Daisy Walker: Shhhhhh...

...It's a secret. A secret themed deck that is. And my first foray into a deck built well and truly for hard difficulty; not stan-hard, not 'we start on normal difficulty and adjust the difficulty based on our performance', true start-to-finish hard difficulty.

While this deck would be perfectly serviceable on normal difficulty, the number of boosters is likely overkill, and the heavy investment into token-ignoring tech later on will provide less dividends when the worst modifier you can draw is -4 instead of -6 and the symbol tokens are not nearly as punishing.

Despite being tailor-made for hard mode, the strategy that this deck is built around is as straightforward as can be, and will not require much detail to outline. It's main claim to fame is the adding of 'secret' uses to assets in order to prolong their usage; that's it.

A VERY quick description

The three cards that add secrets to assets are Truth from Fiction, Enraptured, and Astounding Revelation.

Enraptured is a practiced skill card, and Astounding Revelation requires searches to make use of, thus, we include Practice Makes Perfect, a cool card introduced in the latest cycle. To guarantee Practice Makes Perfect hitting a practiced skill card, we also include Deduction, Perception, and Prophesy (N.B. Only use Practice Makes Perfect during an investigation action or test).

More searches are needed to make Astounding Revelation likely to trigger, and two Daisy staples, Research Librarian and Old Book of Lore do the job swimmingly. One more for good measure, No Stone Unturned will pick up the slack when Old Book of Lore is replaced by a better tome, and until then, it's a decent support card and guarantor that you'll have a tome to work with, even on a bad starting hand.

Speaking of tomes, let add some to the deck, specifically ones with 'uses: (secrets)': Archaic Glyphs and Scroll of Secrets fit the bill (A sparse library for now, but by the end of the upgrade path, we will own six secret tomes, none that are lvl 0). Other than those, one Medical Texts for emergencies, and the aforementioned Old Book of Lore. And while not a tome itself, Knowledge is Power directly synergies with a tome deck, so why not include it?

And with four slots for two pairs of cards remaining, we take the boosters that are Alyssa Graham and St. Hubert's Key; expensive, but within the deck's budget. Why Alyssa over Dr. Milan Christopher? Boredom with Milan mostly, so I think I'll have more fun with Alyssa Graham, since this deck isn't for want of many resources and extra sanity soak is good to counter The Necronomicon. Still, if you're try-harding, I concede that Milan is the better pick.

Told you it'd be quick.

The Upgrades (AKA The Interesting Part)

With the amount of boosters this deck boosts, we will actually be fine for investigating from start of campaign to finish, which gives us breathing room to focus our exp purchases entirely on tomes. The following upgrades can be done in any order that you chose, but they should be the first three improvements you make to the deck:

• Pnakotic Manuscripts, unsurprisingly, is going to be our 'endgame' card; the most powerful seeker card so far (when measured by the combined sum of exp and resource cost), and a tome that uses (and thus takes) secrets. What might be surprising is the fact that it will taken so early, but it's going to be a necessity to alleviate the punishing chaos bag on hard difficulty, which starts to bite from scenario one. One copy will suffice as first, replacing Old Book of Lore, and you'll be looking to either start with it in your hand, or fish it out of your deck with your wide selection of tutors.

• Archaic Glyphs Archaic Glyphs (3) should be an upgrade that you perform as soon as you 'Translate the Glyphs', as they'll be a dead draw in their un-upgraded form after that. The specific upgrade will be 'Guiding Stones'; nothing exotic, just a way of leveraging Pnakotic Manuscripts's token-hate and Daisy's naturally high (galvanised with a bevy of skill cards) to get the most out of all your cards. this combo allows you to be 100% efficient with your critical investigate actions; you need only commit the exact amount of icons to clear a location, no more, no less, and you are guaranteed to succeed and not waste those commits. If that way, it beats out the Higher Education/Guiding Stones combo, which is stronger at lower difficulties.

• Scroll of Secrets Scroll of Secrets (3) will be the utility tome that plays into the side-roll of support for the rest of the team, without compromising your clue-gathering, and for the low, low price of 1 resource. It's low-impact and budgetary nature is key; investigating is already a full-time job, especially if you're the primary clue gatherer. Seeker's resources and actions are at a premium, and so minimising the number of distractions is a priority. Fortunately, Daisy's additional action helps to this effect, and allows her to support her team in the other way seekers primarily contribute to a party; by keeping all players well stocked on cards.

17 exp gets you this far, which is quite standard for the mid point of a campaign. After this, the upgrade path is more a suggestion that a requirement, and you can tool it as you'd like. Imagining that you'll have around 35-40 exp by scenario seven, I personally will upgrade as follows:

One Charisma will alleviate the four allies problem, and round out the total exp used to an even 20.

Two No Stone Unturned adds two more deck-wide searches to trigger Astounding Revelation, as well as improve the odds of Pnakotic Manuscripts coming out regularly. This will be important as the next upgrade will be:

Versatile, to shore up some weaknesses that exist in a very trimmed down deck. Deck-wide searches are not effected by the size of the deck, which will temper the downside of a larger deck. The five cards that I would include would be:

• The third copy of Astounding Revelation.
• One extra practiced skill card (best contender from cards up to 'A Thousand Shapes of Horror' will be Take the Initiative).
• Old Book of Lore, making a comeback.
• Two economy cards to supplement the extra costs, both Emergency Cache and Crack the Case are options; you can elect whichever you prefer to include.

One of the following choices:

• Both copies of Deduction (2).
• A second copy of Pnakotic Manuscripts, replacing Old Book of Lore (again).
• Two copies of one other tome: Encyclopedia, Esoteric Atlas, and Otherworld Codex, are the current selection, as of A Thousand Shapes Of Horror, to replace Medical Texts and Old Book of Lore.

Total exp cost: 34-37.

Weaknesses

The most glaring weakness is the lack of any kind of defence; no "I've got a plan!", no Mind over Matter, no Anatomical Diagrams. I find that, as a seeker, you can only have one secondary role alongside investigating; either self-defence or support. Choosing both spreads you too thin and leaves barely any time to gather clues. Some seekers fit one role more easily than another, and Daisy's better suited for support over combat, but that does put additional strain on your guardians to keep enemies off both of your backs.

A more subtle problem is a slight resource deficiency. While the decks overall resource cost is average, it's expenses are concentrated into two or three assets, namely; Alyssa Graham, St. Hubert's Key, and Pnakotic Manuscripts (when you get it). Getting them out all at once early on will pose a problem. Fortunately, you will have cheaper fall-backs when money is tight (skill cards for cheap skill boosts, Scroll of Secrets for cheap tomes), but it does mean a likely-hood of having an asset stuck in your hand for several rounds.

In conclusion

I think I enjoy publishing decks, especially since they seem to be well-received. I going to try to make this a weekly thing, and I'll take suggestions for which investigator to do next, so long as I haven't done them already. I'm the type of deck-builder to make one defined deck per investigator, and try to fit every card, even the bad ones, into at least one deck. I'm also the type to abhor repeated use of the more powerful/popular cards, so don't worry, repetition won't be a problem.

Anyways, please let me know what you think about this deck, and thank you for your time spent reading this write-up.