A popular pick for strongest card in the game. I would certainly agree with that.

Higher Education's ability is exceptionally consistent and powerful. Spending a resource for +2 to a test is a terrific deal. I mean, some people spend two resources and an action to play cards that grant an ability that's half as good as what Higher Education does. Once you have Higher Education in play, with a bit of planning you can get great odds on any Will test or Intellect test you want, even on Expert. That's awesome. And then there's the consistency of this card. Higher Education is transformative every time it's in play, and it will always be in play after you buy it. The rules literally do not allow it to leave play!

The two stats boosted are usually the two most useful for Seekers. Being able to turn every resource in your pool into a quasi-Guts offers excellent protection from the encounter deck's Will treacheries. That's not even the best use of this card, though, which is to use the Intellect boost to easily crack even the most difficult locations.

There is the hand size requirement. But this is not too hard to work around. After all, you start the game with the condition met, and it's not too onerous to average playing around one card a turn and keep your hand around five cards. It helps that once you have Higher Education you don't really need a whole lot of other assets to go with it. (Though Dr. Milan Christopher and the upgraded Magnifying Glass are nice bonuses if you draw them.) You can also find plenty of card draw in the rest of the Seeker card pool, if you feel it's needed. Even if you don't radically adjust your playing style to fit Higher Education and only find it active, say, half the time, it would still easily be worth 3 XP.

This card is at its most disgustingly broken with Rex, because it allows Rex to pretty easily trigger his investigator special ability even on Expert. Once Rex starts triggering that multiple times a turn, the investigators can advance through the Act deck way faster than the designers possibly could have intended.

It's also very good for Daisy. Lots of Daisy decks try to run Mystic spells like Shrivelling. This used to be pretty weak on high levels because of Daisy's low base Will, but Higher Education single-handedly makes these Daisy builds good. Daisy's free uses of Old Book of Lore are also nice, since they make the hand size requirement trivial for her.

Minh is a much more awkward fit with Higher Education. Her playing style typically involves committing lots and lots of cards, which quickly empties out her hand. And she doesn't have Rex's ability or Daisy's spells that make Higher Education all the more rewarding. Even so, she should still probably buy Higher Education sooner or later. She doesn't have to use it that many times per game for it to be a good use of 3 XP. (Minh could even run Dark Horse, which goes well with it.)

In all, I'd say no card is currently more powerful or game-warping than this one. It could cost 10 XP I would still recommend buying it, at least for Rex and Daisy. At 3 XP, it's a steal.

An absolutely excellent card and powerful in a variety of classes and decks.

What have survivors, historically, lacked since the launch of the Arkham Horror lcg? Whether its Wendy with a Fire Axe or Backstab or Pete with Duke and Fire Axe or Shrivelling, Survivors can bring the pain at choice moments, but loose momentum as the threats escalate and the bosses come out. Yorrick though probably breaks this mould now that he is bringing the upgraded .45 Automatic to the table.

In other words, survivors tend to lack reach, Fire Axe is only good for one buffed attack per round, event attacks are obviously severely limited in their use and Duke is still just a 4 strength attack. This problem is classically solved through teamplay and trickery and perhaps by playing Will to Survive, but getting two copies of that power card takes time and until now there has been no 0xp equivalent placeholder effect.

So, time to talk about Fight or Flight. Damn is it good, I'm surprised its not a 1 or 2 XP card. Dont be greedy with this card, if you can play Fight or Flight for a +2 bonus on every attack in a round it's still a great bonus! If you can net +3 or +4 for two or three attacks then that's even more amazing. Use the benefit to brute-force a boss or to disentangle a pileup of spawns. Perhaps a bit less effective on Wendy than the other two simply because of her limited reliance on the stat, it's still a useful one-off for her. Zoey Samaras might even find a use for it out of faction.

Edit: A side note, Both Ashcan and Wendy can find a use for this card if the yget it when their Sanity is untouched by discarding it for their special abilities.

