This thing is crazy. It's half of Ice Pick (3)'s reaction four times, except you don't have to discard it and it takes up no hand slots and it's free. I can't stress how important extra damage is on your own terms in this game. Getting extra clues for free is great, but doing the exact right amount of damage to an enemy keeps you from taking damage/horror yourself. Edge of the Earth has a few nasty enemies that care about doing any amount of damage at once, so this card is extremely useful to avoid shuffling in extra Tekeli-li. Oh, and the icons are insane -- if you have access to Well Prepared in this campaign, you take it.

This card is amazingly useful in return to TCU. That campaign is filled with two health foes, but worse, enemies that explode when you kill them in your space. And the finale has foes that spawn way out of your way, and possibly several clues away because of the level’s gimmick. It might be a bit overcosted and it’s definitely situational, but this could be the difference between a safe turn and an agenda advance when you’re at the edge of the universe or just trying to make it through the western Massachusetts train system.

Now that more time has passed, more games have been played, and the wider set of Blurse cards is up for consideration, I believe Tides of Fate has a slightly wider place in decks than first anticipated. It's still a finicky form of generation, and will only work when you have a reasonable amount of both generation and synergy, so it's unlikely to see much use if you're only going one way or the other. It will also be of limited use if you don't have a way to mitigate the aftermath, where things shift back to curses. However, if your entire team is playing into Blurse cards, there are enough powerful effects that can be timed such that you can take advantage of the benefits, and avoid the worse of the aftermath.

Getting into the bag is probably the easy part. There are a few cards that have powerful enough effects to warrant adding the odd curse or two into the deck - Faustian Bargain, Deep Knowledge, Stirring Up Trouble, Promise of Power, Ríastrad, Spirit of Humanity, and Justify the Means are all powerful cards that can be used to add a handful of curses. And, of course, a Blurse-happy team will tend towards plenty of Tempt Fate as well. There are definitely other ways to drop a lot of into the bag, but going that far is more likely to be the realm of full synergy, rather than just generation.

In fact, most bless-focused builds are more than happy to run Keep Faith in order to add blessings, and this is one resource cheaper and does more when there are 3-4 curses in the bag. Even combining this with a single Tempt Fate is comparable to that. To get reasonable value from this card, it's more important to make good use of the window of opportunity you have than to make it convert a lot of curses.

And how do you do that? In practice, I've seen three notable ways Tides of Fate can be used.

1. Power turns. Unsurprisingly, if you're near the end of the game, Tides of Fate is capable of helping to solidify the chaos bag. Some characters won't mind having a few more good blessing pulls, and all of the usual tricks can go with it - Ancient Covenant, Olive McBride, Blessed Blade, more reliable Unrelenting checks while drawing, attempts at setting up Tristan Botley or Jacob Morrison, more ways to avoid problems with Lucky Dice, and so on. This can be useful, but you often need to be lucky enough that I would not consider these alone to be worth adding Tides of Fate for. There are more reliable ways to mitigate the downsides, such as...

2. -Sealing effects. Tokens won't be replaced if they're not in the chaos bag, so you can always seal away the tokens to protect them or prepare them for future use. Favor of the Sun, Holy Spear, Rite of Sanctification, and Shield of Faith are all capable of sealing a bunch of tokens on demand. If you're willing to try riskier maneuvers first, you also have a reasonable chance of catching a few blessings using Nephthys, or with the parallel version of Wendy Adams. Some of these effects are strong enough to use on their own, while weaker ones can also be saved for future use by...

3. -Consuming Effects. These effects are expensive, but they're another way to remove tokens from the bag. Both A Watchful Peace and Hallow have been shown to be strong enough cards to warrant addition to the Taboo List. If your group is running these cards, there's something to be said about having a card which can help enable them. And to a lesser degree, even gaining a shot in the arm for a good Radiant Smite can be a reasonable use of your blessings.

Like most Blurse-focused cards, Tides of Fate won't see use in every deck, and will only be worthwhile if your entire group is buying in to the concept. It's also worth noting that many of the cards that synergize are high-XP cards, so not every group will be able to build towards them. However, groups with high-level access, Father Mateo, or parallel Wendy Adams with Blessing keyword access should give this a look. If the group has enough synergy that two -using cards or a single copy of Hallow will show up, this card can be a great way to clean up the bag and squeeze more value out on top.

""At the FFG design table"" : Well guys, Seekers are the class that we like the best! We win the game by getting clues but sometimes enemies show up and make us waste our precious actions on dealing with them, how can we improve Seekers more? We already decided that in future we will give them highest stat that is needed to win the game by getting clues, best draw, best search, clue manipulation effects with cards like Vantage Point, Gené Beauregard etc., pretty good Willpower so they do not have to worry about threacheries, best movement cards with Shortcut, Pathfinder etc., but we still have to give them something to be even more powerful. How about we give them assets that deal dmg like they are Guardians on cocaine? Let's print some testless dmg cards like Occult Lexicon, Ancient Stone, The Necronomicon. Yes, that will be good!! Also, let's give them this card for start, which will let them fight as Guardians, but also clear clues in the meantime when there are no enemies like we are used to, so our Guardian player can sit at the table and play Pokemon Showdown and not worry about the game at all because we will do it all and i love it when other classes feel useless!!!

Some random worker at FFG : but sir, will that lead to players not having fun as there will strictly be 1 class that is better then all the others? Maybe we will even have to do something with the cards, like invent a tabboo list or something?

""FFG guy"" : Fire that man!!

I'm shocked that the only review for this card is basically a joke.

Strange Solution is a fantastic card for Seekers, perhaps another example of how the designers seem to greatly favor this class of investigators. For the cost of a single test, which still draws you two cards, you gain the ability to upgrade the Strange Solution to a powerful asset that can answer any problem that exists in your team.

I'd like to also note that each of the upgraded Solutions can re-supplied with Emergency Cache (4), although that is a pretty heavy investment for Seekers, who have a LOT of options to spend their XP on.

The level of the identified solutions (4) does prevent any Investigators other than Seekers (and Monterey Jack, the Seeker in disguise) from taking this.