Call of Cthulhu LCG

Sorry, anytime you are told to "choose" something, you have to be able to in order to use the effect.

Well it goes from insane to ready, instantly. It also shuts down perma-lock from insanity-causing Lunatics on people whose effects you want to use later in the turn (Peter Clover, ST Carl Sanford).

It is suuuuper niche though

What am I missing that this card requires Agency x2 Steadfast? Doesn't the play restriction in the effect make the Steadfast redundant? Is there a universe where you could have two blue resources on a single domain but not have two blue resources across all your domains?

Also, I love how some of the reviews for this card give 5 stars and some give 1. Talk about love it or hate it.

Can you play events that have no legal target? Like use a shotgun blast if there are no characters in play?

If so the steadfast is relevant, because it stops it from being a free event in some sort of theoretical future combo that just wants to play events.

I don't understand this card.  Rather than restore The Supplicant and then restore Character 2, I could just restore Character 2.  And the fact that Character 2 gets Willpower means if that character is a Lunatic, Benjamin Herriot, or a similar character that actually wants to go insane, too bad.  If The Supplicant restored, READIED, and gave Willpower to Character 2 then I could see the benefit of this card.  Plus, since Character 2 isn't readied, what's the point of temporary Willpower?

If anyone cares to help me out, I'd love to understand how The Supplicant is supposed to be helpful.

I'd totally build a deck around this card. Probably Agency/Miskatonic to get the card draws that would offset the extra plays. Then, look out!

Edited to add: Maybe Agency/Syndicate to get Naomi with a City Map and abuse Tactics.

I could be wrong, but I don't believe Naomi triggering a Tactic event card counts as "playing" an event card for the purposes of readying the Claret Knight.  If anyone knows of any rule that states otherwise, please enlighten me.  Thanks.

My initial reading had me assuming it could be on for one player and not the other, but now I am leaning firmly the other way.

Where it says "Ignore this effect if a player has ..." the use of "a" rather than "the" seems to mean the effect gets turned off if any player meets the condition, rather than just the player a specific bad consequence was about to apply to.

It is sad, this reading makes the card be even more underpowered.

On further reflection, I think for the thing to be effective in any significant number of cases, it should be read as the Hastur character turning off the effect for the player(s) with the committed Hastur character(s) or "no characters committed." (I would have read the latter anyway, even if not explicit: When I'm committed and you're not, I "win" the struggles, but you don't "lose" them, because you're not participating. Consider a three-player game for why this logic can be more generally important.)

I'd like to know too. It seems genuinely ambiguous to me.

Maybe my favorite ST character. Everything about her is right.

I feel like this guy is hard to rate.  In a deck with lots of combat icons and Toughness, he's 1 star.  In a deck that lacks combat icons and Toughness, he's 5 stars.

I have Hideous Guardian in my Silver Key deck, which is full of characters with "exhaust to" abilities.  Such characters usually play a support role and are not strong at stories.  In fact, there's not a combat icon nor a point of Toughness among them in my deck.  Enter Hideous Guardian, and suddenly all my chumps are basically invulnerable for the next six wounds.  The Guardian is the perfect complement to a finesse/control build that doesn't want to mix it up, but rather be evasive, at stories.

I don't know if it will work, but I'm trying this card out in a mono-Agency deck that also runs 3x Catastrophic Explosion and Prize Pistol.  Whether I'm giving everyone on the board 1 wound with the Explosion - thereby making the attached story inhospitable for my opponent's characters - or using the Pistol to snipe characters who dare commit to the attached story, I feel like By the Book should play an important role in a Government deck.  And while neither the Explosion nor the Pistol can still reach an Ancient One, they can control the rest of the board and leave the Ancient One to the mercy of all the combat icons on my side of the table.