Including this card in your deck is like ripping off a band-aid.

At first you look at the 5xp cost, and the net effect, the requirements to pull it off, and careful consideration should bring you to the conclusion that Monster Slayer is a bad card to invest in for 5xp.

But.

Personally.

I tried Monster Slayer, gave it a chance rather then going straight for Lightning Gun, a card that has proven to be worth the cost. At the time I had already finished a Talent based build built around Well Prepared. And then I got the second copy one scenario later.

In the final scenario me and my teammate proceeded to draw two big monsters in the same mythos phase, and I, like Superman grabbing a couple of crooks and bonking their heads together, defeated them with just one action each.

So there I sat, the monster hunter with nothing to do anymore, in disbelief over how effective the "bad card" turned out to be.

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So, yes. Including this card in your deck is like ripping off a band-aid. It looks iffy and you really don't wanna do it, then you finally do it in a burst of stress and determination, and then you relax with a sigh of relief because it was'nt nearly as bad as you thought it would be.

I'll just say this, when you have cards like Physical Training(2xp) and Well Prepared to boost your fight stats without weaponry, Monster Slayer becomes a far worthier addition and a relatively good fit into the cost-curve of such a deck.

Rabbits foot is cool in the right circumstance.

• A. Those regular failures you may encounter will at least refund you a little of the lost value in the card draw.

This is a nice side-bonus but this is not actually the thing that makes this card useful.

• B. Rabbit's Foot triggers when you execute a "Look what I found!"/Dumb Luck/Oops! combo.

Again, nice interaction, but you usually only play with "Look what I found!" or at best two of the three cards, setting up just 2-4 (combo dependent) triggers with Rabbit's Foot is'nt a viable plan.

• C. You can try a test with minimal success chance, for example investigating a Shroud 2 location with an of 3, and turn the test into a win/win circumstance.

This here is the real reason why you bring a Rabbit's Foot in a deck. The faction is good at turning near-losses into measurable success, and very good at conserving resources while doing so. Having Rabbit's Foot in play lets you make a call like "I could commit a Perception on this investigate check, or I could bank on drawing a good token and not waste the action since I get a card if I fail". Quite often an character will spend several actions to evade an enemy and not bother committing anything to the tests, again a good circumstance for Rabbit's Foot.

Using Rabbit's Foot in this way basically conserves your actions, now you will spend less actions drawing for cards, you'll get those cards while testing your luck at progressing the scenario. Keep in mind that even if you DO get lucky, net the successful evade / investigate / Parlay / Whatever, Rabbit's Foot is the card that instigated the Win/Win scenario and thus is the card responsible for netting you the successful check. This is why Rabbit's Foot can actually be a fantastic card even if you don't actually trigger the card draw.

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When you put all the elements together:

• A. Rabbit's Foot will net you a few cards per map, due to regular failures.
• B. Rabbit's Foot will net you cards when you use a "Look what I found!" combo.
• C. Rabbit's Foot depending on exact circumstances, Rabbit's Foot will turn your "Card draw" actions into potential bonus Clues/Evades/Whatever the scenario demands.

TL:DR, despite the card text, Rabbit's Foot is actually best used as a card that conserves actions. If all you want is card draw then go check out Pickpocketing, Lucky Cigarette Case or just a neutral skill card.

Premonition reveals the next token you're about to draw from the bag. This lets you custom-rig all your modifiers and actions around it.

Got a big action coming up? Play Premonition and-----

-Revealed a 0? Rather then committing everything you have to ensure success enjoy the free success an save your stuff for the next test. This is actually one of the best-case scenarios for Premonition because it will now have netted you a lot of saved resources.

-Revealed an easy to achieve number like -1, -2? Same as above exept a little more costly. You might as well have played an Unexpected Courage rather then Premonition to succeed on this test (or the other skill card equivalents for the upcoming test). Revealing a token you could have accounted for with minimal expense is actually the worst-case scenario, having a high-base statistic to beat as many of the low numbered tokens as possible will synergize with Premonition.

-Revealed a large number like -4, -5? This is where Premonition gets good again, similarly to how Lucky! lets you bridge the gap and beat these hyper-penalties Premonition it this case lets you tailor your expenses to guarantee success.

