This is a different take on Invisibility Gear.

Both essentially trade a scheme for an attack, each costing 2-ER, though the timing is a bit different.

Observe works on the player turn, letting you get rid of the threat before the villain turn. Both are based on the idea that your character, playing Justice, should be able to deal with threat more easily than an attack.

Between the two though, this compares rather poorly. Invisibility Gear, you set down and can use any time you're attacked. This schemes now and immediately negates the next instance of damage. Unless the villain gets piercing from a boost card, which means you did this for nothing.

This also actually gives the villain an extra activation instead of changing it. That means another potentially potent boost effect like putting a minion into play or stunning/confusing you.

Invisibility Gear is already not a good card, and this is a worse version of this. The ONLY thing this is good for is giving Justice a way to stack some tough cards on Luke Cage. If you're building a Luke Cage Justice deck where this is increasing Jessica Jones' thwart, this might be an okay tradeoff. If you're not, it will be bad.

If there is someday some archetype that heavily rewards use of tough cards, maybe this will be great. But otherwise, I can't imagine wanting to play this over Invisibility Gear... and Invisibility Gear is already a card I have zero desire to play.

If you want to replace an attack with a scheme, just go alter-ego and use Entrapment. Now you get the extra draw from being in alter-ego and whatever benefits come with your alter-ego identity. And you get to deal some damage to the villain too!

I love that you steal the Sai back! Very cool design here.

This card needs to be updated here, it incorrectly shows it as 3 per player threat, it is not 3 per player threat, it is only 3 threat and Hinder 1 per player.

Not a particularly great card but nice to have more player side schemes available.

You pay every turn 1 resource for loses icon? In theory this is bad. But sometimes you want to pay this tax to avoid bigger threats. I'm really interesting how it works in GMW campaign, where there are campaign cards with more icons (especially on expert)

Rating (A-C) C+ don't put in random deck, specific for scenario

I have no idea in what situation this card would be viable. Villain schemes for at least 3 per usual so you will have to thwart that and add it to the cost of this card... just to get measly tough... wow this card is useless.

if this card cost 0 and gave you draw it would still be crap because on higher difficulty levels (expert and heroic) villain no longer scheme for 3, they scheme for 6-8 and mitigating the scheme is much harder and more costly.

comparing this card to swift retribution - the other one at least brings you closer to victory, it may be used as a finisher. this card only brings you closer to defeat.