Don’t overlook how this card deals damage on an evasion test.

It’s natural to look at a spell card like Blinding Light and intuit that it can just as easily evade as it can kill an Acolyte or a Whippoorwill. But it’s less natural to look at this card and think “alternative way to deal damage with .

Certainly worth consideration for investigators like Wendy, Finn, or Rita.

I want to add that Old Shotgun really shines when used with Prepared for the Worst (attached on Stick to the Plan) to find and play it with 2 ammo. I have had lots of fun using it as one of my primary endgame weapons with parallel Roland (who can play Prepared for the Worst + the gun fast). Since Old Shotgun does not cost any resources, searching for it and playing it is essentially free. I usually stack a Custom Ammunition on it and think of it as a $3 weapon comes with 4 ammo that deals 1-4 damage (4 against monster enemies). Not a bad deal. With Custom Modifications Quicksilver Bullets, it can deal up to 5 damage. Pair the gun with Cleaning Kit and Well-Maintained for further mileage, and you can blow apart any enemy with ease."

This card is amazing in conjunction with Archaic Glyphs!

Going all in on Guiding Stones can clear a whole location's worth of clues in one go but runs the risk of the ol' tentacles. Not any more! In addition, if no tokens are drawn every two icons you add guarantees you another clue.

This is an 8 XP combo requiring a researched asset with limited charges on both. While it's on the upper end of the power curve I don't think it's inappropriate.

This is a niche upgrade. Sure, you get +2 to the things you were testing before (foot/fist/brain), and you can put on book tests (which is great news if you’re Trish), but there are a lot of great cheaper rogue cards. I can see this fitting into Winifred once you pass 30 XP and have all the assets and events you’re looking for. You can spend up to three, which means spending zero is possible, but at that point, you spent 3XP to add a pip to unexpected courage.

In theory, I understand the idea. If you can play this and consistently discard illicit assets that are high value, you can then get them back and play them again. But in order to do that, you need to spend 4 XP, draw and play an exceptional card, have a reliably way of getting that illicit asset out of play, spend 2 resources and another action, and spend the resources/action to play that again? And then do that multiple times to really get value from it? The barrier to getting good use out of this is incredibly high.

It's made worse by the fact that this is in rogue - one of the classes where you can do the same thing and so much more by simply drawing through your deck again. Ace in the Hole, All In, Friends in Low Places, Lucky Cigarette Case, and so on all exist - if you're really relying on getting something illicit twice, you can do so by getting more cards.

And that's assuming that your illicit asset isn't important enough that you're throwing a second copy of it under Underworld Market, which is already a premium way of gaining access to illicit cards - a second copy of any other illicit card is still going to be a resource and action cheaper than trying to use this.

Is there a space for this somewhere? I suppose this could theoretically also go under Underworld Market, so you could do something involving using this, firing off a Gatling Gun at full power repeatedly, getting rid of it somehow, then spending a couple of actions to play it again and again. But making this worthwhile requires one of those 4+ card combos that needs to set you up for the rest of the game, and this just doesn't. I'm not sure I'd use this as 1 XP permanent, never mind a 4 XP, 1 Cost Asset.

This requires so much to do something so theoretically straightforward that you can hear survivor recursion cards laughing at all of the effort and resources it takes.