I saw a lot of people saying Tempt Fate is a free cantrip since the Bless and Curse tokens just cancel out each other, but I have a feeling this is not exactly the case. Let's look at the numbers.

Standard The Gathering, as -1, as +1 (probabilities from www.arkhambagcalculator.net):

At -1 / +0 / +1 / +2 / +3 / +4 above test difficulty, the probabilities to succeed are 13% / 25% / 63% / 81% / 88% / 94%.

With 3 Bless and 3 Curse, those probabilities shift to 17% / 29% / 59% / 76% / 85% / 92%, i.e. a change of +4% / +4% / -4% / -5% / -3% / -2%.

Given that it's likely that you do way more tests at +1 or above than at +0 or below, I would say the net impact of the 3 Bless + 3 Curse added is slightly negative.

Whether this is worthwhile for the deck thinning effect or not is debatable, but it is not exactly free.

I'm a little surprised that discussion of this card so far has been focused on two issues that seem to me secondary.

1) How bless and curse tokens change your odds of passing checks. 2) The advantages of deck-thinning.

The main reason to play this card, in my view, is because you're going for a build that exploits either bless or curse tokens to achieve other, card-based effects. And if you are, it's wonderful! Here are some nice combos that you can pull off with current and upcoming cards:

Bless deck:

1) Rite of Sanctification: If you happen to have both the Rite and Tempt Fate in your opening hand, you can immediately seal three Bless tokens on the Rite for a total savings of six resources over time. Not bad! If the combo emerges later in the game, it's less valuable, but still likely to be helpful.

2) Radiant Smite: If you have Tempt and Smite in your hand at the same time, you can drop the Tempt to make an absolutely bonkers attack with +3 Will and 4 damage.

3) Ward of Radiance: Unfortunately, I don't think you can use the player window in the Mythos phase to draw your card, dump bless tokens in the bag with Tempt, and then cancel with the Ward. BUT if you have the Ward and Tempt in hand heading into a Mythos phase and think you might want to cancel what you draw, you can increase your odds of doing so by plumping the bag.

4) Beloved: If you desperately need to pass a check but lack the skill value, you can increase your odds of an auto-success by dumping some bless tokens in the bag before you draw (heck, even if you draw a curse token, your second pull could be a bless).

5) Ancient Covenant: Once a turn, bless tokens are pretty much auto-successes. They therefore become MUCH more valuable, and worth the 3 curse tokens.

Curse Deck: As a general rule, curse decks love this card even more than bless decks do. Bless decks are willing to deal with the three curse tokens in order to achieve some other benefit, but if cursing is your jam, it's not like you HATE having bless tokens in the bag as well. Tempt Fate simply becomes a win-win!

1) Blasphemous Covenant: Tempt Fate works great with this card. Just play Tempt Fate as soon as you draw it, and feel the math of the bag bend in your advantage...

2) Skeptic: This seems like a weak card to me, especially at 1xp, but if you happen to be running it, Tempt Fate does make it mathematically more advantageous.

3) Eye of Chaos: Once again, the bless tokens help you pass checks; the curse tokens get you clues. If you're into ocular entropy, you're happy about all SIX of the tokens that Tempt puts in your bag.

4) Gaze of Ouraxsh: I have no idea whether this card is good or not, but I do know that the cursier the bag, the better it gets!

5) Cryptic Grimoire: Man, this thing seems hard to translate, even with a couple tempts in your deck. But the tempts will certainly help.

Summary: To me, it's kind of an academic question whether this card is good or bad in a deck that has nothing else to do with blessing and cursing. Clearly, it's a FANTASTIC card, probably even an auto-include, in decks that are using bless and curse tokens to do other things.

This card is much more potent and insidious than it first appears.

The effect of adding 3 [curse] and 3 [bless] to the chaos bag is not why I would consider running Tempt Fate. All that does is to increase the volatility of the chaos bag, unless you have a way to leverage blesses and curses (which I'm sure will be coming out in this cycle - I'm writing this review as of Innsmouth Conspiracy).

