If you are wondering how strong this card is, just imagine that it says for no resources and no actions, an investigator at your location draws 10% of their deck. Yeah, I'd say that is pretty good.

Currently, only 6 investigators can take this (every Seeker except Norman). Among them, the hardest thing about taking Cryptic Research is choosing to prioritize this. 4XP is a lot of XP to spend on a card and Seekers have a lot of places they could be spending their XP. Add to that the fact that Seekers have a lot of card draw even with no XP at all. It's truly not hard to draw through your entire deck with Seeker, even with no XP at all. If you are worried about redundancy, then think of it this way: Cryptic Research could help you consolidate some card drawing power into one card, leaving you more space to add other effects.

However, don't neglect the multiplayer possibilities. There are other factions that have a hell of a time drawing cards, Guardians in particular. If you are doing a classic Seeker + Guardian multiplayer campaign, this can help your Guardian draw through their deck to get cards they need, while you draw through your own deck with your own tools.

As other reviewers have noted, this card pairs beautifully with Alyssa Graham. Basically, Alyssa lets you look at the top encounter card for free, but makes you pay a hefty price -- doom -- to get rid of it. Split the Angle makes you pay to peek -- an action -- but then discard what you saw mostly for free. Put the two together, and it's ALL free.

Commenters, however, have done what commenters do, and raised annoyingly rational objections. They point out that you only get one StA, so you might never find it at all, and if you do, there's no guarantee Alyssa is in play, etc. etc., doom and gloom. Unfortunately, they are right...

I think, in the end, StA takes a sweeping deckbuilding commitment to make it reliably good. Step one is including 2 copies of Alyssa Graham. As others have noted, you'll probably want to upgrade into level 3 Scrying. Scrying is especially handy in solo, because it gives you multiples turns of information about the encounter deck in a single use. Say you're solo-ing away, and in the tea leaves you find a pair of ancient evils and something relatively harmless. You can arrange them into an Evils-Meh-Evils sandwich; and use StA two turns in a row to discard the two slices of death-bread, drawing only the mild Meh in between (and something random) -- all for no actions at all. Of course, the downside here is that you are now using both your arcane slots on encounter-deck mining...

As long as you're investing in all these cards that let you burn through or optimally order the encounter deck, you may as well toss in Stargazing (you are an astronomer, after all...). You're much more likely to actually draw the The Stars Are Right if you can dig for it with Alyssa/StA/Scrying.

With 2 copies of Alyssa and 2 copies of level 3 Scrying, the odds are now pretty good that if you do manage to draw StA, you'll have something to pair it with. If you are absolutely determined to make this combination happen, Word of Command can help you find StA or Scrying, and Calling in Favors can help you track down a shy Alyssa.

By now, we're talking about quite a commitment! Is it worth it? Strategically, maybe not, but it might make for a fun thematic build. A prescient astronomer with occult leanings reading doom in the night skies -- and then somehow averting it by means of dubious geometry or an eldritch astrolabe -- that sounds pretty Arkham-y to me.

While Practice Makes Perfect has some good uses with combatants, I also wanted to point out that Mandy Thompson can use it to rather ludicrous effect. Using it on an arbitrary investigate can turn it into a single trigger where you can pick two of the most fitting cards to use out of a selection of cards including Deduction/Deduction (2) and Perception. This can turn a single card into both a boost and bonus clues or card draws over multiple tests. It only gets better depending on the secondary class picked - you can also branch into things like Enraptured with mystic access, or Momentum or Three Aces with rogue access.

The ability to improve Practice Makes Perfect from one draw/boost/bonus effect into two draws/boosts/bonus effects is immense, and given the symbols on many of those cards, it means she can throw it on pretty much any investigate action to get a lot of effective resources on top of a notable boost.

What exactly does it mean "which would trigger during the investigation"? Things like Haunted are included? Location effects like "When you discover the last clues at this location: ..." ? Does this card automatically make blank the text on a location?

I'm surprised this hasn't come up yet on this page, but put 2x of this in your Joe Diamond Hunch deck, and you basically added 4xp to your deck, as you will get the effect of playing Preposterous Sketches2 because of Joe's Hunch discount!