The Great Depression is a thief deck's dream. When played, players have two choices: discard all non-thief champions (and a deck of all thieves can just choose this option and be completely safe) or discard 1d4 magic items and/or artifacts from play or hand (or 2d4 if a regent is in that player's pool). Note that Rigged Dice (22/MI) isn't very good for use with this card, as a choice is involved and, since each player rolls their own dice, it can affect only one player.

The nastiest part of this card is that the choice MUST be made before any dice are rolled, so you can't wait to see how high the cost is before choosing. Worse yet is that if you choose the magic item and/or artifact choice, and roll higher than the magic items and artifacts you have total, you still must discard the non-thieves (though not the attachments).

It all accounts for a very nasty effect, with the worse effect against decks using regents, especially with the advent of magic item decks using Chernevik (347/4th) to try to protect them (and Chernevik can't be discarded by this card, but still requires the higher discard cost).

For a true thief deck, this is a great card, but otherwise it's nearly worthless. Therefore, you will find it in fun theme decks, but practically no where else.

The best ways to counter this card are the standard event counters or champion event immunity (like Sergei Von Zarovich (98/RL) isn't discarded by Great Depression (53/MI)).