I'm in the minority in finding this an underrated card. Some points in its favor are:

• it never runs out of charges, leaving you defenseless

• it lets you conserve charges on other fight spells, defeating 1-health enemies or contributing to odd-health ones

• it doesn't exhaust like Sword Cane

• it's cheap

• it's level 0, so it's playable as a splash card for someone like Pete

• it offers utility on its own. Compare to the various "weaken the enemy" events that are too specific to merit deck space like Anatomical Diagrams, Expose Weakness, Makeshift Trap, or Map the Area

• it fights with instead of . This isn't unusual for mystic spells, but it's really important for characters with low combat such as Norman when faced with a pesky Rat or hell bird. Effectively it's like a weapon that has +2 skill bonus and permits icons to be committed

• great synergy with Sign Magick (3), granting an action to attack with a free "one-two punch" effect

• one great use case is with Jacqueline, who is nearly guaranteed to reduce the enemy's stats. This is a huge boon for landing attacks for the remainder of her turn. Can somewhat improve success against elite enemies.

• also Pete can use this to "soften up" an enemy before spending valuable actions with Duke

In all, it's a niche card to be sure. In many cases you'll want to replace it with Brand of Cthugha (1) or upgrade to the amazing Wither (4). But it is far from a useless "binder fodder" card.

"The most damage" can be 0 damage; meaning an undamaged Manifold enemy can replicate. Also if there is only one damage to distribute you can move that damage onto newly spawned enemy as it goes with the rule "distribute the damage that is on both enemies so that the remaining health on both enemies is as equal as possible".

This is a very rogue card. It's a card asking for you to take a gamble. You're gambling that you see this card in your opening hand (or at least within the first few turns) or waste 8 xp.

From a minmax perspective:

This effectively gives up to +1 card* +1 action** once per round, at the cost of 8xp for a single copy that can't be tutored, 4 resources, 1 card and 1 action.

Considering that a lot of the time you can't actually use this every round, that's expensive as hell in terms of XP. You absolutely need several cards worth playing twice, and the economy to play those cards. Double playing Intel Report costs you 8r for 4 clues, a hefty chunk of change even if you're Preston. A doubled Faustian Bargain or Hot Streak will recoup the costs for only one such doubled play.

In-faction, rogues don't have many strong, cheap events that they can abuse with this, especially if you're playing with Taboo where Black Market and Ace in the Hole are Once Per Round. One of the best card to double be Friends in Low Places with the Swift upgrade, letting you play two different cards each round from your deck. A doubled Sneak Attack/Small Favor/Backstab is useful for the occasional assist kill, but is too situational to recommend building your deck around.

To maximize what you can get out of the card you must look at off-class access. Trish with her access to the very strong low-level seeker events like Burning the Midnight Oil, Extensive Research, Deep Knowledge, Stirring Up Trouble, Shortcut, etc. makes her an excellent candidate. In Survivor, Scrounge for Supplies and Salvage recursion power is worth considering, as is "Look what I found!". Guardian and Mystic pools are, at the time of writing, harder to use, though gems like Dynamite Blast, Stand Together and Drawn to the Flame do exist. If you can get synergy, Call for Backup is very strong to double play.

In my opinion as someone who hates gambling, this card at its best when played as 1) a capstone luxury purchase for an events-based deck with good draw*** and 2) in a support deck built around playing other player's cards with (Black Market and "You owe me one!") - playing Extra Ammunition/Recharge twice for your guardian/mystic, or Soothing Melody twice to heal up to 4 horror/damage, or letting your guardian dig twice with Prepared for the Worst (2), or "borrowing" your seeker's Cryptic Research or No Stone Unturned,

* playing the card again isn't the actually same as drawing it again (not all cards are equal), but it's a close enough comparison

** only if the event wasn't Fast

*** so that you can find Double, Double early

Tabooed or not this card is ridiculous. For the love of God, please change that evade to "non-Elite" enemy. Even then it should be at least 3 XP (Sorry Luke). It's easy to find; it's easy to get in play; it's 3 bonus testless actions.

This is the Return to the Night of the Zealot's replacement for Grasping Hands, and while it won't outright kill you like Grasping Hands will, it will certainly stun you from being able to get set up early. Plus it plays into the rest of the "forcing you to discard cards"/"having no cards in hand" theme that the rest of this Return To campaign has, the entire purpose of which seems to be taking the theme started by Umôrdhoth's Wrath and making it even scarier.

One thing about this card that I find odd is that Grasping Hands makes you perform a test but this makes you perform a test. That means that there aren't any -testing cards in the entire encounter deck for Return to The Gathering, and none in Return to The Devourer Below either if memory serves! (Not counting enemies that you can evade of course.) Return to The Gathering is the scenario I usually play to test my decks out, so I think I will house rule it that this card tests instead of , to help keep as a relevant encounter deck defensive stat when testing my decks. This card only shows up in two scenarios out of the whole game anyway, so it's not like this little change will break a whole campaign.

PS: I know this is a treachery card from a Return To set and therefore not a lot of people will see this review, but I still want to get it out there, lol.