The real competition here is with Emergency Cache. Both provide a base of 3 resources and cost 2 XP. Emergency Cache guarantees you a card draw. This card doesn't give you a card draw but provides three possible alternative benefits:

1. An extra resource if you have a very large hand.
2. An extra action if you draw it during your turn (since you don't have to spend one to play it)
3. Icons if you can't/don't want to use it for resources. None of those benefits are guaranteed. An action is better than a card draw but you'll have to judge the probability that you'll draw this card during your turn based on your deck. When in doubt, I think Emergency Cache still wins.

What does "surviving" mean here? Do you take trauma if you resigned? What if you had already been defeated (defeated does not equal killed)? I really wish that reviews did not require 200 characters.

Some desk and upgrade planning is required. But this card can be so insanely amazing and fun with Double, Double. It's probably one of the strongest card to double, it seems to me.

A way to make this combo work with ease-

1. pick Jenny Barnes
2. fill your splash with various permanent colours (ex. Geared Up, Down the Rabbit Hole, Forced Learning or even Shrewd Analysis, etc.)
3. buy Double, Double. Pray that you draw it. Use LCC or LCC lv. 3 to find it, etc. Buy CFB.)
4. enjoy the doubling effects! Enjoy the whooping gang effects of move 2x, deal 2 damages, discover 2 clues (both can be from different locations), heal 2x horrors and damages for $2 and an action.

Another way for Rogue to get their colour synergy going is for course to upgrade to Bruiser, Crafty and/or Antiquary. Getting the mystic synergy is probably must difficult for most Rogue. Some Rogue build wants neither Antiquary nor Blur.

Well this is at least a 12xp combo. So, ya, it better to be pretty great.

"A player controls the cards located in his or her out-of-play game areas (such as the hand, deck, discard pile)." Core rule book page 16

So this card is not actually difficult to activate at all, but insanely easy. You need one copy of a multi-class card that does not remove itself from the game. Or take an extra couple of seconds to think about deck construction with the Dunwhich investigators' 5 lvl 0 cards of any class deckbuilding option. Or play an investigator who gets to build cards for his deck based off traits.

Fully activated this card is one of the best in the game, measured in action economy, effect per card draw/resource, or value for experience, in all metrics this card is among the best.

After having realized this I doubt I'll end up playing many decks that don't feature the synergy cards ever again.

So I have to step in here and try and prevent another senseless loss of ...okay its not that critical but honestly I am seeing grave diggers shovel all over the place and wondering to myself "why?"

Let's look at what it does piece by piece:

What it is: 2 cost, item, tool, melee, weapon. hand slot. A lot of cool tags to help it get into play, you can discount it, hold it in a bandolier, its also not too expensive so you don't really need to do much to get it into play.

What it gives you: +2 to combat for 1 damage fights, action and discard to get 1 clue these seem alright on paper, but remember this is tied to a hand slot, a hand slot that could have been a flashlight if core was all you had, and flashlight while providing no combat powers provides much more clue gathering ability at lower shrouds. If you are at the point where all that are left are high shroud locations and the only tool left is the shovel you are in for a world of hurt to win anyway.

The main issue I have is, even if this card is free to play, came into play fast it still isn't worth your time to use it, because the effects that brought it into play could have gotten anything else with the similarly wide net of traits. So really what this turns into is 2 resources, 2 actions, get 1 clue, maybe fight slightly higher between the two actions against odd health enemies. almost any other investigation card you can think of will outperform the shovel and now days we have Ice Pick, Mysterious Raven, Grete Wagner, faster effects that are just as guaranteed to work or remain as the shovel.

And for William Yorick the king of recursion, while the big Gravedigger's Shovel is a little fancy, Ancient Covenant+Favor of the Sun buries this card and breaks it down to salvage. If you really want to get clues at 0xp and your collection is limited: Lucky!, "Look what I found!" and Evidence! are all core set cards, if your team needs more than that there's Flashlight.

I can see it and its upgrades sleeker version being somewhat playable in a one handed melee weapon bruiser deck that had high enough combat to be using bruiser just for free money but what I have seen is decks running things like chainsaw and gravediggers shovel wondering to myself "how do they plan to use it?" "when do you get a chance to play it?" "where is the missing bandolier?" and "why?"