Roland Recruits a Task Force for a deadly Hunt.

Credit: Shane Pierce

What's best than looking at one of the oldest investigators in the light of new cards? Especially the Field Agent opens exciting possibilities for an ally-focused deck that heals his team to benefit from them. This deck is not shiny, but it proved surprisingly reliable and enjoyable.

This series is a celebration of the 20k points on ArkhamDB to thank you all for all the support received.
Click here to see all the previous decks. I will keep releasing a new standalone-ready deck concept every week on Friday, so stay tuned and keep pressing the ♥ button if you want to see more!

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• Overview

• Main Strategy

• Get your squadron ready

• Embody your leading detective role

• Other Cards

• Upgrade Path

• Use Motivational Speech to hire a Beat Cop (2) and 2 Field Agent at the same time and get to 5 and 5 .

• Heal them with Hallowed Mirror and Trusted, or cycle them with Calling in Favors to get the most juice out of their abilities, and use their soak to stay alive.

To investigate this case, you need a real team you can count on:

• Beat Cop (2) deals the 3rd damage to save you a use on Enchanted Blade/Roland's .38 Special and an action. The is welcome to compensate for Roland base value.

• As Field Agent is not unique, you can play 2 at the same time and bring your to 5, allowing you to find clues decently in locations with shrouds of 3 or less, and their ability can be used to empty the shroud-4+ locations.

  • Healing the Field Agents with Hallowed Mirror allows you to spam their ability, turning Soothing Melody into a 0-cost cantrip that gets you 2 testless clues!

The perfect board state for this deck is Beat Cop (2) x1 and Field Agent x2, bringing your stats to 3-5-5-2 and bringing you tons of soak.

• Calling in Favors helps a lot recruiting your team. Feel free first to play 2 Beat Cop (2) if you find them early, and use one to replace it with a Field Agent once you've extracted the juice out of it.

• Speaking of juice, a Trusted Teammate will find you more clues and be a better recipient for a Soothing Melody.

• Your very Inspiring Presence will motivate your team to give you more of themselves.

• Nothing's worth a good Motivational Speech to get the buy in from your crew. Feel free to do it even when you are engaged with enemies to call for some soak.

• Later in the campaign, you will get an artefact that will make all your teammates fight harder, investigate better, accept more horrors and endure more mistreatments: the The Star • XVII.

Your ability makes you the obvious leader of the team. You can fight better than Beat Cops (2) and get clues better than Field Agents, thanks to your ability to investigate dead monsters and gain insights.

• Shortcut helps when you are engaged with an enemy and there is no clue at your location. Move yourself and the enemy to another location with a clue before killing it and getting the reward.

• If you are on a high-shroud location, use On the Hunt (3) to fish for an enemy and get a clue and resources out of its guts while avoiding possible Rotting Remains.

• Get all the Glory from your team's achievements and get rewarded for killing foes.

  • Later, you can learn how to do Enemy Sketches to prepare your fellowship for what they will encounter out there.

• As you gain experience, your Keen Eye will help you dealing with harder situations.

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• Machete is your obvious choice when you are engaged with one single enemy.

  • Daring and Overpower help compensate for your low value, against 4+ combat enemies.

  • We end up upgrading it into Mind over Matter (2), which is a fantastic companion for these power turns where you need to land every blow and evade the boss.

• Enchanted Blade and Roland's .38 Special, on the other hand, are prioritised when you are engaged with more than one enemy.

  • Later, we upgrade into Enchanted Blade (3), which helps with our 5 base sanity as well as one of 's main weakness: draw. Especially as we upgrade the Hallowed Mirror (3), the more draw, the more heal on our team, the more ability spam we get.

• Take the Initiative is our answer to the Encounter Deck mostly, but also some scenario tests. Our other main answer is simply to take the blow and use the soak of our Allies.

• Shout-out to Breach the Door, which didn't make it to this list but that should be considered by anyone playing with 3 or more and/or going to TSK.

• I also added Mysteries Remain and The Dirge of Reason to the side deck, as these are possible to use instead of the OG set, especially if you are running campaigns like TFA that are already trauma heavy.

  • I wouldn't recommend going with both sets at the same time as Mysteries Remain is basically one gained action and The Dirge of Reason 2 actions lost, for a net loss of 1 action.

A little word on consistency here: being a guardian means protecting your team against enemies as much as possible from turn one.

• 5 weapons mean an 88% chance of finding one in your opening hand if you hard mulligan for one.

• Drawing 2 cards on your first turn if you didn't find a weapon in the first place brings your total chances of playing a weapon on your first turn to 92%.

• If You're like U2, a second turn of power draw brings you to 96.8% chances of finding and playing a weapon.

As a flex deck, I consider this more than enough in terms of consistency to skip Prepared for the Worst.

Link to the 0xp deck

(View at arkham-starter.com)

Link to the full xp deck

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