Anna Kaslow is the Tarot enabler, she's the linchpin that makes bulking 3-4 tarot cards a playable strategy.

• Her ability echoes that of the tarot cards, netting you a small 1 / 1 horror and health tank in addition to the tutor effect of searching your deck for a Tarot and playing it as well, all for free if she makes it onto your opening hand.

• When played post-turn 1, she's still a deck thinning tarot tutor, pulling and playing cards directly from your deck reduces the chance that you'll draw and get stuck with the relatively costly tarot cards. Get them out of the way so as not to dud your draws later.

• An additional 2 tarot slots means that you might see the dream of running with +2 to a stat and +1 to another, for free! Holy crap! This is a veritable magical Christmas land scenario though, where you're much likely to wind up with just 1 or 2 tarots at a time, probably paying for one of them. Some scenarios will have events that poke damage at an ally and sometimes, frankly, taking a hit on her is just going to be the best course of action.

• She occupies a hugely contested slot! With just 1 health and horror to survive by she has absolutely no tank. Given that she's in your deck you probably depend on and fill up those Tarot slots quickly so loosing her will probably start a chain-reaction of asset discards. With Anna Kaslow in your deck Charisma is very probably next on the agenda.

• Not a cheap asset by any means at 3 resources, not to mention the 4xp as well.

All in all, I think that Kaslowe's weaknesses make her a very iffy card, the dependency on being drawn in the first hand, the cost, the slot, the lack of tank, the XP. Despite the fact that I do like Tarot cards, Anna Kaslow has yet to impress me enough to be worth a whopping 4-xp a pop.

The top characters who might be interested in her are Diana Stanley, Joe Diamond and Sefina Rousseau, the former two because they benefit greatly from both their in-faction tarots so slotting 3-4 tarots isn't out of the question and the latter because her large opening hand makes finding tarot mechanics easier. Also there's always Lola Hayes.

P.S, this point is a bit unfair, but one of the worst feelings in the game has to be: Sitting around with 3 tarots in your hand, 1 on the table, and 2 Anna Kaslowe's laughing at you from somewhere in your deck.

tl;dr Crunched some numbers and got some estimated probabilities for getting Anna and Tarots in your opening hand in different situations.

I wrote something similar in a comment on this deck but I thought I'd post some more stats here for anyone who's interested in taking this card, but is unsure of the chances of her being in your opening hand.

Most people probably pair this with Sefina Rousseau, so we'll start by looking at her. Initially we'll consider the situation when we've purchased 2 copies of Anna Kaslow and 3 tarots, probably made up of The Moon • XVIII or Four of Cups. The table below shows the different events that can occur in an opening hand with this set up and their corresponding probabilities:

We'll look at the same situation as above but with an extra tarot i.e. Sefina Rousseau with 4 tarots and two Anna Kaslow cards:

With 4 tarots we might be worried about dead cards in hand. Here we have almost exactly 1/5 chance of having more than one tarot and no Anna, compared to a little less than 1/7 chance with only three tarots. On the flip side you have have a higher chance of getting a stat boost at the start, just under 19/20 times compared to jut over 10/11 times.

Now we'll look at more standard investigators. Our mulligan rules will be: keep 1 tarot and 1 Anna, replace anything else (unless you have Anna initially then keep 2 tarots). One assumption I've made is that you have 2 weaknesses and 1 signature card (so we're essentially sampling from a pool of 31 cards). Note that if you're looking to keep another card or have story assets that'll stunt your chances of an Anna + tarot start.

Like before we'll look at 2 Anna Kaslow + 3 tarots first:

And with four tarots:

Looks like it could be viable, although even when taking a mulligan for Anna and only keeping a tarot if it comes up, we're still left without her nearly half of the time, but 9/10 times we're getting a starting stat boost with 4 tarots, which is always nice.

Some things to look out for when interpreting/looking at these results:

• This is only focusing on getting Anna Kaslow and tarots into our opening hand, this is all well and good but if she's discarded in the first Mythos phase she's pretty useless.
• It could make for a cool themed deck, and in those cases you don't really care as much about your deck being top tier and could maybe deal with the unlikely chance you get no tarots or Annas.
• The second Anna Kaslow isn't a terrible draw, like the extra tarots, as she has a wild icon.

