I thought I'd write up a review of this old card, since I've seen widely varying opinions as to how useful Dodge actually is. My own evaluation of it has changed quite a bit over the years.

Dodge was well-received when it first came out. It's really nice that this card is cheap and reliable, that it works even against Elite enemies, and that it can help other investigators at your location. It compared well to the clunky and awful healing options that existed back then. It still compares well to the more expensive versions of this effect we've seen printed since.

Even so, my opinion of this card has really come down over the years. Nowadays, I almost never include this card unless I'm playing Diana Stanley.

The problem with Dodge is that it's situational, relatively low-impact, and grants an effect which can be covered by less-situational cards.

For starters, this is not good enemy management. You might see a newer player include this in, say, solo Rex to "handle enemies," but this is not a good idea. If you have an enemy on you that you can't deal with, Dodge is not the card you want to have in your hand--it will only Delay the Inevitable and offers no permanent solution. After you Dodge, you will be in the same bad situation as before, now down a card and resource.

Of course, if there's a strong enemy you can only kill over multiple turns, Dodge can help you (or an ally) avoid some damage in the meantime. But I've found this to be surprisingly uncommon. Unless you're running a build in which you're trying to get attacked with stuff like Guard Dog (and such a build certainly does not need Dodge), you're just not going to take a ton of attacks from enemies in this game. Most of the time, a properly-built Guardian should be able to clear enemies from the board or comfortably tank their attacks. Either way, you don't really need Dodge. It does serve as a failsafe in case things go wrong, like drawing the autofail against a Retaliate enemy--but that's not something you have to dedicate a card slot to. You can usually just tank the occasional hit from such things every once in a while. Most enemy attacks deal 2 or fewer combined damage and horror, anyway.

Furthermore, Dodge faces a lot of competition nowadays from healing cards that are actually good, like Hallowed Mirror. Healing effects address a lot of the same concerns as Dodge, but are quite a bit more flexible because they can help not only with damage and horror from enemy attacks, but with damage and horror from treacheries and locations (a much more significant threat in most scenarios.)

Yes, Dodge will on occasion have some very good moments (often involving Ancient One enemies). But is it worth lugging this card in your deck just for that? I don't think so.

So, all these considerations mean I've moved away from running Dodge in my Guardians, and I haven't missed it. The minor synergies that have been printed over the years, like Counterpunch, don't really move the needle for me.

But a final note on Diana Stanley, with whom I do tend to run this card. If you're trying to quickly increase her Willpower to cast spells (which is my preferred way to play Diana), then you need a high density of cancels in your deck. Dodge is more situational than I'd like, but at least it's cheap, and sometimes you or a teammate can deliberately provoke an attack of opportunity to enable it. I prefer it to really expensive cancels like Hypnotic Gaze or Hand of Fate, or unreliable cancels like Eldritch Inspiration, Defiance, and Read the Signs. But I see Dodge as a necessary evil in her deck, not something I actively want for its own sake.

There are a lot of Seeker cards that you would gladly forego your auto-resource to add a secret to, and this enables that interaction. I can mostly think of tomes so Daisy will love this, but some of those tomes are powerful enough that any seeker will take them, and this is akin to a third or fourth copy of those cards (or a second copy for the Necronomicon). There's also plenty of non-tome secret cards this benefits as well, making a secret-based deck more viable.

EDIT 17/12/21

The main use of this card is not mentioned in a comment yet so I'll add it here:

This card is a must-have alongside Holy Spear. Indeed, using the big attack of the Spear forces you to seal an ever-growing amount of tokens on it, with no means to return them either to the bag or to the token pool.

Well look no more, seal tokens on the Spear to get high attacks, and free them to remove 1 Doom. It's literally a double bonus.

And secondly, if your teammate(s) are using curse in their deck, there is an obvious combo with Tides of Fate to clean a big number of tokens in one action with one doom removed.

This could for example be a good way to get rid of 5 tokens sealed on Holy Spear and 5 sealed on Dark Ritual, or with someone that would break the vow of the Geas

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

Should I run Safeguard, you ask? Well, would you run a 2-cost, slotless Leo De Luca?

OK, so maybe that comparison is a little bit flippant, but I do think this card is quite pushed and is probably the best level 0 Guardian card we've seen since the Core Set. This thing does a very respectable Pathfinder imitation, while being cheaper and not costing XP.

Note all the tricks you can do with this card and enemies. You can still activate Safeguard if you have an enemy on you. This allows you to drag enemies across locations without attacks of opportunity. This has cool applications for investigators like Roland and cards like Grete Wagner. Even outside of that, I've found that this comes in handy surprisingly often. For example, does your location have some nasty text that makes it unpleasant to stay and fight there? Just Safeguard your way to a nicer spot, action-free. With Safeguard II my Guardians have found themselves dragging enemies across the map in frankly ridiculous fashion.

Note that, unlike with Safeguard II, if another investigator moves into a location with an enemy, this version of Safeguard does not allow you to swoop in to preemptively engage that enemy (since you move "after" the other investigator). This is one of several reasons why I would recommend Safeguard II as a strong upgrade to an already great card.

Another benefit you'll notice from Safeguard, beyond the obvious one of saving you a ton of actions, is that you'll much more often be able to end your turn at the same location as the rest of the team. This is usually a really good thing. Investigators will more often be able to support each other with commits during the Mythos phase, for example.

Finally, Safeguard gets even better if other investigators are running the movement cards of their own faction. It's so strong with another investigator's Pathfinder or Shortcut. If you haven't tried a multiplayer group where one player takes two Pathfinders and everyone else takes two Safeguard IIs, well, you really should. It's pretty sweet.