There are many candidates for worst card in the game including Power in the Earth and Taking Initiative, but for me, this is it. This is the only card in the game that is just flat out unplayable. The absolute best thing you can do with the card is pay 1 and draw 1, which makes it like Hidden Cache. Other than that, the effect is useless unless you pay more than 3 resources, in which case it is absurdly expensive. Let's just compare this card to the ally Galadriel. Galadriel costs 3, and for that price you get to do basically the exact same thing as Gandalf's Search going 5 cards deep, except instead of drawing a card you can get a FREE attachment and a pretty decent one turn ally for questing or chump blocking. The comparison immediately reveals how Gandalf's Search is utter garbage. People barely run Galadriel and she is a hundred times better than Gandalf's Search. The card is so bad it is insulting and nauseating.
Gandalf's Search
Action: Look at the top X cards of any player's deck, add 1 of those cards to its owner's hand, and return the rest to the top of the deck in any order.
Gandalf, The Fellowship of the Ring
Core Set #67. Lore.
Do you ever find yourself swimming in cash and yet not the right cards in hand? This is the card you want to include then. Sometimes if steward is played early to get the right cards out the gate, you might find yourself with a ton of cash and no cards to play. This is why drinking song is so popular in this sphere.
I believe it to be unfair to say this is one of the worst cards in the game. First of all, there is no limit to X. Heck, if you have 20 lore resources you can reorder the next 20 cards of your deck. Toss duplicates near the bottom, vital cards to the top. You can combo it with vilya. You can use it for a very good tale. Or zigil miner. Or recur card draw for the next x/2 turns with expert treasure hunter. You can get timing right with thror's ring, hidden cache, or other discardable cards. In certain quests (the riddle one comes to mind) deck scrying is very important. The pure versatility of this card makes it worth it. Yes galadriel costs 3 and puts one into play -- shes a great card for sure. She also leaves play at the end of the round, so it's not a permanent boon. Also her attachment trick might whiff. So while galadriel is an excellent card, she does not set the standard for how scrying should work nor is it a perfect card to begin with.
I will say I do not play with this card often, but I could name 10 cards worse than this one right off the bat.
This card is in the “worst cards in the game” category, but is not the absolute worst card in the game. The 2 things it gives you (card draw and deck reordering) are done by much, much better cards almost immediately. Card draw staples like Daeron’s Runes and even Beravor are available in the early, early going of the game and blow this out of the water. If you still thought the deck arching/reorder ability is nifty, Imladris Stargazer makes this card obsolete almost immediately. You’d have to pay 5 Lore resources with this card to do the action one time in order to equal what Stargazer does for you in one turn. But then she goes on to do it for you for free the rest of the game. Not to mention she only costs 2 Spirit resources. Again, not the worst card in the game, but what it does for you is performed much better and much more efficiently by other cards, most of which are available in the Core and early cycles. 10/10.
On the contrary, I would argue this is a semi-strong card and not garbage. The ability for any deck to pay one resource to draw one card during any Player Action window could be valuable. This card, and Ally Galadriel, synergize nicely with Elrond/Vilya decks. Paying 3 resources to play a card during any Player Action window that allows you to draw a card and know what the next two are could be gamble with a possible huge pay off (like placing a Ally Gandalf or Glorfindal in line to be played by Vilya for free...5 cost card for 3 resources, not to mention the card you put in your hand). Ally Galadriel can only be played in the Planning phase unless played with Sneak Attack, Timely Aid, etc.
This card might be garbage, but it's at least special garbage. This garbage card is the only event in the game that can get a card into your hand without "draw" or "search" as part of the text, which can potentially be relevant when facing certain encounter/quest effects. Granted, King Under the Mountain, Messenger Raven, and Gildor Inglorion can also do this and are almost certainly better than Gandalf's Search in nearly every situation I can think of, but those aren't event cards.
I'm surprised that as of this writing, none of the reviews on this page have mentioned Lórien's Wealth yet. I started with the revised core set and as soon as I saw the two right next to each other, I wondered what the use of Gandalf's Search could be over Lórien's Wealth. Sure, you can pay 1 resource to have any player draw 1 card with Gandalf's Search, but as soon as you pay 2 resources to still only draw 1 card, it loses to Gléowine (also in the core set), and if you pay 3 resources, it loses to Lórien's Wealth, and it just keeps plummeting from there on out. Sure, you get to rearrange the top of your deck, but isn't drawing cards better than rearranging them almost 100% of the time? Especially on a one-shot effect where you have to pay more resources to look at and rearrange more cards. And by the time cards and scenarios came out that finally did care about the top cards of your deck, we had already gotten much better deck rearrangement options like Imladris Stargazer and Wizard Pipe. The only time I have ever used this card was when playing the mono- starter deck from the revised core set, and that was only to pay 1 resource to draw 1 card.
I did see a comment on a Youtube video a while ago (I don't remember which video) where the commenter had made a house rule errata for Gandalf's Search: it costs 3 instead of X, and lets the chosen player search their entire deck for a card (and then shuffle their deck) rather than searching only the top few cards of their deck. I wonder, if that were the case, how much more play would it have seen? Would it have been worth it to use a deck slot and pay 3 lore resources to have a player search out their combo piece? And, on the other hand, would it have been healthy for the game to have a deck-searching card right from the beginning? But I'm not a designer.