When you see this card, your mind probably immediately jumps to Guardians. After all, they love their guns and fight boosters. And they tend to have expensive guns, win-win right?

Well... not so fast really. Guardians already have fight pretty darn well covered, and this isn't going to be a better option than most tools they can take to serve as a fight booster, especially at 3 XP. Between your base stats, Tarot Cards, Friendly Local Officers, and Evidence on a stick a guardian can easily sit at a fight value of 6 before their +4 from their Flamethrower comes into play.

Guardians also have expensive weapons, but they tend to play a singular weapon due to both how powerful their 5 xp suite are, their ability to keep it topped off with reload cards they can ensure are sticky and the strength of their tutoring. Guardians with the right mulligan policy can force their big expensive 5 XP weapon on the first two turns. So you really can't view this as a discount card for them.

Charisma to run more of your +fight allies, Reliable, Ace of Swords, heck, even Physical training (4) all kinda low key do what this card does but better? If your looking at this as a chance to really boost one attack with one card (say... you are running Shotgun for some reason and you really want to make that initial hit slam someone), you even have stuff like Enchant Weapon which for most guardians is just better and blows this utterly out of the water for weapon usage.

I am sure a guardian deck is out there that may want to spam niche weapons with huge burst swings and plays lots of armor cards too (Old Shotgun decks with pocket fulls of grenades maybe?) but overall this is just questionable in the guardian pool. Some of the tri-class 'pick a tribe' cards are economy cards, but these 3 assets are not spammable in guardian, so it really comes down to being a booster card in guardian, and guardians just do this better, and while this can stack with them, are you really going to need more than 8 deckslots dedicated to passive boosting?

I would say the most compelling case for this card is in the rogue class, though some survivors may want it as well.

Rogues can get really good at fighting, but struggle for static boosts, especially with how almost every slot they have is highly contested. They are less likely to power upgrade their weapons because while they have good higher end weapons they are less able to force them into their hand than guardians, due to lacking Prep for the worst and Mr. "Someone deserves a raise for figuring out this pun name."

A lot of rogue weapons and strategies reward you for playing more than one weapon over the course of a game, due to their low ammo counts and come into play effects, and while this won't give you discounts with Sleight of Hand it will fit nicely into sleight of hand style decks. After all, if you are running sleight of hand you eventually plan to PLAY that gun you keep flashing. And you often want to 'over-succeed' on rogues, so having a boost can really matter.

And, of course, there is the base stat gap. Even if rogues COULD run as many slotted boosters as guardian, most rogues have fairly low fight values, despite being a fighty class. They make up for it a bit with a lot of fantastic skills and events and draw to fuel those skills, but between their lower weapon bonuses and lower stats it can take a rogue a bit more effort to get to where they are hitting as often as a Guardian, let alone succeeding by whatever.

Survivors can also get some value out of this too. One unexpected candidate for this card is everyone's favorite 1 fight orphan herself, Wendy Adams, is a strangely great candidate for Bruiser, because she can combo this with her famous fireaxe to get much more serious value out of those free resources, or use it to push her attack value up to 9 for a swing.

Every single one of these cards is going to feel different just because the flavors of these tags matters so much, but I think for bruiser the question isn't going to be 'do I like weapons and maybe armor?,' because this doesn't really help those in generic cases that much. Instead, the question is 'Do I need a fight boost but lack access to one in slots I can safely give up, or am I going to be playing 3+ weapons in a game?'

War of the Outer Gods Veteran Gloria Goldberg with True Magick and Sign Magick is the hell of a medium. Use Sixth Sense to gain one or more clues, then activate Dreaded End, draw an additional card from the encounter deck and discard 2 + 1 cards. You can't have more controll over the mythos deck.

That is, what Sign Magick is made for. You may have only one charge for charge spells (which can be refilled with Twila Katherine Price) but you can activate Wither / Wither or Sixth Sense / Sixth Sense without the need of charges.

True Magick is all your spell assets in your hand at the same time for the purpose of activating them. And True Magick is "under your control" for the purpose of Sign Magick.

So keep spells in your hand. You cast from your book. Quite cheap and effective.

A couple useful tricks:

--With Luke Robinson as lead investigator, he can use a Gate Box charge (in the enemy phase, after Dream-Gate's end-of-investigation effect would've passed) to discard a nasty enemy seen with Alyssa

--Peril only applies while resolving an encounter card, so when you see a peril you can confer openly to pre-decide on peril choices without detracting from gameflow the way that trying to pre-decide normally does

This is going to draw a lot of comparisons to the Ornate Bow for obvious reasons. They're two-handed weapons that use alternate stats to attack and have functionally unlimited ammo. The Ornate version is a very specific tool for a very specific style of play; you're spending a serious investment in cash and XP on a weapon that uses two actions to deal heavy damage with one accurate attack.

The Enchanted version is... not that. It's cheaper both in cash and XP, but also all around less useful. You get less bonus to hit, it deals less damage, it takes up more slots, and while you don't have to reload it, it exhausts to attack. And that last part is the real killer.

3 damage is the magic number. Many, many enemies have 3hp or less; 87 enemies have 3hp, compared to only 62 with 2hp. That means for the extra 30% enemies that you'll encounter, one shot will not kill it. And if you're packing a weapon that focuses on or , you almost certainly don't have the to just punch it for that last point of damage. You'll then be relying on a spell to actually kill it (as a mystic), or evading it (as a survivor). And you're filling up 3(!) valuable slots for a weapon that can't seal the deal, leaving survivors with no hands for any other weapons and requiring mystics to dedicate both of their arcane slots to combat spells.

Not only that, it loses out to the Ornate bow on DPS too. If you're fighting a boss and not engaged with it, the Ornate bow can fire, reload, and fire again, for 6 damage in a round; the same as any standard 2 damage weapon. It's awkward, but it works in a pinch. The Enchanted bow does 2 damage per round, full stop. The Ornate bow can benefit from Venturer and other reload abilities, the Enchanted cannot. Multiclass Guardians can't even use Vicious Blow to push it over the 3 damage sweet spot, because you cannot commit skill cards to tests without matching icons.

Okay, so you want to use it anyway, because it's cool. Who can make use of it?

Candidate #1, "Ashcan" Pete. Pete can discard cards to ready other cards, meaning he's the only character that can actually fire the bow twice in a round. 4 damage is sufficient to kill most things, and It also leaves Duke available to investigate, or squeeze in another 2 damage at a slightly lower bonus. A solid option.

Candidate #2, Rita Young. She's a very strong user for the Ornate bow, but if you aren't filling the primary monster hunter role, you might find $4 and 3xp too pricy for a weapon you won't use all that often. Her ability lets you use to squeak in that final point of damage, so you aren't up a creek against 3hp enemies. She can also evade first, use her free move to move to a connecting location, and spend a charge to fire backwards, ignoring Retaliate. Theoretically useful.

Candidate #3, any dedicated monster-hunting mystic that normally runs with Wither. Wither already requires you to double-fist combat spells by virtue of only doing one damage, and the bow slots in nicely at the 2xp median if you don't want to drop 4xp on the upgraded version. It can do an admirable job at stretching Shrivelling charges and is cost-comparable to other options, if you don't care about your hand slots.

Candidate #4, anyone crazy enough to build a character around hunting Aloof enemies. 3 uses of Marksmanship in a single asset that doubles as a weapon is actually pretty economical. Dunwich, Circle Undone and Innsmouth all benefit from being able to snipe aloof enemies, if you don't mind handicapping yourself for the remaining 80% of the campaign.