Compared to Unexpected Courage, you lose a Wild icon when you commit it to your own test, but you gain a Will icon when you commit it to another investigator's test. This is not really a great deal. One of the big strengths of Unexpected Courage is its great flexibility: it provides a pretty substantial benefit basically no matter what the game situation is. Leadership loses a lot of that. You're giving up 50% of the ability to boost yourself in exchange for the fairly modest upside of one extra Will icon. In the ideal situation, Leadership is a little bit better, but on average Unexpected Courage is going to be more useful.

So I wouldn't run this over Unexpected Courage, even in a high player count game. But of course, Unexpected Courage is a pretty good card, so "slightly worse Unexpected Courage" does not equal unplayable. You could viably run both in a 3 or 4 player game, if you could find the deck space for it. It would probably make the most sense to do so if you were playing alongside a Mystic and/or a second Guardian, as those are the classes that typically need Willpower boosts the most.

For the right investigator, this lineup of cards is fantastic. Getting a lot of cards that wait around until you take some damage is counter-intuitive in many decks, so you can never take more then a couple, three at the very most. This is especially true if you got a nice stash of Sanity to tank through before triggering these cards, but what about the low sanity investigators? Roland, Skids, Lola, Mark, Yorric, Zoey and especially Ashcan can fairly reliably expect to put these cards to good use, relatively early.

At 5 sanity, Roland and Mark can bet on gettign these cards into play quickly, which makes Reckless Assault and Say Your Prayers very good for them.

Reckless Assault because turning horror damage into fight potential is extremely effective (Give Fight or Flight a chance, it's awesome). Say Your Prayers because it's like a bulwark to hide your dwindling sanity reserve behind.

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My favourite investigator to use desperate cards with is "Ashcan" Pete. He has 5 Sanity so he can reach that breakpoint as fast as Roland can, but he has the added safety of Duke to hide behind, and then his repertoire of useful desperation cards is bigger too. Desperate Search links with Duke to become a whopping 8 strength investigate check, or a 6 strength test to follow up the regular Duke test and secure the second clue on a difficult location. Run For Your Life isn't half bad on him either since a 7 value evasion attempt is very nearly guaranteed success against most foes. Also, Ashcan has access to Mystic cards, Rite of Seeking and Shrivelling being obvious targets for Say Your Prayers.

Finally for Ashcan, if the desperate card is burning a hole in your hand, just chuck it at Duke.

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As a final note, I find Desperate cards to be the perfect placeholder for an upgrade, especially if you intend to take some permanents. Gonna get Scrapper or Keen Eye immediately after scenario 1? Well Physical Training or Hard Knocks is probably gonna become a dead draw and who knows if you'll even manage to make use of them in the first scenario anyway? Try some desperation cards instead! My route of choice for "Ashcan" Pete? Scrapper after scenario 1, then replace the desperation cards with Will to Survive.

Just to underline a key point in this weakness's power, as has already been mentioned. This weakness hits you every single game.

Trying to list every possible way a weakness (even this one) can mess with your game is impossible, but all the basic weaknesses share one, essentially the same, game effect , you loose a round (With the notable exception of Amnesia, Paranoia and Overzealous, all of which can cost you a good deal more). The way Indebted differs? Instead of "When drawn, loose a round" it basically reads "You loose the first round each game".

The first round each game is usually where the team sticks together and drops the assets they mulliganed for on the table, indebted slows this down so you're still setting up on round 2, or entering the fray underprepared, Indebted can wind up on itself, especially if you draw a bad starting hand, imagine the scenario where you get all of your support stuff on the opening hand and no main gear, mystic drawing their holy rosary, blinding light and Arcane studies on the opening hand for example but no Shrivelling or Rite of seeking, playing these cards and paying their costs makes actually playing for your main cards that much harder when you finally draw into them.

How to deal with this weakness? Depending on your investigator you might just ignore it, you might spend your first actions getting back the lost resources, you might start tecking out costly cards. The key positive factor about indebted is that it reduces a lot of pressure and add's a little bit of predictability to your deck. Even so, do not make the mistake of underestimating this weakness. Depending on which Investigator you are playing, Hypochondria and Psychosis are still probably easier to shrug off.

TL:DR. Indebted is the most mitigatable weakness, it is unique however in the fact that it must be mitigated every single game (whereas other weaknessess only show up 2 out of 3 scenarios) and that it always hits you in the very first round.