The artwork of this card is sooo cool. And here you are an interesting tip: the woman painted on this card is a real ffg employee. Does anyone know any other card with such background? Let's gather collection!
I've been using this card with Daisy Walker rather than with one of the main Mystics which makes this perspective slightly different. The short version is that I really like the card, though I appreciate that it's not awesome.
So let's start with the basics. I think the icons are better for Daisy Walker than they are for the Mystics, particularly the Agility, so that's something. It's also important to point out that it's both fast and so it doesn't cost you an action as well as it costs 0 resources. This means that the only cost to it is the slot is takes up. The ability to play it at pretty much any point in the game regardless of location or turn order really increases the odds you can use it at a good time.
Now for the more complex stuff. There's lots of times you can use this, but the times that provide a good benefit are much fewer. Reacting to things like nasty encounters haven't turned out well for my group. Typically we've drawn a terrible token and so there's little else to do than suck it up - no amount of committing will help. In fact various of the uses of the card are for nought when you draw a bad token - all that happens is you know the inevitable and so either just fail or end up wasting an action.
There are times when you find out how much you need to commit (or not) and those are nice, but they're often pretty niche. On the one hand you might be really likely to fail so there's a question about why you're doing it anyway and typically you'll just find out that up you're going to fail. In another case you might be pretty likely to succeed and so you just confirm that that works too with no real value. The ideal situation is that it's a challenging but not insurmountable test for which you have enough cards to commit but would ideally save them if you can. However, you must consider that you're spending a card to save cards so you'll need to save at least two cards to make it worthwhile. Hmm. that's a pretty niche case in my opinion. I suppose you might find out how much to boost with something like Higher Education though.
So where does this leave us? Well, it really starts to improve when:
When reading the other review here I saw that this perhaps has a lot more use in a Mystic deck than with Daisy Walker. This is because most spells fit two of these criteria. With Daisy Walker you're generally just smashing out clues so it has less use, but we have been using it with Old Hunting Rifle on another investigator nicely. Some uses are random chances - using it essentially unnecessarily before Archaic Glyphs meant I avoided an autofail that would waste a token - and those are nice but not exactly strong. You can get some utility by using it early on as well - ideally before anyone has started their turn - and essentially help plan your turn. If you get something cool you or someone else can do good stuff, but generally you learn "yup you will fail the test" and so plan around that accordingly.
As I said at the beginning, I like this card and it's fun, but in my opinion its use cases are more situational than I at first thought. It's almost useless for encounters as well as for many of the Big Moments that appear in this game. It's most useful things with limited uses such as spells, items and cards, and things you control that may have bad side-effects on certain pulls.
It felt like the community went pretty bonkers over this card when it came out. I've been using it most of the way through Carcosa so here's my thoughts.
It costs a lot of XP and a lot of money, and you'll maybe want two copies to make sure you get actually it at a useful time. You might feel it needs even more support too in the way of cards to add more secrets on to it, so that's even more slots/resources/xp ploughed into it. This adds up to a lot so it better be pretty damn good.
Basically, it's not been as good as I hoped.
Maybe it's the investigator party mix that's the issue, but I'm Daisy Walker which seems like the intended user. Maybe it's that running it in Carcosa isn't so good. Maybe running it with only two investigators is the problem due to not always being at the same place as another investigator. Who knows?
What tends to happen is that first it requires a lot of saving up if I don't have Dr. Milan Christopher out, which is already annoying. Then I get it on the table and then it sits there waiting for a good opportunity that only seldom comes. The reaction to encounters seems great, but then there's lots of reason it's not useful:
The secrets can sit on the card unused for a while. I find similar things can happen with cards like Ward of Protection and Forewarned which I have also been using, where using the card is just as bad as the potential penalty from the encounter, or it's an enemy so you can't use it - these cards are great and powerful but sometimes can wait a long time for the right opportunity. Pnakotic Manuscripts has been falling into the same category for me.
The other ability this card has does have it uses and has been used to good effect, but the times where you would like to use it are often problematic:
Now, it is good when combo'd with risky things like the Old Hunting Rifle. It's great for that stuff for sure; however, we've been managing the campaign pretty fine without using that card for a while now. I haven't tried it with things like Lightning Gun etc., but it's probably less great for them as you get so much combat boost that's it's often not really necessary. From reading around it has potential for those all-or-nothing plays that Rogue decks sometimes have and that's probably got some legs. However, in that use case you're waiting for even more stars to align than just everyday usage which is already a bit problematic so you may only get that working a couple times in the whole campaign.
