One full expansion in, Evidence! remains one of the strongest level 0 Guardian cards. One card and one resource for one clue is a very strong trade that will speed up your progress considerably. The event is pretty easy to trigger, as most locations in Arkham Horror have clues on them, and it is a rare scenario indeed in which the Guardian isn't killing a few monsters. It is sometimes worth it to take an attack of opportunity to move with a monster to the right location (or, better yet, use Shortcut), but most of the time you can trigger Evidence! without any such hassle. If for some reason the monsters aren't showing up, the two Intellect icons on this card are also useful.

I usually include this card as all three Guardians. Zoey and Skids, otherwise desperately short of clue-gathering options, are very grateful to have an efficient one like this in-class. I think Evidence! is particularly strong for Roland; his plan of attack was already to kill monsters on spaces with clues, and Evidence! rewards this further. Clearing a high-shroud, two-clue location merely by killing a monster (something you probably would have had to do regardless of the clues) is excellent.

This may seem obvious, but as someone that doesn't play standalone mode often and prefers campaign play instead this fact had escaped my notice: Cover Up really has no effect in standalone mode. And perhaps I'm being petty, but it feels pretty good to draw it and not have to pay any sort of attention to its presence. I think the word I'm looking for is empowered. It is is a wasted draw, but other than that its harmless. Heck, The Necronomicon is worse to pull in standalone. So spread the Good News! There are times when Roland just doesn't care about his weakness. (If only he had more Sanity...)

Defiance seems a low value card but it shows its strength in two independent conditions:

• Defiance is obviously useful when the issue of a chaos token may be dramatic. For instance if you’re playing The Miskatonic Museum and Harold Walsted is your one and only asset, you really don’t want to endure an effect (which would add a token for the remainder of the campaign). It is very situational, but you may encounter many of those specific situations during the campaign.
• In Easy mode, we can demonstrate (see below) that Defiance is equivalent to Unexpected Courage in most scenarios when you play to maximize the odd of success of skill tests so, if you play this way, you can safely put it in your deck instead of Unexpected Courage and benefit from its situational value when it appears. Or include both to have the best of both worlds!

Demonstration (for readably purpose, I ignore token):

Say you’re playing The Midnight Masks and you’re about to make a skill test with a skill value of 4 for a difficulty of 3. If you play Unexpected Courage, you will pass the test in all cases. If you play Defiance and choose , you will also pass the test in all cases. It’s the same for The Miskatonic Museum (if you have in Chaos bag OR there is an Hunting Horror at your location), Essex County Express (before agenda #3), Blood on the Altar and Carnevale of Horrors.

With The Devourer Below, Defiance is even better than Unexpected Courage as you need a skill value of 2 above difficulty before playing Defiance (then you play Defiance on and you pass the test in all cases), where you need a skill value of 3 above difficulty before playing Unexpected Courage (then you play Unexpected Courage and pass the test in all cases… if there isn't any Ancient One in play!). Curse of the Rougarou offers a similar analysis (unless you’re in Bayou location).

With Extracurricular Activity with , Defiance is better on all difficulties, as it’s really complicated to ensure success without it. Without , Defiance is equivalent to Unexpected Courage as soon as you have 10 cards in your discard pile.

With Undimensioned and Unseen, Defiance is slightly better, as Unexpected Courage can’t protect you from the additional effect.

On the contrary, Defiance is worse or slightly worse than Unexpected Courage for The Gathering and The House Always Wins (because of the positive effect of that you won’t want to cancel). Only 2 scenarios in a total of 13 published scenarios.

For Where Doom Awaits and Lost in Time and Space, it depends on the exact situation.

In conclusion, not a terrific card, but it can make sense including it in a deck, especially if you play in easy mode. You also may want to include it in hard or expert mode because the situational effect can become very strong.

Note that if you use player cards that take advantage of success margin as .41 Derringer, Unexpected Courage will be preferred.

I found it a little strange that the only review of Burglary was positive, because I consider this one of the worst cards in the Core Set. In the abstract, spending an action for three resources is sometimes good, because three resources are (very slightly) more valuable than an action. But Burglary brings along with it a host of problems and complications.

