Sefina is insane. Outright broken. Here's why:

1. The massive 13 cards for her opening hand.
2. Access to Foresight, Friends in Low Places, Parallel Fates (2). Use these to completely cancel Stars of Hyades.
3. Access to Transfiguration AND Black Market. Transfigure yourself AND your teammates.
4. Access to Double, Double. 'nuff said.
5. Access to Underworld Support for -5 deck size. If you really wanna thin out her deck even further.
6. Access to Charon's Obol, The Great Work, Down the Rabbit Hole, Arcane Research. Literally ALL the XP giving permanents. The first two are huge, the last two are situational. That's +21 xp after the first seven scenarios.
7. Access to Leo De Luca and The Red Clock, for more action compression.

So what's the completely broken combo?

Having Double, Double. Trapping 5 events under her to further thin out your deck. Transfiguring into Patrice Hathaway. If I'm doing my math correctly, you have a possible deck size of 33 + 3 + 1 + 1 = 38. Minus 5 from Underworld Support. Minus 5 from events trapped under her. That's 28 cards.

If we take into account filling up every single slot and a Mask, and Double, Double for assets. That's potentially 10 more cards in play, making her deck 18 cards. The Painted World are removed once played, so that's 15 cards you can have in your deck in circulation.

This means, you can transfigure into Patrice to draw your entire deck every 3 turns and play her bonkers Rogue events with Double, Double every turn.

Since Foresight works on all five cards drawn during upkeep, and since Friends in Low Places can potentially be fast, you can deal with your weakness easily in a circulating deck of 15 cards all without spending an action.

Your only problem is dealing with the Damage/Horror that comes from either missing a Star of Hyades cancel, or from shuffling your deck constantly. But you can always opt to use Leo de Luca to soak it up and he'll be back in a few turns anyways.

tldr; Sefina can get a ton of xp from permanents, can transfigure into any investigator giving them a boost of 13 opening cards, can cancel her weakness extremely easily, can "remove" 5 events from her deck from circulation.

Deliverance has a use case: scenarios that when you advance the act or agenda, you shuffle in new cards. Over the years, a lot of boss monsters come with treacheries that summon them, even if you defeat them once. With this card, you get to delay that.

Deliverance will help with any advancement that shuffles encounter back into the deck, but with a cost of 3XP and a surging encounter, it's a high price to pay so that you don’t see certain encounters again. If you don’t know what’s coming, it’s hard to say that “later” will be worse than “now”.

Yes, the first thing you realise with this card, is that it gives high-combat Guardians/investigators a reliable way to get clues. Especially useful for solo play. As such it'll fit in perfectly with a bunch of characters.

The bit that interests me though, is that it's a tool that can use an activate action either to investigate or to fight. As such it's currently unique in the cardpool. And it makes it the ideal target for Wilson Richard's Ad-hoc in a flex build.

Fighting and need an extra point of damage? Chuck a lantern. Need that last clue but you drew an auto-fail? Chuck a Gravedigger's Shovel. You get the picture.

Also what if you're struggling to get your combat high enough to get the high shroud clues? Permanent combat boost assets can be pretty expensive. If I had one or two experience points to spare, I'd be really tempted to get the under-rated Reliable.

Ice Pick can also co-exist nicely depending on your build. Possibly very nicely for a William Yorick deck.

More a question than a review, what happens of the clues when you get control of the Custodian ? Can you spend them (i'd say YES) (based on that fr.arkhamdb.com ) ? What happens if you spend them, do you lose control (i'd say no)

At first glance... Ew no thank you but in chatting with friends I see surprising value in this. Note I'm not great at deck building but I love talking about it! mostly want to gather relevant cards to think about for discussion and deck building :)

Synergy Cards

First lets take a look at the cards that mitigate Ascetic then lets go into ways to use this.

Experience Gain

• In the Thick of It make it 13 exp at the start

• Refine

• Arcane Research

• Down the Rabbit Hole - auto take on mystics with Ascetic

• The Raven Quill

• Pelt Shipment

• Green Man Medallion - Jenny Barnes Only

  Investigators

• Father Mateo 5 free xp

• Kymani Jones 5 free xp

• Roland Banks alt 5 free xp

• Jenny Barnes reduced xp costs

• Skids O'Toole ignore weakness

• Joe diamond ignore weakness

Strategies

Have you met my identical cousin?

I don't like this strat but a friend mentioned it so I'll throw it out there. Use effects like Charon's Obol and get yourself defeated maybe using I'll see you in Hell! or Ghastly Revelation to get a bit more value from your defeat plus ensure you can trigger it at the last possible moment. This allows you to rebuild your investigator for every scenario. You'll never be great but if you know whats coming and wanna get meta you can be ready for that specifically. Like I said real weird not a fan but something you could do and gives a reason to take 2 cards that I imagine get very little play.

Can't Stop, Won't Stop

As mentioned in other comments this is a solid, play by the rules, I died but lets not scuttle the campaign. Rare but nice way to continue in unfortunate events.

The Mentor Must Die

This is a solid one for teaching new players or to help round out a team. Survivors don't always need a lot of XP so having a survivor that helps carry while the team is coming into their own. Some investigators like Sister Mary heavily rely on XP to be functional so early missions can be a struggle. This arch-type can help pave the way for players that start slow. It could also be a great way to help new players get a crutch while they figure things out and feel really important and valued in later missions when the teacher starts falling off due to lack of experience.

Plans Within Plans - Wizardry Ascending

Mystics in particular have a lot of ways around the downsides of this card. 2 Arcane Research and Down the Rabbit Hole. These cards alone let you upgrade 4xp net worth when fully efficient. this can be 3xp on a spell and 1xp on any card, or 1 xp on 2 non-spells plus 2xp on a spell. so first scenario you could upgrade shriveling (0) to shriveling (3) plus a 1xp upgrade somewhere then the second scenario upgrade to shriveling (5) plus 2 other non-spell cards. Throw in some customizable cards to soak XP as needed and you are likely to always get value from all 4xp every scenario. All of this is guaranteed too. No slim pickings missions to stop your crawl to power. This will require a LOT of forethought in building your char though. Everything must be planned ahead of time or you'll get burned but a solid and interesting way to play a spell caster.

Conclusion

Way more nuance to this card than I initially thought. I'm actually tempted by that last archetype. I can see some fun play around this especially in helping new players find the same love for the game that I have. I hope this is helpful for people who want to see some fun and value in this card beyond a challenge all Ascetic team of investigators