The theme of this card feels great, especially for Hunter investigators like Zoey. I've split my thoughts into a few quick-read sections:

Pros:

• As it plays fast, can be considered action-less.
• When you deal a point of damage it can deal an extra point as a and it stays attached to an enemy. This makes it fairly invulnerable to poor chaos bag draws, unlike Vicious Blow, and you don't need to take a specific action to make it work (e.g. you need to fight to commit Vicious Blow for more damage).
• Provides a +1 boost on all actions fighting that enemy (so on high health enemies, you can get a +1 skill boost across all attacks, and then trigger the on the final hit).
• Has a icon, so you're always going to find a way to use this even if it's not for fighting.
• Is a Spell, so can be taken on the likes of Marie Lambeau or Agatha Crane (who may not benefit from the +1 , but can make use of the additional damage).

Cons:

• Costs a resource, unlike Vicious Blow.
• Only deals 1 additional damage, unlike Vicious Blow ••.
• Can only be played in your own turn, unlike Vicious Blow which could be committed to fight actions of other investigators (allowing them to take the first turn).
• As an event the additional damage is a one-off benefit, unlike cards such as Beat Cop •• which persist and can deal up to 3 points of damage (more if you heal them).

I guess you can see there are a lot of Pros and not many Cons - so why would you not always take Hunter's Mark? The answer is it's another card to fit into your deck and the competition (e.g. Vicious Blow, and off-class cards like Long Shot where applicable) costs no experience. For me a see a few possible use-cases…

It's best used on:

• Decks using +1 damage weapon assets (e.g. Blessed Blade ••••) where even more damage offers meaningful action compression. On these decks, it synergises well with Vicious Blow, Strong-Armed and Enchant Weapon.
• Decks making use of and/or testless damage, where an additional +1 damage can also offer action compression (e.g. Beat Cop ••, Toe to Toe, Quick Shot, Dynamite Blast, or in conjunction with off-class cards like Luger P08 or Blood-Rite).
• Fight event decks that lack a back-up extra damage weapon (e.g. Nathaniel or Marion).

It's not really needed on:

• Decks which deal +2 (or more) additional damage with an asset, such as Flamethrower or Lightning Gun. In cases such as these, 1 more damage is often a drop in the bucket, especially when you can use cards such as Vicious Blow for free (or purchase cards like Custom Modifications with Quicksilver Bullets, which provide persistent boosted damage for just a little more XP).

For me, it's a nice to have on flexy Guardians who want additional damage - but even in these cases it's unlikely to ever be an early XP purchase as that takes XP away from bigger and better purchases or upgrades. If you want to see it in action I've recently posted a Mark deck which makes use of it and Blessed Blade plus Crowbar, but even in that case I save the purchase of Hunter's Mark until I'm over 20 XP for the reasons stated. I like this card a lot, but it's just a little shy of an auto-include when faced with the many great options Guardians have these days.

I slept on this card for too long. 4 resources just seemed like a lot to pay for a cancel, when most other cancel events cost 0-1, but when I thought more about it, I realized it's a pretty good rate.

Sure, this costs 3 more than Ward of Protection, but you get to draw a card and avoid a horror. Considering that rogues tend to fear treacheries in general and horror in particular, isn't that a good deal? (If you imagine that the card drawn is Emergency Cache, then the total cost to use this is 1 resource +1 action) Most cancels actually do have a significant other cost, or limitation, whether it's dropping clues, fishing for tokens, or being very delayed.

I don't think of this as a "big money" card, a phrase I now associate with hoarding. You probably don't want to spend 4 on this if you're trying to turn on The Black Fan or if that could be spent to crush two more tests with Well Connected. Instead, this is a classic "medium money" card.

Since this card's release, rogues seem to get richer every set. They've got tons of ways to generate resources passively while they are playing to win. This means that once they've set up, they're likely to accumulate a stash of 6-8 extra resources by the mid-late game kind of by accident. This isn't necessarily enough to make buying all the big money payoffs a priority, or you might just have other plans for your XP. But it makes running some Counterespionage totally reasonable.

I've always been skeptical about the tri-color talents. The idea of a card that makes resources and boosts any skill sounds great. But 3 XP and 3 resources is a lot of up front investments for an untutorable card. If you're trying to make a resource profit, it takes 3 turns to outperform Emergency Cache, and then only if you play suited cards on the correct tempo. If you want +2 to a skill test once per turn, there are many High Roller, other assets that will get you there, and that's before we consider the passive +1 stat cards or the +1 Lucky!-likes to be competition. The dream seems to be that you find it early and mix and match the two uses until it becomes basically a free to play skill booster in the long run. Nothing has changed my fundamental doubts here.

That said, with The Drowned City, prospects for Sleuth are looking better than ever. We got powerful new tomes in three non-seeker classes, including both the other classes on Sleuth. One of those tomes can bounce tactics back to your hand, letting your replay a One-Two Punch 4 times if you can pay for it (which, with Sleuth, you can!). We got a guardian who loves playing events. Even Agatha Crane has a very slight synergy, since she can replay ["I've got a plan!"](/card/02107) from the discard.

