As a "weapon" that does not occupy any slot, It's a good secondary to kill critters, while saving ammo on your big guns. Albeit at the risk of hurting other players, but there are ways around that.

Avoiding damage to other players

• Emergency Aid to heal other players afterward
• Attack with Blackjack 2 instead of grenades
• True Grit, Brother Xavier or Agency Backup to take their damage
• Pass your Armor of Ardennes around with Teamwork
• If you have access to seeker, Shortcut to send other players away. However enemies engaged with them will leave as well, you could use Taunt before that

Combos

• Emergency Cache 3, Contraband or Venturer to reload
• Marksmanship to attack a connecting location
• Vicious Blow for more damage on the primary target

Side question, how does Hatchet Man interact with this card? Is the extra damage dealt to the attacked enemy or the target of Hatchet Man?

There are so many great spell events to choose from. Deny Existence Drawn to the Flame, Uncage the Soul, etc. Since she works on secrets you can use Truth from Fiction to increase her uses. I think she would be fun to build around.

This card is pretty cool because it is a seeker card that actually lets a seeker fight for real, landing a gigantic blow that can defeat a 4-health monster in a single action.

However, this card is very, very undependable. Unlike Mind over Matter, you absolutely cannot expect this card will be usable when you need it. It isn’t a big deal for most seekers to pick up 3 clues when they are available. Unfortunately, most scenarios don’t let you keep those clues, they force you to spend them in order to move to the next Act. So you can’t use this card at the start of the mission, you can’t use it right after advancing to the next Act, you can’t use it when you are still trying to find the place where the clues are located or otherwise busy dealing with something before you can collect clues, you can’t use it when the Act requires you to spend clues a few at a time as soon as you collect them, and you can’t use it during the many Acts that don’t involve collecting clues at all. And when you do have a lot of clues, it is not uncommon that you are on a roll collecting clues and would rather collect more and end the Act, rather than go off and fight a monster. There are definitely plenty of times you can use this card, but a lot more when you can’t.

On top of that, the card is quite expensive for a one-shot event and you need to be willing and able to spend the money on it. And while you hope you have enough Lore and other cards to hit the target, that may not always be the case, especially if your base Lore isn’t 5. And it could be embarassing if you miss since you likely have no other fighting abilities.

To summarize, this isn’t really a self-defense card that you can hold in your hand and rely on to get you out of trouble. It is more of an extra card you throw into your deck so you can occasionally do something awesome.

Duke is a good dog. No body is going to kill my Duke! Duke and Guard Dog are friends, and I have two dogs! Don't put any damage on Duke or Guard dog on my watch! They are good doggies. They are very brave. I love Duke!

First some numbers. If you combine this with Chthonian Stone and a reasonable bag, you might have 4 out of 15 tokens that cost a charge, meaning this will last around 26-27 draws on average.

On the plus side, this card provides a shield against the dreaded auto-fail token that no other card matches. You could potentially protect everyone in a 4-person party, no matter where they are located, from auto-fail for 3 full rounds. From that perspective, it seems like a pretty powerful effect.

The problem, and the reason I find this card hard to like, is the extreme cost for each failure you prevent. You are probably going to prevent 1-2 tentacle draws by playing this card, at a cost of an action, 4 resources, and a 5 XP cost card. That could be worth it to cancel tentacle draws at really bad times. But you can’t control which tentacle draws you are preventing; a lot of the time, the auto-fail you are preventing, would have come during an investigate check or some other task with no great penalty for failing other than losing an action (or worse, during a treachery skill check you end up failing anyway). And the benefit of not losing 1-2 actions is tiny compared to the heavy cost of this card. You really need to prevent an auto-fail with a heavy, heavy penalty for failure, in order to justify the cost of this card.

And while no other card quite does what this does, there are other ways to protect against auto-fail that are an awful lot cheaper. Such as Time Warp, for example. And while the comparison isn’t a direct one, it is worth mentioning that Father Mateo’s special power does a better job of stopping really important auto-fails than this card, yet it isn’t even that great of a power.

It seems like the time to use this card, would be when the party is about to perform a series of critical actions, every single one of which absolutely has to succeed, and the party is spending a ton of resources to make sure they all succeed, and needs to guard against the auto-fail. Kind of specialized in my book for a 5 XP card.