Preston Suffering From Success

Card draw simulator

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damirius · 1033

Preston Suffering From Success

https://images-cdn.fantasyflightgames.com/filer_public/50/23/50231c4a-eeda-4c8c-8695-b8c3caa14276/ahc29_art_preston-fairmont.png

Introduction:

Original idea actually started with Rita Young. Idea was to take / to combine pay to succeed strategy of with auto succeed strategy of . Unfortunately I was adamant on using Stealth which quickly brought down my choices to either Lola Hayes or Preston Fairmont. While I would like to see Lola Hayes build with this in mind, I also opted to use Double, Double which set my eyes on Preston Fairmont.

Table of Contents:

  • Overview

  • Overall Strategy

  • Investigation tools

  • Enemy management tools

  • Card recurring engine

  • Ally choices

  • Other cards

  • Optional cards

  • Allies

  • Upgrade Path

Overview:

 
Difficulty: ★★☆☆☆
Enemy Management: ★★★☆☆
Clue-getting: ★★★★★
Encounter protection: ★★☆☆☆
Survivability: ★★★☆☆
Economy: ★★★★☆
Card Drawing: ★★★☆☆

Overall strategy:

Investigation tools:

Enemy management tools:

  • Stealth one of the main reasons we go with Preston Fairmont. You pick up this bad boy and together with Gumption and Flashlight + Exploit Weakness you can DISCARD any non-elite enemy from play. So that's 6 evade enemy. In most cases you will need 2-4, so only combination of two of those cards let you discard any enemy from play without any test! NOTE: It is still not 100% clear but if you are using Exploit Weakness on Elite enemies you shouldn't be able to apply Double, Double to it to get 6 damage or 9 damage if you play Double, Double + another copy of Exploit Weakness since effect is replacing existing one. In any case, doing 3 damage + auto evade is already great!

Card recurring engine:

Ally choices:

  • Leo De Luca is overall great card, I don't think I need to waste too many words on him. Getting bonus actions always pays off and here is no different. You will need to position yourself, do some arbitrary actions on board for your friends, Leo De Luca is the man for it.
  • Miss Doyle is optional, but giving you an option to perform an evade/investigate/fight with 5 base value goes a long way. Discard options on cats give you more chances to commit Momentum and Resourceful to tests.

Other cards:

  • "You handle this one!" is your basic encounter protection. If you see something that will stick to your threat area feel free to forward it to someone else. Just remember one resource goes to your Family Inheritance.
  • Friends in Low Places is absolutely amazing card IMHO. Pick Trick + Fortune traits. Then pick Clever and Experienced upgrades. As you can see we have 12 cards in total with those traits (unfortunately not one with both). You will get your engine running in no time. And do not skip Clever upgrade. If you hit your main engine cards like Double, Double, Flashlight, or Old Keyring or some Ally you will be able to place them as next few cards that you will draw. So just put them on top and take a draw and get them in no time. This is card which I included instead of Lucky Cigarette Case for the draw and believe me it's more than enough.
  • Lucky! and Gumption are your "get out of jail" cards. While you want to save Gumption for your Shed a Light or Exploit Weakness combos, feel free to lower test difficulties for some stupid encounter tests with Lucky! you can mitigate some of the "for each point you failed" tests.
  • Hot Streak combined with Double, Double solves all your economy problems if you had any in the first place. Solves your Lodge "Debts" also. As a big plus it's also Fortune traited, so you can pull it with Friends in Low Places
  • Momentum is cool card that I wanted to add in the deck. If you auto succeed, you go with your skill value against 0 difficulty test. That means if you use Miss Doyle cats and you discard them you will go 5 vs 0, which means that you can commit Momentum and you will get -3 difficulty for the next test, which saves you Flashlight/Old Keyring/Gumption uses and gives you really high difficulty lowering abilities.

Optional cards:

There is not much space for other cards in this deck, but I will mention few of them.

