I was amazed looking at all the fancy new toys in Hemlock, and decided to try my very own curse deck starring eveyrone's favorite trumpeteer Jim Culver.

When looking at this card, you notice it's a skill, and the only icon it has is . This shows you this card was not meant to committed to any test. huh. Then you read and notice it gives you after you draw a curse. This is a big step up from it's 1XP yellow cousin Fey.

In reality, this card works as a pseudo . Draw a ? Go ahead, pretend it's a +2, just this once. If you're ever in a space where you need to pass an important skill test and you draw a , this card basically makes the test an auto pass (unless that ugly comes up). You can even game the system by drawing one through Favor of the Moon!

Imagine this scenario: You're playing Trish Scarborough and you have your Lockpicks & Lucky Cigarette Case out. You investigate a 4 shroud location. Uh oh! . Then you trigger your Blasphemous Covenant and play your Diabolical Luck and turn that -2 into a +5. Lastly, you draw a -3. Now, instead of failing the test, you're searching the top 6 cards of your deck for your favorite card.

Outside of curse decks, this is a waste of space, but in them, it's fantastic safeguard for unlucky curse tokens.

A very solid failsafe against that I feel is more suitable for Mystics than actual main-class Rogues.

A free Lucky! that you can only use when a curse is revealed is the perfect compliment to the Cursed suite of spells. For acutal Rogues though, False Covenant is more reliable at preventing curses from intervering with you. Even at 0XP there aren't that many good Curse cards for Rogues (while Faustian Bargain is crazy good when you can ignore the consequences, I don't think it's worth 2 deck slots to do), so I'd see this as a good 0XP pick for Parallel Jim, Kōhaku and Dexter.

Also wanted to say this card highlights the distinct thematic directions each class is taking with the curses and I really love it for that - Seekers, the ones who flirt with forbidden knowledge, are symbiotic with curses and decent at both generating and leeching off them; Mystics, the ones who delve too deep, get even bigger payoffs by playing with curses but they have very little mitigation so the curses may turn on them at the most inopportune moment; finally Rogues, the ones who run from trouble, add curses just as a side effect, so they avoid them like the plague and most of their curse "payoff" cards are just them trying to avoid the consequences of their actions like this one.

This is a good card, but not as good as some suggest.

A lot of players favorably compare Diabolical Luck to Fey. It's also sometimes referred to as "cursed Lucky!. Both analogies fall a little short.

Note that the value proposition of Fey is that it returns to hand if a Curse is revealed. If you're using Scrying Mirror, Premonition, Favor of the Moon, or other manipulation tactics though, the reactive benefit of this card is moot while the return to hand advantage of Fey is tremendous.

Meanwhile, while the reactive element of this card makes it valuable as a splash card to sort of toss into a deck that uses Curses, in much the way players toss in Lucky! simply for being good stuff without feeling obligated to build around it, it's worth noting that this card isn't nearly as reactive as Lucky!. You know for sure when you play Lucky! that it's going to pass the test for you, whereas this one can wind up being played to no consequence because you chain into more curses, or into the autofail, or into a token that would have let you pass the test anyway.

In short, this card is very good. It is not strictly better than Fey and is not as good as Lucky!. It definitely relegates Skeptic to bicycle spoke status though.