Finn's favourite gun.

There's not much to say about this thing. It's great for high- characters or characters who lean into it. It's a little too inaccurate to use if your is less than 3, but for "Skids" O'Toole or Winifred Habbamock it's perfect.

Saving actions is a useful mechanic, the .25 Automatic is fast already, so that's a saved action, the free attack on the evade is also good, another saved action. But wait. Is it? The action to evade is still an action, so if youre attacking the enemy, just with evade actions instead of attacks, what's the point?

Here's the point: Speed and safety. Layering the attack onto evades means that you get a double layer of defense, the attack may fail, but the enemy is still evaded, alternatively a tough opponent might survive one attack, but it's not in your way anymore so you can either leisurely finish it or keep moving, safe in the knowledge that when the enemy gets in your way again later, it's prepped for faster killing. Against a boss that you need to work through in more then one round, the initial evade attempt isn't a "wasted" action, not to mention the circumvented Retaliate. Also, dont forget, if the attack actually fails, and you find yourself in trouble, the enemy being evaded gives you an escape route.

Here's another thing. If you're experienced as an character, you should be familiar with those moments when youre stuck evading 2+ enemies who've swarmed you, the .25 Automatic is'nt target-locked onto just the newly evaded guy, you can evade 3 different enemies in a round, and shoot whichever one you want dead with all 3 bullets.

In short, this weapon is by itself not the greatest gun in the world, but for an character, the sheer amount of tricks it unlocks is staggering.

Brilliant weapon. Just the basic attack is worth the XP cost, it's extreemely efficient and dependable and a 1 resource difference makes it competitive with Timeworn Brand despite the hand disadvantage. The spear however lacks the boss killing special attack, instead it has this:

A 3 damage burst attack that depends on to be usable, and the ability to hoard via the main attack.

So. By itself the Holy Spear cannot generate the bless it needs, but the big attack can bank up a small stash of that you can release to try and chain together a spear swinging combo, so long as something or someone is generating the tokens in the first place. The initial tokens are the hard bit, because full hand slots block Blessed Blade and Book of Psalms. A Holy Rosary coupled with encounter card management can do the trick (Gloria Goldberg or First Watch for example), Hand of Fate will do it, but it's pricey. My favourite methods are Keep Faith, Spirit of Humanity and Righteous Hunt, if your class access or level isnt good enough, Tempt Fate will do the trick in an absolute pinch.

When set up with teck, the Holy Spear grants access to full rounds of 3 damage super-attacks, something that insofar only limited-use cards like Shrivelling or Lightning Gun grant access to, and Holy Spear blows them out of the water by being a desirable 2 damage weapon in of itself. Once you add in all the other support for doing damage, cards like Enchant Weapon or Vicious Blow, you really will start dancing through enemies.

Note that Sister Mary with her roundly bless token has the best chance at enabling the spear without too much trouble, even in a 4 player game the spears's bank ability and her native generation should let her pull off 3 damage attacks once in every three rounds in multiplayer, or more often if she adds more support.

Outside of Mary, Zoey Samaras and Tommy Muldoon can muster a lot of power with the Holy Spear, by merit of having access to Keep Faith and other cards.

A good example of tech that you can splash outside the archetype, also a card that's uniquely GRRREAT at hard and expert, but a little "meh" at standard.

In normal / easy, the bag is tough, but not horrible, it doesnt take too much to cover for the vast majority of tokens in there to guarantee a "success barring ". For this circumstance, the hoops you jump through to execute a Justify the Means are just a little bit too hard by themselves. Dumping 3+ in the bag to deliver a single Pilfer or Backstab is just a bit steep.

In harder difficulty, where the bag is on average 1 or 2 higher difficulty than standard, paying or committing your way to a successful test routinely becomes a roundly drain, a difficulty like 3 fight/shroud requires something like an 8 for your skill value to be "guaranteed", and an autofail is just backbreaking. You'll gladly take the tokens if that means your key skill is delivered in tense circumstances.

As a side note. This card is obviously best if you have some high-value tests to pass, a Pilfer, Sawed-Off Shotgun, these sorts of things that do a LOT of work in singular tests.

