Dream Serum Daisy

Dream Serum Daisy, is an experiment to see if we can make Dream-Enhancing Serum work. Dream Diary is a stand in for Dream-Enhancing Serum, which is from the latest card pack but not on Arkham db yet.

For reference:

• 3 Cost
• 1 Will icon
• Arcane slot
• Only the first copy of each card in your hand counts towards your max hand size.
• When you draw a copy of a card that is already in your hand, reveal both copies and exhaust Dream Enhancing Serum: Draw 1 card.

This deck exists merely to answer the question, can you build a deck around the Dream Enhancing Serum card (hereafter referred to as DES)? The answer is yes, but also I can't help but feel you could probably build a better deck by cutting DES and using some other card in it's place.

Anyways I digress, let's analyze DES since we're building a whole deck around it. What do we get for 3 resources and an action? We get a once per turn draw ability that seems unlikely to occur, and a max hand size ability that seems pretty irrelevant except for one scenario. (Bonus points for you if you can guess which one!) But we're building Dream Serum Daisy, so enough naysaying, let's dive into this ability whole hog!

So, what are the good sides of DES?

• 1) Well, we can have a REALLY big hand, and not bump up against hand size limits. This means cards like Curiosity and Higher Education can net us some gains.
• 2) If we stage the playing field we can ensure that we trigger the card draw every turn, turning one card draw action into two. (Or 3 if we get both copies out.) So in an ideal scenario, this leads to lots of card draw for us. (Later down the road, if we pick up Ancient Stones, we can rat-a-tat-tat for a bunch of ping damage)
• 3) This is kind of a weak benefit, but at least DES only takes up an arcane slot, which is not in competition with a lot of stuff.

Card choices:

• Old Book of Lore, Eureka!, Mr. "Rook" all exist to try to find us our DES, so that we can start playing our plan.
• Astounding Revelation is for Economy, since we're doing a fair amount of searching we should be able to reliably pull it.
• Magnifying Glass is our other hand item to go along with the Book, since it's fast.
• Deduction, Shortcut, Inquiring Mind, and Ward of Protection are all included just because they are good solid cards.
• Enraptured is included because honestly, I can't say I've ever played with it before and it actually makes sense here to refill Mr. "Rook" or our Ancient Stones later on.
• Knowledge is Power lets us fire our Book from our hand, and even discard our second book.
• Guts and Perception are included for even more card draw, but are probably the easiest cards to flex out for different stuff, if you'd rather run No Stone Unturned or something else.

The most important part of all the deckbuilding honestly is just that we have two of everything.

Piloting:

For our opening hand, we want:

• Dream-Enhancing Serum
• Mr. "Rook" / Eureka!! / Old Book of Lore
• Mulligan everything else and pray to the chaos gods that you get some of the above.

For the actual playing of the deck, things actually get pretty interesting.

PHASE 1:

Get DES into play. You should fire of Rook, Old Book of Lore, Eureka! and everything else trying to get a copy if you didn't start with one in your hand. If you fire one of your searching tools and you don't come up with DES, try to pick cards that you do not yet have in your hand. (AVOID DUPLICATES!) The final thing to remember is, every card that you play that isn't DES costs you a card draw in the future. Because of this, you want to play a minimal number of cards. You basically only want to use your searching cards, everything else should be held in reserve.

Core rules for phase 1: FIND DES. AVOID DUPLICATES. CONSERVE CARDS.

PHASE 2:

At this point, you have one (or both) copies of DES in play. Now you need to ensure that it fires every turn. The best tool you have for this is Old Book of Lore, since you can use it with your ability every turn. Rook is even better, but he only has three charges before he's used up. The most important thing to remember at this phase is, don't use your cards unless you have both copies in hand. Clearly there might be some instances where you have to break this rule, but in general you don't want to play a card until you have both copies in hand. (ex: Do you Ward to stop an Ancient Evils that will tick over the Agenda? Or hold it until you get that second copy?)

Core rules for phase 2: HOLD CARDS UNTIL YOU HAVE PAIRS. SEARCH FOR PAIRS. PLAY PAIRS.

The ideal situation for DES is as follows:

• You use Old Book of Lore / Rook / Eureka! and find a card that already exists in your hand. You draw that card, trigger DES, reveal the pair and draw another card. The new card that you drew does not already exist in your hand.

You might end up drawing a card with DES that already exists in your hand, which then basically means a wasted card draw. Honestly, I wouldn't worry too much about this, it's pretty much bound to happen eventually. As long as you're finding that you trigger DES every or almost every round, you're doing well!

It's also somewhat worth keeping track of the cards in your discard pile or in play which you've already used trying to find your DES. Any of those cards lurking in your deck are basically free grabs if you have multiple search triggers in a turn.

Potential Upgrades:

• Ancient Stone is a pretty good grab here, so that all that card drawing actually turns into something use-able. (DAMAGE!)
• Magnifying Glass is a solid upgrade too, as you can use it before you've found the pair for investigating, then pop it back to your hand so it's ready when you find that second copy.
• Higher Education is also worth mentioning, as if you're drawing this many cards you should always be over the limit.

From there you can pretty much go with whatever you'd like as long as you ensure you always upgrade cards in pairs. The only other advice I can give is to shy away from too many assets. Since you're holding a lot of cards for long periods until you get that second copy, events or skills feel more immediately use-able while sitting in your hand.

Lastly, why not Mandy Thompson? Honestly, I don't really have a good reason here, other then Old Book of Lore doesn't cost you an action every turn, so you can still put some effort towards winning while pulling off the jank that is DES. You could easily mutate this into a Mandy Dream Serum deck with little to no updates. (Maybe -2 Old book, +2 No stone unturned?)