  • Scavenging can be useful with Augur to get back Flashlight and Old Keyring but I think it's a waste of slots. Not many items in this deck to be worth it and I don't think you need that many uses of them over the course of scenario that you will use them all without any option to get them back (either by Resourceful or by reshuffling your deck).
  • Counterespionage is a great card which gives you a lot of flexibility and encounter protection, but unfortunately it puts a pressure on your economy (you will not be able to pull resources from Family Inheritance for it) and you lose Trick trait from "You handle this one!" which you will probably upgrade from.
  • Miss Doyle is optional, but it gives us some auto succeed options where you can commit cards, if you are in need of more soak feel free to include either Cherished Keepsake or Leather Coat, both of them are empty slots we don't use. Of course in that case Scavenging becomes more useful, but we are losing on Miss Doyle to be able to trigger it more easily with Augur. So it's kind of a catch 22. You could remove some other cards as well instead.
  • Dumb Luck if your investigator party needs more enemy management. It works with all evasion tech you have. Slot it instead of some of your investigation tech, i.e. "Look what I found!"
  • The Skeleton Key is amazing card, especially for TSK where a lot of expose tests work from shroud. Remember you can't modify the shroud value anymore, but you CAN modify difficulty of tests. So Flashlight and Old Keyring doesn't work but Flashlight works! Gumption and Stealth also!

Allies:

You are flex investigator so you can work with whoever. But cool thing to think about is combining your investigator with Darrell Simmons to get even more options to reduce the difficulty tests and Map the Area, Wither to get easier tests.

Upgrade Path:

Link to the 0xp deck

Upgrade path can vary, depending on your needs, but most important part is to get Gumption, Double, Double ASAP. Afterwards Stealth/Flashlight for more flexibility and Miss Doyle in the middle of it. If you need more soak, get Charisma earlier so you can have your Leo De Luca and Miss Doyle in play. If not go for Hot Streak and Friends in Low Places upgrades. Everything after Momentum is in lux territory, so do as you wish with it.

 Cost  Total
   In the Thick of It  →  Miss Doyle 1 XP 1 XP
   In the Thick of It  →  Gumption 1 XP 2 XP
   In the Thick of It  →  Gumption 1 XP 3 XP
   Lucky!  →  Double, Double •••• 8 XP 11 XP
   Take Heart  →  Stealth 1 XP 12 XP
   Kicking the Hornet's Nest  →  Hot Streak •• 2 XP 14 XP
   Flashlight    Flashlight ••• 3 XP 17 XP
   Flashlight    Flashlight ••• 3 XP 20 XP
   Friends in Low Places    ☑☑ Versatile 2 XP 22 XP
   Friends in Low Places    ☑☑☑ Experienced 3 XP 25 XP
   Friends in Low Places    ☑☑ Clever 2 XP 27 XP
    →  Charisma ••• 3 XP 30 XP
   Hot Streak ••    Hot Streak •••• 2 XP 32 XP
   "Look what I found!"    "Look what I found!" •• 2 XP 34 XP
   "Look what I found!"    "Look what I found!" •• 2 XP 36 XP
   Take Heart  →  Momentum 1 XP 37 XP
    →  Another Day, Another Dollar ••• 3 XP 40 XP
    →  Another Day, Another Dollar ••• 3 XP 43 XP
   Leo De Luca    Leo De Luca 1 XP 44 XP
   Leo De Luca    Leo De Luca 1 XP 45 XP

(View at arkham-starter.com)

Big thanks to Valentin1331! This guide is made with help of his template which you can find here here

8 comments

Dec 28, 2022 chirubime · 25326

I've been workshopping this deck myself. I much prefer Lola Santiago to Miss Doyle. Miss Doyle bloats the deck and the deck has a ton of moving parts you need to assemble. However, Lola Santiago can end up yielding 1 free clue every round when you do the Flashlight/Gumption/Old Keyring shroud reduction stuff.

Dec 28, 2022 chirubime · 25326

Salvage also came up during my playtest. It's less reliant on cats vs Scavenging and plays well into being Double Doubled'd and Resourceful

Dec 29, 2022 damirius · 1033

@chirubime Thanks for the comment.

I've actually talked exactly on those topics with @Valentin1331 on the discord. I think Lola Santiago is actually really good option. Val also mentioned it in combo with Scavenging/Scavenging since you get your to 2, which is enough when you go with difficulty 0/auto succeed to get your stuff back without commiting another icon. Now for that combo I didn't have any spare space for Scavenging and also I noticed that 2 copies of Old Keyring and 2 copies of Flashlight were enough in 3p game to get me through the scenario without any issues. I also think it's mostly because of Intel Report which can indirectly save you a lot of Old Keyring and Flashlight uses on higher shroud locations where you will need to stack both of those abilities together to get to 0 difficulty. This is mainly the reason why I skipped on Salvage too, but I can see better use of it with few more item cards, soaks or something like that, since both our body and accessory slots are empty (or when dropping Intel Report and/or "Look what I found!" for some other cards).

