Minh is a "Stone"-cold killer

This deck has been hanging around in mind for a long time and I decided to put it into work a while ago. I have tried different versions of it, but I concluded that this should be the best one to play. Needless to say it's a Minhfinity Stones variant, one of my favourite Minh decks and I just couldn't resist making my own version of it using the new cards. I can't say they make it better, as the taboo list hitting Drawing Thin has taken away a lot of its power level, but I have to say that with the taboo list active I have managed to create a version of it that is viable, interesting and worth trying.

Star of the show of course is Ancient Stone: Knowledge of the Elders. This is where most of the damage output comes from. Then we have ways to activate it. Analytical Mind, Grisly Totem (3) and Mr. "Rook" are the most important ones, but we also have other ways of dealing damage, so that we don't count solely on the Stone for the most part. That's until we get our final upgrades though, where the stone wil do most if not all of the work.

To begin with, this is a standard cluever Minh deck. What differentiates it from other Minh decks is its ability to deal with enemies on its own. Well, sometimes you might need help from your teammates, as you might not have your toolkit set yet, you might be lacking the right cards, or The King in Yellow may ruin your day (we still have ways around this though).

Let's talk briefly about the level 0 version of the deck. In this version you are mainly a cluever, but you can still deal damage to enemies with various ways. Occult Lexicon allows the use of Blood-Rite, Mind over Matter can help you evade or deal with small stuff and Improvised Weapon boosted with a A Glimmer of Hope can be surprisingly useful.

To talk about upgrades, Ancient Stone, will have to come a little bit late, as there are other things that take priority in order for the deck to function properly. We need upgraded Grisly Totem and we need 1 copy of Drawing Thin before we get the Stone, so that we can put a lot of charges on to it. Drawing Thin, by the way, couldn't be missing from such a deck, but at a steep 3 XP cost we have to compromise with only 1 copy. Until then, as we said, we have Occult Lexicon, Improvised Weapon and the added Segment of Onyx and Pendant of the Queen can do a fair bit of enemy management.

On to the main stuff:

UPGRADES

1. 2x Working a Hunch, 1x Shortcut: 3x Segment of Onyx

2. Grisly Totem: Grisly Totem (3)

3. 1x Mind over Matter: 1x Cornered

4. 1x Crack the Case: 1x Drawing Thin

5. 1x Mind over Matter: 1x Ancient Stone (1)

6. 1x Ancient Stone (1), 1x Occult Lexicon: 2x Ancient Stone (4)

7. 1x Preposterous Sketches: 1x Cryptic Research

8. Charisma

9. 1x Improvised Weapon: 1x Miss Doyle

10. 2x Eureka!, 1x Improvised Weapon: 3x Surprising Find

11. 2x Deduction: 2x Deduction (2)

12. Studious

A fully upgraded version of the deck can be seen here: https://arkhamdb.com/deck/view/646849

After you get the Ancient Stone, this is where the real game begins. You can now wonder around the map freely, killing almost any enemy you encounter.

How the deck is played:

Get your Ancient Stone and Grisly Totem asap. Mr. "Rook" helps but he is not mandatory. Grisly Totem is the most important card of the deck (or second most important if Ancient Stone comes first). It is the enabler of your deck. Analytical Mind serves a similar role, but you really want the extra icon (I'll explain later). You have 6 recurrable cards in your deck that have a single icon. The 3 A Glimmers of Hope and the 3 Segments of Onyx. You can pitch one of these cards once a turn to get a card. If you have both the Totem and Analytical Mind down, you get 2 cards. Don't be afraid to pitch Segments of Onyx. You have Scavenging to get them back. Early in the game they are part of your draw engine. This will gradually lead you to get all the cards you need. Eventually you will draw your key cards if you don't have them and you can start working on enemies. Mr. "Rook" is important because he can get you the cards of which you have only 1 copy but are important. These cards are Cornered, Drawing Thin and Analytical Mind.. If you have all your assets down you (most of the time) don't need help from anyone. Let me be more specific about the mechanics of this deck:

Draw Power: With Grisly Totem, Analytical Mind and Drawing Thin, you can draw 2 cards and gain 2 resources or draw 3 cards per turn. With Magnifying Glass you are at 5 and if you pitch a Segment or Glimmer you go at 8 , which will allow you to pop Drawing Thin for extra benefit without failing the test. You can also use Cornered here for better results.

