The only thing I can think of with this card is Joe Diamond strapped with his Colt 1911s, jamming an Ice Pick into a shoggoth, slamming it in with a Sledgehammer and dropping one final shot into the thing for good measure. No Bandolier required as both of those tools take up no hand slots as long as he's packing heat!

I wonder, how this card interacts with (non-level 0) Myriad cards. Initially I thought, they should cost +3 XP, if you take a set of three. But the rule for Myriad states: Additionally, when you purchase a myriad card for your deck, you may purchase up to two additional copies of that card (at the same level) at no experience cost. Because "no" is not a numeric like "0", you could add to, I do now think, that you can replace cards into them just for +1 XP.

For me the best use is in an "Ashcan" Pete deck:

• 1) you start the game at 3 remaining sanity and thus can commit the Desperate skill without using your precious off-class slots for Arcane Research or St. Hubert's Key,
• 2) you start the campaign with 3 XP that can be used to upgrade one copy of Peter Sylvestre or 2 copies of Yaotl to have a 2nd use of your Desperate skills.

For me there are 2 ways to consider this card:

• as a way to save on resources to play assets, ideally Relic ones (and eventually draw cards), for example the Forbidden Tome or the Ancient Stone,
• or as a way to have a much easier investigate action in a high shroud location.

  The 2nd use can lead to very interesting combos: with Magnifying Glass + Deduction / Deduction for 2 or 3 clues with a 0-difficulty test, with Magnifying Glass + Dream Diary to improve your chances to "interpret the dreams", with The King in Yellow (and probably the Magnyfing glass) to have immediately an easy investigation to get rid of the weakness if you lack symbols for other tests, with Scavenging to play while getting a clue the asset you got in your hand because you succeeded you previous investigation by 2, ...

Contrary of the review above, I think this card is actually very good, for having playtesting it. It's the ever vigilant equivalent of Seeker. Yes, it requires you to have three cards in hand to play it to its maximum effect, but with seeker card draw, it's not much a problem. Like Cryptic research, it's not a good card by itself xp wise, but it will greatly enhance your deck when you'll include it. If you play with higher education, the difficulty of the test becomes trivial. Let's say you pay for a 3 cost and a 4 cost asset, you test at difficulty 7 and you're Ursula. It means you need roughly 4 resources to crack the test in standard. For one card, one action and 4 resource, it nets you 7 resources, three actions (two play action and an investigation). That's a total of +5, which has the same value as a hotstreak lv4, for the meager risk of getting the autofail. It gets better with 5 intellect character, or if you manage to land your int tarot turn 0. In asset heavy decks, this card is a god sent. The additional draw from relics is a bonus at this point.