I'm not going to comment on the viability of the card too much, (other then to say that in 4 player especially 1 clue isn't really that significant because you're at best removing one of 4 clues from a location which isn't that high impact) but I've seen a couple comments saying that this card lets you filter the encounter deck. This isn't really true. Sure, if you draw a problematic encounter then you can bin it and not have to worry about one copy of it for the encounter shuffle. But you're also fairly likely to not find any particularly bad encounters and end up removing two of them that would have been relatively easy for your team to deal with and cause you to draw the harder ones sooner. You're not actually filtering your draws, because these are cards that you wouldn't have drawn anyway. It's similar to how discarding cards from your deck doesn't substantially effect your draws aside from having to take a horror from the reshuffle earlier as it means that cards you would have drawn in the middle of the scenario are drawn earlier, and later on in the scenario you'll be drawing cards you otherwise wouldn't have if you didn't discard the cards.

In the end, you're about as likely to discard difficult encounters as you are to cause your team to draw them earlier and more often. Not saying the card is bad or anything, just that "improving your encounter draws" isn't a thing this card really does as it is about as likely to make them worse.

In my opinion, this card shows a problem Fantasy Flight Games has with some of their games, namely Arkham Horror and The Lord of the Rings. In both games, a fairly frequent occurrence is scenarios where there's a binary state; either the players are in state A, or they're in state B. For Dim Carcosa, that binary state is "No sanity remaining;" either you have sanity remaining, or you don't. This in and of itself is not a problem, but the way FFG makes the scenario use the state is.

In any state-based scenario, there are a few questions to consider;

1. Which state will the players want to be in, absent any non-act or agenda features?
2. Which state is easier to stay in and how much effort is required to change states?
3. Do the designers want to incentivize or discourage being in either of the states?

For Dim Carcosa, the answers are relatively simple:

1. All the players' experience will incentivize them to make sure they have sanity remaining.
2. It is easier to have no sanity remaining, and while it's easy to go from sanity to no sanity, it's very hard to do the reverse without cards dedicated to the task.
3. Not known for certain, but my guess is that they wanted to discourage having no sanity remaining, in order to make use of the design space the mechanic of sanity in Carcosa opened up, to emphasize the dangers of Carcosa, and to prevent infinite sanity from trivializing the game.

These answers help us to better understand the design of a lot of the cards in the scenario; Dismal Curse helps turn the horror on players into damage, Realm of Madness tears the player's board state to shreds if they have no remaining sanity, and The Final Act serves as 2 Ancient Evils and another encounter card if they have no remaining sanity. All of these serve the goal of discouraging players from running out of sanity, and do so admirably.

What's done less admirably in the scenario, in my opinion, is discouraging players from keeping their sanity. State B is heavily punished, but State A feels barely touched, and the scenario honestly feels like it doesn't push losing your sanity (Going from State A to State B) on you too heavily, the way The Forgotten Age might push the Poisoned weakness, for example. Yes, there's Rotting Remains and The Yellow Sign, but even on top of the starting horror you take, it feels like being pushed over the boundary between the two states is gradual, honestly downright avoidable at times.

Once you are over that line, though, suddenly you have to deal with double Ancient Evils (with surge), a 3-of 5 test in the encounter deck, the potential to be flat out killed before you have the chance to react, and a chaos bag that, on Normal, went from five -2 tokens to four -4s. Add in Hastur's nightmarish mutation of the chaos bag, and you've gone from potential victory to almost-certain defeat. Your friends who still have sanity, meanwhile, are still able to traverse the land of the King, possibly without abnormal threat if they're able to shrug off The Yellow Sign and Rotting Remains.

This is the problem FFG has with binary-state scenarios: they make one state too punishing without including enough that forces the player into that state. You live or die based on which state you're in, and it's surprisingly hard for the game to push you into one.

Fortunately, this is somewhat easily fixable; instead of including so many cards that punish players for being in "the bad state," include a mixture of cards that alternate between punishing the players for being in "the bad state" and pushing the players towards that state, designing an encounter deck that not only tries to keep players down but also has methods of getting them there in the first place. For Dim Carcosa, that might have meant making Dismal Curse push the players towards losing their sanity instead of punishing them for not having any, or making Hastur's frankly game-ending token manipulation apply if you have sanity remaining, incentivizing you to fall deeper under the King's sway. The twin suns of Carcosa might be searing madness into the investigator's minds (personally, I think a lot of the visuals from this cycle would actually look beautiful in real life), but that doesn't mean the designers don't have the tools of reason to help them keep that madness from plaguing their players as well.

