I stumbled into a silly exploit that let's you set your hand at will and infinitely use "Study the Notes" and "Knowledge is power"
If you are pretty familiar with the flying roots expansion there won't be any spoilers for you:
It boils down to four cards: 1) Vampolina botany card that allows you to "Think" for one fewer card and one success 2) Remember (with the "will" keyword) 3) Making Preparations (advanced skill card that allows you to search the deck/discard for any card you want) 4) Botanist in Training - When you apply the effect of a card with the keyword "Botany" you may choose one card with the keyword "will" from the discard pile and add it to your hand.
Basically, you find a Vampolina plant with Remember in your discard pile and Making Preparations in your hand. Then you use Making Preparation to find any card you need, and immediately take Remember back to your hand with Botanist in Training ability (for using the Vampolina plant). Then you Remember Making Preparations and do it again. With the ability to set your hand you can collect all the knowledge is power cards and play them repeatedly for infinite experience without having to draw (Again, the Vampolina botany card). Since you can build your hand anyway you want, you can also draw all the 050 cards using Study the Notes, a star success and Learn By Doing (I did this in a much more convoluted way with the character I was using).
It was fun...once :) Let me know if I made a mistake!
I found a variation of that exploit today. My setup could probably be simplified, but I can make almost any item I want, plus use Study the Notes and Knowledge is power.
My setup:
1) Botanist in Training 2) Eubellis - move action is zero from an adjacent tile 3) Colored Smoke - Adv Skill -2 move to fire while card in hand 4) Phileas Fogg (or two player game)
The Eubellis I used was on a +3 move card, so Colored Smoke let me move off of it for free to fire I had placed. I could have set the fire up next to this spot in order to draw Remember over and over. In my setup, I had the
hot air balloon
next to the Eubellis and my fire token on a 1+ move square. With Phileas Fogg, I could move off the fire token and instead of drawing 1 card, switch it to zero cards and 1 success, using a card in hand to apply a success without having to draw (the card in hand coming from Remember).
With that setup I could move to and from any square that had a 3+,0 move in order to use it's resources. Resourceful (Adv Skill) also helped. For free I could remake Cushion over and over to spam 050 cards from Study the Notes, move to and study any Flying Roots on the board with the required cards and successes in hand, and make any items that I could get resources for or that only required 1 card draw (converted to a success).
It helped having a very low action deck so most of the cards were available to me. I was also in the same area as
a burried treasure,
a hidden major relic that could restore all cards in the discard
so once I'm done I'm back to normal.
Super fun exploit to discover and explore, but like all exploits in this game, it's less fun after the fact.
