
When it says “if no such token is revealed, choose one of those tokens and ignore the rest”, does it mean “one of the skull, cultist, tombstone, elder thing, auto fail” or does it mean “one of the 5 revealed” tokens?
When it says “if no such token is revealed, choose one of those tokens and ignore the rest”, does it mean “one of the skull, cultist, tombstone, elder thing, auto fail” or does it mean “one of the 5 revealed” tokens?
I was chatting with someone online who mentioned that they took two copies of this card. That seems wild to me. If you want testless clues as Stella, there's the raven. A copy of charisma is all you need there. You can even recur it with resourceful. But two?
Because a lot of the time, your first action is going to involve you and the enemy you got during the mythos phase. You’re going to want to punch this person, hit them with a fire ax, or a chainsaw, or dodge them so you can go on with whatever else you were doing. Especially if they're alert.
If you want to modulate difficulty with Stella, and that’s perfectly reasonable, drawing thin costs an action but one less XP, and you can use it whenever you want. Flub a track shoes test. Mess up an attack so you can play oops (Which is particularly funny with the chainsaw). Get paid or draw!
One copy is amazing though, because suddenly you are using your old ring of keys to get free clues at three shrouds, automatically hitting rats... getting one failure that leads to two successes. Definitely an early pick with Miss Clark that helps every other card she might want to play.
Now that our pal Stella is around, along with Granny Orne, failing by one becomes even better. If you have the Ankh, or even better, someone else on your team is wearing it so you can keep your rabbits foot, once return you can succeed automatically. Not just some of the time, not just if nobody draws the tentacles, but automatically with an Orne/Ankh combo.
But it’s probably not worth doing an entire side mission for that. So now consider other things you can do when you fail by just a little: use oops, which lets you auto hit, even better if you are using your chainsaw. In that case, deal three damage and get another supply on the chainsaw, or deal four damage. Or use live and learn for a similar effect, resolving a failure for the supply then immediately attacking again without taking another action.
Maybe you’re holding down the fort on clues, you can use look what I found! with your Ankh, to get two clues for two bucks. And if you’re drawing thin, you can make sure you fail the test the first time, get paid for it or draw cards, then pass. Booyah.
I've been messing around with a hyper-draw Sefina Rousseau that uses this and 2x Quantum Flux. So far I'm loving it. I'm also using 2x Pickpocketing to give me even more draw. This means I get to have multiple uses of many key events for getting clues or fighting. To enable the Pickpocketing I start with Stealth then move to Suggestion. Since i'm drawing so many cards its not uncommon to have 2x Pickpocketing. I combo my evades with Double or Nothing, "Watch this!", and Gregory Gry. This often nets me 18 resources.
From here I pay may way into winning with Intel Report, Small Favor and once I have xp Lola Santiago
Each Scroll of Prophecies can enable me to grab 12 cards from my deck. I discard what I don't need right now and it's not much of a downside because of the reshuffle from Quantum Flux
Sefina Rousseau is pretty fast and doesn't need much setup since she is so event heavy. Scroll of Prophecies helps to ensure you're even faster since you can just pick and choose what you need right now from your deck.
I might replace these with All In at some point and grab some Spirit Athame but for now they are doing work.
The existing reviews have already touched on the bonkers combo potential that this has with Double or Nothing. Indeed, it is the core (along with Quick Thinking) of the well known Rogue infinite actions combo. In spite of these cards being tabooed, it is still quite possible to go infinite, it's just easier for it to be disrupted by a . My tip, for those who want to engage in this degeneracy, is to take Swift Reflexes, as it gives you a bit of a buffer zone on this disruption, and Three Aces, which allows you to guarantee the full payout on (usually) every other test. Unfortunately, the resources and cards from Three Aces can't actually be doubled, but they're still good.
I wanted to add a few points on using All In that don't require DoN:
For one thing, All In allows you to basically draw a whole new hand if you want, while cashing in on various skills. This is actually pretty great even without DoN. You could quite easily get +6 or more to the test without actually depleting your hand, or with very minimal net loss of cards. That might even be enough for you to pass a test in some cases, while still profiting handsomely from succeed-by effects. This works best if you have a lot of s in your deck because you're basically replacing generically useful cards with other generically useful cards, while drawing through your deck. Did I mention that any weaknesses you draw get shuffled back into your deck? Yeah, it's really good.
Another point about All In is about its synergy with Ace in the Hole. Ace in the Hole is an extremely powerful card that gives you +3 actions! This can be clutch even if you only draw it once. Those 3 actions can be the difference between being defeated by some treachery and defeating a boss to advance the final act. If you have All In in your deck, along with a few other sources of card-draw, it is not unlikely that you can see Ace in the Hole several times in one scenario. I would even go as far as to say that Winifred Habbamock, with a high-xp deck, (going into Shattered Aeons, for example) that includes both Ace in the Hole and 2 copies of All In, feels completely busted. This is even true without DoN, but with, it's even more insane.
The other side of that synergy is that getting 3 extra actions can help you play or commit any excess cards you have in hand from All In, so that they don't just get discarded. That's generally the only drawback of using All In, IME.
The final point is that, because this card lets you shuffle back weaknesses, if you have a nasty weakness that shuffles itself back into your deck unless there are 5 or fewer cards left in it, All In can help you get through the part of your deck that is most vulnerable to repeated draws of that (perhaps between 5 and 10 cards). I'm not sure how likely you are to be able to actually wait to get to that point, but even without that benefit, this is still a good choice for Sefina, because she runs a lot of events, and so wants to keep her hand full, anyway.