I've seen players comment on their experience with playing Occult Lexicon a few times during a scenario. Based on my understanding of the card, that's not possible.

Bonded cards have this ruling:
New Keyword: Bonded. If your deck contains a card which summons one or more bonded cards, those bonded cards should be set aside at the start of each game.

• Before scenario, set aside 3x copies of Blood-Rite into a pile.
• During scenario, play Occult Lexicon. You fetch the 3x copies of Blood-Rite from the set aside pile of bonded cards.
• You play another hand asset over-top of Occult Lexicon. Lexicon goes to the discard, and all 3 copies of Blood-Rite are removed from the game.
• Later in the scenario, you replay Occult Lexicon. The Blood-Rite cards have been removed from the game; they are not considered to be amongst your set-aside pile of bonded cards.
  Right?

It's expensive XP-wise, but this can be used to address Marie Lambeau's weakness, Baron Samedi. Since a star allows you to add doom, you can speed up the Baron's exit by a full round. Pushing him out 1 turn sooner means you can get rid of him on agendas that would advance at 3 or 4, while otherwise you need at least a buffer of at least 6. Getting 3 doom on the Baron over 3 separate rounds is surprisingly hard.

In a 4-player Standard campaign, I always start my deck with 3 of these, and remove them somewhere before the halfway point of the campaign, and it works out well for me each time.

To start with the upside, if I draw 2 Open Gates, it routinely saves the group 3 actions a game, sometimes less, frequently more. In most campaigns' early missions, you're in the "explore" phase of the mystery, where you are wandering around town/campus/jungle flipping locations and collecting clues. Since you're low-xp characters, you don't have much of your jank, but the game accommodates you with easier shrouds and monsters, many of which are beatable with just base stats. It's usually effective for your group to split up, but there's always that Act that says "investigators at <Location X> spend clues as a group to advance/resign", where the party has to get to a specific spot. Open Gate lets at least one teammate teleport there, which may even let you advance the Act a whole turn sooner than you could have otherwise.

As for the fail cases, If I draw 1 Open Gate early but never get its partner, then I'm out a card and resource, which is a fair price for a failed gamble in this game. If I draw it late, I can pitch it to a treachery. It may be suboptimal, but it's never dead.

The card definitely gets worse as the campaign goes on, both because missions start to become "charge forward to your inevitable doom" with no backtracking, and also because your bottleneck changes from movement action economy to succeeding repeatedly at difficult tests, and Open Gate doesn't help with that.

Like Flashlight, I think this is an excellent level 0 card for your starting deck that you swap out later as they become obsolete.

I was wondering - does the "Fight" on this card (and similar Event-cards) triggers effects on Cards like "Frozen in Fear" (https://arkhamdb.com/card/01164) or the "Hunted by Byakats" from Barkham Horror?

They force you to spend something (an additional action / a ressource) to perform a "Fight" Action. Is the "action" you are performing with an Event card not a "Play a card from your hand" Action that just happens to have that "Fight" effect?

Tanks in advance!

December 31, 2020
To provide clarity to anyone checking this page to ensure they're playing correctly, I will ask:
Is this the correct understanding on how the card works?

• If you draw Shocking Discovery naturally (i.e. Upkeep phase, draw a card action, etc), then you shuffle the card back into your deck. That's it.

• If Shocking Discovery is among the searched cards (i.e. Mr. "Rook", No Stone Unturned, etc), then you discard Shocking Discovery. You cancel the search, shuffle Mandy's deck, then draw the top card of the encounter deck. Shocking Discovery is now in your discard pile.

• If you choose to use Mandy Thompson's ability to "resolve 1 additional target of the search" (ex: No Stone Unturned to search the top 6 cards of your deck and draw 2 of the searched cards instead of just 1 card), and Shocking Discovery is among the searched cards, the entire search is cancelled. This means that you do not draw a card at all because the entire search is cancelled. Then, you shuffle Mandy's deck and draw the top card of the encounter deck. Shocking Discovery is now in your discard pile.