So, basically each time you use George's power, you get +2 in card advantage. Why +2? Well, you draw a card, so that's +1, and you get to not-really-discard the other, for another +1 as long as it's a skill. Or a card you would've assigned. Or any card that you don't need immediately since you can get it back later thanks to Grim Resolve. Now, it's not as good as drawing 2, but it's close enough if you build your deck with loads of skills. A standard investigator power is a bonus action per turn, if you deck is build around it. Drawing 2 is usually better than +1 action. So, as long as you can reliably get it once per turn, it's a quite good investigator power. That is, if you actually get value from discarding.

There are of course a decent amount of cards that allow you to discard productively during your turn. At low xp it's mostly the new set of investigate/fight/evade tools, but later there are also cards like Cornered, Gift of Nodens or Bound for the Horizon, all pretty good cards in their own. So long as you manage to get one of those in play, you can reliably activate George's power most turns, if not every turn.

But of course, having a good power that you can activate almost every turn is good, but George's power is once per phase. So you want to use it more than once per turn. So, how to use it outside of the investigator phase? 

At first I thought there were not many great ways. If you overdraw you can use it during the standby phase, but that's not ideal. Idol of Xanatos allows you to discard instead of taking damage/horror, which can happen in the enemy phase or the mythos phase, but that doesn't seem very reliable. Artistic Inspiration is great because it can be reloaded at any phase, but that imply to use it, which you can't always do productively. And Cornered and Gift of Nodens can be used in the mythos phase if there is a test to do. All that is good, don't get me wrong, but it's not as reliable as I'd like. So even with a good setup, you probably won't be able to use his power twice every turn, at least not early in the campaign, or maybe you will have to use it in sub-optimal way (like reloading an Artistic Inspiration that you didn't really need).

And then I realised that George totally can take Forced Learning. Which allow him to use his power every. Single. Standby. Phase. And not just to replace a card that you overdrew, no, no, to replace a card in addition to your draw. With absolutely no setup, and no xp spent.

So, again, each standby phase, you draw two cards, you discard one of them — but not really, it's not discarded, you can still assign it, and then you draw one more card. Basically drawing 3 cards instead of 1 every turn (so long as one of the first two is a skill). In addition to your "main" power, that you can still use pretty much every turn during the investigator phase, and maybe an additionnal time during the mythos phase.

Yeah, yeah, I know, that imply to have a 50 cards deck. Who cares? You draw like 3 to 4 more cards than a normal investigator each turn. It's not a disaster to have 70% more cards in your deck when you have thrice the draw power.

TLDR: A solid and very fun flex cluever who requires very little to excel. He works without a big collection, he works without much XP, and he works without many assets in play. Core+Drowned gives him an easy to build deck that works. Large collections open up a dizzying vast array of deck options. Easily my favorite new investigator in years, possibly ever.

The Basics: Stats and Role

Stats: George has 4/3/3/2 in intellect, combat, agility, and willpower, so you know he wants to investigate often. His character ability gives him lots of extra cards to commit to tests. Some of the best discard engines can boost any test, and as a survivor he has access to several good multi-stat cards, too. He can easily set up to pass lots of tests using many stats. I think his combat and agility numbers can give him a lot of value and you should try to do something with them. If you just want to draw zillions of cards while spamming investigate and passing willpower mythos checks, you might as well play Daisy or Rex or Agatha Crane.

Clueving: He's got tons of good clue compression in color. Nautical Charts, Contemplative, Winging It, and Sharp Vision all synergize with his sctick. Mariner's Compass doesn't, but is still great. "Look what I found!" is okay too. His yellow and green access gives him Deduction, Quick Thinking, and a variety, of, other, options. He should have no trouble keeping up tempo.

Flexing: George's ability makes him very good at exploiting skills, assets that discard cards, and events that play from your discard. For damage, there's Improvised Weapon, Hand Hook, Brute Force, and Long Shot, while Anchor Chain, Survival Instinct, Nimble, Lightfooted and Stunning Blow enhance evades with bonus movement or damage, or by evading two enemies at once or one enemy for two turns. He's also perfectly capable of using staple assets like Fire Axe, Meat Cleaver, and Disguise effectively.

