I think people get the wrong impression of Stella. Her abilities reward failure, but there are really two ways to go: failure with success, and failure with “not caring about success ”.

What makes her so special is that there are so, so many survivor cards that reward failure. Predestination, take heart, rabbit's foot, “look what I found“, Live and learn... So if you’re going for partial success, you have the option to fail in your first and second action and set up your third and fourth. What’s great is, even in campaigns like the dream eaters where there aren’t many skill test on your encounter cards, you can slot the new level zero “test of will” to either get rid of a treachery or gain an extra action (and probably a card, because rabbit's foot is the best fit for an accessory.)

Permanents like a quick learner, which would be poisonous for most other survivors, let you fail early and succeed later. In fact, a -1 to future difficulty test means that you’re going to face automatic successes, especially if you’re dodging a low agility enemy, hitting an acolyte or group of rats, or using your old key ring to investigate a three shroud location. (Vital to appreciating this card: knowing that it doesn’t apply to the mythos phase. Your stats are safe there.)

In solo games, you’ll be able to persevere/bungle your way through skill test and fights with “neither rain nor snow”, getting these amazing +3 bennies, recurring with resourceful, and later True Survivor. Or you can rely on the Mysterious Raven to attack your sanity in exchange for one action clues, and heal with Grimm's fairytales.

In a group, you’re likely to get in a flex role: you’re great at agility, and with dark horse or the right skill cards, can be good at a few other things. Sometimes, with Peter S by your side, it’s soaking fear or dodging enemies. But Stella has a surprising role that is harder for other survivors to play: support. "Neither rain nor snow" allows you to give +3 wild skill icons to fellow investigators. Plus, it gets rid of the sting of failure. Some scenarios have cruel effects that, when resolved, can defeat you, take rounds off the scenario, or drive you insane. Not anymore.

You’ll have a lot of options to pick through as you gain experience, because the chainsaw and your .18 derringer both reward a failure first style. True survivor and drawing thin, while expensive in terms of XP, make an amazing late-campaign engine.

Playing Stella will have you saying weird things though. Things like “darn, I succeeded all of my actions!”, or bragging about how only the grit of the Postal Service can take on the horrors of the universe. So watch out for that.

You need this card only you're playing with a campaign with high Will test.

Pay-out

• 3 Exp
• 1 Action with 2 Resource

Benefit

• +2 Will (3 Times for Treachery only)
• 1 high change to auto evade a non-elite enemy

However, survivor can use Cherished Keepsake, the cheapest horror soak or Nothing Left to Lose to prepare for incoming treachery with 5 Card and 5 Resource

"Ashcan" Pete can play Moonstone with the same price.

It's hard to squeeze this card for the full-potential because you need to play it before the treachery appeared. Then wait for 3 another treachery card.

Verdict

• Recommend to use Nothing Left to Lose and wish you found Lucky! in 5 of that 5 cards

EDIT:

Thanks everyone for the comments! Let me outline the discussion on top for anyone revisiting this card in the future.

If you fail this skill test and would like to choose option #1, then as Zinjanthropus in the comments clarified, the damage is dealt to "an ally" rather than "allies", "you", or "your investigator". And since it specifies one ally, this means (as StyxTBeuford notes) the card is effectively telling you to discard one ally. However, the card does NOT specifically say "discard" even though that's exactly what it wants (although because it is damage, as Hylianpuffball notes, this means you can trigger reaction effects upon death such as Brother Xavier). Do note that you cannot have multiple allies absorb the hit in order to keep them alive either (this is largely impossible anyways). It tripped me up at first because ordinarily, treacheries tell you when they want you to discard (e.g. Crypt Chill). In this case it does not because it sounds scarier, but more importantly, it is more thematically consistent. Someone is getting killed (or severely wounded) from a snake bite. This ally must be able to receive damage though so the incorporeal Guiding Spirit cannot take the blow as SGPrometheus brought up. Django and others point out that in short, when an encounter or other card effect requires you to do something, you can only choose to do it if you are able to meet the request in part. In other words, it has to effect the game state. If it says to lose 3 resources, and you only have 2, you may still choose this option. In our case, when it says to deal 5 damage to an ally, as long as you have an ally with any amount of health, they can take the hit even though the rest of the effect will not amount to much.

