If I played this card while engaged does it provoke an aoo? What if I use it to deal 1 damage and kill the enemy? What if you play this card, use it to move to a location and discover a clue, but you get engaged by an enemy as soon as you move to the new location? I'm assuming that just the playing of the card itself will provoke an aoo.

How good is Take Heart in 2024? Does it still deserve to be a staple or is it another casualty of the ever-expanding card pool?

Imagine a hypothetical 0-cost event that draws 2 cards and gains 2 resources. That would compare favorably to Emergency Cache (2), and be a solid card at 2 XP or close to an auto-include at 0 XP. So how does the real Take Heart compare to this hypothetical event?

Cons:

• To "play" it as an action you need an available test you can fail, most reliably an investigation.
• You suffer the effects of a failed test, such as Haunted abilities or random chaos token effects.
• Sometimes a +1, , or will accidentally succeed the test and waste the card entirely.

Pros:

• If there's a test you are going to fail anyway (such as a treachery), you can "play" it without spending an action or incurring additional risk.
• It synergizes with other fail-payoff effects like Stella Clark, Rabbit's Foot, and "Look what I found!"
• It synergizes with skill-matters effects like Silas Marsh and True Survivor.

So where does that leave us overall?

If you can reliably fail investigations without horrible consequences, Take Heart is still a very strong card. Baseline, this means an investigator with 2 or less. Any higher and you're having to wait around for higher-shroud locations or roll the dice on dodging 0 tokens. But even with 0-2, any of the following could make it much worse:

• A teammate going into tokens.
• Playing The Circle Undone campaign (just don't do it).
• Particularly punishing failure effects on , , or . This is the hardest one to plan around, but even in the worse cases you're usually only looking at 10-20% chances of meaningful consequence, and if it's a forced test you're not increasing your risk at all.

So those are the factors that could make Take Heart worse. What factors make it better?

• While low is the most reliable way to use it, low defensive stats increase the odds of getting to freeroll it off a treachery. This makes it marginally better for someone with low like Silas Marsh, and much better for someone with low stats across the board like Charlie Kane or Carson Sinclair.
• It's best when soak is your main way to survive troublesome treacheries, compared to passing tests or canceling the cards.
• If you're building around other fail-matters or difficulty increases, it goes from good to amazing.

There are places where Take Heart is obviously great, but consider it the next time you find yourself playing Agnes Baker or "Ashcan" Pete! Maybe you can even find space for it in Zoey Samaras or Daniela Reyes. And Hank Samson is just around the corner...

All the reviews I read on Minh do her little justice. You can look at her ability and frown a bit, but it is not what makes her strong. Her stat line is not perfect, but it is perfectly reasonable - at 4 Will and easy access to +2 from comitting a single symbol she is very resilient to the nastier effects of the mythos deck. Her 2 foot is not stellar, but if she commit a symbol and someone else commits a symbol she is at 6 Agility. Plus her 7/7 health pool is a blessing, since Seeker allies tend to soak horror better.

She is ridiculously strong and among the best Seekers in the game after only 4xp. The reason? Scavenging 2 + Seeker 5. Its an unique combination that gives you the best of red plus the best of yellow. Scavenging in a Survivor deck is all nice, but most Survivors have trouble to pull it off easily out of the box and even when they can survivor has very few items worth scavenging. Darrel can, but he doesn't have access to good cards to scavenge aside from Old Keyring. Minh and Rex are unique in this regard, but Minh does it more consistently from Turn 1 and can play scavenged items without spending an action with Scavenging. Considering that Rex get a clue for free, but has to spend turns playing scavenged items almost evens the clue game all by itself.

Two cards make the core: Scavenging and Schoffner's Catalogue

Shoffner can pay for all of your AND your allies items. And it takes no slot. It's basically a 3 resource card (2 cost, 5 return) that auto-recurs. It is easy to over succeed after you play your seeker items. Even on tough shroud you only need to commit 1 symbol to reliably overshoot the check (on Standard difficulty. On higher difficulties Encyclopedia or Dream Diary should be considered.

Scavenging + ANY item with ? (Rabbit's Foot or Encyclopedia or Hyperphysical Shotcasterfor commit turns her ability into a mini-Darrel. You never actually play these items. You just commit them over and over again.

Scavenging + The Necronomicon. Minh is THE BEST Necronomicon user by none. Overstack on Hand slots, play cheap assets like Magnifying Glass to go over your hand slot and discard necronomicon. Recur, play for free with Schoffner. Trivialize every monster.

Scavenging + Scroll of Secrets. Scroll of Secrets is Gloria Goldberg in the form of 3xp 1cost seeker item, which you recur and play for free with Schoffner's Catalogue

Expensive Seeker assets like Fingerprint Kit and Fingerprint Kit or Grim Memoir are a joke to pay for Minh. With Research Librarian you can tutor either your Schoffner's Catalogue to load on resourced or The Necronomicon start the chain reaction depending on what you get in your starting hand. Put a single copy of Astounding Revelation makes Research Librarian pay for itself.

It comboes very bad with core set mythos card: Dissonant Voices, which prevents you from playing assets and ... events. This is an event, so if you drew Dissonant Voices and this on top of the Hunch deck, it's going to stay and there's nothing you can do about it (*you wound need to drop Dissonant Voices first to be able to play it). On the flip side, chances for that are really low.

Another interesting thing about this card is that in the last scenario of a campaign, you simply don't care about it. You don't need any experience any more.

After reading the other reviews, I found it curious how so many good points were brought up, yet the logical comparisons between Catalogue and Emergency Cache didn't mention the factor of asset-hating treacheries, of which there are quite a few. One secret could be left on the Catalogue to effectively replace a Crypt Chill's "Discard an asset you control" effect with a more palatable "Lose 1 resource". Besides the asset-hating treacheries, one could also consider the asset-loving SU-21 investigator who can devour the Catalogue with the last secret left. Plus, unlike investigators who might have no use for the Catalogue once fully set up with all the items they want, SU-21 always hungers for more cards to eat including items the Catalogue will help pay for.