Card Recursion: As I said above don't be afraid to ditch your Segments. You will just get them back with Scavenging. This can allow infinite cycling of cards, until you choose to summon the Pendant of the Queen. It also reduces the need to get your Glimmers back from your discard pile. Note that sometimes it can be beneficial to play both Scavengings, if you find yourself pitching too many cards.

Cornered Fodder: 2x Winging It, 2x Improvised Weapon, 3x A Glimmer of Hope, 3x Segment of Onyx, your second Grisly Totem. That's a lot of cards. Of course you need your Segments and Glimmers for your commits but if you find yourself at a hard spot you can ditch those cards with Cornered as well. As said above, you can use Cornered to help out a test in which Drawing Thin is involved.

Dealing with enemies: This is where all the fun is. So an enemy is finally upon you. Just attack the enemy and pitch a Glimmer or Segment and your done. you are at 2 , the card you pitched brings you up to 5 and Cornered can give you another 2 for a total of 7 , but that's not all of it. That will deal 3 damage to the enemy with the Stone, but if it has more health there's more. There's Improvised Weapon which you can play from your discard for extra damage and boost and there's also Drawing Thin which can be played in the same way as described above to draw you a card and deal 1 more damage. That's up to 5 total damage in one action. What if you can't kill them? Then evade. The same way. And drawing cards will slowly chip away part of the enemy's health with the Stone. You have more skill cards to help you in this case. Inquiring Mind is excellent, but Eureka! can also take the place of the pitched card. Oh, and forgot to mention Mr. "Rook", which can draw you a card mid-fight for 1 more damage.

With more XP, Cryptic Research can be of tremendous help and Miss Doyle and Surprising Find can be of serious help as well. Zeal and Hope play an important role in the deck, as with them you can fight and evade at high skill value and the automatic success ability can be crucial for various reasons, but it also effectively allows the use of Drawing Thin without adding difficulty to the test.

With Surprising Find in the mix things get more spiced up. You can Rook mid-fight to get it plus get one more card and commit it in the way described above for a total of up to 6 damage.

EDIT: There's one trick I forgot to mention. If you have Mr. "Rook", Analytical Mind and Drawing Thin (and Ancient Stone of course) down you can easily deal 3 damage without the need to pass a a skill test. You just Rook mid-fight for 1 damage, then attack or evade and commit a Segment/Glimmer to trigger Analytical Mindand pop Drawing Thin for a card. This will deal easily with 3-health enemies. And this is where the Dream-Enhancing Serum (see variants) would be of serious help. It would be able to deal 1 more damage by getting a duplicate with Rook and drawing 1 more card.

These all cases desribed above are best-case scenarios, but more often than not, you will be missing your key cards and you won't be able to deal with enemies as effectively. In these cases you can still evade. All you need is your Grisly Totem and you can turn a card with icon into 3 . That's enough most of the time to evade. And in case of emergencies, you can throw an Inquiring Mind.

Dealing with The King in Yellow: I have given this part quite a lot of attention as it can shut you down from doing your job. For this reason and only you need to save your Inquiring Minds. Yes, that's right. They are mostly in the deck for clearing your weakness. And they are so important that they are worth "Rooking" for. If you have your Inquiring Mind, you 're fine, which is why you should not fully clear locations from clues if you don't need the clues. But the thing is that The King in Yellow does not totally shut you down. You have a ton of icons. If you happen to be engaged with an enemy and you have The King in Yellow it's not the end of the world as long as you have Inquiring Mind. You can still fight or evade by pitching the Inquiring Mind and a combination of Glimmers/Segments until you reach the 6 icon threshold (typically 2 more cards) and you can still do your work.