Mechanically, do remember that "automatically succeed" means that the test difficulty is "0", so a "beat by" attempt still needs to beat 0 by the required amount, and the card may be committed to any test, including a friends's.

I think Jacqueline is an enjoyably straightforward character. Her limited card selection isn't that bad since most of the spellcasting decks I make are very heavy on Mystic cards anyways, and having the 3 for her intellect is the best secondary statistic for a Mystic.

I ran a mathematical evaluation of her special ability (arbitrarily assuming the value of tokens in the bag was +1, +1, 0, 0, -1, -1, -2, -2, -2, -3, -3, -4, -4, -5, auto-fail), and how it compares to just having a flat skill bonus:

1. If the check is beyond her skill level completely, obviously her power is useless and you would be better off with a real skill bonus.
2. If the test is doable, but challenging, that is where her power really shines and becomes very useful. Her power never becomes as useful for succeeding as a flat +2 skill bonus, but it gets close (and it could be better if your goal is to avoid drawing a specific chaos token at all costs).
3. When the test difficulty drops to the point where it would be quite easy without her power, with only a few tokens in the bag that can fail, her power starts to become less useful. If the only way you could fail normally is by drawing the tentacles token, her power is barely useful at all. There are likely to be token distributions which cause her power to actually increase the chance of failure, but that did not happen with my sample token bag (her power was still a slight net positive, the triple chance of drawing the auto-fail was fully compensated by the excellent probability of succeeding even if she does).
4. When the test becomes even easier, her power then starts to become useful again. It is possible for Jacqueline to reach a point where she is so skilled that there is zero chance of failure, something which no fixed skill bonus can ever achieve.

There are two main benefits of note with the Backpack upgrade.

The first and 'lesser' benefit is the cost reduction, and even that isn't insubstantial. Going from 2 cost to 1 cost is only 1 resource saved, but it makes a huge deal for characters who want to set up on turn 1. Having 4 Resources to work with instead of 3 means you have that little extra wiggle room to do something like play both Lockpicks and Switchblade, or set up two Hawk-Eye Folding Camera in one turn. It also makes the Backpack a much more attractive option for those who plan on cycling through their deck by finding and using another Backpack - 2 resources for a deep search is a much lighter cost than 4 resources, and those 3 resources remaining can help you get out one more play. It even serves as a reasonable card to draw when you're running low on resources - since you'll usually have your upkeep resource to use, and if nothing else, this will help thin your deck down afterwards.

The second and more notable benefit is that you're now able to search through 12 cards of your deck. At the start of the game, that means you're dipping through about half your deck, which is a very effective way of finding something useful. Even Prepared for the Worst only digs through 9 cards, and search through what's often a smaller subset of Items. This massively improves the reliability of the action. And, while it won't quite be as available as using Stick to the Plan for PftW, this has the potential of landing a fairly reliable Ever Vigilant. This becomes a tempting option rather than trying to buy a second copy of a high-XP card. Even before that point, this can boost reliability when only using 5 or 6 other item cards total, allowing for use at much lighter item counts than the base version.

Digging deep also means that you end up with addition synergy on Research cards. Effects like Astounding Revelation and Surprising Find suddenly become much reliable. With the recent Taboo of Mr. "Rook", the cost of repeatedly searching cards becomes higher, and this can be a reasonable substitute or convenient earlier step. It also has the advantage of using a common tag, meaning you aren't forced into inconvenient build plans in order to trigger them. It's not enough to trigger every Research card on its own, but it's something that can easily be slotted in when you're already using them.

And since I'm talking about Research cards, I'd be remiss to not mention the other obvious Seeker synergy, Segment of Onyx. If you're playing with someone who digs for those segments and manages to use up Pendant of the Queen, the segments all go back to your deck. And guess what can now dig through a 12-card deck and potentially throw out three of them for a single action, as long as you can afford the cost.

To summarize, in common circumstances, the low XP cost and low barrier to use makes this an incredible piece of added reliability. Many non-Caster characters will tend to have at least a handful of items that they want, and many of them also lack anything important occupying their body slot. If you value reliability over power, this is worth a look - and as campaigns go on, that can definitely be the case.