Elixir potion is underwhelming

[Tadpole]

Ironclad-specific uncommon potion: exhaust any number of cards in your hand.
TLDR solution: exhaust all status cards from your hand, deck, and discard pile.

While I get the idea that it's supposed to work with cards and relics that reward you for exhausting cards, all of them are uncommon, and if I'm picking them, I usually have enough ways to exhaust the cards I want exhausted, and don't need a special potion to do so.
Even when I could use the extra exhaustion means, it's not for as much of a benefit as one would think. With a Feel no Pain in play, I need to exhaust 3-4 cards to get the same effect as a block potion, and if I'm exhausting that many cards, I'm probably leaving some energy floating, as I could've played those cards with the normal block potion.

Let's say you're using this to remove curses or statuses for a fight. Well, you have to have multiple of those in your hand if you want to exhaust more than one, and if your hand is filled with statuses and curses, you're probably having a really bad turn, and would like a potion that can actually make that turn better (such as gambler's brew or swift potion). You may say that you can also exhaust bad cards like strike and defend, but that doesn't affect you until you make it through your draw pile again, and removing cards without playing them naturally causes your current turn to be bad.

Generally speaking, the main issue with the potion is that as a one-time effect, it seems to need a build-around to be useful, or doesn't stop a bad situation from being any less bad. I think the potion needs to be adapted to do something valuable when you're not the deck that specializes for it.

To fix this, I propose we expand the cards that can be exhausted. Instead of trying to make it work with an exhaustion deck, I suggest we instead look at the status-based cards (like Wild Strike and Power Through) for the synergy. The effect should be "remove the status cards from your hand, deck, and discard pile." The goal is to remove bad cards, and even if you don't have a deck revolving around these things, there are fights that put a lot of statuses in your deck, making this potion very useful in those fights (useful enough to be deserving of its slot as uncommon). Allowing you to remove the status cards from everywhere like this will make sure you remove what needs to me removed, cleaning out future turns without costing you the current one.
I've tried to think of changes that support exhaustion strategies instead, but those either made it too easy to turn the deck into a small infinite combo, or made themselves too similar to other potions. Also, removing statuses like wounds and dazes from yourself feels more like the effect drinking an elixir would cause, instead of just tearing apart cards like it is now.

What does everyone else think about this? Is this potion good, and I'm just using it wrong?
(P.S. This is my first post in a steam forum, so let me know if I put it in the wrong one, or made a simple mistake like that)

[Zu]

I'm not sure I'd be on board with it targeting the card piles. Things get silly with charon's ashes and/or feel no pain juggernaut. Super niche hard counters like this are mildly inelegant.

I'd just slap "Draw 2 cards." on it as a prefix. Chad's kinda crap at drawing cards in some runs and you could play around it by playing wild strike on an empty draw pile or headbutting a burn.

A for thread effort btw.

[brickey.8]

I routinely throw the Elixir away without using it in exchange for even the lamest of the common potions, and I have probably used it (and actually benefited) less than 10% of the times I've acquired one. It just does NOTHING significant most of the time.

I think it still needs to let the player manually choose cards rather than auto-targeting status cards (you don't always generate statuses, and with the right powers you don't always want to get rid of statuses, but you almost always have strikes and defends). But it needs to target something besides the cards that are currently in your hand.

The options I see are:
1. Look at the top 5 of your draw pile, exhaust any of those. This gives you immediate value and synergizes with both exhaust powers and status builds, but it's a bit too much like scrying.
2. Draw X, then exhaust whatever you want from your hand (too much overlap with the existing swift potion)
3. Exhaust from your hand, but draw that many. (Too similar to the gambler potion)
4. Exhaust up to 5 cards from your discard pile. This doesn't give much short-term value (unless you have certain powers), but it counters status-hogs like hexaghost and nemesis a lot better and it makes it easy to target all your strikes/defends/curses to cycle your good cards faster.

Of the options I listed I think 4 is the only good one.

[DJDiceZ]

I could see it have an effect like "Exhaust X cards in your hand, put that many from the exhaust pile back into your hand". But it's a bit strong.

[Seftak]

This potion saved my bum a couple times in exhaust heavy deck where i really needed some attack or defend cards on a turn or i would die. You can use it as a gambling potion, a defence boost, a card generator, a damage dealer and probably other creative manners in an exhaust build.