Thanks to "You owe me one!" and Black Market, you can potentially turn anyone into anyone else. Having Norman Withers pick up a copy might be the best way to set up a guaranteed hit on Black Market, or let a teammate know when to play You Owe Me One without table talk. So what is this crazy thing actually good for?

• Access an investigator's stats and ability without having to cope with their weakness

• Combine one investigator's signature card or deck building options with another's abilities.

• Swap in or out of Investigators whose abilities affect set-up, are one-shot, or have notably better value in the late game or early game.

• Theoretically you could just take it as a toolbox card planning to adapt yourself to the needs of specific scenarios. But it's probably not really worth it without a plan.

What am I most excited for?

• Turning Preston Fairmont into anyone who's not Preston Fairmont. You get real stats + a special ability + remove the handicap on normal resource-generation effects. The same "My ability is really a permanent" trick works to bring Lily Chen's disciplines or Luke's Gat Box into any other investigator.

• Turning any mystic into Patrice Hathaway so you can draw 5 cards per turn with a lean deck and access to level 5 purple.

• Turning other Seekers into Norman Withers or Monterey Jack to get their powerful abilities without thier deckbuilding restrictions.

• Turning Sister Mary into Michael McGlen?

• Turning anyone with a lot of healing directly into the second-stage versions of Hank Samson, or turning Hank Samson into someone else to get around his no-healing rule.

According to the Rules Reference (https://arkhamdb.com/rules#Cancel), in the Cancel section, you totally can play Dodge to cancel the incoming attack, and Toe to Toe will still work!

"Any time the effects of an ability are canceled, the ability (apart from its effects) is still regarded as initiated, and any costs have still been paid. The effects of the ability, however, are prevented from initiating and do not resolve."

Um... I have questions :P

1) I feel a very important aspect of the front of the card was omitted from the inclusion list: The name of the investigator!!!

Is this by design? In other words are you meant to still have the name of you original character, preventing unique cards and unique weaknesses from breaking or do you now have another name such that a whole lot of unique cards no longer work (Sefinas Painted world and her weakness for example would both be unable to find any card beneath Sefina, if you now have another name and therefore there is no Sefina. Luke Robinson can not enter the dream gate if his name chances etc etc).

If you do not change name there is a whole plethora of investigators that reference themselves in the abilities on the front of the card, so those would stop working if you retain your old name.

Both switching name and not switching names creates many strange and broken interactions :P

2) What happens if a character capable of putting investigator cards under itself (like Diana or Sefina) uses this to turn into Amanda Sharp? Amandas ability is not worded with multiple cards in mind so you would have to do a bunch of guessing how this works out.

Lola Hayes is the very worst investigator to put this card in. Change my mind.

To clarify this discussion, I’m going to make a distinction between the Investigator you start the game as (the Base investigator) and the investigator you Transfigure into mid-scenario (the Landing investigator). My comments all have to do with Lola as the Base investigator, and apply to both pre- and post-taboo Lola.

With that out of the way, let's get to why Lola is the game’s worst possible Base investigator. There are three clear drawbacks to Lola as a Base:

1: She can’t take level 4-5 cards. Sure, you can do a lot with level 0-3 cards, but if we’re going to be giving up high level cards I would expect to get something pretty great in return and Lola has very little to offer in exchange.

2: Lola’s larger-than average decksize means she’s less likely to draw Transfiguration in her opening hand. Also her limited ability to combine draw effects from multiple classes hinders her ability to dig through her deck quickly if she doesn’t draw it early.

3: Her weakness (Crisis of Identity) can discard your cards before you even get to play them. Crisis discards cards from the top of your deck as well as your hand and/or play area, so there is nowhere a card is totally safe from being trashed by Crisis. The worst case is that Transfiguration gets discarded before you can play it, but even after you’ve Transfigured, Crisis might discard whatever cards you were using Lola to get. On top of all this, Lola also has two copies of Crisis, doubling the chances for things to go wrong.

There are other Base investigators who face some of these drawbacks, but Lola is uniquely situated to face all three drawbacks every scenario. And all of this is on top of the fact that she has a difficult-to-leverage statline and an investigator ability that is all downside. Any combo that can be set up by another Base will always be better set up by that other Base, since that investigator comes with fewer drawbacks and more strengths to lean into.

The only upside to using Lola as a Base is her broad card access. The things she offers that other Base investigators can't is 3+ class combos, or combos of multiple level 3 cards (and not all examples from these categories are unique to Lola). And I cannot think of a combo that fits this criteria that convinces me to risk all the negatives of starting out as Lola.

That said, the number of possible decks available to Lola are nigh unlimited, so I certainly haven’t considered every possible option. If people would like to comment below their best examples of cards that they would put in a Lola + Transfiguration deck I would be interested to hear them. So far, despite lots of chatter on the internet, I have yet to hear a single example of a Lola-specific setup that would make me consider taking on all her negatives.

Hit me with your best Lola + Transfiguration builds. If you post something truly awesome maybe you'll be the one to change Pseudo "Tough Crowd" Nymh's mind!

Until then, I stand by my opinion that Lola is simply the worst possible investigator to take Transfiguration.

George Barnaby's new best friend, alongside Mr. Lawrence Carlisle! After some deck-testing, I found the influx of cards compounded with the increased maximum hand size to be a great boon for Mr. Barnaby, who is often grappling with being low on cards, both in hand and underneath him, due to his high turnover rate. Did you draw Cast Adrift at an unfortunate time? Fret not, you can hang onto two of the essentials in your hand thanks to this lovely companion!