Skill

Practiced. Cursed.

XP: 3.

Rogue

You may commit Justify the Means to any type of test.

As an additional cost to commit Justify the Means to a skill test, add tokens to the chaos bag equal to this test's difficulty.

This test automatically succeeds.

Borja Pindado
Into the Maelstrom #306.
Justify the Means

FAQs

No faqs yet for this card.

Reviews

A good example of tech that you can splash outside the archetype, also a card that's uniquely GRRREAT at hard and expert, but a little "meh" at standard.

In normal / easy, the bag is tough, but not horrible, it doesnt take too much to cover for the vast majority of tokens in there to guarantee a "success barring ". For this circumstance, the hoops you jump through to execute a Justify the Means are just a little bit too hard by themselves. Dumping 3+ in the bag to deliver a single Pilfer or Backstab is just a bit steep.

In harder difficulty, where the bag is on average 1 or 2 higher difficulty than standard, paying or committing your way to a successful test routinely becomes a roundly drain, a difficulty like 3 fight/shroud requires something like an 8 for your skill value to be "guaranteed", and an autofail is just backbreaking. You'll gladly take the tokens if that means your key skill is delivered in tense circumstances.

As a side note. This card is obviously best if you have some high-value tests to pass, a Pilfer, Sawed-Off Shotgun, these sorts of things that do a LOT of work in singular tests.

Mechanically, do remember that "automatically succeed" means that the test difficulty is "0", so a "beat by" attempt still needs to beat 0 by the required amount, and the card may be committed to any test, including a friends's.

Tsuruki23 · 2472
In standard it still makes plenty of success for the over-success archetype. Succeeding a 3-difficulty test is obviously not terribly difficult there, but succeeding it by 6 is a different story (especially with something like the Shotgun that lacks a baked in boost). I think it's quite difficult to make Shotgun work _without_ cards like this TBH, and it gives you a bit more security with something expensive like Pilfer or that RFGs like taboo All In. — Zinjanthropus · 223

I think this is a pretty interesting card. For starters, automatic success is good, in general, but it's especially good in the Rogue faction. This is because Rogues have a lot of effects that not only care about whether or not you succeed at a test, but also how much you succeed by. Something like "Watch this!" only needs you to succeed by 1 to get a positive effect, and it's not too difficult to get your stats high enough that you're at least very likely to do that, however with something like All In or especially Sawed-Off Shotgun, you really want to be succeeding by a lot more than that to make them worth including in your deck. This can be fairly taxing on your resources, because you might want to be as much as 11-up on a test to make sure that you'll be dealing the full 6 damage with a -5 in the bag (for example), and doing that leaves you extremely vulnerable to the . Enter Justify the Means.

The way that automatic success works is that you don't draw a chaos token and you succeed by your skill value. Now you just need to get your skill value to 6 and you have a guaranteed 6-damage in one action. That's value! You can also trigger whatever other succeed-by effects off of the same test.

Over-success effects are probably the main thing that you want to do, but part of what makes this card good is that it's fairly versatile. Running low on sanity in a scenario with Rotting Remains? Well, you can use this to make sure that you don't die. Get Frozen in Fear? No problem, just add some to get rid of it. Forced to explore from Crumbling Precipice? If you fail the test, you're still safe when you have Justify the Means, and at the low cost of only 2 .

So, what's so interesting about automatically succeeding tests? That sounds boring. Well it isn't. The cost of adding equal to the difficulty of the test actually makes it really interesting. This means that you can't use it if you would have to add in excess of 10 to the bag. This means that if you're using it to succeed high difficulty tests you're going to hit that limit pretty fast. Possibly the best part about this is that, unlike Three Aces, it doesn't really matter how degenerate your deck is. If there's 10 in the bag you just can't use it no matter how fast you can draw it. This also makes it less costly to use on easy tests that you had a good chance to succeed anyway, which can be very relevant when using it for oversuccess purposes or for must-pass tests. It also means that it combos with one of my favorite Rogue skills, Momentum. There's actually no cost to succeed at a 0-difficulty test.

The other thing that makes it a bit more interesting is that, unlike Three Aces, it gives no skill boost of its own. If you need to hit a succeed-by-6 threshold, and you only have a stat of 3, for example, you need to find some way to close that gap.

I did test it a bit in TTS, myself, and was able to make a really fun solo Wini deck that had a single Sawed-Off Shotgun as the only source of damage. It had Justify, Three Aces, and Daring Maneuver (2) to make sure that I could always hit the requisite threshold to kill 3-health enemies regardless of the number of cards in hand. In spite of the aforementioned drawbacks of Justify, it actually still felt pretty busted, but that's honestly hard to avoid with Wini, regardless of the deck. Looking forward to actually having the physical card. So long to wait X_x

Zinjanthropus · 223
It's practiced, for Finn & Trish. — MrGoldbee · 1391
Or Amanda! — MrGoldbee · 1391