This card is absolutely insane.

With level 0 fine clothes on, you pass all of these tests with no commits unless you draw a tentacle and there is no penalty for tentacle draw. That's an extraordinary amount of tempo in one card, potentially even for free, and just shoots Alessandra to the top of the list. Absolutely broken card!

Sure, this is a great card, and it will see a lot of play, but it kind of makes me sad, how it ruins this whole "slot game".

Why bother youself with Familiar Spirit or Book of Shadows if you want more arcane slots? Blessed/cursed will cover a lot of mystic assets, just pack this.

Why bother youself with Bandolier as a guardian for sidearm? Just pack this and Enchanted Blade or Blessed Blade while keeping your hands for a big gun.

You got the idea. Yes, this costs you 3 XP, but for that XP you gain stability, actions and resources that you would spend to "fix" your slots. Not a fun of such game design.

This card is going to be major for pairing with the Fireaxe (which also got an upgraded version this time!). You can dispatch much bigger enemies at ease now - hatchet for the first shot and FA for the second one. Pete can use Duke in a similar fashion.

Agnes, Ashcan, Calvin, Hank, Rita (can evade for the 3rd damage!), Silas, Stella and maybe Willson even are all very good targets for the weapon.

Dynamite Blast is the biggest "noob trap" card in the game, and by that I mean this: Imagine you just bought the game, know very little about it and decide to get started with the Core Campaign. You pick Roland as your Investigator, as naturally Guardians are usually the Investigator that attract greenhorns the most for solo play, and decide to build a deck yourself. You pick cards to build your deck, see Dynamite Blast among the main offensive events, pick it up and try using it... And then realise how botherline useless it is.

Let's talk about the positive: 3 AoE damage that doesn't not require a test to deal is extremely good. If you nail a room of 3 enemies or so, it already pays for itself despite the high resource cost. The cards also gets a discount and makes you immune to attacks of opportunity when played when upgraded

As for the negatives: you provoke attacks of opportunity when played and it can cause friendly fire, these two combine makes it impractical to blow your location up with it, because most of the time it will leave you and your companions in pretty awful conditions, making any kill you score with it a phyrric victory at best

And now let's talk about what actually makes the card nearly useless in my opinion: it is an issue with the card itself, is an issue in how the game is designed, specifically about one aspect of the game: enemy spawning

Enemies in Arkham spawn usually in 2 ways: on top of you, or in an empty location (connecting or otherwise). Sometimes they spawn the furthest location from you, very rarely on a specific location (that is usally reserved to Elites), but the mayority of spawn instruction are usually right in your face or annoyingly close and separated.

That means, it is rare for enemies to clump up in any location beside your own, if all Investigators are in the room: which is NEVER when you want to chuck dynamite. You never get your dream scenario of blowing up 3 Acolytes and their leader with one explosive because they all spawn separately. You never get a chance of annhilating every Ghoul Minion on the board without first exploding alongside them.

This is a perfect example of a card that would be better if it belonged in a different class: Rogues can make much better use of this because at least they can run away from enemies using Elusive or Cat Burglar and then chuck a stick of dynamite in the room just left, but even you run into the issue of having to evacuate your buddies as well to avoid frindly fire. Still "Skids" and Jenny can take it, and Skids can even upgrade it to level 2, if you are considering running it to make up for his average fight.

I do not think Dynamite Blast is a good event: it is not completely useless, but most of the is impractical to properly use in most situations, and the few time where you can get that perfect scenario where you get to blow up 6 enemies without hurting any Investigator means you just failed your job as Guardian by allowing these many enemies to be alive at once.

Beautiful card! I'm one of the guys who said that a card like this should have been in the core set, and would make Rogues in the early days a much better experience for new players. There are many situations where you will have 2 enemies on you, or your friend will have one engaged with them, so this in one action of your evasion saves you a whole turn basically, as you don't have to engage their enemy and then for the third action evade that enemy too! In reality, this is a real powerhouse of a card and is just a pure value, and will probably never whiff. It makes an evader of your group much more efficient. Simple, yet powerful, and will probably see a lot of play. Rita Young can take this too, which is just an icing on the cake!