• Q: At which step of the skill test do the bless and curse tokens activate their effects, for the purposes of Sacred Covenant and Paradoxical Covenant? I assume step 4 like other chaos symbols effects. In this case, how does Sacred Covenant work? [Skill Test timing] A: Some effects may cause skill test timing to jump around a bit. In particular, whenever an effect causes you to reveal a new chaos token outside of Step 3 (reveal chaos tokens), it resets the timing back down to step 3. For example, if you were to reveal a token with the effect “+2. Reveal another token,” resolving that effect during step 4 would reset the timing back to step 3. (That way you can go through the standard motions of revealing that token and applying its effects and modifier.) The same is true for bless and curse tokens.

  Let’s say you drew 2 bless tokens and a +1 and wanted to use Sacred Covenant to put the unnecessary bless tokens back in the bag. It would go like this:

  St. 3 — reveal bless token.

  St. 4 — resolve its effect (reset back to step 3 to draw again).

  St. 3 — reveal another bless token.

  St. 4 — resolve its effect.

  St. 3 — reveal +1.

  After St. 3 — trigger Sacred Covenant to put the two bless tokens back in the chaos bag.

  St. 4+ resolve as normal.

My initial analysis of this card wasn't great. Sure, it adds a lot of tokens to the bag, effectively, but I am still not really sold on the power of bless tokens. There are a few things worth noting here though, first, it triggers on a test at any location, as opposed to the other covenants. Second, Diana Stanley. Her ability places things below her as an effect, not a cost, and Sacred Covenant uses the word 'ignore'. This is notable, because though the explicit ruling is not that permanents can't be placed beneath investigators, every ruling thus far has been along the lines of "permanents can't leave play" and cards beneath investigators are not in play. So you should be able to trigger her ability, get the card and resource, and keep your covenant in play. This is silly, if you are doing some bless things. You could even double down on it with Dayana Esperence and Radiant Smite so that you get some good benefits out of the tokens, making a poor woman's Flamethrower.

When playing Sister Mary in a high player count I often got annoyed when somebody else would pull several blesses at a time on a simple test that they would've succeeded on anyway. This prevents that once a round (note that it can activate at ANY location unlike the other covenants!), and being Mary, I also need those blesses to seal, kill, or delete, and if most of them are gone after the mythos phase and you have no bless recharge in hand, it can be infuriating. This 2 xp card might not look powerful but that's only until you see it silently doing work. If your cards consume blesses, you will love this, but if all you want out of blesses is to just make the bag easier, Sacred Covenant would probably be a waste.