So yeah, in my opinion based on current plays it's basically a lot more situational than it appears. This doesn't make it terrible, but costing 5XP and 5 resources is a very high price to pay for it and I'm not entirely convinced it's worth it.
PS: not sure if anyone else felt like this, but this card also weirdly makes the game less fun too, which is not something I expected. If you remove key pulls from the bag from big moments in the game you have these super plays that have no risk. As a result they can be less exciting; Arkham is all about that chaos bag.
Interesting that the only review of this card in arkhamdb is so negative. The Bow seems to be great for any investigator with a high base agility and access to rougue cards though. The main points of criticism of the bow are:
With Leo De Luca the load-action drawback is mostly mitigated and even without him the bow is still usable. If you really need to be dealing damage you can use ally searchers like Calling in Favors or Flare to maximise your damage output with Leo, an ally which is always good to have anyways. Finding your self engaged with a 4 or even 5 health enemy doesn't always mean you have to use more than 1 arrow on it because you should also be running some event monster-removal cards (like Sneak Attack, Waylay, Coup de Grâce, etc) to support the bow or in case you don't draw the bow from the beginning of the game. And Hatchet Man is also a thing by the way.
The only true important asset you may not be able to play while using the bow are the Lockpicks. This is only impactful if you are the main or only cluegatherer and there are many clues for you to pick. If these is the case ofcourse you can skip the bow. On the other side, If your team needs you to deal damage or in true solo (where there are fewer clues to pick) investigators like Jenny Barnes, Finn Edwards and even Wendy Adams can easily get away with not using lockpicks because they have many other ways to boost their intellect and get clues like for exmaple Streetwise, Dr. Milan Christopher, St. Hubert's Key (in case of Jenny Barnes), Lola Santiago, "Look what I found!", etc. So in conclusion, the importance of those hand-slots is relativ to the the amount of cluegathring you will be doing and based on that you make the decision to get the bow or not.
The strenghts of the bow on the other hand outweight it's drawbacks.
The fact that rougues and rougish characters like Wendy come with a base agility of 4 and the ease with which they can boost that agility make the bow super effective. Staple cards like Streetwise, Lola Santiago or Peter Sylvestre boost agility and don't even represent an opportunity cost because you will be gettingt them anyways. The new Track Shoes and The Moon • XVIII can further increase your agility menaing you can consistently loose your arrows like Legolas with 9+ agility. Considering this and taking into account how ineffective it is to boost combat with rougue and/or survivor cards (I am looking at you Hired Muscle) means that the bow is for the moment more efficient than the Chicago Typewriter. I personally prefer to shoot 2 times per round with 9-12 skillvalue than shoot 4 times per round but with only 5-6 skillvalue...
This is also important to consider when comparing the bow to other weapons with ammo. With the bow you just drop it and forget about it for the rest of the game. No last bullet anxiety or need to bring expensive support cards like Contraband.
This is very relevant because the new base health of enemies is 3. Been able to oneshot those pesky swarmy 3 health enemies feels good and because they now usually have hunter it's even more fficient than just evading them. Piercing the hearth of those annoying snake-people and 3 health cultist with an arrow is priceless.
Besides the bow only the Old Hunting Rifle and under certain conditions Lupara can deal 3 damage with one shot. I won't discuss here why the bow is superior to these two but limit myself to mention that as a rougue you can get the bow relatively early in the campaign supported by other staple cards that you normally get early. This means you will reach your max. damage output way earlier than guardians, which have to expend allot more XP for their big game weapons and support cards.
Because you are so invested in agility you can always decide to evade instead of attack. Using the bow doesn't prevents you to play an evade heavy strategy with the added benefit that when an enemy that must be killed in order to get some juicy Xp or advance the story appears, you alway have the damage to take him down.
That's it from my side. If you agree/disagree leave a comment.
Great card! As a seeker, it rewards you for doing your job! Fast action is cool and it's a card for team players, you can fund your team on a high-shroud location. You could even replay it with Eidetic Memory I could see it very well in a Minh deck, she's always been a team player. But it's cool for a lot of investigators, Roland for exemple would welcome the extra cash. A great card indeed!