Most significantly, there's the up-front 1-action, 1-resource, 1-card cost of playing Burglary. This means the card takes forever to generate a profit. If you successfully Burglarize once, you've swapped 2 actions, 1 card, and 1 resource for 3 resources. Terrible. If you do it twice, you've swapped 3 actions, 1 card, and 1 resource for 6 resources. Still terrible. If you do it three times, you're getting close to breaking even. At 4+ times, you start generating a small profit. For this to really generate enough upside to justify the deck slot, you'd probably need to successfully activate it 5+ times. That is a lot of time to spend Burglarizing--a lot of time in which you're not advancing the Act deck and actually winning the game.

Burglary is even worse than that, of course, when you consider that you might fail the test. The three investigators with in-faction access to Burglary have a base Intellect of 3. That means that unless they're hanging out at a 1-shroud location (which may or may not be there) on Easy, they'll likely fail the test a good chunk of the time. That makes Burglary take even longer to pay for itself, if it ever does. Voluntarily inflicting a ton of skill tests on yourself, by the way, also will expose you to a host of bad special token effects.

Arkham Horror is a rush game. You have limited actions in which to get your objectives done, and you've got to get moving quickly. You simply do not have time to sit around at a low-shroud location for multiple turns doing nothing but amassing resources. And if you play Burglary and only use it a little bit, then you've gotten a terrible deal.

I will grant that Burglary is better for Rex Murphy than it is for other investigators. However, I think it is still not worthwhile even for him. In my opinion, even for Higher Education Rex, picking up 2 clues is slightly better than picking up 1 clue and 3 resources. That means the only real use for Burglary is to clear out locations with 1 clue more efficiently. But Rex has a huge number of ways to get that last clue without sacrificing efficiency (Working a Hunch, Deduction, Seeking Answers, having a teammate do it, etc.) When you consider the up-front cost of Burglary, and the fact that Rex probably has to invest cards and/or resources to succeed by 2+ to get the resources and the clue, I think Burglary is still not paying for itself.

Moreover, Burglary takes up a splash card slot for Rex. That means that instead of a dubious efficiency gain when investigating 1-clue locations, Rex could have had one of the strongest cards in the game: Ward of Protection, Fire Axe, Dynamite Blast, Elusive, etc.

Vicious Blow basically amounts to spending a card to get the equivalent of a successful fight action. As it turns out, a successful fight action is way more valuable than a card, so Vicious Blow is great.

Killing a monster in one fewer action than would otherwise be possible is terrific. It's always useful to save an action, but Vicious Blow is at its very strongest when its action compression allows you to kill a monster you otherwise would not have been able to kill until your next turn. For instance, Vicious Blow can save you a lot of damage if it kills a monster that would otherwise have survived into the enemy phase. It could even save you an entire turn if it deals that last point of damage to a boss.

Moreover, by killing a monster in one fewer action than you otherwise would have, you're also reducing the number of skill tests you have to take. This is great. If you need to pass 1 skill test instead of 2, or 2 instead of 3, that allows you to concentrate your boosts, giving you much higher odds of a successful kill. And each skill test you avoid reduces your risk of drawing the autofail or some other nasty special token.

Of course, assuming you have a 2-damage-per-action weapon like Machete out, Vicious Blow won't necessarily be an action saver if you're facing an even-health enemy. Fortunately, though, there are plenty of enemies thus far printed with 3 or 5 health. Plus, you only need to add in 1 additional damage from some other source--maybe Beat Cop, or Zoey's Cross, or even a second Vicious Blow--and then this card can also work against even-health enemies.

Of course, there's a chance that you fail the test, in which case Vicious Blow obviously amounts to spending a card for nothing. But a) Vicious Blow itself gives you +1 to the test, and b) you can and should combine it with other boosts so you are very likely to succeed and get the bonus damage.

If an investigator has in-faction access to Guardian cards and plans on fighting with Combat (in other words, 99% of Zoey, Roland, Mark, Leo, and Yorick decks, plus the majority of Skids decks), I would basically always run this. It is a fine choice as a splash card for the likes of Pete, as well.