by Antistone
I think you are thinking of the Shop Owner, which is one of the starting contacts and has the effect "As an action, while in the Shop Owner's city, swap 2 City cards from your hand with 1 City card from the Player discard pile." [o]I did not end up using the Shop Owner. A couple of times I considered adding it to the Conference Coordinator to give them an additional thing they could do in the same city, but I don't think it would have helped much since the Politician is limited to once per turn, and I usually had a good card to give away even without the Shop Owner.[/o]The Spy Camera is one of the starting pieces of gear, and it has the effect "As an action, draw the City card matching your current city from the Player discard pile." This lets you spend more total cards per game, which is pretty useful if you are trying to do things that cost a lot of cards. You can also use it as a sort of desynchronized alternative to Share Intel: if someone wants to give you a card, instead of both of you going to that card's city, they can just discard it and then only you need to go to the card's city to pick it up.
It's been my impression in every season of Pandemic Legacy that you can get a pretty big advantage by choosing your upgrades carefully. Unfortunately, this makes it hard to pivot strategies mid-way through the campaign. Also, there is some guesswork and luck involved because you don't know what additional upgrades or rules will come into play later on. In season 0, I had two key contacts that I assigned to aliases exactly one game before something was revealed that would have made me want to place them in different cities than I actually did. (But I still think I made the best play I could with the information I had at the time--they were valuable contacts, and I got to use them across more total games this way than if I had taken a wait-and-see strategy.)
As far as the Clinic Planner, [o]I think they started out building around 5-6 safehouses per game, but gradually declined to about 3-4 per game in the late campaign. This may have been due to having more permanent safehouses already on the board, or perhaps due to various changes that helped neutralize agents more efficiently so that they could focus more on other goals. Remember this was with 3 pawns in the game; if you're playing with 4 then the Clinic Planner will get fewer turns per game and that will probably reduce the numbers.[/o]