Superb card.

Not many items make it straight from the draw to the table, Magnifying Glass does just that. A 1 cost permament boost to while investigating is crazy value. it can let you hit the ideal sweet-spots of difficulty for several game modes and once you start layering more bonuses you'll be able to brute-force clues very quickly.

The fast mechanic is a huge deal here. often you might hesitate to play a Flashlight not knowing if you need it right away and when you finally do play it it might set you back one of the actions you'dd rather have used to actually start investigating, Magnifying Glass is out on the table exactly when you feel like playing it and generating value immediately.

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The only drawback is the slot. A wont mind, they typically don't have much competition in the slot and might even supplement the Magnifying Glass with Flashlight to raise the odds of drawing helpful hand slots faster. Non characters however might have some competition, mostly from weapons.

Ultimately it depends on your character and difficulty. A 4 is much more useful in standard then hard, so a Magnifying Glass wielding Roland Banks is a solid plan, but on Hard you'll need a lot more support to warrant the Magnifying Glass card slots.

The grand test for usefulness is how great a number you can hit with just the one Magnifying Glass on the table (Drawing 2 is not impossible, but the hand slot might be occupied and if the card is'nt useful with just 1 copy of it in play then it's probably a bad fit for your deck). Netting 3 isn't worth the trouble, 4 is good on Standard but needs more support for Hard, 5 is definitely powerful in all modes and 6+ is an outright autotake.

When you decide to go with Magnifying Glass in your deck make sure you have more support to supplement it with, Perception, Fieldwork, some icon cards, stuff that might buff your investigates to hit the comfort numbers.

Ah, the good old Mag glass. Many years have passed, and i can honestly say from the bottom of my heart that i hate Mag glass even more now then i did back in the days. Sure, it was strong, but no way did i know that Seekers would be so over-the-top overpowered that a simple item that gives them +1 would be deemed as OP. Why, you might ask? Well, let me give you an example.

Imagine if Guardians had something like Mag Glass from the core set, which most of the community does not even see as problematic, but imagine a guardian asset like this: takes up an arcane slot for example, 1 cost-0xp fast asset that says you get +1 . Why would anybody in their right mind NOT play that card?

And they won't print it because it would immediately be auto-include in most Guardian decks. But even if they print such an insanely broken and not fun card, here's the fun thing; IT WOULD STILL BE WEAKER THAN MAG GLASS! (since mag glass gives Seekers the thing that they use all game long in almost all of their actions, it gets the job done and clues win you games, while fight is something that you need only when enemies show up and most of them end up being dead in the same turn). Every single thing about this card screams "VALUEEEEEE", and the fact that this card came out alllll the way back in the core set, it pushed designers into a bad alley of balancing future cards around cards like this and Dr. Milan Christopher which we already know is the best ally in the game at lvl 0. The worst part of all of this is that poor Rogues still do not have an ally that gives them +1 to play with at 0xp which does something usefull, Mystics again have no good allies at 0xp after poor David Renfield got nuked with the latest tabboo list and are again back to the good old Arcane Initiate which is pretty damn good but still not on the level of Milan.

This whole review might seem like a lot of complaining and not a straight up review, but i just wanted to tell the new players that they should not look at this card as a simple, poor +1 . It is insanely strong, and you will never feel bad to draw it and just slam it onto the table, because even in the worst possible outcome if you need to discard an asset because you have drawn Crypt Chill, you can discard this damn card which didn't even cost you an action to play and just continue doing what Seekers do, which is running around and clearing clues and drawing cards and winning the game. Just put your high enough, and that's it!! Even better when designers put something like a boss enemy to "balance" it out, so that Seekers cannot win the game just by themselves, which is the time for our Guardians to shine!

But wait, aren't most of the bosses and scenarios "balanced" out by having the ability to spend clues to deal dmg to enemies, or spend clues to move for free, or spend clues to.... you get what i'm saying? Well, the normal brain would then ask: "If Seekers get the best draw, best movement, best search, insane action compression, completely maxed-out stats or insanely strong abilites, i can deal dmg with Strange Solution and Ancient Stone, i can get easy money with cards like Crack the Case etc., why would i play anything else?". And that's where my group is at currently! With the full cardpool, there ain't no way in hell that any other class compares to Seekers, so we just stopped playing them. And it all started with this poor, simple card........