Compared to Unexpected Courage, you lose a Wild icon when you commit it to your own test, but you gain a Will icon when you commit it to another investigator's test. This is not really a great deal. One of the big strengths of Unexpected Courage is its great flexibility: it provides a pretty substantial benefit basically no matter what the game situation is. Leadership loses a lot of that. You're giving up 50% of the ability to boost yourself in exchange for the fairly modest upside of one extra Will icon. In the ideal situation, Leadership is a little bit better, but on average Unexpected Courage is going to be more useful.

So I wouldn't run this over Unexpected Courage, even in a high player count game. But of course, Unexpected Courage is a pretty good card, so "slightly worse Unexpected Courage" does not equal unplayable. You could viably run both in a 3 or 4 player game, if you could find the deck space for it. It would probably make the most sense to do so if you were playing alongside a Mystic and/or a second Guardian, as those are the classes that typically need Willpower boosts the most.

For the right investigator, this lineup of cards is fantastic. Getting a lot of cards that wait around until you take some damage is counter-intuitive in many decks, so you can never take more then a couple, three at the very most. This is especially true if you got a nice stash of Sanity to tank through before triggering these cards, but what about the low sanity investigators? Roland, Skids, Lola, Mark, Yorric, Zoey and especially Ashcan can fairly reliably expect to put these cards to good use, relatively early.

At 5 sanity, Roland and Mark can bet on gettign these cards into play quickly, which makes Reckless Assault and Say Your Prayers very good for them.

Reckless Assault because turning horror damage into fight potential is extremely effective (Give Fight or Flight a chance, it's awesome). Say Your Prayers because it's like a bulwark to hide your dwindling sanity reserve behind.

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My favourite investigator to use desperate cards with is "Ashcan" Pete. He has 5 Sanity so he can reach that breakpoint as fast as Roland can, but he has the added safety of Duke to hide behind, and then his repertoire of useful desperation cards is bigger too. Desperate Search links with Duke to become a whopping 8 strength investigate check, or a 6 strength test to follow up the regular Duke test and secure the second clue on a difficult location. Run For Your Life isn't half bad on him either since a 7 value evasion attempt is very nearly guaranteed success against most foes. Also, Ashcan has access to Mystic cards, Rite of Seeking and Shrivelling being obvious targets for Say Your Prayers.

Finally for Ashcan, if the desperate card is burning a hole in your hand, just chuck it at Duke.

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As a final note, I find Desperate cards to be the perfect placeholder for an upgrade, especially if you intend to take some permanents. Gonna get Scrapper or Keen Eye immediately after scenario 1? Well Physical Training or Hard Knocks is probably gonna become a dead draw and who knows if you'll even manage to make use of them in the first scenario anyway? Try some desperation cards instead! My route of choice for "Ashcan" Pete? Scrapper after scenario 1, then replace the desperation cards with Will to Survive.

Just to underline a key point in this weakness's power, as has already been mentioned. This weakness hits you every single game.

Trying to list every possible way a weakness (even this one) can mess with your game is impossible, but all the basic weaknesses share one, essentially the same, game effect , you loose a round (With the notable exception of Amnesia, Paranoia and Overzealous, all of which can cost you a good deal more). The way Indebted differs? Instead of "When drawn, loose a round" it basically reads "You loose the first round each game".

The first round each game is usually where the team sticks together and drops the assets they mulliganed for on the table, indebted slows this down so you're still setting up on round 2, or entering the fray underprepared, Indebted can wind up on itself, especially if you draw a bad starting hand, imagine the scenario where you get all of your support stuff on the opening hand and no main gear, mystic drawing their holy rosary, blinding light and Arcane studies on the opening hand for example but no Shrivelling or Rite of seeking, playing these cards and paying their costs makes actually playing for your main cards that much harder when you finally draw into them.

How to deal with this weakness? Depending on your investigator you might just ignore it, you might spend your first actions getting back the lost resources, you might start tecking out costly cards. The key positive factor about indebted is that it reduces a lot of pressure and add's a little bit of predictability to your deck. Even so, do not make the mistake of underestimating this weakness. Depending on which Investigator you are playing, Hypochondria and Psychosis are still probably easier to shrug off.

TL:DR. Indebted is the most mitigatable weakness, it is unique however in the fact that it must be mitigated every single game (whereas other weaknessess only show up 2 out of 3 scenarios) and that it always hits you in the very first round.

EDIT: Complete review overhaul. The old one was just wrong and 8 months later and several decks trying it out later it's time to rewrite it.

So. Evading. A strategy that may or may not be very useful depending on your investigator and campaign. The old Pickpocketing grants cards on successful evades and isn't fast. The cost, action to play and the slow pace at which it returns on it's commitment is just too damn slow, thus Pickpocketing "classic" is a terrible terrible card, another downer for a strategy that didnt have too much support when the game was brand new.

Things have changed quite a bit since then, the full campaign maps are generally less claustrophobic than the core campaign and less populated with stuff that you need or want to kill, cards like Lockpicks, Lola Santiago and Ornate Bow exist now, making based characters more powerful, more consistent and all-round better (not that every would pick the bow but the option is there). In fact the latest campaign greatly rewards sustained evasion.

So, back to Pickpocketing. Here are some strong points in the cards favor:

• The fast keyword means that you never need to play this until the exact moment that the benefits would be useful.

• The flexible choice between Resource or Card means that you can shift gears depending on what you need at the moment, not to mention the double benefit from overkilling the test.

• The card enables sustained spending on evasion checks in the same way Dr. Milan Christopher enables sustained spending on Higher Education. You can use the cash from Pickpocketing to fund the use of Streetwise, and in turn the success bonus/overkill bonus might actually net you your investment back. Unlike Dr. Milan Christopher however you may have 2 copies of Pickpocketing in play at once!

• Like Rabbit's Foot, a card that turns risky tests into Win/Win situations, Pickpocketing turns evade attempts, which to some might be considered "lost" actions, into far far more useful actions that simultaneously keep you safe and help fund your future actions. Imagine a card that said " Exhaust: You get 1 resource when you hit something." Said card would be in every deck.

Note that the option to gain resources from evades is the mechanic that really makes/breaks this card in comparison to the 0xp version. The ability to fund successful evades with past successful evades give you sustained test-effectiveness. it's impossible to predict exactly how many evades you will succeed on in a scenario, but I bet a dude like Finn or Wendy might be required to evade 6+ times in a given scenario, not counting failed tests, with this in play that'd net you 6+ resources and/or 6+ cards. A, fast, 2 cost card netting you so much returns is obviously terrific.

Do consider Pickpocketing when you build an based investigator, especially if you have stuff like Lola Santiago, Trench Coat or Peter Sylvestre in it to raise your base value into 5+ territory. Lola Santiago + Pickpocketing is a good combo in of itself since the evade actions can now fund your clue gathering like never before.

Standard cost of a weakness is 3 actions :

• One action since you don't draw a card in compensation
• Two actions to get rid of the weakness Depending on how much you draw, you draw a weakness between half of the time and 5 times over 6. Lets average it to 2/3. So in average, a weakness make you lose 2 actions each game.

This weakness make you lose two actions at the start of the game :

• No surprise. Determinism is always a good thing, since you can build against.
• The other players can compensate you inefficiency in the first few turns.
• You are less likelly to draw a weakness. Drawing a weakness while searching for a solution to a problem is a VERY bad news. You are significantly reducing the probabilities of a bad news.

So except if you planed to "rush" trough the scenario (which is reasonnable when playing alone), this weakness is better than the "standard weakness".