I love this card. The art? Fantastic. The name? Flavorful. The flavor text? One of my favorites. And this effect is just amazing for Calvin, allowing you to get 2&2 soak for just 1 resource. You get to live close to the edge, boosting your skill values to incredibly heights, knowing that even a treachery that deals direct damage or horror won't defeat you.
Slam dunk, 10/10 card, one of the best signatures.
Purchasing card with Exile keyword going into the final scenario is already a good tactic. But for this card it is even better. Penultimate / final scenario has a trend : designers love to add Ancient Evils set around here to make remaining time unpredictable, and round loss is likely with heavy consequence. Therefore A Test of Will (1) is like purchasing rounds of play with little amount of XP.
It has "lite" version of team-coverage feature compared to Ward of Protection (2) (requires same location), but that already fix more than half of the biggest problem of unupgraded Ward of Protection (0) vs. its highest reward target Ancient Evils : It must land on the Mystic otherwise there is no way for the recipient to resist.
You can go in with some strategy, like grouping up tighter a few rounds in until 1 or 2 out of 3 Ancient Evils passed by. It is relative to when you actually draw this card vs. how many evils are left at that point. But you can also try mulligan to get this then you get to defend against 3 evils for sure.
I just came back from a certain campaign with tight location layout on finale. While we won, amount of rounds left is scary low. Factored in how lucky we were that Ancient Evils often land on the party's Mystic when he has the Lv. 0 ward on hand (he only has enough XP to upgrade 1 copy to Lv. 2), if luck was not on our side we would have lose and I regret I didn't think about getting this card with my leftover XP. A team with Survivor and Mystic will be at huge advantage on keeping the evils away.
I rolled this weakness as Daniela Reyes and my deck was pretty much unable to handle this guy save for committing Vicious Blows with my Survival Knife or waiting for enemy phase. I think it's a mistake that the dealt damage reduction isn't reduced to a minimum of 1 - I had to versatile into some tactics into the deck to be able to deal with this guy.
Double unfortunate for me is that I have this weakness in a campaign with Mark Harrigan who also randomly rolled into this weakness as well, which has led to rather amusing moments of killing each other's Lurker in the Darks when they spawn on top of the other investigator.
Bonus points for this enemy not doing horror though - we love having sanity.
A lot of positive reviews here, but I will go one step further:
3 cards for one action and 0 cost is already that good. Another way to read it is: draw 10% of your deck in one action.
Deep Knowledge will get you 2 for this and is considered one of the best lvl 0 cards, Preposterous Sketches will require 2xp and 1 clue at your location, and Cryptic Research will ask you 3 more xp per copy to get your action back. And as you probably noticed, all these cards are in , was one of the remaining draw-starved classes (with and ), until this card arrived.
So this card already goes in every deck that has access to it to increase consistency, but where it becomes insanely good is when you do not need the draw:
Most dilemmas are "it could go well in the right moment, but terribly bad in the wrong moment", like Fickle Fortune that could heal your whole party for free during the Witching Hour but also have you deciding between killing Calvin Wright or turning into an Ancient Evils.
At a Crossroads, on the other hand is literally a win-win-win.
As of the current state of the card pool, considering everything up to TSK (Edit 06/2024 - added the FHV cards), I thought it'd be interesting to make an inventory of cards that provide a benefit to Lola even when she is not in the card's role.
Hopefully, this will help some of you break down Lola's deckbuilding puzzle by spotting in this list some possible combos between multiple cards in it (The Red Clock (2) helps you to oversucceed your first test, which collects evidence on Empirical Hypothesis) or with other cards from another role (Celaeno Fragments will boost your to help you trigger Scavenging).
Guardian:
Level 0:
Level 1+:
Seeker:
Level 0:
Level 1+:
Rogue:
Level 0:
Level 1+:
Mystic:
Level 0:
Level 1+:
Survivor:
Level 0:
Level 1+:
Other honourable mentions:
PS: If I forgot anything worth mentioning, feel free to suggest it in the comments and I will edit my review.