To get back to Miss Doyle, I usually got her down on the board later on after getting Double, Double/Stealth in play and it was pretty consistent. One pretty nifty combo was to use the cats for any auto succeed test and commit Momentum to those tests to get -3 difficulty on next test. Which is actually pretty cool way to also save uses from Flashlight and Old Keyring. Especially because everything in our arsenal lowers the difficulty by 2 and odd value of shrouds/evade are common enough that sometimes it just feels bad spending 2 uses to get something from 3 to 0. Another cool thing with Miss Doyle is that it can be recurred back with Resourceful.

All that said I think Lola Santiago is totally valid choice here and easy way to modify the deck just replacing Miss Doyle. And I think there's an option with going with more items, Scavenging and Salvage by replacing some of the clue tech.

Jan 05, 2023 mattastrophic · 3018

How have you found Exploit Weakness compared to already existing one-shot-the-enemy events? Exploit seems like extra work to accomplish the same effect.

Jan 05, 2023 damirius · 1033

Heya @mattastrophic. I could say I'm little bit biased here because the idea was to get Stealth + Exploit Weakness in Preston at the first place, but in any case I've found it fun and effective in practice.

If we are talking about things that Preston can bring one card that I think would be also great is Dumb Luck. I've opted to go more with the clue route so I've left it out. But feel free to leave some clue tech out for it if more enemy management is needed by your party.

Actually the great thing about Exploit Weakness is that most of the time you just need Stealth in play, it gets you free trigger evade -2 difficulty without anything else in play, that's already great, we are saving one action for that evade. Then you can combine it with either Momentum/Flashlight/Gumption, or some other effect from other investigators and/or scenario effects and with just one of those we can hit -4 on difficulty which is in 95% of the cases enough. Note that for external help I had Map the Area from time to time and Wither. I've used Map the Area few times but actually Wither, while useful, was often times just an overkill. That said I think combining this deck with Darrell Simmons is absolutely bonkers, but I didn't actually try it with him in the party.

Another great thing about Exploit Weakness is that you know you are going to succeed against whatever bag without any commits. It actually also works with Elite enemies, which you can evade and deal them 3 damage which is actually really nice additional flex ability of the card. And on top of all that you can return it easily with Scrounge for Supplies and Resourceful (you can even commit Resourceful in the same test).

So for the setup in general the cards that I was looking to mulligan for are Leo De Luca/Double, Double/Stealth. Everything else comes naturally and getting all 3 of them on the table is usually bit harder for other investigators because of the resource cost but for Preston not so much.

Do you have any "one shot" cards on your mind that you would add?

Jan 06, 2023 mattastrophic · 3018

The angle I'm coming from is that stuff like Waylay, Close Call, Dumb Luck, and that card from Edge with Calvin in the art do a similar thing, without needing a combo set up, and they aren't exactly staples. That being said, Exploit does fit the theme of this deck and doesn't require a skill test to pull off.

Jan 06, 2023 mattastrophic · 3018

As for a card I'd personally consider, probably Elusive in a 1-2p setting, because you can just say goodbye to an enemy and get a move as a fast play for 2r.

Jan 08, 2023 damirius · 1033

@mattastrophic

Agreed on Elusive, in general it's a great card, even after taboo it's still value.

As for evade tech, I don't like Waylay that much in general, but also here in Preston I don't think I could make it work to be honest. It costs 3, targets just non-elite, have a condition that requires given enemy to be already exhausted. That means that we must somehow exhaust an enemy with something (not stealth) then go through new (3) test for which we can't use Flashlight nor Hope and so on. Only thing that I can see the value of it is some big hp enemy with victory, since Waylay defeats the enemy. I could see it in some other high investigator, but not here with this setup. Could see it in Preston with some Eye of the Djinn/Ancient Covenant/Favor of the Sun deck, but well that's another story.

Fend Off is amazing card, it also has synergy with Friends in Low Places because of the Trick trait which we have on it. Unfortunately can't be taken by Preston.

Dumb Luck I would add if your party needs more enemy management like I said, it's great card and it has good synergy with rest of the deck good for TFA also. Got synergy with Friends in Low Places as well because of the Fortune trait. Unfortunately can't be pulled back with Scrounge for Supplies.