Generally, I would rate this card a bit weaker than Roland's .38 Special (at least until you have enough XP to be toting a Lightning Gun with some Extra Ammunition). That said, this card has great synergy with Roland's ability as it's fairly common, even with careful planning, to end up needing to kill an enemy on a location with no clues. Since this is a fast action, it doesn't provoke attacks of opportunity and can simply be thrown down right before the finishing attack, and not waste a Roland ability trigger on a clue-less location.

It also is the only investigator card to date that allows a clue from the token bank to be added to the total - this can be significant if the investigators end up 1 clue away from success and would otherwise need to travel to another location to obtain the last clue. The flexibility of being able to alternatively simply discover a clue as an effectively upgraded version of Working a Hunch ensures it isn't a dead draw on scenarios where you need to remove clues from a location rather than accumulate total clues (a common occurrence in the Carcosa cycle).

As a cute bonus, as an Insight it can be copied by other investigators who are using Eidetic Memory, though because it removes itself from the game it will be very difficult to actually use it very many more times by this method.

When playing Roland in an 8-scenario campaign, I'd always choose this card paired with The Dirge of Reason over the standard cards. Alternatively, since both this card and The Dirge of Reason have synergy with Roland's .38 Special AND with Cover Up, playing all four at once is also probably viable if you can tolerate the slight increase in deck size. Cover up is much less threatening if you pair it with cards that place clues on your location, since the real issue with Cover up is not so much the actions required to gather the clues as it is the possible lack of clues to gather, or the fact that they might be in distant or inaccessible spots. See also Dr. William T. Maleson and Forewarned for other cards whose clue-dropping can help Roland get rid of Cover Up.

Pretty weak card, still useful for a very specific purpose. And it's actually pretty flexible for that purpose!

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When you play a dedicated combat guardian, like a Mark Harrigan or William Yorick, you stick close to your clue specialists, you stick around picking up easy clues or beating down trouble that you or they find. This card helps you serve this role of tight-formation protector.

The trick to this card is that it works against voluntarily suffered attacks as well as enemy-round ones, this means, for example, that if you stick within one location of your buddy, if they draw an enemy, they can spend one action to move to your location, you intercept the attack of opportunity, and they carry on hoovering clues. If you're at the same location as an ally who's just drawn an enemy from the encounter deck that ally can just carry on as if nothing happened and keep digging for clues, you will intercept the attack anyway!

In other words, you need to not think of this card as a way for you to engage enemies and deal them damage, obviously this card does that job terribly! You need to think of this as a Fast auto-evade for your friends, who while you have this card in hand are able to do their jobs uninterrupted.

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William Yorick likes this card because he has a test-less card package that can deal respectable damage without risking the luck of the bag. This involves the use of cards like Guard Dog, Lantern, Mano a Mano and/or Beat Cop.

Mark Harrigan specializes in killing threats and mitigating damage, it's easier to heal oneself than others and this card lets your friends drop off a target to spend all that Ammo on along with a bit of damage to heal.

I can't see other characters having the sheer staying power to support this card, Zoey Samaras can bear with it since she's one of the toughest characters in the game thanks to her resistance to horror via her great but she may find it hard to find space for this card in-between her tech cards.

Having played Daisy quite a bit now, I can say that I don't care much for this card. Usually as Daisy, you only need one useful tome out (Typically Old Book of Lore or Encyclopedia). Once you have the book, your other hand slot should generally stay free in anticipation of drawing The Necronomicon.

The action and resources spent playing this out do nothing to directly help the investigators win, and often won't do anything even as the game drags on when either you don't need or can't play the other books, such as Medical Texts or even Book of Shadows, both of which are situational to begin with.

If your build really relies on having this many tomes out at once, then you'll be stuck waiting for this card to appear. Unlike your Tomes, this can't be tutored for by Research Librarian.

My take: if you play Daisy, assume you have only one hand slot. This isn't a big deal as your best killing tools, such as the acidic Strange Solution or "I've got a plan!", or even evasion tools such as Archaic Glyphs don't require a hand slot. You don't really need Magnifying Glass or Flashlight, nice as they are, when you can use Old Book of Lore to draw stat boosters or Encyclopedia to get a flat +2 for the entire turn.

Daisy's Tote Bag is best saved to commit to a skill test. Seekers simply don't have the time to durdle around with a potentially-meaningful hand slot increase when you can just deckbuild around it from the start.

Cherished Keepsake - the Horror equivalent of Leather Coat. Really, there can be few pleasures in life like William Yorick recycling this for the sixth time in a scenario. Between it and Leather coat, he can tank horror and damage like nobody else.

Let's consider it's benefits. It's free - so slap it into your discard pile early so you've a nice target to fetch with Yorick's ability. It's got a nice icon to help. Commit this to tests early and often! It soaks 2 horror. For him, I think this is an improved Holy Rosary.

A lovely little horror soak. The only downer is that we're seeing good Accessory slot cards appear, and this might compete with Police Badge for him.

Leaving Yorick aside, this is, like Leather coat, a lot less spectacular. Being Accessory slotted is a problem for Agnes and (ironically) Wendy, who both want theirs free. I don't think any of the Dunwich investigators want to use this for their splash cards. It's maybe suitable for a "Ashcan" Pete build; he's got quite a low sanity himself, and being free it's Dark Horse friendly.

But for all that the card mentions Wendy, and has some of the most touching card text, really, this one is for Will.

just a heads up to players looking for advantages in Path to Carcosa. You spend a lot of scenarios with just the and a single other type of special negative token in the chaos back.
In other words, defiance has just two targets, the three and the two extra token, all of a sudden this card is turning three draws into 0's or 2 draws into 0's and ignoring whatever else they may do to you. Combo with Jim Culver and now you have just one target and your deck now has a total of 5 additional 0's, unparalleled reliability and it benefits every type of test.

This is good for Jim Culver decks because it re-enforces his archetypical ability, reliability.

This is good for other decks because it, at worst, gives them Jims's ability.

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The average Carcosa bag contains 17, 18 or 19 tokens. (Easy+Standard, then Hard or Expert respectively). Now you just need to do some math to understand the value of this card. If we assume that the skull is a -2, ignoring the penalty means that there's now 6x 0's, If you break even on the skill check then you've got a 39% chance to succeed, a jump up from 22%, if you have +1 then it jumps to 50%.

If you continue the math you'll spot an issue however, using this card to turn a -2 beats the purpose when you sport a +2 modifier anyway! In other words, learn your chaos bag and do the math. The most efficient use in my opinion is to play this card to get a +3 modifier and to negate a -4+ token type, for example in Curtain Call when you've got 4+ horror on you. In that exact circumstance a +3 on hard has a 50% chance to succeed, playing Defiance to net that +3 and negating the Skull would get you a 72% success chance.

Now if you do a little more math, you'll discover a flaw, Unexpected Courage does pretty much everything I just mentioned, and is a little more flexible since the extra icon helps succeed whether you draw special tokens or just a really large negative number. This means that defiance isnt strictly better than courage, it does a different thing, it negates all the extra bad effects of the negated token, thus there's no risk of horror or enemy spawns or other negative effects that might be the result of bad token draws.

TL:Dr. Defiance is bad in a vacuum, good when used correctly, sets itself apart from Unexpected Courage by having a somewhat similar base-job but actually has a very different job that swings in usefulness between scenarios. If you would put Unexpected Courage in a deck then give this a consideration, when used well it should give you the same net benefit as Unexpected Courage and then some extra.