How good is Take Heart in 2024? Does it still deserve to be a staple or is it another casualty of the ever-expanding card pool?

Imagine a hypothetical 0-cost event that draws 2 cards and gains 2 resources. That would compare favorably to Emergency Cache (2), and be a solid card at 2 XP or close to an auto-include at 0 XP. So how does the real Take Heart compare to this hypothetical event?

Cons:

• To "play" it as an action you need an available test you can fail, most reliably an investigation.
• You suffer the effects of a failed test, such as Haunted abilities or random chaos token effects.
• Sometimes a +1, , or will accidentally succeed the test and waste the card entirely.

Pros:

• If there's a test you are going to fail anyway (such as a treachery), you can "play" it without spending an action or incurring additional risk.
• It synergizes with other fail-payoff effects like Stella Clark, Rabbit's Foot, and "Look what I found!"
• It synergizes with skill-matters effects like Silas Marsh and True Survivor.

So where does that leave us overall?

If you can reliably fail investigations without horrible consequences, Take Heart is still a very strong card. Baseline, this means an investigator with 2 or less. Any higher and you're having to wait around for higher-shroud locations or roll the dice on dodging 0 tokens. But even with 0-2, any of the following could make it much worse:

• A teammate going into tokens.
• Playing The Circle Undone campaign (just don't do it).
• Particularly punishing failure effects on , , or . This is the hardest one to plan around, but even in the worse cases you're usually only looking at 10-20% chances of meaningful consequence, and if it's a forced test you're not increasing your risk at all.

So those are the factors that could make Take Heart worse. What factors make it better?

• While low is the most reliable way to use it, low defensive stats increase the odds of getting to freeroll it off a treachery. This makes it marginally better for someone with low like Silas Marsh, and much better for someone with low stats across the board like Charlie Kane or Carson Sinclair.
• It's best when soak is your main way to survive troublesome treacheries, compared to passing tests or canceling the cards.
• If you're building around other fail-matters or difficulty increases, it goes from good to amazing.

There are places where Take Heart is obviously great, but consider it the next time you find yourself playing Agnes Baker or "Ashcan" Pete! Maybe you can even find space for it in Zoey Samaras or Daniela Reyes. And Hank Samson is just around the corner...