Sadly, Return to the Boundary Beyond, unlike Return to Threads of Fate, did not notably alter the scenario, leaving it almost as frustrating and confusing as it was before. There are some new "modern location" cards that vary the punishment you must inflict on yourself to explore, and the removal of the treachery cards from the Exploration Deck at least means you aren't paying for the right to be abused by treacheries, but this remains the low point in an otherwise lively and exciting campaign.

That sounds harsher than it is. AH:TCG is not a very complicated game (most of the complexity is involved in resolving specific card interactions), and the design crew at FFG deserves credit for regularly coming up with new twists on scenario design (and cramming them into fixed-size expansion packs). That this scenario is not as much giddy fun as its immediate predecessor (where half the pack was act cards; remember opening that?) is not a condemnation, just a disappointment. Interesting idea; frustrating execution, this "Return to..." eased the latter a bit.

So the 2020 Taboo has been very kind to this card. I've been playing this card in Minh with Scavenging and Charles Ross, Esq.. Free draws that are super easy to recur at 0 cost because of Charles Ross and because Minh can investigate so well with Scavenging. Heheheheh enjoy the combos!

It's fantastic for discarding out weaknesses, discard-synergy cards like Miss Doyle's trikitty, Winging It, items to be scavenged, Yaotl. You name it! Love the new card. It's absolutely a seeker staple for those who have the hand-slot. Even the mystics who have very uncontested hand slots should love the lvl 0 version!

Seeing answers in Terrible Secret and Crisis of Faith it seems people want to resolve the whole revelation effect before applying the result so one card can deny the whole iterative cycle. But with the same logic here can you choice to discard four cards at random when you have only one, but plenty of assets. As that choose will still change the game state and as such should be a legal option?

The main question being if you have a revelation effect on a treachery card that has a for each statement. Do you resolve it step by step or as one effect at the end?

Did a little math with a few sample bags:

Let's say unexpected courage gives you +25% chance to pass a test (going from say +2 above test to +4 on hard difficulty), and Beloved gives you ~1/2 that for a fight or int test with just its icon. The added benefit of beloved's ability is unfortunately pretty low, generally only about 5%, even with 10 blessing tokens in the bag. So Beloved only gives you +17% chance to pass the test vs UE's +25% chance.

Note that going down to 6 or 7 blessing tokens in the bag doesn't make that big of a difference.

The problem is that if you draw a blessing token in this sweet spot of where we tend to take tests when playing, if you draw a bless token without beloved, you're nearing or generally at "all but autofail" territory.

The value goes up a lot if you aren't likely to succeed at the test, but not by that much unless you are taking tests with <50% chance to succeed. If you're taking the test at +0 before you commit skill cards, the value of Beloved's ability goes up to ~10%, still not as good as UE.

I think the card still has a little value but it's niche. It keeps the bless tokens in the bag and it's a little better than UE for head or foot tests. UE doesn't make it into most of my decks these days anyway though it does in Patrice and Silas.

I didn't think it could happen; they took a very solid scenario, one that is very fun and has a lot of replayability, and made it ven better. The addition of a 4th act deck requires a bit more text than most "Return to..." scenarios, and you need to hang onto your insert (or the PDF which is finally up at FFG) for set up and resolution information, but this scenario revision ups the pace, adds bothersome new enemies and treacheries, and generally makes a good scenario that much better. This is what I wish all "Return to..." scenarios were like.