Now that Scarlet Keys has been released, Alice has greatly increased in utility.

Her biggest shortcoming, aside from cost, is that discovering clues generally provokes attacks from enemies, pigeonholing her as an expensive supplemental damage asset to an evasion/investigation build in the wrong color.

With Keys, however, we have to contend with Concealed cards. Concealed cards normally eat a fight/evade/investigate action to reveal, but Alice effectively doubles your action economy by providing a testless reveal once per round after gaining a clue. Roland, Joe, Rex and Vincent can combine with Research Notes and the new clue-dropping cards to have free reveals on tap.

For Rogues this card is Eon Chart but the action has to be an evade, and in exchange you get +1 to the test (helpful for succeed by X cards) and it takes up an arcane slot instead of an Accessory. For Rogues that plan on doing a bit of evading, (and that's a lot of them) this card IMO is actually just better than Eon Chart (1) because it gives you a boost and it uses a MUCH less contested slot. The evade restriction isn't even that bad, because usually turns where you have to evade are ones where you want an extra action anyway. IMO a sleeper hit card from Edge, at least for Rogues.

I think this is a serious contender for the most overrated and overplayed card in all of Arkham. A lot of people insist that this card is a staple Guardian card that should be played in pretty much every deck that has weapons as it makes your deck more consistent. In reality, I think this card is pretty subpar and should only be ran in very specific decks because it makes your deck less consistent.

"But this card lets you tutor for weapons. How can it make your deck less consistent?" Firstly, tutors in other card games are valuable because you can look at your whole deck, which effectively turns it into a toolbox where you can pick the best card for your current situation. This card only looks at the top 9 cards. In most cases with this card, you do not have a choice which weapon you pick, either because you only get offered one weapon, two copies of the same weapon, or no weapon at all. And unlike card filter effects, this card does not have much flexibility in what it can give you. Cards like Eureka! can be used to get any card in the top 3. Prepared for the Worst though, if you don't need a weapon then there's not much point in using it. Weapons in general are a type of card that largely help with only one thing (killing enemies) and often have pretty big overlap in how useful they are so if you have one weapon the second and third incur diminishing returns. As a result, in most decks this card becomes a lot less useful if you draw it later, which means that you'll usually have to commit it instead. To its credit, the card does have alright icons for a level 0 card, but it's not great icons for a card that you'll be committing a pretty good chunk of the time.

That's not even mentioning perhaps the biggest issue with the consistency of this card: it can whiff. This creates sort of a paradox for this card in that no matter how many weapons you run, this card has consistency problems. If you run a lot of weapons, you have a higher chance of drawing those weapons without the help of this card, thus making this card redundant. If you are running fewer weapons, you increase the chance of whiffing and not getting any weapon at all.

And the thing is that even when the card works properly, it's not even that good especially at level 0. Sure, Machete is probably a better card than .45 Automatic. But is it better if it costed 4 resources and an extra action to play? Probably, but it's a lot closer. The big issue with level 0 decks is that the best level 0 weapons aren't SO much better than the alternatives that I feel like I need to run a card like Prepared for the Worst to more consistently find them. Instead of playing a Prepared for the Worst to find a weapon, you can just play another weapon and skip the possibility of whiffing with it as well as the action and resource you have to burn even if it does hit. MAYBE if you're running a deck with just Runic Axe, it might be worth it to run this card since you don't realistically need and can't even use other weapons. But firstly, I think that is less PFTW being a great card and more that Runic Axe is pretty overpowered, and secondly that's only one type of deck, most everyone else I think you're better off just running more weapons.

"But what about Stick to the Plan?" While putting it on Stick to the Plan does help with the "just run another weapon" problem a bit, it also has another issue where if you find your weapons and don't need to use it you not only are wasting one of your precious 3 slots on Stick to the Plan that you could have put something else on, but you can't even commit it to a test as a fallback plan. And the odds of that happening are actually pretty good.