I maybe wasn't clear in my original "review" but my intent was to ask the community so that I know to make sure I play the card correctly, and so that others with the same question can now find an answer. As an aside, yes, Agency Backup and Trusted x2 is about the only combination that could have an ally survive this hit, but not for untamed wilds (unless you start with bonus exp somehow). If anyone has dealt 5 damage to an ally and the ally survived, I'd love to hear about it because it sounds epic.

ORIGINAL:

I'm not sure I understand why this card pretends to offer you a choice should you fail.

Dealing 5 damage to an ally means the ally must be able to receive 5 damage (during the assign damage step). If the total incoming damage exceeds the card's maximum health threshold, then the rest needs to be dealt to your investigator (or any other card that can take damage). So my question is, can I choose this first option even if I only have one ally up, say William T. Maleson or Jake Williams, and then stomach the rest on my investigator?

If you can, it's a lot of damage but at least poison can be averted. If you can't, then you'd be forced to choose the second option and suffer poison. But frankly, you'll never be able to choose the first option without having at least 2 allies in play. Why? Because the only allies who offer 4 HP are Agency Backup and Red-Gloved Man, and that still isn't enough to satisfy the requirement. It may not be as big a deal in later scenarios, but if we're talking about Untamed Wilds (which this card is in), then the only investigator who can effectively tank this is Leo Anderson, AFTER he has Mitch Brown AND one or two other allies in play. There is Trusted but it won't be enough. Mateo could soak it in theory since he can spend his bonus EXP on Charisma and two Summoned Hounds, but sheesh. I do feel like the severity for avoiding poison should have some bite, but this is impossible at lvl 0 for anyone but Leo (beyond protecting himself, he can sort of protect someone else with Tetsuo Mori but he didn't release until well after FA) and Mateo (again, only with hounds who did not release until much later). You can buff yourself with some armor, but most lvl 0 options are too minimal to help much.

In short, this card is scary.

I want to like Anna, I want to make her nonsense work. It's just tricky to justify when she amounts, more or less, to a 1/1 Ally that grants a net +2 to your skills at a cost of 6 XP (4 for Anna, 2 for the tarots), which literally 14 investigators can get thru Peter Sylvester (2) for just 2 XP, and 6 more can get thru Lola Santiago or Delilah O'Rourke for 3 XP, plus all the sanity/clues/murders they respectively bring.

One novelty, something of a swingy thingy if you feel lucky while playing Carolyn Fern or Roland Banks:

• Stick To The Plan
• Anna Kaslow
• Astounding Revelation x2
• Tarot of your choosing (Carolyn uniquely has access to three useful tarot)

==

If you draw Anna in your opener/mulligan (odds improved as STTP + AR thins your deck by 4), you'll start Turn 1 with:

• Your deck thinned by 6 cards
• 9 resources
• Anna
• 1 tarot of your choice in play

Assuming I used this card-draw calculator right, a hard mulligan for Anna puts the odds of landing her at about 61%.

All for the low price of... er... 18XP. huh.

I have to agree with the consensus that this card is a bit strange, but I don't necessarily think it should grant clues or some such. I do think it could be altered to scale differently. Here's how I'd house rule it:

The text would read: After you successfully investigate, exhaust Burglary and gain resources by however much you succeed by, to a maximum of X. X is the printed shroud value of your location.

This version would offer the benefit of not forcing you to "waste" an action investigating to get resources, you'd just get them as a result of successfully investigating like normal. The number of resources you'd gain would be quite low most of the time, but you probably won't be spending a lot of extra cards or resources to succeed by a large amount anyways, certainly not on low shroud values. High shroud locations can net you far more resources, but you would have to succeed by that much more in order to get them. The function of the card is not to net you a large chunk of change; most likely it will trickle out resources as you investigate along the way (and the exhaust keeps it from being too overpowered). Note that I would emphasize "printed" shroud value to allow cards like Skeleton Key to combo. You could essentially hack the shroud value, but still gain large quantities of resources in this way. It might need to be lvl 3 as opposed to 2, but if it means the card sees play rather than how it is now, then I think it'd be worth it.

But enough tooting my own horn. The card as is, does have some viability. Finn might like it, or anyone playing Fence since you can get it up quickly and then snag some dough whenever you have a spare moment at a low shroud value. You can still combo cards like Double or Nothing and "Watch this!" to heap a pile of cash, and I suspect this is probably the instance it'll be used (Boss Leo would probably love this). The problem, of course, is that while you can net a grand total of 16 resources this way, you could get 12 with Burglary lvl 0 which I would think is plenty. So I guess I'm back to being confused over where the allure in this upgrade exists.