I was excited by this card when I first saw it, but having now finished a campaign as Kate I think it’s only okay-ish. At first glance this card looks like clue acceleration that comes with nifty consolation prizes if you don’t hit the +4 test result for the extra clue, but I quickly realized that I overestimated how often I could force the result I wanted. There were plenty of times I wanted to pick up two clues in a single action (very easy to do with other level 0 cards like Deduction or Fingerprint Kit) but test result just didn’t come out the way I needed.

As it turns out, consistently succeeding by exactly 4 is not easy to manage. Steady-Handed expands the range to 3-5 to get the extra clue and Fine Tuning gives you two attempts per turn, but at this point you’re devoting additional assets (not to mention experience points) to an effect that still isn’t guaranteed to pay out when you need it. It’s worth mentioning that none of these cards are Fast.

With any clue acceleration that relies on Investigate checks you can pull the tentacle and fail, and that’s true of Chemistry Set too, but Chemistry Set has the additional problem that there are lots of other tokens you can pull from the bag that will ensure you get absolutely no benefit from the Chemistry Set at all. The most common way to miss out on a Chemistry Set payout is to pull a token with a larger negative value than you were planning for, but it also feels bad to miss out on the extra clue because you pulled a positive token and got a result that’s too successful to provide a benefit. A levelled up Chemistry Set that exhausts after you pull the token would help avoid a lot of wasted activations and feel-bad moments.

Sure, even when Chemistry Set doesn’t pay out you still get the basic clue from the Investigate test, but that would also be true if I hadn’t spent the action and resources to play Chemistry Set in the first place. Even the tool synergies seem underwhelming, since there are a lot Tools that help you investigate and provide more reliable benefits than the Chemistry Set (such as Lockpicks, Old Keyring, Mariner's Compass, Magnifying Glass, Fingerprint Kit and Ice Pick, to name a few).

To be clear, Chemistry Set paid out cards/resources a few times every scenario I played it, and sometimes even helped me pick up extra clues. It isn’t a terrible card and it does explore interesting new territory for Seeker assets. However, even with multiple support cards in play it often didn't pay out when I needed it to. With the notable exception of Kate and her Science synergy, I think Chemistry Set is more of a novelty than a staple.

The basic or specialist-ized versions seem like they reliably give 3 or more wild icons almost all the time if you do a little planning and jumping through hoops. But Survivors have always been able to get lots of wild icons on 1-2 XP skills and occasionally on 0s. This one is solid but not especially exciting as far as that goes.

Mythos-hardened seems pretty bad outside of extremely niche counterplay situations. I rarely want to spend that much XP just to prevent one copy of one treachery from coming back, let alone limiting myself to a subset of traits and requiring a test and locking up an otherwise good card. "Fool me once..." and The Eye of Truth put this to shame.

Nemesis seems okay as multiplayer support (take elite trait for boss fights) or to enable Exploit Weakness, but I have little to say about it. No, the only really interesting part of the card, IMO, is Always Prepared, which lets you return one of these cards to your hand once per round if you draw the right kind of encounter. In one sense, 5 XP feels like a lot to spend on a card with no action compression at all, just to pass tests. On the other, a lot of decks do run multiple 2-3 XP assets that are mainly for skill boosting and test-passing. If we can actually make this trigger at least every other round, it might be worth while.

One nice thing about Always Prepared is that while Nemesis and Mythos-hardened only trigger if you actually commit Grizzled against the encounter card, Always prepared doesn't require you to be testing against the card at all. You get it back in your hand to do whatever you like with as long as you drew the right type of card. I believe it should even work when you draw weaknesses from your own deck, if the traits match.

This will be especially valuable if you have special incentives to commit cards to tests (Sea Change Harpoon), other uses for cards in hand (Wendy Adams, Cornered, Celaeno Fragments), or a tendency to draw extra encounter cards (Kicking the Hornet's Nest, Drawn to the Flame, Nature of the Beast, Nine of Rods).

I can especially see Patrice Hathaway taking this traited with "monster" and some common treachery traits like terror, hazard, or madness. She'll get one in the discard early and pull it back every time she hits a monster in the encounter deck, draws into her personal weakness, or fishes out a treachery, and she can just throw it into an invetigate or away for vioin money. If she misses she can fish with Drawn to the Flame and Nature of the Beast for more matches. "Ashcan" Pete can do most of the same stuff.

