I recently ran a flex (cluever-lean) Sefina in a 4-player Carcosa hard runthrough and boy did she rock.

A common Sefina critique is that her stats extremely defensive: Low , means she is bad at both fighting and investigating. I find this criticism overstated:

• There is no shortage of cards that fight or gather clues while using Sefina's actual high stats. Or just cards that fight/cluever without any tests at all.
• Rogues and Mystics have access to plenty of passive / boosts. Standout among them is Moxie, which meshes perfectly with Sefina and makes your important stats whatever you want them to be.

For my Sefina deck, all gamestate-advancing cards were events. While this build is usually inadvisable, it synergizes extremely well with Sefina. Thanks to the massive 13-card opening draw, I never had a scenario with less than 5 events in my opening hand. Even after tucking 5 events into the basement, oops-all-events Sefina still has 3-5 events in hand, meaning she can hit the ground running like no other investigator can, picking up clues immediately with the likes of Intel Report, Drawn to the Flame, or Read the Signs. With card-draw cards (Easy Mark, Lucky Cigarette Case, etc...), Sefina never stops having events to play and never stops contributing to either gathering clues or killing enemies.

This Sefina build has one major downside: your effectiveness at any given moment is determined by which events you have in hand. Having all fight events when there are no enemies or having all clue-events while enemies are swarming can leave Sefina in an awkward spot. Still, this weakness only seriously comes up when several things have gone poorly at once and can be mitigated greatly by taking a good balance of clue/fight/economy events in your deck/basement.

Sefina is an extremely powerful flex investigator that fits well into any team with a designated cluever/goon. While the Seeker/Guardian are getting their assets into play, Sefina immediately starts contributing by scooping up clues and hitting enemies.

Errata/Must-Include cards

• Double, Double gives you an extra effective action each round. Definitely recommend saving XP to pick this up ASAP, even if it means forgoing upgrades in the first few scenarios.
• Crystallizer of Dreams essentially eliminates the need for skill cards, leaving more room for the events Sefina loves so much
• Chuck Fergus' is not an auto-include as his usefulness is impacted by what kinds of events you're using (ie a Sefina with several Mystic events might want to pass on Chuck). But given the right set of events, Sefina can make use of Chuck nearly every turn.
• Hot Streak/Easy Mark/Faustian Bargain. Playing the number of events Sefina wants to is expensive. While you don't need all of these recource cards, you should definitely focus on economy even more than you normally would when building for Sefina

I tried to wrap my hand around this card for a while. This is a pseudo evasion+ attempt that ignores the alert keyword. But...

Who wants this? Alessandra Zorzi? Although saving the action, it's still very meh in itself. Maybe for having an enemy with her for stuff like Grift. Benefitting from the bonus skill value from Dirty Fighting? Trish Scarborough? Can't take it and has too low willpower, anyway. There might be some other obvious investigators who take this early in a campaign as a mid-tier pick, but what I find especially weird is that Patrice Hathaway, who is depicted in the card art, does not benefit from the fail-safe at all!

Then it came to me. Fail-safe...

POV: You are Stella Clark and are utilizing discard shenanigans, benefitting from having cards in your hand. Play this with Drawing Thin, return it to your hand and then simply keep it as fodder for e.g., Cornered, or... Live and Learn to get the evade+ effect and still have the card in your hand for using it again later.

Not sure if that interaction makes the card viable, but I honestly see it more in a fail deck than in a parley deck.

Sounds expensive, but okey-ish, if:

• You have high willpower and/or
• you are wearing Fine Clothes and/or
• you are Alessandra Zorzi and/or
• the enemy has no horror value

until you realize you can use String of Curses as a fail-safe! Granted, it's too inefficient to fail on the test purposely, but the fact that you still get what you wanted to do with playing one more card is pure ASMR to me.

This is pure gold for Alice Luxley.

When I am playing my Joe Luxley deck (yes, he took her name, very progressive and all), I always have to remind my group to leave some clues at my location if they want me to be the flex I claim to be. Because no clue -> no discovering clues -> no happy Alice -> no unhappy enemy.

With this at first sight mid-looking upgrade, my buddies can go through with their plans when I see it turning up at my Hunch deck - any clue from anywhere will suffice for Alice, and this is exactly what it does.

I know this is almost pointless to say, but Armor of Ardennes is even less appealing in the mordern card pool since the launch of Hunter's Armor...

For 3 less xp, you can buy 2 Hunter's Armor with the same resource cost, 2 more sanity soak each, and a whole lot of potential then this thing; for the same 5xp of a single suit of Ardennes, that's 2 pieces of 4/4 soak which occupies an even less contested slot (arcane).

So, yeah, unless this is tabooed to somewhere like 1 or 2 xp, I'm not gonna take it out of my binders...