Everyday people with flashlights elucidate the darkest night, Mystics exhibit bombastic magical explosions of light!

Blinding Light is more or less a filler spell to protect the caster until the real killer shows up. It's main strength comes from the willpower test against the enemy's evade value. The majority of evil servants have higher combat skills than evade. Advantage of being an event: you can instantly use it. The damage is just a nice bonus.

Drawing one of the special tokens during the skill test is particularly nasty, because you will typically want to do things after you evade without taking Attacks of Opportunity. Usually, you can not save it for your last action, because what are you going to to with your first two? ...

This spell's ideal application would be invocating it as a last action against big monsters that you need to tank and whittle down over the course of several rounds than against small targets.

Pros

• Evade and damage one enemy during one action by a test of will.
• Works against all types, including Massive and Elite.
• Needs no setup and can handle early-game threats.
• You can combo Blinding Light with other cards to maximize it's value: Sneak Attack and Pickpocketing.
• The upgraded version Blinding Light(2) is significantly better.

Cons

• Drawing one of the special tokens can result in a minor tempo loss, even if you do not fail the test, you lose one action.
• High play cost.
• One-time effect only, for emergencies.

Recommendations

• Instantly parley spoiler on the Midnight Masks scenario.

I think this card is really underrated. The 1 damage is helpful, but not hugely relevant as any Mystic has a lot of ways to deal out damage. The true purpose of this card is to be able to evade with an event at level 0. Of course, there are competitors with this card for that exact role, but when you just need to evade something having this as an option is helpful.

While this card has largely been overlooked, this card might be seeing some new life in Jacqueline, who can pretty nimbly avoid the penalty on this card and who also has low base agility.