-Revealed a special icon? In case of scenario specific icons you will now be able to bypass or defend against the token effects whilst still being able to match the numerical penalty. In some cases you might turn the token into an advantage, for example Agnes Baker attacking with Shrivelling to deal 3 points of damage.

-Revealed a token you cannot beat ( for example)? Knowing that you're about to fail you can waste the action on something trivial, get the token out of the way, and attempt the test with a fresh token.

This all will make Premonition seem really really good, but there is a point against it. Whichever use you get out of it from the above you're always spending the Premonition card and this is why it has such a polarizing "good/bad curve", if you reveal a token that still requires you to spend a little cash or a card to succeed (a -2 or -3) then you'll wind up having over-spent to cover a penalty token that you would probably have tried to cover anyway. This all in a faction that typically struggles with card draw (or has some very specific cards that it needs to see) makes it hard to find space for a luxury event like this one.

Two more points: Premonition is free, so it wont weight down an already expensive Spell heavy deck, and it has rather unimpressive icons. A lack of icons means you'll never-ever play it for the icons, playing it to see the token will be better anyway.

Edit: The more I play this the better it gets. A variety of cards synergize greatly. Say you play this early in a round before using Rite of Seeking, you can avert lost actions by doing a different test first or, ifthe token has a decent bonus, you can just draw some cards/gain cash rather then loose the action. Then there's Defiance and Recall the Future that you can deliberately target the drawn token with. If you want to go all the way then you can try tricks like Hypnotic Gaze and try to further manipulate the bag with Olive McBride and the like.

Cool card. Mathematically similar to Emergency Cache.

You can play Take Heart in three different ways:

A: You find an action that's safe to fail and intentionally fail it, ideally an investigate action or something that wont bite you after failing it, in this case Take Heart comes out exactly one action superior in action economy to Emergency Cache, granting 2 resources + 2 cards for 1 action and 1 card rather than 3 resources for 1 card and 1 action. Note that many survivor builds favor cards over resources.

B: You play it on a "free" test you're content failing, this would most often be a treachery test, for example Rotting Remains. You need to be careful in this case but the "1 card = 2 cards & 2 resources" actionless trade is a very large tempo boost.

C: You play it on a test you intend to fail, in order to trigger a "Look what I found!"/Dumb Luck/Oops!. And here we have the kind of deck you absolutely should take Take Heart in, the kind where you're able to turn failed tests into greatly successful ones.

At this point you might be thinking "So, its a better Emergency Cache?", not quite. The Emergency Cache is always only an action away, minimal effort for a reasonable gain, Take Heart might actually get held up by gameplay circumstance, no "Look what I found!" to combo with, no risk-free actions on the map (perhaps due to risky token effects) and no treacheries that you don't mind failing (Remaining sanity too low, risky effects), maybe even no investigates you can reliably fail (not to mention the occasional accidental success (Damn you +1 token!!).

Regardless, the survivor faction can replace Emergency Cache or even supplement it with this economy option, suddenly the "scrounger" faction has become one of the most economically healthy factions in the game.

Edit: P.S. Play this for 100% chance to draw a positive token and beat any test ; )

This is an extraordinarily good card. It definitely ranks in the top 3 for the Forgotten Age cycle, if not being the very best level 0 card in the cycle. It is good for 3 simple reasons:

A: It plays somewhat similarly to Lucky! in that it lets you play fast and loose with your card and resource commitment to tests. Say for example you can beat a -3 with minimal effort (Agnes Baker Rite of Seeking investigating a Shroud 2 location for example) but there's a -5 in the bag, Live and Learn will help you beat that check with assurity.

B: It protects against tokens and very large negatives (more common in harder modes). Giving you a retry on that test.

C: It recovers lost time and resources! Namely the action spent to attempt that test and whatever charges, ammo, secrets, supplies, whatever you used on the original test. (In the example above, lets say Agnes Baker drew a -5, with Live and Learn she can try that test again, without spending an extra Rite of Seeking charge, and the +2 from Live and Learn will cover against another -5).

All in all, Live and Learn is the card to pick if you play through some key assets or events, the bigger the gun, spell or event, (or if you just got a good pupper) the better Live and Learn is.