This is such a prominent and frequently-referenced card that I thought it deserved a quick review. In the days when we only had the Core Set, Unexpected Courage was absolutely one of the 15 best cards available to every investigator, and you saw two copies in pretty much every decent deck. To this day, people use Unexpected Courage as a benchmark for evaluating new releases.

I think Unexpected Courage is still a perfectly decent card, and will not cripple your deck should you run it. More often than not, though, I omit this card in multiplayer these days. Although +2 to any test for a card is not a bad deal--you can almost always find a situation where the test is important and the +2 is a significant swing in probability--for the vast majority of investigators, there is more than a full deck's worth of more powerful cards available. Simply put, the standards have risen.

This card does offer a lot of flexibility in exchange for relatively low power. But in high-level multiplayer, that's not the kind of trade you want to be making. The best approach there is to have investigators hyper-specialize and spend as little time as possible taking tests outside of their area of strength. You can see how Unexpected Courage is not one of the most powerful cards for this strategy.

Besides, this card's flexibility diminishes on high levels. On Easy, this card gives almost any investigator a decent shot at doing almost anything (except maybe the very hardest tests in their very weakest stats.) On higher levels, when the average pull is -a -3 or worse, you would have to stack a lot of additional boosts for the card to function this way.

I think this card is better in true solo, where flexibility is much more important. And there are some investigators who have special synergy with skill cards, like Minh, for whom this card is obviously more powerful. But these cases aside, I'm usually not finding room for Unexpected Courage these days.

(By the way, nothing in this review applies to the other core skill cards: Guts, Overpower, etc. Those cards are a totally different kettle of fish and continue to be outstanding, in my opinion.)

This card is almost OP on standard difficulty, if you are playing an investigator that can gather resources quickly and have some static +1 skill boosting cards (like the new Lola) Santiago ).

I tried it in my Solo-Jenny Barnes deck on the Carcosa campaign, wich focuses on resource gathering, converting those resources into skill boosts through talents and having a decent amount of static +1 skill boosting allies (like Lola) Santiago and Dr.) Milan ) and amulets (like St.) Hubert's Key ) in play. The set up is a little slow depending on what you draw but once you have it rolling you can hit anytime with relative low resource commitment 8 or 9 in any skill that you are testing, meaning you will only fail to the auto-fail tentacle chaos token. Under this conditions you are normally able to activate this at least 3 times/turns before it fails and you loose your 3 resources, wich for a Rouge is very efficient. I think this will still be good on hard, but I haven't tested it yet. In Summery, if you have the cards to back High Roller up, you will dominate the scenario and steamroll your way to victory (at least on standard :P).

As I'm currently using Marc Harrigan for the Forgotten Age, this card feels like it might be a highly viable replacement for the Extra Ammo card I currently have stacked under Stick to the Plan. Fast (but only during your turn) is getting overlooked, and it's a big advantage. Especially if you have a shotgun with one less ammo than you need, but you still need all three actions to kill that Immortal Elder God from Beyond the Time. Plus you can reload something without getting attacks of opportunities, which makes it even more useful against suprise monster ambushes from the Encounter Deck.
On Marc this essentially allows you to break the 5 damage hard-cap on Shotgun against the only enemies that are going to need it. All of a sudden, your shotgun goes from being able to do 15 damage max a turn to 18. That's a reasonble jump, and doesn't factor in any Vicious blows, Beat Cops or Home Front nonesense.

At 3 cost and 3xp, I'll personally be holding off getting it until I upgrade at least one of my Emergency Caches to the 3xp version, and only one copy of it for Stick to the Plan, but I can definitely see it being part of a slowly building monstrous combo with Shotgun Marc that enables me to kill Elder Gods in a turn.

I'm going to expand on a comment posted earlier.

"The bow gets much better if the user or another player us venturer and e.cache3 to reload it. — Django 1177 2 days ago"

This card is (can be) baller for Skids, Ashcan or Rex (And I suppose Jenny but she has her guns). Now, keep in mind that Skids has a decent Combat as it is at 3, so it makes it slightly more challenging when comparing to +combat weapons for him, though the others are base 2.

If we break down the efficiency of this vs other weapons usable by Skids, it makes it slightly less valuable, but still in the running. Rex has access to Acidic Ichor and Ashcan has all re-usable weapons to choose from, making this harder to justify. The biggest issue is that it requires you to have Venturer out to re-ammo the bow for a instead of an . Let's break it down.

Ornate Bow - To hit: 6 | Damage: 3 | Both Hands | 4 cost | 3 XP -- Can be stacked with Venturer to attack twice using only two actions

Chicago Typewriter - To hit: 5 | Damage: 3 | Both Hands | 5 cost | 4 XP -- Can be stacked with Leo De Luca to deplete ammo in a single round

Lupara - To hit: 4 (5 if new) | Damage: 2 (3 if new) | Single Hand | 3 cost | 3 XP -- Can be stacked with Sleight of Hand to grant bonus to hit and damage without using an action to play it

Let's assume all combos available and all attacks hit. Over 4 attacks, which would deplete all ammo for each weapon:

Ornate Bow: 12 damage using 4 actions, two rounds, 8 total resources, 3 total XP -- Pro: Still offers 1 action per round to do other things -- Cons: Relatively resource costly, requires two rounds

Chicago Typewriter: 12 damage using 4 actions, one round, 10 total resources, 6 total XP -- Pro: Only uses one round opposed to the others' two -- Cons: Very expensive, both in resources and XP

Lupara: 12 damage using 5 actions, two rounds, 4 total resources, 3 total XP -- Pros: Very cheap to play, only uses a single hand slot -- Cons: Requires two rounds, only offers 1 spare action.

Where this starts to break down is the introduction of Emergency Cache to re-supply Venturer. This allows you to keep up the pace of Venturer being your caddy for an additional 4 shots, where it does nothing for Chicago Typewriter or Lupara directly. Those would require Contraband or Extra Ammunition, both of which are resource heavy. The moral of the story is that for Skids (and pretty much only him) this card is right there with the rest of them, so long as you have Venturer.

Gotta love this card. It's use depends on the exact character you are playing, but the overall utility is the same:

Play a weapon with ammo and use it for one round cheaply.

• You can play Leo Anderson or Zoey Samaras and play a Lightning Gun for 1 resource, waste all the ammo, and still be ready to play it later again with full ammo.
• You can play "Skids" O'Toole, Jenny Barnes or Finn Edwards and play Lupara or Chicago Typewriter.
• You can play the vast majority of characters and a smattering of others and sneak out the Ornate Bow for an extra shot.

Obviously the card isn't bad when used to cheat out a less powerful weapon (.45 Automatic for example) cheaply and when you really need it.

The main downside to Sleight of Hand is that, if you have no worthy weapon in hand, or draw it too late and your weapons are already in play, then this card is totally useless. You really need to have a reasonable selection of weapons to choose from or ways to tutor them like Backpack or Prepared for the Worst.

The best case scenario for this card is super rewarding, but the worst case scenario (playing it for just the lone icon) really evens things out.