This card's flavor is amazing! You are studying the nature of the entity you are facing/will face. By looking at the top 3 cards of the encounter deck you can understand what kind of menace this scenario may bring and through that insight you discover 1 clue. That's why it activates upon REVELATION: you never know or control when this insight will come.
The illustration is the cherry on top. One of your friends must suffer a little bit in order to achieve a greater comprehension of the beast.
It's interesting that the upgraded version of Hunter's Instinct loses the text "If there are no supplies on Hunter's Instinct, discard it." This is actually a significant nerf to the number of uses you can get out of it.
Because of the Limit 1 per investigator, you're stuck with the first copy you play and can never play a second copy, as per rule 2.3, Limits Pertaining to Play Areas: "Another copy of that card cannot enter the specified play area if this limit has already been reached."
You also lose all the recursion shenanigans with Resourceful and William Yorick, since you can no longer discard it from your play area.
The only way to get more than the initial 3 uses is through supply-manipulation effects such as Emergency Cache(3), Contraband or Cleaning Kit.
With all that in mind, I'd seriously think twice before upgrading your level 0 Hunter's Instinct into this version.
One thing that hasn't been mentioned is just how good this fortune event is for Parralel "Skids" O'Toole. With his Additional Options, Skids can likely duplicate this glimmer of hope to have 6 copies of glimmer in his deck.
Unless I'm missing some rules... Skids should be able to pull all 6 copies out of his discard to commit however you wish, and those agility icons are the perfect thing to pump the numbers on his signature ability.
This card is best compared to level 0 Streetwise. For a similar median effect of (around) +2 skill value per 2 resources:
-This costs 4 additional xp
-This costs 2 additional initial resources
-This increases the risk of autofail
-This takes an extremely valuable accessory slot
-This removes itself from the game after an average of 10-20 uses.
A similar comparison can be made to Hard Knocks, which came out in the Core set and is still stronger. Level 3 Streetwise which came out in the same expansion completely blows this out of the water. The only argument left for this card is use in Willpower tests. However, even in an extremely limited card pool, any Rogue would be better off taking two copies of Guts and Unexpected Courage, or even Elder Sign Amulet for the icons before even considering this.
Therefore, even with just Core + Dunwich, this card is never worth taking except for purely roleplaying reasons, or with buffs from house rules.
so... Adhoc is really good in combination with the other 2 versions of this card. I can only assume adhoc can't do 3 damage with this weapon since its in the discard and can't exhaust. same for pushed to the limit. This feels pretty targeted.
It takes 2 actions to fight and there are very few cards that guardians can have access to in order to use it twice hand-eye coordination is the only guardian card that I can think of. Course Leo could do it if you can take rogue cards but that is rough. So what exactly is this card nerfing by switching to exhaust besides this?
is this niche combo only about 3-4 guardians can take really so broken? I get the rebalancing with the new core set but this card feels really bad compared to the lvl 0 sledgehammer. even taking the exhaust away its +1 fight to either action for 3 experience, for frankly mediocre results.
We'll see how much rebalancing gets done and how much weaker cards are in general as we get more expansions in the new core but this seems like something that will fall short and may need to get buffed.