IF you know what the top three cards are, being able to pick one and install it will frequently be a valuable play. This clearly won't ever be Ob-tier in terms of being able to find whatever you need with remarkable speed and consistency, but if you have intelligence gathering in place there might be enough click savings that this won't be a total joke.

I suspect that the low ceiling on this ability and the weird (reactive) trigger it needs will probably leave it closer to a Hyoubou, a virtually unplayable identity which was tied at the hip to a weird trigger with little good card support, than a proactive NEH which only asks for new servers, though. Unless you’re getting ravaged by something like Imp decks, NEH’s ability feels generally better (and easier to navigate) in a great many situations. It freely adds a lot of value to something which many decks want to be doing anyway. In NEH, your ability fires hopefully like 3+ times on the first 4 turns, and almost always on turns 1-2. I doubt that Epiphany will get as many opportunities to fire early, and some of the fires just won’t find cards you want to install. Then there’s the setup factor.

If you DON'T already know what the top 3 cards are, blindly investing a click hoping that one of them might be a card you'd want to install feels unusually dicey for an click-compression move. Even whenever R+ and NEH rotate out or are otherwise unavailable, it’s hard to envision a card pool where NBN identities add so little value that Epiphany won’t look a bit sketchy. (2024 update: with Hollow Man, being able to install an agenda from R+D with Epiphany might make Holo Man much smoother than in an identity where you are only installing agendas from HQ).

Thankfully, Federal Fundraising seems actually quite good for recurring intelligence gathering and Balanced Coverage pays well for it. I still think it's not quite a Hyoubou situation. However, of these three cousins (Epiphany, Federal Fundraising and Balanced Coverage), Epiphany feels the most dispensable as of September 2023. Federal Fundraising already does a pretty good job pushing the cards that I want to install into my hand at the time I want to install them. And, also, doesn't require me to give up steals or trashes.