The secret effect of this card is that its a 0 resource, fast card (that can be played in any window), that says draw a card. Discounting the bless and curse mechanic for a minute, this is a completely free "cantrip" (or card that replaces itself). So it costs no actions nor resources to play and the only real opportunity cost to use it is to include it in your deck over something else. So lets think about that cost as a benefit.

There is speculation in many card games that such a cost-free cantrip would see play at the highest levels because it makes your deck more consistent. Effectively it can be considered to be "water" because it will always be played straight away and replace itself straight away; it might as well be considered not in your deck for most purposes. This means that you are effectively breaking deck construction rules by packing 2 less cards than your deck size, therefore making it more consistent.

Fortunately Arkham Horror is different to most other card games: card draw for us is not necessarily king, owing to every deck having at least one weakness that it mostly doesn't want to draw into. However, digging deeper that's not really true - most weaknesses can be handled, but you just don't want to draw them at the wrong time. So given that you can control when to play the cantrip, the main reason against making your deck smaller can be ignored with smart play.

Do you run Prepared for the Worst / Tetsuo Mori to get away with running fewer weapons in guardian? Tempt Fate too. Do you use Mr. "Rook" to help find specific cards or to set up a combo? Tempt Fate too.
Do you ever spend experience on cards and want a higher chance of finding your powerful cards each turn? Tempt Fate.

I fully expect this to get hit by the taboo list; such consistency feels like the sort of thing that gets put onto XP cards. I only hope it doesn't set a precedent.

Lets talk about this card, with dummy probabilities. Because numbers are tricky and I think I can explain it simply.

First off, this is a "cantrip", it's a cheap/free card that draws another card. Why is that very good? Most arkham decks have a few cards that you cannot go without, your most important cards, for example a weapon for a fighting , spells. Having a cantrip like Tempt Fate means that when youre sifting through your 30 card deck to try and find those key cards, you're actually sifting through a 28 card deck.

But, it is'nt "free", it comes with the bonus / penalty of and tokens.

Without going into exactly how, / tokens are inversely more powerful depending on how many tokens on a chaos bag net you success or failure. When the chance of success is low, is more powerful, the inverse is true for .

I.E. If you're doing a lot of tests that you know you'll win just barely (most of the time you'll be avoiding to do tests if your chance to beat it are negative!) then curses really hurt you, similarly if you do a lot of tests you know you'll just barely loose, then the blesses will help more then the curses hurt. This effectively means that Tempt Fate hurts consistent characters with good baseline stats, but helps risky characters with a glaring weakspot (Like many folks who find themselves doing tests from low starting points.) Incidentally, this means that strategies can be very helpful to middling characters like Roland Banks, who find themselves throwing repeated Investigate checks at shroud 2 or 3 locations.

To explain it more detailed: You can calculate the most common token draw from a bag pretty easily, many // tokens are net -1's or -2's on standard, and on standard -1's and -2's are common. If you test such a chaos bag with a baseline of +2, and then add blesses, your chance at success increases only by the amount of tokens in the bag that a bless might help with (a -3 or -4), but because those are less common than the opposite, the blesses help less then the negative effect had by a similar number of curses, because there are more tokens that a curse can turn into failure, than there are tokens that a bless can turn into success.

For example: If you have five -0's in a bag, and three -2's (and nothing else), and you're testing from a baseline of +1 over the difficulty, then if you add a bless into the bag, there are 3 tokens where bless + token replaces failure with success, if you added a curse instead, there are 5 tokens where curse + token replaces success with failure. I.E, in this case, adding a curse hurts more then the help gained by adding a bless.

I put this into Harvey Walter's to trigger his investigator ability every turn (its fast and unconditional unlike some other cards). I was playing small hand Harvey but it would work just as well in big hand decks.

A really strong enabler for parallel Wendy Adams when you have your Wendy's Amulet in play.

Play it fast, hope you don't draw your weakness, then play it again fast and shuffle it back into your deck.

Tada 12 tokens.