I think this is a serious contender for the most overrated and overplayed card in all of Arkham. A lot of people insist that this card is a staple Guardian card that should be played in pretty much every deck that has weapons as it makes your deck more consistent. In reality, I think this card is pretty subpar and should only be ran in very specific decks because it makes your deck less consistent.
"But this card lets you tutor for weapons. How can it make your deck less consistent?" Firstly, tutors in other card games are valuable because you can look at your whole deck, which effectively turns it into a toolbox where you can pick the best card for your current situation. This card only looks at the top 9 cards. In most cases with this card, you do not have a choice which weapon you pick, either because you only get offered one weapon, two copies of the same weapon, or no weapon at all. And unlike card filter effects, this card does not have much flexibility in what it can give you. Cards like Eureka! can be used to get any card in the top 3. Prepared for the Worst though, if you don't need a weapon then there's not much point in using it. Weapons in general are a type of card that largely help with only one thing (killing enemies) and often have pretty big overlap in how useful they are so if you have one weapon the second and third incur diminishing returns. As a result, in most decks this card becomes a lot less useful if you draw it later, which means that you'll usually have to commit it instead. To its credit, the card does have alright icons for a level 0 card, but it's not great icons for a card that you'll be committing a pretty good chunk of the time.
That's not even mentioning perhaps the biggest issue with the consistency of this card: it can whiff. This creates sort of a paradox for this card in that no matter how many weapons you run, this card has consistency problems. If you run a lot of weapons, you have a higher chance of drawing those weapons without the help of this card, thus making this card redundant. If you are running fewer weapons, you increase the chance of whiffing and not getting any weapon at all.
And the thing is that even when the card works properly, it's not even that good especially at level 0. Sure, Machete is probably a better card than .45 Automatic. But is it better if it costed 4 resources and an extra action to play? Probably, but it's a lot closer. The big issue with level 0 decks is that the best level 0 weapons aren't SO much better than the alternatives that I feel like I need to run a card like Prepared for the Worst to more consistently find them. Instead of playing a Prepared for the Worst to find a weapon, you can just play another weapon and skip the possibility of whiffing with it as well as the action and resource you have to burn even if it does hit. MAYBE if you're running a deck with just Runic Axe, it might be worth it to run this card since you don't realistically need and can't even use other weapons. But firstly, I think that is less PFTW being a great card and more that Runic Axe is pretty overpowered, and secondly that's only one type of deck, most everyone else I think you're better off just running more weapons.
"But what about Stick to the Plan?" While putting it on Stick to the Plan does help with the "just run another weapon" problem a bit, it also has another issue where if you find your weapons and don't need to use it you not only are wasting one of your precious 3 slots on Stick to the Plan that you could have put something else on, but you can't even commit it to a test as a fallback plan. And the odds of that happening are actually pretty good.
I think what really sunk the card for me was when I actually looked up the odds of finding cards, both naturally and off PFTW. If you have 4 weapons in your deck, you have about an 85% chance to find a weapon within your first 3 draws if you mulligan 3 cards in your opener. If you fully prioritize weapons with the mulligan, that goes up to about 90%. And once you factor in stuff like Beat Cop, Vicious Blow, and any other sources of damage you might have, you can realistically still stall for a couple turns to find a weapon even if you do hit the very low odds of not finding a weapon at roughly the start of the game. PFTW on Stick to the Plan is really only good in the situations where you whiff on a weapon in your mulligan, while also getting a hit when you play the card your first turn. If you mulligan 3 cards, you have a 25% chance of not finding a weapon. And if you use PFTW immediately after the mulligan, you have a 84% chance of hitting. In total, if you mulligan 3 cards and keep 2, you'll have the best-case PFTW scenario of whiffing on weapons in your opener but finding it off PFTW about 21% of the time. The other 79% you'll either find a weapon normally, or you'll whiff on PFTW, and if you try to aggressively mulligan for weapons that percentage of positive outcomes for PFTW shrinks even more. IMO, if you're running 4 weapons or more, you really don't need PFTW on Stick to the Plan to consistently find weapons, you're better off putting something else on there and maybe throwing another weapon in if you're really that concerned.
What about 3 weapons? On a 3 mulligan, you have a 36% chance of whiffing a weapon and 74% chance of finding one off PFTW. So in total that's about a 27% chance of getting the best case scenario for this card. Better than 4 weapons, but still not great. Meanwhile the odds of finding a weapon normally in the early game are 76% on a 3 mulligan, or 83% on a full mulligan. For 2 weapons, your odds are 50% to whiff a weapon off a 3 mulligan, but only 58% to hit one off PFTW. That's about a 21% chance to get the weapon off PFTW, but you also have a 21% chance of both whiffing on your mulligan and whiffing on your PFTW, which would be catastrophic.
Lastly, a lot of people argue that this weapon is better when you have XP weapons in your deck. I don't really agree. The issue is that in most scenarios, the time that you REALLY need your big guns is near the end of the scenario when a boss monster spawns in, and by that time you'll have a good chance of finding it even if you don't play PFTW or much card draw in general. If your XP weapon is something that has ammo on it, I'd argue that finding it early is actually not a good thing because that means you'll be burning ammo on less threatening enemies so you'll have lest leftover for when the boss shows up. From my experience, it's not THAT important to find your XP weapons early. You'll usually find them eventually by scenario's end, and that's what really matters.
IMO, unless all the other weapons in the game are so poor for your build that they're not worth bothering with, you are generally going to be better off adding more weapons to your deck and mulliganing aggressively for them than you will be adding PFTW to your deck, even if you have it on Stick to the Plan. In most decks, the advantages of having slightly higher quality weapons and being able to mulligan less aggressively is outweighed by the fact that you have to spend an action and a resource to get your weapons off this and that a big chunk of the time you'll find a weapon normally anyway which makes this card a lot less useful.
Overall, I feel like the best situations for this card are either A: when you really only want to run 2 weapons that hyper synergize with your deck, and running more wouldn't really help your deck at all, or B: you have several weapons that you want all out at the same time as they provide different utility, like maybe if you're running Survival Knife or Garrote Wire in addition to your other weapons and don't have good access to card draw otherwise. The issue though is that even in those situations though, I feel like you're better off spending some XP and getting the upgraded Prepared for the Worst instead as it provides a lot of solid upgrades for just 2 XP, and since you probably are going to slap it on Stick to the Plan it's a fairly decent use of 2 XP since you'll use that card every game. And in those situations, I would probably still not bother with the level 0 version since it's much worse when it's not on Stick to the Plan and I'd rather just get the card when I need it instead of running the clunky level 0 version in my deck for the first couple scenarios when it won't be very effective. For every other Guardian deck, I would run more weapons instead if I felt like I wasn't finding them consistently enough as this card is generally either inconsistent or unnecessary depending on how many weapons you're running.
EDIT: One final thing I forgot to mention was that if you are playing with a significantly limited card pool, (such as if you only have a handful of expansions that don't have great weapons and/or you're playing with teammates that also want the same weapons you do and you're forced to share) then the value of this card does go up a bit. If the next best weapon for your deck is something like a .32 Colt and you're a 4 Combat investigator, it might be worth running PFTW instead. But assuming you have access to most of the current card pool, I don't think that running slightly less optimal weapons is a big deal especially with Machete going back to 0 XP.
Another EDIT: I recalculated my statistics assuming that 3 of the cards were missing from the starting deck due to being attached to Stick to the Plan. This makes the statistics even less favorable towards PFTW.
