I'm a little amazed that no one has pointed this out in the other reviews, so hopefully I'm not missing something here: 2x Beloved + 1x Favor of the Sun = 2 auto-succeeds, making this one of the best skill cards in the game for only a 1xp investment 2-card combo. Before anyone says "but Favor of the Sun doesn't actually reveal a bless token", per the "as-if" rules: "Other card abilities or game effects resolved during this duration are also resolved with the altered game state in mind."
Навык
Innate. Blessed.
If a token is revealed during this test, you may remove Beloved from the game to replace that token's effects with the following: "You automatically succeed. (Do not reveal another token. Return this token to the chaos bag after this test ends)."
FAQs
No faqs yet for this card.
Reviews
What was once simply a Toni Morrison novel is now an interesting pick for Silas.
My starting assumption is this: if you’re running a bless heavy deck, you probably have sister Mary.
(Predestination is not gonna fill up the bag unless you’re cycling it with resourceful.)
Now, Silas can give this a shot once a turn, hoping for the token, withdrawing if he doesn’t get it. It’s not the most efficient use of his time, but there’s no action loss involved.
The wild symbol is what makes it truly neat. Let’s say you’re using Olive McBride, a scrying mirror, and/or Jacqueline to look at multiple tokens. (Premonition also works.) You can play this on a teammate to make them automatically pass a check, something that would otherwise cost a lot of XP (or four resources). And with the wild symbol, it can apply to any skill. One of the ridiculously high ones in the circle undone. An evade of a brutal monster in the Yucatán. A sawn-off blast with double or nothing.
Sure, it takes a lot of time, effort, and you can’t do it alone. That’s how you know it’s love.
Edit: Now that we’ve seen the pact of the sun, this card becomes “use ancient covenant another time this turn, but a tad better“.
Did a little math with a few sample bags:
Let's say unexpected courage gives you +25% chance to pass a test (going from say +2 above test to +4 on hard difficulty), and Beloved gives you ~1/2 that for a fight or int test with just its icon. The added benefit of beloved's ability is unfortunately pretty low, generally only about 5%, even with 10 blessing tokens in the bag. So Beloved only gives you +17% chance to pass the test vs UE's +25% chance.
Note that going down to 6 or 7 blessing tokens in the bag doesn't make that big of a difference.
The problem is that if you draw a blessing token in this sweet spot of where we tend to take tests when playing, if you draw a bless token without beloved, you're nearing or generally at "all but autofail" territory.
The value goes up a lot if you aren't likely to succeed at the test, but not by that much unless you are taking tests with <50% chance to succeed. If you're taking the test at +0 before you commit skill cards, the value of Beloved's ability goes up to ~10%, still not as good as UE.
I think the card still has a little value but it's niche. It keeps the bless tokens in the bag and it's a little better than UE for head or foot tests. UE doesn't make it into most of my decks these days anyway though it does in Patrice and Silas.
So +2 to will or dex, +1 to anything else and if you reveal a blessing you don't chain it on and empty the bag of more blessings.
If you have a lot of blessing in the bag then this card is good for saving them, if you don't have blessings then yea its just worse unexpected courage.
Simple, strong but not game breaking.
Previous review was based on wrong rules (my mistake) and edited.
The icon // seems good enough to counter many encounter tests. If you don't believe you'll reveal [bless] during the skill test commiting Beloved, one possible combo is Scrying Mirror. After you reveal bless token, you may commit this card for auto-success.