Boosting skills bores me because so many other cards do it, so let's look more into what expensive tactics we could look with The Art Of War. A support Marion could spam Task Force to give her team loads of movement and let someone else swing a weapon around, or she could just chuck tons of dynamite. Someone with two hands might instead hold Blessed Blade in one hand and Sun Tzu in the other, and zip around with free "Get over here!" every turn. Bonus points if it's someone who can throw one copy of the book away to get around the unique rule.

But the funniest answer is probably Rex Murphy using Sun Tzu to loop "I've got a plan!"s when he's not busy memoiring.

When Katana came out, I speculated that it was meant for a future Guardian investigator. This is a weapon for characters who are comfortable attacking with it only once per turn, and either good with agility or with success manipulation. It's also two-handed which means you usually can't be planning to spend the rest of your actions swinging other weapons, nor investigating with tools. Thus, it seemed like a card waiting for a high-agility fighter who liked playing combat events. Or, perhaps, a token-manipulating fighter with extra arms.

Well, Drowned City indeed gave us a high-agility Guardian (3 is high, right?) who likes to play fight events. And she's often played with a once-per-turn weapon and then follow-up events. There's just one problem -- She doesn't have two arms!

It's not all bad for the weeaboos, though. Artistic Inspiration is probably the best way to control your success margin we've seen so far. And they even introduced a new way to get more arms, though it seems quite overpriced. So if you really want to make this work, it's more workable than ever.

But there's still no actual reason to try beyond morbid curiosity or sheer stubbornness.

TLDR: The dream weapon for Dirty Fighting Lucius or a berserk Amanda. Probably otherwise useless.

This is a really weird card.

• As a 4xp researched card in the increasingly-valuable accessory slot, you want to get really quite a lot of value from it. They even printed it right alongside Antikythera, so everyone who might look at this does have a compelling other option.

• This card does a whole bunch of stuff, including stuff Seekers have never done before, but it doesn't seem like a cohesive package. And I'm not sure any one of its functions justifies running it.

• It can be a weird pseudo-weapon that spams unlimited 2 damage attacks. But they're made with combat skill, at no bonus. There are only 3 characters with more than 2 combat who even can play it: Joe Diamond, Parallel Jim, and Kohaku. All of them have access to some guardian melee and two of them have mystic combat spells, so I don't see any of them going for it unless Joe really needs a hands-free attack cause he's juggling too many investigation tools. Speaking of hands, while other Seekers could certainly find ways to pass these tests, they'd probably rather run Timeworn Brand if you own it. In a big collection there's also lots of events or charged assets that let Seekers deal good damage. Only Amanda seems likely to actually want to spam attacks.

• It can manipulate tokens. This mitigates the auto-fail, and you can make up for the lack of skill bonus by testing at low skill and fishing for good tokens. But if you do this it rapidly gets used up, in which case we must ask why you're not running events or spell assets instead. Because it manipulates tokens, it can trigger Agatha Crane's ability. But she has 1 Combat and access to Shrivelling and Spectral Razor so who are we fooling?

• It can give you evades with +1 damage. Plenty of seekers have good base agility, so this is less of an uphill battle. And evade with damage is an okay effect, potentially. Historically, we've seen that effect a bunch of times and it's rarely been played much. But then, the old versions tended to have serious problems, like being expensive, requiring multiple tests, or having really bad random backlash effects, or being stapled to a mediocre character. How much better is an asset that lets you do it as much as you want, with no downside, and auto-fail insurance?

• If you were going to take basic evades frequently, this is probably enough of an improvement to be worth playing. It looks especially good on Ursula Downs, who is more likely to go off alone and get engaged on, and of course on Lucius Galloway, who can evade for clues and use the token redraws to fish for "succeed by X". You will frequently get to ping something with a damage just for doing what you were already going to do.

• But, how often does that really benefit you? Spaming 2 or 3 evades in a row to kill one guy doesn't seem efficient. When you wipe a 1 HP opponent with it, that's great. It's also good if you drop an enemy's health enough that your team's fighter saves an attack. But sometimes the enemy had even health and the 1 point doesn't matter. So I think in most cases if you have a conventional fighter on your team, this damage matters only 2-3 times per scenario, despite being unlimited use.

• This card's downfall is that while it's better than basic evasion, I think it compares unfavorably to other evade cards you could be running instead. Getting extra actions from Blur or Eon Chart or Pendant of the Queen, or keeping the enemy down longer with Disguise or Slip Away, or even getting free movement from Nimble or Mists of R'lyeh, all seem like better payoffs than 1 damage, in yellow.

• In conclusion, you might run this just as an evade boost for Lucius in Core+Drowned limited. With a full collection, I don't think this is good unless you're planning to both evade and fight with it. Being able to two-shot 3 health enemies all day while gaining all the benefits of evasion is pretty good, and you can probably manage to pass one combat test when you need to. As I mentioned above, Dirty Fighting with Lucius Galloway would probably be the combo. That free action attack comes in at a respectable ... 3 skill, counting Dirty Fighting, but at least it's free and you get some re-draws. He could run Michael Leigh if he really wants a passive combat boost and another damage source? You could get more Dirty Fighting value by running some parley events? Sounds jank as heck but maybe solo-viable.