pretty thin on resources.

I think there's a good way to build a Roland Banks deck without Beat Cop, and I think in those builds Art Student is one of his better choices. There is some minor synergy with Calling in Favors and Laboratory Assistant where you can use the allies for their "entering play" effect, have them soak one horror, then return them to your hand so that you can use their "enter play" effect again. Roland Banks likes these smaller, cheaper Seeker allies for horror soak.

So, while Art Student isn't necessarily the best card, it definitely has its uses. In decks that count on the occasional testless clue and want cheap Seeker allies for horror soak, I think it's a reasonable choice.

You know, the "14 resources to get going" may actually be worth it, in this case. The way I see it, the Unscrupulous Investor has four especially important interactions right now:

• Jenny Barnes's unique ability plays well with Dario, and I would especially recommend Dario for a Jenny deck. Raising her willpower and intellect from 3 to 4 significantly boosts her resilience and investigative ability, and Jenny's Twin .45s can make excellent use of a giant resource pool.
• Streetwise is a reliable and efficient way to ensure that double-digit resource pools can be used to full effect. For Rogues who can buy it, Physical Training also deserves a mention for, alongside Streetwise, letting the investigator buy their way to the top of any skill check.
• Hot Streak allows you to get Dario's stat-boosts as quickly as possible.
• Now for the non-obvious one: Lockpicks. When you're early in the scenario, Dario and Lockpicks provide a useful turn-loop, where you take one action to investigate with lockpicks (almost certainly successfully), one action to get resources with Dario, and one action for miscellaneous purposes like moving or putting other cards like Lone Wolf into play. Reliably getting one clue and three resources per turn makes it fairly painless to hit the magic 10. (Admittedly, many things can disrupt this loop. Welcome to Arkham Horror!)

It's worth noting that 10 of the resources you're committing to Dario aren't actually spent, so they're more like a war chest that you can sit on until the endgame, and then spend on a final flurry of Streetwise-based investigations and evasions.

My point is that, provided that you have Lockpicks, Streetwise, and Lone Wolf in your deck, Dario actually has a very nice tempo in most scenarios:

• in the opening, when there are less likely to be dangerous enemies to deal with, he's an effective way to build up your war chest while still getting some things done;
• in the midgame, he's a persistent and boost, which is a top-tier bonus from the ally slot, and provides the occasional extra resource-bump when you happen to have a spare action at the end of your turn; and
• in the endgame, he's the reason that you have like 20 resources to buy your way out of trouble, plus some much-needed damage-soak.

You can get Streetwise and two Lockpicks for just 5XP, which is often feasible just one scenario into your campaign, so this is a very attractive starting point for leveling up your Rogue.

If Dario had been available when I played Jenny Barnes, I expect I would have settled pretty early on a Dario/Hot Streak/Streetwise/Lockpicks deck, resulting in an effective, Treachery-resistant clue-gatherer who just happens to be able to transform into an unholy murder-machine with Twin .45s, when necessary.

The deck-building lesson here is that the best way to compensate for having actions that can only trigger once per turn is to get additional once-per-turn actions. Dario is there so that you have something useful to do when you can't use your Lockpicks; your Lockpicks are there so that you have something useful to do when you can't use Dario.

Good card for Daisy Walker and Norman Withers, reasonable on Minh Thi Phan too but Ursula Downs and Rex Murphy don't need it or have better options.

The higher your intellect can go the better Mind over Matter is, thus it synergizes with Dr. Milan Christopher and St. Hubert's Key, both cards are good and frequently taken on Norman Withers and Daisy Walker. The maximum potential Mind over Matter buff is 7 and for a round which makes you a fearsome warmachine much like Fight or Flight does for characters.

Supplement Mind over Matter with Anatomical Diagrams which can have similarly drastic effects on your abilities, Anatomical Diagrams is not quite as strong a card but consistency is the key here.

The good thing about this card is that it isn't much of a "combo", you're just tapping into stats that are already making you good at other stuff that you really need to be doing. Do consider bringing a simple weapon however to make proper use of this large buff, Knife is perfect in this role since the discard mechanic means that you eventually get the hand-slot back to fill with a Magnifying Glass.

Finally, it's just an entertaining play. The Scrawny smart-person hulking out and knife-fighting down a bunch of Ghoul Minions or karate chopping a boss is just plain fun.

Just to underline how powerful this card is in a Daisy Walker deck. There is an interesting note on how card draw and randomized decks work.

Whenever you draw a card from a randomized deck, say a deck of 20 cards, there is a 1 in 20 chance to draw any one particular card. In an environment where you draw cards regularly, there is a 100% chance that you'll draw each card in the deck eventually. This means that even though there is a, say, 1 in 20 chance of seeing your weakness on each draw, there is a 100% chance that you'll draw it eventually. To be more particular, there is a 100% chance that you'll draw it at the point that you find it in your deck, say for example if it's the 4th card from the top, then there is a 100% chance you'll draw it once you've drawn 4 cards.

Old Book of Lore has a really funny interaction here. Whenever you shuffle your deck you refresh each cards randomized location, so long as you shuffle every turn the cards will have a new randomized location every turn! This has the effect of changing when you draw your weakness from "100% once you've drawn 4 cards" to "100% so long as the Weakness is the topmost card after a shuffle."

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TL:DR. So long as you use Old Book of Lore every turn, the chance to draw a weakness is literally "1 in however many cards are in your deck". The only Weaknesses will be those that you're unlucky enough to top-deck after a shuffle.

I.E, Daisy Walker is very unlikely to draw her weaknesses with this card in play.

BTW the same is true for Eureka! and No Stone Unturned but neither of those can minimize weakness odds indefinitely..

Superb card.

Not many items make it straight from the draw to the table, Magnifying Glass does just that. A 1 cost permament boost to while investigating is crazy value. it can let you hit the ideal sweet-spots of difficulty for several game modes and once you start layering more bonuses you'll be able to brute-force clues very quickly.

The fast mechanic is a huge deal here. often you might hesitate to play a Flashlight not knowing if you need it right away and when you finally do play it it might set you back one of the actions you'dd rather have used to actually start investigating, Magnifying Glass is out on the table exactly when you feel like playing it and generating value immediately.

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The only drawback is the slot. A wont mind, they typically don't have much competition in the slot and might even supplement the Magnifying Glass with Flashlight to raise the odds of drawing helpful hand slots faster. Non characters however might have some competition, mostly from weapons.

Ultimately it depends on your character and difficulty. A 4 is much more useful in standard then hard, so a Magnifying Glass wielding Roland Banks is a solid plan, but on Hard you'll need a lot more support to warrant the Magnifying Glass card slots.

The grand test for usefulness is how great a number you can hit with just the one Magnifying Glass on the table (Drawing 2 is not impossible, but the hand slot might be occupied and if the card is'nt useful with just 1 copy of it in play then it's probably a bad fit for your deck). Netting 3 isn't worth the trouble, 4 is good on Standard but needs more support for Hard, 5 is definitely powerful in all modes and 6+ is an outright autotake.

When you decide to go with Magnifying Glass in your deck make sure you have more support to supplement it with, Perception, Fieldwork, some icon cards, stuff that might buff your investigates to hit the comfort numbers.