Confused?

The card text here basically boils down to: Attempt nearly any test you're normally bad at, with a +2 advantage.

4 Difficulty treachery hitting your Silas Marsh? Guts + Rise to the Occasion for a total advantage of +4!

4 Difficulty test for Ashcan? Commit Rise to the Occasion + Perception for a total advantage of +4!

3 Difficulty test for Wendy? Rise to the Occasion + Baseball Bat for a total advantage of +4!

Even if you cut out all those other cards, Rise to the Occasion still lets you attempt tests you're normally bad at with a +2 advantage, this is most important for those forced scenario tests and unique treacheries that just gotta go, I speak off the Locked Door, Frozen in Fear, that kind of stuff.

In my opinion this card is alright by me, and downright great in a Silas Marsh deck.

Combos very nicely with Venturer cards. Venturer is not only a sanity/hp soako but allows you to distribute his 3 supplies/ammo between different assets. Basically, if you have venturer and lightning gun, he pretty much doubles the amount of bullets.

Another great card is Extra Ammunition - straight up + 3 ammo to a Firearm card like this. 2x Venturer + 2x Extra Ammunition, and you have lots and lots of +5 Strength +2 damage attacks. OUCH!

This card is worthwhile in a lean (low average resource cost) Norman Withers deck with Dr. Milan Christopher for resource generation. When played the top of the deck with Norman’s power, you get a net +1 effect (1 resource and 1 action for 3 cards) instead of the normal -1 (1 action, 1 card and 2 resources for 3 cards). When played from your hand, it can also be used to change the top card of the deck to expose a new potential play for Norman’s power. I say lean Norman deck, because with a normal resource curve, the extra cards are overkill in a deck that already has good card draw.

I think three things make this less attractive:

1. It is situational
2. Its effect is small (like emergency cache, +1 net action economy assuming you didn’t need the asset)
3. It costs an XP

The most useful scenario is when you actually benefit from discarding the asset (e.g. David Renfield before the doom harms you), but there are other perfectly good ways to do this (painkillers, forbidden knowledge) that don’t cost XP.

TLDR: Grab this early in Dunwich, grab this early in a group of 3+ players, otherwise stick with Shortcut until perhaps for the final scenario.

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Shortcut is a good card. Shortcut is also a good card. However, these two cards, have different functions.

Shortcut is this magic little boost that "burst" moves you around the map, It does not trigger opportunity attacks and not being an action can have nice interactions with specific cards and circumstances (for example to move an enemy around to play Scene of the Crime, get away from a massive enemy, get away after spending 3 actions to evade, ETC.). There is also a lot to be said about the added burst movement, having all 3 actions to attack/evade an enemy can be important.

Shortcut has all the same mechanics, but an added cost of 1 resource and 2 XP makes it a lot trickier to work into a deck, the cost is very prohibitive. First off, the biggest difference is that Shortcut is a persistent effect, so long as you keep entering the affected location you reap a benefit. In solo you need to play this card with finesse and find the location where you expect to pass by 2+ times, if you cannot then at least save it for that all-important moment where bonus movement is crucial. Its easier in multiplayer since the bonus moves will be used by your friends at least once, even in monodirectional maps like Essex County Express.

In fact Shortcut grows wings in any scenario that has locations you tend to move through routinely and every campaign has a couple such maps, but, I especially recommend Shortcut in Dunwich, 6 of its scenarios have at least one spot that will probably have you passing through 3+ times, sometimes passing through every single round for half the scenario. Also, final scenarios seem to have a way of making you run around a particular location a lot so give extra consideration to Shortcut before a final scenario.

Don't forget to consider your investigator's particular abilities, Roland Banks should never leave home without Shortcut and can give consideration to the upgrade (minimum one copy if you go for Stick to the Plan, which can host Shortcut), so should Ursula Downs, both of these characters really benefit from extra actions. Supporty Daisy Walker and Minh Thi Phan decks should also consider it.

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Although Shortcut has a LOT of power, compared to the un-upgraded version, the new -careful- way of playing it actually removes a lot of its charm, the spontaneous power is gone. The ability to capitalize opportunistically is still there, but now you must weight the opportunity up against ideal positioning and the added cost becomes a "Why did I bother to spend 2 XP on this?!" moment.