
I am usually doing extensive reviews, but here I think the main combo hasn't been mentioned by other reviews yet, so I'll make a short one.
This card should always come with its symbiotic partner: Persistence.
Joking, I can't keep things short, so let me develop.
Phase 1: Play Gift of Nodens and thin your deck.
- Short Supply is a tremendous help to start with a far thinner deck
- Add Resourceful and Scrounge for Supplies to your deck to make sure you don't discard Gift of Nodens without any options to get it back.
- At a Crossroads and Unrelenting also help a lot, and any other draw card your investigator has access to
Phase 2: Loop and never re-shuffle
Initial State
- One Persistence in your hand
- One Persistence and one Resourceful in your discard pile
- You have Gift of Nodens on the table.
During any
- Commit Persistence from your discard pile
- Use the of Gift of Nodens
- Discard Persistence from your hand
- Commit Resourceful from your discard pile
Results
- +2 skill value to your test (if it wasn't )
- Resourceful is placed at the bottom of your empty deck
- Persistence is then shuffled with Resourceful, into your deck
- Resourceful brings back any card to your hand
- As soon as you draw Persistence again, you are back at the initial state of 1 Persistence in your discard pile and 1 Persistence in your hand.
This is so strong because:
- Once you set up Gift of Nodens, you really don't want to shuffle your discard pile into your deck. This would remove all the targets of both Gift of Nodens and Resourceful.
- Persistence is the easiest way to add a card to your deck to prevent it from happening.
- Persistence is also the easiest way to commit a card to a test, to trigger Gift of Nodens's , since it has a and doesn't even require you to have it in your hand.
- Resourceful is the most versatile target for Gift of Nodens, but if you want to use Resourceful to recur a skill card like Contemplative, Long Shot, or Brute Force, you can target it right away.
- If you draw exactly 2 cards per round (1 during the upkeep and one other), you have an unbreakable loop where you can basically use Resourceful or any other skill every single turn until the end of the scenario.
The last question is:
Why not simply using Gift of Nodens on a chosen skill card, place it at the bottom of my empty deck, and draw it during the Upkeep phase, rince, and repeat?
This doesn't work because Gift of Nodens wants you to:
- Commit one card to a test
- Discard a card from your hand
So you need an input of 2 cards in your hand every turn to feed Gift of Nodens, which would require you to draw more than the 1 card placed at the bottom of your deck.