But you can still clear The King in Yellow even without Inquiring Mind. It can happen, but at high cost. You 'll have to pitch 4 cards with a single icon (Minh and Grisly Totem add 2 ). It's doable, but if it comes down to this it will cost you a lot. That's why, as said above, you should save your Inquiring Minds.

The Segments of Onyx and the Pendant of the Queen: As described above, you are free to pitch your Segments for benefit, as you can get them back with Scavenging. But summoning the Pendant of the Queen isn't a simple case. That is because doing so will greatly diminish your draw power and ability to kill enemies. As described above, the Segments play an important role in enabling your Grisly Totem, Analytical Mind and Cornered. You should be very wary of when to play the Segments. First of all, you need to have the resources to spare, but secondly and most importantly you should do it at the right time. Yes the Pendant of the Queen is a very powerful asset, but you should weigh it if you actually need it or not. I have played whole scenarios without the need to summon the Pendant once. Such powerful is the recursion of the Segments that you end up not needing it. And if you choose to summon the Pendant don't be afraid to use it up quickly. The Segments will just get back in your deck after it's run out of charges. You may even be able to summon the Pendant more than once.

Typical Investigating: I've left this for last, as it's the least important part- you just get your clues. You have Deduction and Winging It recursion for a lot of bonus clues and let me remind you again to try to not clear the locations from clues if you don't need them.

This pretty much covers the whole of it. There's not much more to say, which just reminded me: There's the in the bag. Now THAT is what can ruin your day. But not completely. You are not totally helpless even if you draw the . You have Cornered, you have Glimmers and of course, you have Inquiring Mind. That's one more reason why it's in the deck. For emergencies like this. Of course there's also the Pendant of the Queen which can automatically evade an enemy, but that requires that you have it on the table.

Now THAT covers the whole of it, so let's talk about...

Variants:

• Dream-Enhancing Serum: That is a card I really wanted to include in this deck and have tried it in other versions, but you just end up not needing it. What has repels me from it is its high resource cost and you already have a ton of card draw. But what this card can do is that mid-fight you can search for a copy you already have with Mr. "Rook" and draw an extra card for 1 extra damage with the Stone. It's helpful, but it's not really necessary. It also doesn't really fit my personal playstyle. I usually use Mr. "Rook" to find my sigletons and it's not guarranteed that you will have a Rook charge during the fight.

• Jessica Hyde: We are using our stat so a boost to it wouldn't hurt us, so this can come in handy. I wouldn't recommend it in place of Miss Doyle though, but it's an option. The infinite damage soak can also be helpful.

• Versatile: We do have a ton of card draw so this is viable and I 've tried it. The good thing with it is that you see fewer weaknesses when you Rook. The bad thing is that you have a harder time to find your key cards, which is why I don't really recommend it. But one other good thing is that you reshuffle fewer times, which makes it less likely to see your weaknesses again. I won't say it's not viable. It's ok and it's fun. You can add more cards in your deck and funny enough you can also add more consistency. You can add things like Perception or Sharp Vision, True Understanding, Caches, stuff that will help you in general, but the key here is the out-of-faction card. I have 2 recommendations: Alice Luxley and Vicious Blow

Alice Luxley adds to your which is helpful and with her you can kill enemies engaged with other investigators more easily, simply by investigating and committing cards. There's also a little combo with Pendant of the Queen as you can discover a clue as a fast action, which will allow you to hunt down enemies you need to kill, if there are are clues on their locations. This can be especially helpful with Acolytes.

Vicious Blow is the other card I would recommend adding with Versatile, which I also find more solid. I think its utility is obvious. a icon which can be turned into with +1 damage is very useful in this deck as you can tell. And it's surprisingly helpful at the early stages where you 're not fully set-up yet.

Conclusion

I 've had a lot of fun playing this deck, but I don't recommend it if you don't like taking risks. As I said above, an in the wrong spot can totally ruin your day and this is a risk you must be willing to take when playing with this deck. Other than that, the Ancient Stones are very strong, we already knew that, but it's nice every now and then to see it in action.

Thanks for reading and hope you enjoy the deck if you choose to play with it. :)