Something very cool about George is that if you dedicate some deck slots to enemy handling, you don't need to invest much of anything during the game to bring his combat ability on line. One reason some people build dedicated cluevers instead of flexes is that they don't want to waste actions playing weapons, nor hoard resources for combat events. Sometimes they don't even want to allocate hand space to those options. But it costs george very little to prepare for battle. He could walk around with Brute Force and Long Shot below, Hand Hook in hand, and Improvised Weapon in discard. With only 1 resource banked and one "real" hand slot spoken for, he's ready to make 3 attacks for 8 total damage at any time. Actually doing so will cost at least 4 cards + probably more to ensure he passes those tests, so actually doing the damage won't be cheap. But being ready to, if needed, is cheap. For this reason I think if you aren't flexing, you're leaving a lot of optionality value on the table.

Combatant: I don't recommend full-time fighter George because too many of his best combat options are one-use (events and skills) or once-per-turn (the nautical tools and usually hatchet). Even survivor weapons that are technically spammable get unwieldy. Furthermore, he's at most risk than most characters of losing his options at unfortunate times. Cast Adrift can wipe out damage skills tucked in the boat, and sometimes also events in your hand. Reshuffling the deck may take your improvised cards offline, etc.

Intermediate Sailing: Leveraging the Boat.

After picking a role, the next biggest question is how often you want to trigger George's ability (you could do it 4 times a turn, but probably won't), and how you're going to make that pay off. This determines the interlocking combination of draw effects, discard engines, skill, and play-from-discard cards you'll want to include.

A tricky thing with George is that the cards other discard investigators used with their abilities mostly don't work well his triggered effect. Play-from-discard cards don't have icons (except glimmer of hope), so if you tuck them under George they provide no value and in fact are stuck there until Cast Adrift or recalled with your signature, but even that requires swapping something else in their place. So, if you discard only one card per phase, you'd probably rather tuck a skill instead of pitching a discard asset. These shine best in a George deck that expects to discard multiple cards in one phase, usually because you're using Cornered repeatedly or in tandem with nautical tools in the Investigator phase, or because you're overdrawing and discarding multiples in Upkeep. So: the more you plan to discard on your turn, the more play-from-discard cards you should run, and then the more card draw you need to pay for these multi-discard binges.

Since you can tuck once per phase, and you want to mostly tuck skills, the more skills you have, the more you want to find extra chances to tuck. And the more chances to tuck you have, the more skills you want to run. The easiest way to make our your tucks is to run Artistic Inspiration, Nautical Charts or Cornered, and Cornered or Idol of Xanatos. During Mythos you discard to pump a test or prevent damage. During Investigation you discard to pump a test or feed a tool. During the Enemy phase, you discard to refresh Artistic Inspiration. During Upkeep you overdraw and discard to hand size. This lets you draw 5 cards per turn and get full value for all of them, if 4 of them are skills. Unfortunately, it's not realistic to make more than about 50% of your deck skills. You'd thus need to draw 8 per turn to find 4 skills on average, so you need three more draws. Sometimes the skills themselves might provide that, especially if you're using Gift of Nodens to recur Last Chance. But it's probably more reasonable to settle for tucking 3 times per turn. This also reduces the risk that you run aground after clogging the boat with situational skills you can't yet use, or don't want to.

Brief Remarks On His Interactions With Other Stuff In The Card Pool

• George does great with all the skills mater stuff in Survivor, and somewhat with the Discard matters.

• George can take Short Supply, Underworld Support, and Forced Learning in any combination. This means your initial draw pile could be anywhere from 20 cards to 50 cards deep after your mulligan and optionally mill. Personally I think Forced Learning is still very bad, even for George. There aren't enough skills or "discard me" cards to fill the slots, and he doesn't need the help triggering his ability in Upkeep. He's already going to overdraw naturally more often than not.

• George can also use the Dark Horse archetype very well. Skills are free and the play-from-discard stuff all costs only 1. He may well want to pass tests with all 4 skills frequently, especially if he's got something like Fire Axe + Nautical Charts +Track Shoes going on. Madame Labranche is already good with him because he can empty his hand frequently. He has two other drip economy allies, and also lots of burst economy options other Survivors don't, even testless ones.

• Customizing Grizzled with the return-from-discard effect gives him the only repeatedly-tuckable skill option.

• George also does well with the Edge of the Earth "synergy" mechanic and multi-class cards. With just permanents he can get Call for Backup to be move+clue+heal damage, great if anyone pulled a heal-able weakness. Talisman of Protection is an easy way to sneak purple in, too.

I'm getting confused about the "Limit 5 cards" - I was trying to compare it to Diana and Gloria but wording is different every time - can I still use the ability when there are 5 cards under him and discard one of the previous ones?