William Yorick can go tell others to "Let me handle this!" or take First Watch to make sure he gets his triggers in. (Calvin Wright also gets some of these options).

It's never going to be as viscerally exciting as firing up a Lightning Gun, Seal of the Elders, or The Black Fan, but I think it has enough value to be worth a shot.

The introduction of Survival Technique in the Hemlock Vale set creates new possibilities for all our old favorite traps, especially this customizable beauty. Survival Technique allows you to return one of your cards attached to a location to you hand each turn, which means that you can relocate these traps and keep them going indefinitely. You will definitely want Simple so you don't want actions re-setting them, and may also want the tripwire or improved timer to cut down on the resource cost of frequent replays, although honestly you will probably move around enough that you rarely need to reset one without moving it anyway.

That 1 cost to redeploy could become negligible anyway if you're running Dark Horse or Madame Labranche or On Your Own or The Fool • 0.

If you manage to find both you can even stack them to give all non-elites a -2 difficulty, and if you make them poisonous you can even deal some damage over time to the elites so the guardian can't say you didn't help at all.

At one point there were FAQ answers floating around implying that Survival Technique would boost basic investigates, which I thought might make it enough of a staple to reshape the playing field. As things stand, the difficulty of finding and playing a 2xp talent and then both copies of your ~level 2 trap is significant enough (none of them have easily tutored for traits) that the juice probably isn't worth the squeeze unless you have a lot of other pieces that interact with it.

NEW (as feedback in comment corrected me, thank you): So, I've been playing this with Kōhaku. Read the Signs will get you a 8 base check. In a 2-shroud location this should give you 3 bless tokens average in Normal mode.

If you add some stat boost (Gabriel Carillo, Holy Rosary, St. Hubert Key...) you can get to 9 or 10 base check. If you fetch a bless token with Tome of the Living Dead you get to a 11-12 base check. You may want to add even a skill to get higher numbers.

This card should always give you 5 bless tokens in the right setup for 0 cost and a slot in your deck (2 if you run 2 copies). It is fun and cheap. Maybe there are more reliable ways to add bless tokens to the chaos bag, but if you plan to have a very high base check in your deck this is worth the slot. Kōhaku can play this (and should, since he is the prime user of Spectral Razor (2) and Read the Signs (2)), Sister Mary can enjoy it since she will gladly run Spectral Razor or Cyclopean Hammer, Lily is more of the same...

OLD (I dind't read well the limitation of 5 bless tokens maximum): So, I've been playing this with Kōhaku. Read the Signs will get you a 8 base check. In a 2-shroud location this should give you 3-4 bless tokens average in Normal mode.

If you add some stat boost (Gabriel Carillo, Holy Rosary, St. Hubert Key...) you can get to 9 or 10 base check. If you fetch a bless token with Tome of the Living Dead you get to a 11-12 base check. You may want to add even a skill to get higher numbers.

I've seen this card giving me 6-8 bless tokens. It is fun. Maybe there are over more reliable ways to add bless tokens to the chaos bag, but if you plan to have a very high base check in your deck this is worth the slot.

A very solid failsafe against that I feel is more suitable for Mystics than actual main-class Rogues.

A free Lucky! that you can only use when a curse is revealed is the perfect compliment to the Cursed suite of spells. For acutal Rogues though, False Covenant is more reliable at preventing curses from intervering with you. Even at 0XP there aren't that many good Curse cards for Rogues (while Faustian Bargain is crazy good when you can ignore the consequences, I don't think it's worth 2 deck slots to do), so I'd see this as a good 0XP pick for Parallel Jim, Kōhaku and Dexter.

Also wanted to say this card highlights the distinct thematic directions each class is taking with the curses and I really love it for that - Seekers, the ones who flirt with forbidden knowledge, are symbiotic with curses and decent at both generating and leeching off them; Mystics, the ones who delve too deep, get even bigger payoffs by playing with curses but they have very little mitigation so the curses may turn on them at the most inopportune moment; finally Rogues, the ones who run from trouble, add curses just as a side effect, so they avoid them like the plague and most of their curse "payoff" cards are just them trying to avoid the consequences of their actions like this one.