"Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver." Ayn Rand depicted the reasons for including Emergency Cache with few words, but you surely expect a longer explanation.

An event that gives you 3 resources for one action sounds like an auto-include in most decks. It speeds up your initial setup: play Emergency Cache, play Leo De Luca or Dr. Milan Christopher and still have 2 actions and resources to spend. Mid-game it can fuel the "pump" skills, like Dig Deep, for you. Late-game it probably sticks on your hand as a "dead draw". Emergency Cache has no alternative use, no icons to commit to skill tests. With a huge resource pool, you can buy anything, but you need expensive cards in the sale, too!

As a rule of thumb, i would offer you Spiryt's advise: If you can see yourself spending more than one action per scenario fishing for resources, then this card is a great way of ensuring you have the means to play your most powerful cards.

With more packs being released, the number of economy sources will raise. Right now, the slot for Emergency Cache mainly competes with Burglary and Dr. Milan Christopher (with 0 xp) and Hot Streak(4). Especially the guardian class runs low on resources, in-faction there's solely Stand Together(3). In solo play, Lone Wolf always is the better alternative to Emergency Cache.

Pros

• Feasible resource gain.
• Best economy card for Roland Banks.
• Wendy and Pete find cards without committment icons useful, they have innate abilities where they must discard cards.
• Jump start enabler: mulligan for Emergency Cache and Leo Di Luca.
• There's an upgraded version available: Emergency Cache(2)

Cons

• Card has no icons to commit to skill tests.
• One-time effect only. Supplement with drip economy for the long run.

Recommendations

• spoiler In The House Always Wins it is sometimes better to have a full wallet at your disposal than big brains.

In the board game Seven Wonders, Nefertiti gives you four victory points for four bucks. Other leaders have more variable powers, but she is a good measuring point for whether or not something is worth four bucks.

It’s been three years since the last review of emergency cache. There are a lot of ways to get money in your deck now, so the question is… Is it still worth taking this thing?

The individually sold investigators added new ways to get money for blue yellow green and purple. For the first three, it’s relatively simple: take an action you would normally take (fight, investigate, or evade) and do that as well as getting two bucks. For mystics, they have to draw tokens and hope for symbols, rewarding having Olive out and playing Jacqueline.

So why do we still need emergency cache? It’s more niche, but for decks outside of green that need a lot of money, or blue characters that support more than they fight, or expensive purple decks that don’t do token manipulation...This card is efficient. And it can grow with your team: its (2) upgrade lets you draw a card, giving you four actions for the cost of one. And for 3XP, you can power chainsaws or alchemical concoctions.

So this card is still a Nefertiti. It’s a sometimes food, which makes sense because it’s not called “everyday cache.”

EDIT: with more experience, I see the value of the card. But if you've got a lot of 0-cost cards (Shortcut, Leather Jacket), abilities that draw resources (Zoey's special ability, Dr Milan Christopher), and not a lot of skill cards that increase your card draw, then you may not see any value in it.

In the beginning of the opening round and at the end of each round, you gain cards and resources at a 1:1 ratio.

With all skill cards as well as many events and assets costing 0, not to forget that you'll commit cards and especially asset cards when slots are full... a resources needed per card ratio of 1:1 seems common in my decks and many of those I see about on this website.

With my limited experience and player card pool, depending on the investigator/s chosen, I've found I'm more likely to end a game with up to 10 unneeded resources than lack the resources needed to play a card.

I wrote an essay for a card with text this short... After playing 10+ decks, this card surprisingly gets more intriguing the same way as deciding to choose Guts, Perception, Overpower, Manual Dexterity in the starting deck.

Resources flow in this game can get pretty dynamic, such as having Dr. Milan Christopher and your cash flow now depends on your performance, you use pump cards like Hyperawareness, receiving resources from Teamwork, or aiming to play Event costing 2+ that is situational. They depends on scenarios. In these case, I need some play-testing to reveal cash problem I haven't thought about as thinking in vacuum is difficult.

But recently I played Daisy deck with no Dr. Milan Christopher and very little situational Event. Most spending will be on assets that I play regardless of situation and won't go away other than random scenario effects. That really changed both the decision to include this card to a clearer one, and even the timing to play it became clearer : Play the first copy I see.

The deck has Alyssa Graham Cost 4, Blur Cost 2, Encyclopedia Cost 2, Old Book of Lore Cost 3, and average of 1x Research Librarian Cost 2 to get one of the book. The first version I have no Emergency Cache at all, and in most scenarios it turns out I failed to setup fast enough.

Now I add 2x Emergency Cache and play again, I managed to setup most of the time. I also found that I have to play 1x Emergency Cache regardless of situation each scenario, and I will be fine. (The 2nd copy is situational and can wait.) As soon as I see the first copy, I play it regardless of not having the thing to spend resources yet. This is a huge benefit for a card that cannot be committed.

This is the most dramatic difference I had experience between including and not including it. It appears that when resource is quite static in your deck (scenario effect can't be helped), I can sprint "ahead" of my resource requirements ahead of time and stay that way. Gone the days when I was a beginner and having to play Emergency Cache to Backstab in the same turn which was really clunky, and I am now short on action to do other things.

Not many decks will be "resource static" like this one, but this deck will serve as a way to debug "how Emergency Cache works" for long time to come, if I know why it made huge difference.

Also it is important for the deck to be able to setup partially and work from there. (Not that everything falls apart when lacking even 1 piece.) I found that the smaller the cost difference of each "partial", the better Emergency Cache can give you more choices.

For example, I have Research Librarian and Old Book of Lore on hand right now. Essentially I have 2 choices to choose from : Research Librarian 2 + Encyclopedia 2 = 4, or Old Book of Lore for 3. (Just Research Librarian doesn't make things better other than poor soak, so 2 doesn't count.) The difference is 1.

If I used Emergency Cache earlier, and now I have exactly 4 resources, I got an extra choice from it (that won't be possible if Encyclopedia cost 3 instead). I can now use Encyclopedia buff to work on more resources to setup the other things.

In summary what I learned :

• Contrary to the name, you should not play Emergency Cache in real emergency. You should be able to reliably play Emergency Cache ahead of time as soon as you get it and magically get benefits in later turns, since the card has no commit icon so hogging on hand put you at disadvantage. More likely to be usable that way when your deck is "resource static".
• Having clear total cost required for the assets you must put down. My deck was about 12 ~ 14 (+7 ~ +9 more than starting 5 resources) and I need to play 1 copy most of the time.
• If you have ways to get resource based on performance such as Dr. Milan Christopher or Monterey Jack, that cash flow gets uncertain, maybe better to bet on the side of not including this card and make deck spaces, and focus on doing that resource-earning performance.
• Less usable for decks that need resources to fund powerful one-off Event that maybe too situational it ended up not getting used. Therefore playing Emergency Cache ahead of time is a risky investment.
• Varying cost between each combo set in your deck, with small cost difference between them, so +3 resources can better unlock the choices which one to setup first.