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×As the plant was not avaliable on that terrain card.

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The vast majority of botany abilities are very small bonuses that aren't usually worth discarding a card for.

Plants are placed so their botany cards will be useful. Fragonia has a lot of relevance to and there's a lot of Fragonia bushes on hunt spots. There's almost no non-Fragonia plants on hunt spots, though, so even though those botany cards are some of the rare ones worth discarding a card for, you never get an opportunity.

A few botany abilities, like those that drop states or provide crafting resources, are good but not time-sensitive. Discarding a card to cure poison if you don't have access to the right plant isn't too high a cost, but most of the time you can just wait for the plant that lets you cure it for free. Most plants grow in most places, after all.

Many of the areas where plants are scarce (undergound) have no plants at all.

Some botany abilities, like the gourmet one, have to be activated several times in a row. You have to discard 1 vigilance card per activation, and you'll never have enough.

Vigilance is a super mediocre keyword to begin with, probably the second-worst after Stealth, so she doesn't get that much out of using it to keep her Vigilance stack healthy the way Lovecraft can keep a Walking Stick forever with his ability.

×Not knowing what botany cards might exist doesn't make any of the actual botany cards any better. Most of them still aren't really worth a card. New players get to hold out hope for better Botany cards, but by and large they don't find them -- they find a lot of small things that aren't really worth Keelan's cost, and some things like the Poison resource that occasionally are worth the cost but are still pretty small.

You do eventually find one winner. The card that lets you swap a card from your hand with a card from the action deck is theoretically incredibly strong, easily the best Botany card, and Scholar makes it free and guaranteed. That's really fantastically abusable, to the point that I've seen some house rules that nerf that botany card. You can build any item you want, you can pull all the half stars out of the deck before an important check, you can pick Valiant Hearts and all 3 Remembers out of the deck after every heal, use Valiant Hearts instead of drawing cards on checks, and eat a piece of food when you run out of Remembers, return to the fire you lit on a Terracokus, and do it all again. You can do anything.

Discarding vigilance cards to use this ability is a lot worse than using it to to freely sculpt your hand at an actual Terracokus, of course, but Terracokus don't grow everywhere. I could imagine a new player becoming very reliant on that ability. What I've actually seen, though, is, new players just don't use it because they don't know what to search for -- the options are just overwhelming.

I myself basically never use that card, Keelan or no. It makes the game very easy at the expense of making it very boring. You spend much of your time doing repetitive action deck manipulation, so your progress is very slow, even if it is very safe and very consistent. I don't think I need it, as a veteran, and as a new player I didn't really know how to use it.

So, the thing I've used most is the fire starter, but that is the most powerful option. Perhaps that option is more important for new players?

×-It fixes the vaguely nightmarish timing of the old ability, which is technically still an open question: https://the7thcontinent.seriouspoulp.com/en/forum/topic/3951/can-frankenstein-get-a-card-back-in-the-middle-of-a-check/

-It lets Keelan start using her ability as soon as she gets her first Botany card, instead of having to collect one of each plant to open up her options. You never have to choose between a new plant and a botany card that does something useful.

-It means Keelan can use her Botany cards when there are no plants, instead of just when you can't find a plant, which is useful to veterans and new players alike. New players who don't know where all the plants are benefit when they can't find one, Veteran players benefit from being able to use it where there truly are no plants.

-It lets you get unlimited uses from abilities that you expect to have unlimited uses, like the search-your-deck and the gourmet, making those abilities much more viable to use with Keelan's ability.

-It lets you use abilities that are only useful on very specific spaces on spaces with no plants, instead of just spaces with the right kind of check and the wrong plant, which are very rare. Most of the places you can use things like the Fragonia and abilities have either Fragonia or no plants, and thus don't work well with her official ability. This makes them much more viable to use with her ability too.

-It lets you use multiple abilities that are not worth a card individually, making them much more viable to use with her ability.

-Basically, paying a cost to use a botany ability a single time seems (and is) a lot worse than just finding the right plant, and because it's restricted to more or less random subset of spaces, you often don't get to use it even when a situation comes up where you might want it. This removes that restriction, so you can always use it when you see an opportunity to do so, and when you pay the cost, you get something a little better than finding a plant, instead of a little worse. Instead of being promising but frequently disappointing, it's just, good. Every other character's ability is pretty much "just good" I think, it's weird that hers is so incredibly conditional.

-Perhaps most important of all, it makes her look at the Botany pile differently. Theoretically, the Botany pile should be sort of a part of Keelan. Her ability is supposed to give her a special relationship with it, in sort of the same way that Lovecraft has a special relationship with curses. "Botany cards are better if Keelan's here" should be something obviously and unshakably true. Right now it kinda isn't -- her ability comes up pretty rarely and provides only a small benefit when it does. "Botany cards are better if Keelan's here, AND we have a botany card that would be useful, AND there's a plant here, AND it's not the right plant for that botany card, AND we have another botany card that refers to that plant, AND she has vigilance card ready to discard, AND we don't forget about her ability, which probably wouldn't happen if we got to use it more often" Outside of that, a few of them use checks which means they benefit from Scholar. Infinite free search-your-deck is the only one of these that's major though -- other than that one very busted interaction, all it does is save a single card on the cure poison one. So that's not really a special relationship with the whole Botany pile, just a combo between a single Botany card and one of her cards. She does collect them very quickly, but that doesn't make her any better at using them, and that means that they don't really feel like they're "hers."

×that provides the poison resoucse

×have an item to craft that requires poison?