Do your friends play too slow? Do you have work the next day? Are you missing a 5 letter word in the crossword with the hint “low ranking member of British nobility”?

Baron is your answer. As an ally that comes into play for free and with no action cost, Baron Samedi is king of ally efficiency. Additionally, once he is down you can began the amazing trick of skipping entire rounds (mythos included)! Here’s a hypothetical:

Imagine you are in a 4 player campaign. The scenario features three agendas with a doom threshold of 4 each. Normally, this would mean you have a 12 round game, but this isn’t a normal game, in this game you get the clutch turn 1 Baron. You play him for free and immediately tap him to add one doom.

Mythos phase hits and you go up to 2/4 doom. During the next investigation phase you tap him again. 3/4 doom is on the board and you are now slated to advance the agenda in just two rounds of play.

In total, we have saved 2 rounds and prevented 8 mythos cards from being drawn. Honestly I’m not even sure why they printed Ward of Protection when Baron exists.

But it gets better. When the agenda advances we can remove the doom from Baron and repeat this process. If you consider there are three agendas total we have ended up saving 6 rounds and prevented 24 mythos cards from being drawn. Go ahead and play on hard or expert if you want, the game will be long over before the consequences of your choices catch up with you.

And that’s not all. I said Baron was king for a reason, because his text box includes a cannot be discarded condition, he cannot be discarded by any mythos card. Crypt chill can get a taste of its own medicine while Baron just leaves them on read as the card resolves and fades into the lonely encounter discard pile.

Play Baron. Play speed.

Such a nice little performer.

I've found that comparing Divination to competing "action compressors" is folly, because that's not what this card is for. In such a comparison a card like Rite of Seeking is the clear victor because Rite nets you more clues in less actions overall, at a lesser XP cost too.

Divination is a Test beater, it's the card that you use to leverage a consistent +1 bonus to try and beat a test. Similar action compressors, like Rite of Seeking are such a precious and powerful effect that you rarely risk the charges onto risky tests, you commit to building an engine where you're overpowering tests by +3, +4 or more. If youre at a shroud 3 location and you're stuck at 4 or 5, you'll think twice before risking your charges on that test. Divination's ability to not waste charges creates space for a card that does'nt require the same sort of empowering buildup or aligning stars to be safe to use, instead of spending further resources to play Holy Rosary or actions to search for icons you'll happily sit there and spend those engine building actions on repeat tests to try and fish out the clues instead.

This then makes the card more interesting for a less focused build, a singular copy of Divination will net someone like Roland Banks a card that can leverage his to quickly and effectively speed through 2 or 3 shroud locations without having to build an engine, and it gives him a shot at shroud 4 locations with a lucky bag pull. In such a "flex" deck, where alternative methods to pick up clues might be in place, the freeform ability to grab 1 or 2 clues again complements the deck by working around whatever amount of clues you manage to "cheat" with other mechanics such as Rolands , Lockpicks or Pilfer. Clearly Divination is a good card for "flex" strategies, where a character self-sufficiently covers bases in a team or covers every front in solo.

Finally, the combined access to and more than enables this card for a wider span of characters it also opens the window to very effective skill distribution in a deck, often enough Guts finds it way into a as a defensive mechanicsm and as a cantrip, similarly a Perception might serve to speed things up, with Divination you can channel whichever stat that you can get higher in any given situation, this of course is particularly important for Amanda Sharpe.

Dedicated cluevers with big engines and lots of teck and support will have better options for gunning down location after location, but this isnt a card for those dudes. This is a card for that Roland who's already running Grete Wagner and needs a slot-effective way to get a few more clues, a Diana who does'nt know if her or will be higher at any given point and mostly wants to fight, or just about anybody who is running Guts and/or Perception in their deck and is'nt trying to be the next pre-taboo Rex.

This goes from required to useless depending on your campaign. In particular, it shines in return to Circle Undone and EOTE.

Supernatural Tempest in Circle Undone can very easily clear your entire play area especially as a guardian. EoTE has several very punishing weather treacheries, particularly in the beginning.

Outside of these scenarios it loses a bit of value. It's still a fairly powerful Tommy card for instance, as long as you bait his weakness on something else (Mr Pawterson, for example) and Tommy has tools to let you do just that (spirit of humanity).

Overall it's a good support card when used appropriately, but its definitely not an auto include.

This card is nasty. It's an obvious substitute for crypt chill, but is so much worse.

With crypt chill, you can plan ahead and have a sacrificable asset queued on case you draw it.

Not so here. Being an agility check it's going to be hard enough to pass this, but once you fail you're going to have to discard a high cost asset. And if you only have 0 cost assets up, you're going to lose all of them.

This card is so bad it must be cancelled. Luckily, almost every class has access to some type of cancelation or another. But yea. This is an awful draw and one of the many reasons why return to Circle is so punishing.

Just wanted to point out something that I didn't see anyone mention in other reviews or comments yet--

The higher bonus of +3 is not merely useful for coming back from harder checks. You can now turn a fail by 1 into a succeed by 2. Rogues and others who care about "succeed by X" take note!

Due to being level 3 there are only a few investigators who would care about this interaction in their own decks--but wait, you can now play this on your friends! If there's at least one deck at your table that wants to oversucceed, consider this upgrade.