I think what really sunk the card for me was when I actually looked up the odds of finding cards, both naturally and off PFTW. If you have 4 weapons in your deck, you have about an 85% chance to find a weapon within your first 3 draws if you mulligan 3 cards in your opener. If you fully prioritize weapons with the mulligan, that goes up to about 90%. And once you factor in stuff like Beat Cop, Vicious Blow, and any other sources of damage you might have, you can realistically still stall for a couple turns to find a weapon even if you do hit the very low odds of not finding a weapon at roughly the start of the game. PFTW on Stick to the Plan is really only good in the situations where you whiff on a weapon in your mulligan, while also getting a hit when you play the card your first turn. If you mulligan 3 cards, you have a 25% chance of not finding a weapon. And if you use PFTW immediately after the mulligan, you have a 84% chance of hitting. In total, if you mulligan 3 cards and keep 2, you'll have the best-case PFTW scenario of whiffing on weapons in your opener but finding it off PFTW about 21% of the time. The other 79% you'll either find a weapon normally, or you'll whiff on PFTW, and if you try to aggressively mulligan for weapons that percentage of positive outcomes for PFTW shrinks even more. IMO, if you're running 4 weapons or more, you really don't need PFTW on Stick to the Plan to consistently find weapons, you're better off putting something else on there and maybe throwing another weapon in if you're really that concerned.

What about 3 weapons? On a 3 mulligan, you have a 36% chance of whiffing a weapon and 74% chance of finding one off PFTW. So in total that's about a 27% chance of getting the best case scenario for this card. Better than 4 weapons, but still not great. Meanwhile the odds of finding a weapon normally in the early game are 76% on a 3 mulligan, or 83% on a full mulligan. For 2 weapons, your odds are 50% to whiff a weapon off a 3 mulligan, but only 58% to hit one off PFTW. That's about a 21% chance to get the weapon off PFTW, but you also have a 21% chance of both whiffing on your mulligan and whiffing on your PFTW, which would be catastrophic.

Lastly, a lot of people argue that this weapon is better when you have XP weapons in your deck. I don't really agree. The issue is that in most scenarios, the time that you REALLY need your big guns is near the end of the scenario when a boss monster spawns in, and by that time you'll have a good chance of finding it even if you don't play PFTW or much card draw in general. If your XP weapon is something that has ammo on it, I'd argue that finding it early is actually not a good thing because that means you'll be burning ammo on less threatening enemies so you'll have lest leftover for when the boss shows up. From my experience, it's not THAT important to find your XP weapons early. You'll usually find them eventually by scenario's end, and that's what really matters.

IMO, unless all the other weapons in the game are so poor for your build that they're not worth bothering with, you are generally going to be better off adding more weapons to your deck and mulliganing aggressively for them than you will be adding PFTW to your deck, even if you have it on Stick to the Plan. In most decks, the advantages of having slightly higher quality weapons and being able to mulligan less aggressively is outweighed by the fact that you have to spend an action and a resource to get your weapons off this and that a big chunk of the time you'll find a weapon normally anyway which makes this card a lot less useful.

Overall, I feel like the best situations for this card are either A: when you really only want to run 2 weapons that hyper synergize with your deck, and running more wouldn't really help your deck at all, or B: you have several weapons that you want all out at the same time as they provide different utility, like maybe if you're running Survival Knife or Garrote Wire in addition to your other weapons and don't have good access to card draw otherwise. The issue though is that even in those situations though, I feel like you're better off spending some XP and getting the upgraded Prepared for the Worst instead as it provides a lot of solid upgrades for just 2 XP, and since you probably are going to slap it on Stick to the Plan it's a fairly decent use of 2 XP since you'll use that card every game. And in those situations, I would probably still not bother with the level 0 version since it's much worse when it's not on Stick to the Plan and I'd rather just get the card when I need it instead of running the clunky level 0 version in my deck for the first couple scenarios when it won't be very effective. For every other Guardian deck, I would run more weapons instead if I felt like I wasn't finding them consistently enough as this card is generally either inconsistent or unnecessary depending on how many weapons you're running.

EDIT: One final thing I forgot to mention was that if you are playing with a significantly limited card pool, (such as if you only have a handful of expansions that don't have great weapons and/or you're playing with teammates that also want the same weapons you do and you're forced to share) then the value of this card does go up a bit. If the next best weapon for your deck is something like a .32 Colt and you're a 4 Combat investigator, it might be worth running PFTW instead. But assuming you have access to most of the current card pool, I don't think that running slightly less optimal weapons is a big deal especially with Machete going back to 0 XP.

Another EDIT: I recalculated my statistics assuming that 3 of the cards were missing from the starting deck due to being attached to Stick to the Plan. This makes the statistics even less favorable towards PFTW.