Duke is a good dog. No body is going to kill my Duke! Duke and Guard Dog are friends, and I have two dogs! Don't put any damage on Duke or Guard dog on my watch! They are good doggies. They are very brave. I love Duke!

First some numbers. If you combine this with Chthonian Stone and a reasonable bag, you might have 4 out of 15 tokens that cost a charge, meaning this will last around 26-27 draws on average.

On the plus side, this card provides a shield against the dreaded auto-fail token that no other card matches. You could potentially protect everyone in a 4-person party, no matter where they are located, from auto-fail for 3 full rounds. From that perspective, it seems like a pretty powerful effect.

The problem, and the reason I find this card hard to like, is the extreme cost for each failure you prevent. You are probably going to prevent 1-2 tentacle draws by playing this card, at a cost of an action, 4 resources, and a 5 XP cost card. That could be worth it to cancel tentacle draws at really bad times. But you can’t control which tentacle draws you are preventing; a lot of the time, the auto-fail you are preventing, would have come during an investigate check or some other task with no great penalty for failing other than losing an action (or worse, during a treachery skill check you end up failing anyway). And the benefit of not losing 1-2 actions is tiny compared to the heavy cost of this card. You really need to prevent an auto-fail with a heavy, heavy penalty for failure, in order to justify the cost of this card.

And while no other card quite does what this does, there are other ways to protect against auto-fail that are an awful lot cheaper. Such as Time Warp, for example. And while the comparison isn’t a direct one, it is worth mentioning that Father Mateo’s special power does a better job of stopping really important auto-fails than this card, yet it isn’t even that great of a power.

It seems like the time to use this card, would be when the party is about to perform a series of critical actions, every single one of which absolutely has to succeed, and the party is spending a ton of resources to make sure they all succeed, and needs to guard against the auto-fail. Kind of specialized in my book for a 5 XP card.

After doing some thinking about this card and weighing the options available, my verdict is that I think this card is actually really bad right now due to lack of good options for this card to recur. Even ignoring the XP cost this card costs 2 resources and an action to put into play, it takes up a hand slot, and once it's actually in play you have to spend an action and place a doom to actually use it. Realistically you're probably going to have to activate this card 3+ times to good effect without causing the Agenda to prematurely advance to justify that up-front cost. Without any kind of doom manipulation, that is not really possible in the majority of scenarios as they're usually 3 Agendas long and the final Agenda usually fails the scenario. Yes, you can run doom manipulation with this, but I'm just trying to establish that this card has a very significant cost to it before getting into why the benefits aren't all that good.

This card seems like a natural fit for primary Mystics, but in actuality I feel like it's pretty underwhelming. The biggest problem by far is that the overwhelming majority of Event Spells either have timing restrictions (Such as Ward of Protection) and thus cannot be recurred or they just plain suck. Astral Travel is already not a good card, but on top of that even in the scenarios where it is actually good you usually only want to play it once. Storm of Spirits is not terrible but it's very situational, there probably aren't going to be a ton of scenarios where you want to play this card a bunch of times. Recharge is generally not played because the drawback for failing severe and fairly likely, forcing you to run cards like Eldritch Inspiration to counteract it. Honestly the best card by far is Moonlight Ritual, but I think it says a lot that the best spell for this card is one that removes its downside. Lastly for Mystics there's Drawn to the Flame which is an actually great card so I can't really complain about that one.

Then there's all the Insight cards which are overwhelmingly Seeker cards. To be fair, there are a lot of really good Seeker Insight cards, but the problem is that most of them are Fast play, which means that unless you're playing Daisy and using your Tome action on this card you're spending an action to play a card usually doesn't use one. And I feel like it goes without saying that spending an action to play a card that's balanced around not taking an action is pretty bad. For cards that stick out to me as being worth it there's "I've got a plan!", which is generally a fairly situational card. Generally speaking you're usually better off trying to find cards that allow you to consistently deal with enemies rather than one-shot effects like this. Cryptic Research and both Preposterous Sketches are not too bad. Deciphered Reality is pretty strong in the right situation and legit might even be worth just dealing with the doom. Knowledge is Power is good for activating the tome's effect without having to use an action or place a doom. Logical Reasoning is very situational, but when it's good it's lifesaving. And No Stone Unturned might be legit worth playing without fastplaying it given that getting any card you want is super powerful. However, the majority of the Insight cards that I think are very good are either not good in mystic decks (or are at least not worth spending Jim or Marie's out-of-class slots on them) or cost XP. (Meaning that only Daisy can take them) And for Daisy, if you really want to recur Insight cards you can just play Eidetic Memory. Eidetic Memory doesn't require 2 resources and an action before you can use its effect, doesn't put doom in play, doesn't require you to use one of Daisy's precious hand slots, copies the speed of the card so you can use it on Shortcut and still have full value, and doesn't require you to use Daisy's tome action to make things fast. Sure you can only do it once, but those advantages are so massive that I feel like I'd pick up 2 copies of Eidetic Memory before getting any of this card.

In summary, I feel like this card's upfront cost, lackluster cardpool on most the investigators that can run it, and having to deal with its doom make it hard to justify running. On Marie I'd rather occupy my handslots with Magnifying Glass and Grotesque Statue plus I'd rather have doom on David Renfield as he gives a boost to Marie's most important stat, on Daisy I feel like Eidetic Memory overshadows it, and in everyone else I feel like their cardpool is too weak at the moment to justify running it. That might change later in The Dream Eaters as I anticipate that they'll print a lot more (hopefully good) spell events due to how they synergize with Luke Robinson but for now I feel like this card is too much effort for not an especially large payoff.

I think this card is probably most comparable to Strange Solution. Both require one action to use and some form of test. (Strange Solution has the test built into the card itself, while Ancient Stone requires an investigate action (which is not always a test but usually is)). However, Ancient Stone is much more difficult to use because:

• It requires 1 experience to include into the deck, making the whole upgrading process at least 1 scenario longer.
• You actually want the test to be difficult to get more out of the upgraded versions.

However, if you can pull off the early legwork to get this going, a properly-researched Ancient Stone can be upgraded into some really powerful tools. With a lot of secrets on it, Ancient Stone (Heart of the Elders) can deal a lot of testless damage to monsters, which is amazing in this game. Ancient Stone (Minds In Harmony) is also one of the most efficient ways of healing horror in the game, which makes it a great option for Carolyn Fern (particularly if she has Shrewd Analysis).

There's been some discussion around using Double or Nothing to create an absurdly high skill test. While this is fine, Rogue cards and Seeker cards rarely show up together for the same investigator, so that can take some coordination and it might not be worth the extra effort, since the stars really have to align. However, I have found some success in using 2 copies of Drawing Thin to increase the difficulty by 4, which is still a sizeable amount. Drawing Thin is useable by Minh Thi Phan and Rex Murphy - two investigators that can get a lot of use out of the Ancient Stone - so I think there's good combo potential there. That's to say nothing about how Drawing Thin lets you draw cards before a skill test when you activate it, which means it will be useful even after you use it to boost up the Ancient Stone test number.

Overall, while this is a tough card to play and get set up, I think it is probably worth the investment. I think the new Drawing Thin makes it a lot better, particularly if you are also running Higher Education in non-Taboo scenarios.

When you see this in your opening hand, you can easily expect this to pay off. Will it pay off in a manner that is helpful in the end game depends on how your deck operates. If there is no need for resources for your build late game this card might not be for you.

It makes sense really to take it off when you need it but not really before five or six resources are on it really if you can help it.