If anyone has any questions or disagrees with anything I've said, I'm happy to discuss.

Thanks for reading!

To get these probabilities I simulated drawing opening hands 10,000,000 times and just looked at the proportion of each event.

I want to like Anna, I want to make her nonsense work. It's just tricky to justify when she amounts, more or less, to a 1/1 Ally that grants a net +2 to your skills at a cost of 6 XP (4 for Anna, 2 for the tarots), which literally 14 investigators can get thru Peter Sylvester (2) for just 2 XP, and 6 more can get thru Lola Santiago or Delilah O'Rourke for 3 XP, plus all the sanity/clues/murders they respectively bring.

One novelty, something of a swingy thingy if you feel lucky while playing Carolyn Fern or Roland Banks:

• Stick To The Plan
• Anna Kaslow
• Astounding Revelation x2
• Tarot of your choosing (Carolyn uniquely has access to three useful tarot)

==

If you draw Anna in your opener/mulligan (odds improved as STTP + AR thins your deck by 4), you'll start Turn 1 with:

• Your deck thinned by 6 cards
• 9 resources
• Anna
• 1 tarot of your choice in play

Assuming I used this card-draw calculator right, a hard mulligan for Anna puts the odds of landing her at about 61%.

All for the low price of... er... 18XP. huh.

Sefina with 7 xp. Draws 13 cards during setup and places Anna Kaslow and 3 tarot cards in play at no cost. Starts the game with + 2 Will and + 1 Agility. I can see that nice combo happening.

With other investigators, I don't think so. The neutral tarot card is not that good and you wouldn't want to use splash slots to put a 3rd tarot card.

I suppose part of the value of Anna might be for the specific campaign she belongs to. For those who choose to accept their fate (which is the Anna path anyway), Anna in the opening hand can eliminate the risk of The Tower • XVI by having that be the tarot you search and play. Even Anna drawn after opening hand but early in the scenario can be a cheaper way to get the Tower on the table and also protect another tarot you might already have out. To me this seems the best use for her - picking her up along with Charisma if you chose the "accept your fate" path. If you kill her off you can discard the bad tarot and keep a good one.

The trick of course being to get Anna in your opening hand and not the Tower as well. Calling in Favors could be used if you have other allies in the deck to let you keep whichever ally you start with and swap for Anna quickly.

Nobody has talked about her in Tommy with the star, okay I'll make this quick.

The Star • XVII is amazing in Tommy, it makes you unkillable and filthy rich, but once you have one copy you might be tempted to get a second copy (two of a good card is better than one isn't it?) but do not be fooled, for a single 1xp bump you can get Anna instead who in all ways is a second copy of star (if your deck remains a deck and not a pile), this grants you an additional 4 point of soak, which can translate into a bonus 4 resources. Should Anna start in your opening hand you are probably just going to win off that alone.

The real tricky part is deciding if you should double up on Star's or Anna's first, I am torn because starting with Anna is strictly better than starting with the star, but Having two stars in play just turns Tommy from unkillable, to a laughing god beyond the reach of damage AND horror.

My personal choices after obtaining immortality is grabbing Combat Training and Keen Eye, stacking even more immortality and giving me a way to funnel endless cash into any skill test I am likely ever going to have to make.

I struggle with the low soak. Other cards with 1-health-1-sanity are not central to deck builds (eg Stray Cat). However, with Anna, you're going to build an entire deck around a strategy (Tarot cards). That strategy becomes highly vulnerable to damage being caused to an Ally. One hit and your strategy is broken. I wish she had at least 2 health or sanity to provide just a little more safety.

With the introduction of hyperphysical shotcaster, boosting 1 stat is a lot valuable then before. Tarots are one of the more slot-efficient ways to stat boost.

Putting 1-level tarots x2 + the fool(3) + anna + charisma makes any deck able to +2 in their primary stat without taking up any important slots + cost reduction every turn.

Could be used in:

• rogues that use thieves kit/lockpick engine that loves boosted evasion
• survivors that can use scavenging to recur hyperphysical shotcaster
• guardians with runic axe looking for reliable ways to proc elder or bandolier/shotcaster jank

Not worth in:

• mystics usually have lots of other ways to boost willpower, and after upgrading spells that's enough anyways
• seekers should just invest exp in draw power to draw into other techs