Oof. What a card. Cripplingly over-specialized, and subpar soak and skill icons to boot. It is unlikely that you would seriously consider this card in a blind run of any campaign, and even on a re-run, you have so many more all-purpose options to deal with the enemies with parley actions.

...That being said, I am what you might call, a maniac who makes it his business to include EVERY card that exists in this game at least once in one deck or another, even the bad ones. And to my surprise, I have found a niche for Fine Clothes, in a Joe Diamond deck no less:

Astute players may realise where I'm coming from in volunterring Joe to include this sub-par card; it turns out that Fine Clothes synergises with exactly two cards in the game right now (as of The Search for Kadath): Persuasion and Interrogate. That's right, injecting parley actions into your deck provides insurance against the dead-draw nature of Fine Clothes in the wrong scenario, providing it with the opportunity to always be useful. Granted Persuasion and Interrogate aren't exactly great cards either, but their badness comes from a hard test to pass, rather than a mediocre effect. In that regard, Fine Clothes elevates them to a decent level of power, and Joe Diamond fits the bill for this combo, due to having both the ability to take both and cards, and a hefty 4 in both attributes, which combined with the reduction of difficulty that Fine Clothes provides, all but ensures the success of the parley tests.

That's not to say this is a good combo by any means. It is however a thought experiment in how to maximise the potential of Fine Clothes, and I don't think it gets better than that for our tuxedo wearing mannequin... save for one last possible combo; Adaptable. With Adaptable, and proper knowledge of the scenarios that you'll be facing, you can elect to include Fine Clothes on the missions where it's actually useful, and swap them out when they won't be. This absolves them of their downside of ultra-specialisation, and a -2 difficulty on tests that may be a major part of a mission can turn a scenario one difficulty down for all intents and purposes. As to which ones you should consider swapping in Fine Clothes for, that would be spoilers, so I leave it to you to imagine when dressing in your Sunday's best would be appropiate.

For the longest time I feel like this card never really hit its full potential because the game designers were afraid of printing something that would be too powerful with Double or Nothing. For example, I don't think it's a coincidence that the only 2-class combination that hasn't been used yet is Rogue/Seeker. The card combined with a Fingerprint Kit and a Deduction allows you to potentially scoop up 8 clues in one action, and with stuff like Higher Education boosting you it's not very difficult to pass the doubled test on any shroud location. Finn Edwards could pull a weaker version of this off, but he had to settle for level 0 Deduction and had to dedicate his limited off-class slots to it and he lacked the card draw that Seekers had. But now that Mandy Thompson exists, you get access to scooping 8 clues a turn and are able to piece that combo together very well due to her amazing card searching.

Additionally for the longest time using Double or Nothing on a big-deal combat attack sounded like a pipe dream because it was generally very difficult for you to be able to boost your combat high enough to be able to safely pass the doubled test, and many of the common Rogue weapons relied on you succeeding by 2 or more to have full effect. Now that Tony and his incredible 5 base combat exists though, that dream is a reality. Daring and Momentum both help as well, meaning that if you really want to go wild, you can throw in an All In to the test and get tons of cards out of the deal as well.

With those investigators and cards being printed, I don't think it's entirely surprising that Double or Nothing got nerfed on the optional Taboo list. Even without those cards, I've always felt like it was pretty good just because of its combo with Quick Thinking and "Watch this!", but now you can do far more than gain 2 actions and net 9 resources with the card. Even at 3 XP, I think the card is definitely worth considering in the right decks.

I like this card for Diana Stanley. It works with both standard weapons and spells that use willpower, and Diana can handle the occasional counterattack with her cancel cards. It is more flexible than the core set cantrip skills, which are their main weakness.

Hi all. I've a questione about this card. I won "Carnevale of horrors" and I add Abbess to my deck but... How can I use her ability? I think she's useful only by committing or absorbing damage... or not? tnx u all

There's a very interesting mathematical analysis around this card in my opinion. At first I considered each combination of possible card splits as all the possibilities this card allows you, but then I noticed that each investigator draws the cards dealt to them one at a time (presumably in mythos phase order), which means you technically also get to choose the order you draw all the cards you deal to yourself. This makes the possibilities explode even further. In other words, the order of the cards matters, and without loss of generality all we have to do is combine all the possible orders of the cards with all the possible choices of who can be assigned cards:

• One investigator. (A). 1 possibility
• Two investigators. (AB, ) or (A, B). 2 orders x 2 assignments = 4 possibilities.
• Three investigators. (ABC, , ) or (AB, C, ) (x2, one for each person) or (A, B, C). 6 orders x 4 assignments = 24 possibilities.
• Four investigators. (ABCD, , , ) or (ABC, D, , ) (x3, one for each person) or (AB, C, D, ) (x3, one for each pair) or (A, B, C, D). 24 orders x 8 assignments = 192 possibilities.

The math is obviously less impressive if you don't particularly care about the order that you draw the treacheries, but it's still really good:

• One investigators. 1 possibility.
• Two investigators. 3 possibilities. (Goes from 2, 2 to 1, 2).
• Three investigators. 13 possibilities. (Goes from 6, 12, 6 to 1, 6, 6).
• Four investigators. 73 possibilities. (Goes from 24, 72, 72, 24 to 1, 12, 36, 24).

Either way you choose to look at it, this card explodes the possibility space at higher counts. The only caveat I'd make with the math here is that it doesn't account for duplicate treacheries which will heavily cut down your options. Even still, at 4 players or even 3 players I think you need to have a very strong reason to not take this card. The main killer in this game is tempo, whether that's not having enough time to do everything before doom runs out, or not having enough actions to deal with all the threats before you become defeated. First Watch, for a ridiculously low cost, can buy you an entire Mythos phase worth of tempo. Daisy won't care about that Rotting Remains, give it to her; let's have Mark draw the ghoul so he can kill it in one shot; let Diana cancel that Frozen in Fear no one wants to deal with, you get the jist.

Who should take it? Anyone with access at 4 players, full stop. I think the card is really that good. Do you like The Gold Pocket Watch? This is kind of like a non-exceptional mini version of that. At 3 it's a bit hazier but still amazing, and I think it's worth making sure you include a copy or two. At any counts below that the card is basically useless and not worth running at all.

If you want some particular investigators:

• Diana Stanley can throw something to cancel onto her.
• Zoey Samaras and Leo Anderson have great statlines to stand up to the encounter deck.
• Mark Harrigan and William Yorick love having more enemies to fight.
• Tony Morgan can use it to throw tests at his friends while taking out a few bounties for himself.

EDIT: A new little exploit has come to light. First Watch replaces your entire Mythos phase. Say in a 4 player game you have 3-1 cards left in the Encounter deck, you only draw those cards and distribute them among 4 players, and that's your entire Mythos phase. So if there were a single card left, and you played First Watch, you effectively cancelled 3 treacheries. Now it's questionable how often you'd be able to do this: it depends on how many non surge cards you have in an encounter deck and whether that number is divisible by 4, plus some effects may mess with the numbers in other ways (eg Stargazing), not to mention scenarios where you get consistent reshuffles of the discard pile. But, if you can pull it off, it's a hell of a play.