“This is stupid,” Mark repeated, loading more ammo into his Browning automatic rifle. “Statistically dubious, but also just, well, stupid.”

Finn handed him another pouch of ammo from a crate labeled STEMWARE. He knew better than to argue with the soldier. And besides, he was pretty sure his deals with the guy in the red gloves were part of the problem.

The smoky velvet kept her peace too. Promises of power had kept her from some awful snake bites, and the tides of fate had turned against them. If the party was suffering bad juju, it was anyone’s guess on how to fix it.

She pointed out the beast from the crystallizer. She had warned the bootlegger that they would be consequences but… Well, her life was mostly consequences at this point.

Mark took aim. Then started firing. And kept firing. And kept firing.

The creature was completely unharmed, even as the trees around were shattered or leaked a dark gray sap.

A burst of sunshine blazed through the space where the trees once were. A cool breeze came, smelling of huaya.

Finn turned towards Wendy, squinting his eyes. “That’s not your normal necklace.”

“No. It’s not.”

Not the most efficient use of XP. Compare this to Time Warp; both allow you to draw an extra chaos token, but "Eat lead!" only works for Firearm attacks, and forces you to spend ammo on top of that, and has to be played in advance (before you know whether you'll need the extra token or not).

Now, you can get even more tokens from "Eat lead!" if you so desire—but how many tokens do you really need? There’s major diminishing returns here, as each chaos token pulled after the first contributes less and less to your odds of success. Furthermore, ammo is precious. Even spending 1 extra hurts quite a bit, let alone 2 or 3. This really limits the effectiveness of this card with Shotgun or Lightning Gun, since the ammo is just so precious. It's a bit better with the .32 Colt, but I don't think I'd rush out and spend my XP on that.

I’m not saying this card has no place at all. "Worse than Time Warp" is not the same thing as unplayable. A janky Double or Nothing/Shotgun/Extra Ammunition deck is probably pretty excited to see this card. And with Stick to the Plan, for which both Extra Ammunition and "Eat lead!" are valid targets, these elaborate multi-card combos are more achievable than they first appear. But generally speaking, this card isn’t that powerful for 2 XP. That’s disappointing, since Firearms could have used a stronger buff than this.

Time for a 'highly practical combo!'

Get yourself a friendly Leo and equip an upgraded 45 Thompson

Slap two sets of Extra ammo in there, and then double that delicious 11 ammo twice with two upgraded Contrabands to shoot up to 44 bullets.

Then, just hold down that trigger and rake 30 resources in from your 7 card, 5 action, 16 cost combo by playing two Eat Leads. Bonus, you get to keep your gun with 12 bullets left on it, and you force two elder sign activations! What a steal!

A terrifically powerful card, and at the right price. At lower difficulties, this can allow you to auto-succeed a Fight test by spending 2 ammo and pitching (Vicious Blow) or pumping (Physical Training) enough to beat any negative token in the bag. At higher difficulties you can still do this, it just takes more ammo/pump. Additionally, the cost to play is within affordable margins for any non-Zoey Guardian, and the xp cost is super reasonable. The icons are significant as well, since they buff the two ways an investigator deals with enemies (good for evading if the enemy can't be killed), and as a Tactic card, it can be placed beneath Stick to the Plan (although personally I feel there are better options for those precious slots, like Emergency Cache, Ever Vigilant, and Extra Ammunition).

I'm surprised no one has mentioned this in connection with the M1918 BAR. You can spend 5 ammo to get 5 damage and +5 fight, or 6 ammo to get 5 damage, +5 fight, and 2 draws from the token bag. This can easily get you to an auto-success in easy/standard.

The extra confidence is totally worth it to me, and you're still left with 2 more ammo to use against some annoying acolyte or ghoul minion. Plus, if you're juicing the BAR to 16 ammo with Contraband (which you absolutely should be), the extra +1 ammo is almost trivial.

Guardian insurance (and probably the closest they will get to Lucky!). Its fine, but seeing as the "meta" for the game is more or less dominated by Machete, it loses some points. It does have some fine play with the Colt and it will get better if we ever see an upgraded colt that is worthwhile.

Ironically, at the moment this is probably best in Skids as you can throw sleight of handed bullets at your foe (Typewriter or the like) and ensure that your attack will land.

Overall, pretty ho-hum but it will get better if there are a few more firearms put in the game with copious ammo. Until then, I don't think anyone but Skids will take this.

Big hitter card. An autofail token can ruin the most assured of hits and this is that tech card you include so that your once-in-a-scenario Double Vicious Blow + Lightning Gun combo assuredly hits.

More realistically though its gonna be a single Vicious Blow with a .45 Automatic to deal that imperative 3 damage hit to a Ravenous Ghoul or a Vicious Blow + .45 Automatic to kill one of oh-so many 4hp foes that terrorize our mythos decks.

This latter scenario is probably the most common and useful use of "Eat lead!" in this game, to ensure that those moderately tough "minibosses" die in as few actions and as little risk as possible.