Apostle runs: Juggling your mentor's "assistance" cards

In each of the Apostle runs there is a unique mechanic that is sort of "attacking" you all the time.

As a Grail apostle, thematically you are chronically ill, which increases the rate that you get Afflictions. Your Seasons of Ambitions provide Delightful Blood which you can use to temporarily cure your condition. This system makes total sense, even though it is a little bit boring in practice.

By contrast, the analogous systems for the Lantern and Forge apostles have been head scratchers for me. As a Lantern apostle, you get Dream of a Key cards, which decay to Fascination. As a Forge apostle, you get Shaper's Guidance cards, which decay to Dread. You can't remove these with painting like you can with Restlessness in the regular ascensions. I guess you could probably use them for summons in Sunset Rite if you otherwise don't need aspects from the Influence slot, though I didn't try to do that. (And you certainly can do that after they decay, if they don't get sucked in on a magnet.)

Instead, I went for something that really makes no thematic sense: simply do the thing that the card is for *again*. Even though the results of that are unique cards, all that happens is the new copy replaces the old copy, and you get to remove the card that was trying to kill you.

I found figuring this out to be one of the most immersion-breaking things about the Lantern and Forge runs. For Lantern I can at least contrive a thematic explanation in terms of needing to regain your composure by taking another peek at the Crossroads, or something like that. But the Forge one is just garbled nonsense thematically: the easiest way to do it results in a "Mrs. E" card and a "Mrs. E is en route" card both being on the table at the same time.

At first this seemed like a neat system, a little bit like your Long aggressor increasing the pressure on you. It also felt like it was encouraging you to figure out steps toward the Great Work, so you could use these cards up before they would attack you. But really it just encourages you to figure out one of them (and not a very complicated one) so that you can burn up the cards. After that it's just a bit of extra tedious maintenance.

Any thoughts on this mechanic? Does it seem like they could've made it more interesting, for example by having you *request* these cards rather than just being hit with them every Season of Ambitions?