Wendy Adams - Carcosa Cluever

Quick Notes

• This deck was built using just core, Dunwich, Carcosa, and Stella Clark. If those are the only sets you have, this deck may be fore you. Also, there's only 1 card from Carcosa, so if you don't have Carcosa you could use a different card as a placeholder.
• For Lockpicks, if you don't have Winifred Habbamock, find a card that is off-class and include it in your deck. This will serve as Lockpicks until you upgrade to Lockipicks (1)
• Base Granny Orne is merely OK for this deck. The upgraded Granny Orne, tho, is powerful: it provides a boost of +1 book and once per round you can get a +1 boost to any failed skill test, effectively giving another +1 boost.
• Because Wendy's fight value is so low, I didn't bother including a weapon. Instead, this deck focuses on evading instead of fighting.

Keys to Making this Deck Work

• Lockpicks is key to this deck. You only get to use it once per round but it will be provide a nearly guaranteed clue each round.
• If you're investigating more than once per round (and, ideally, you should be), Flashlight or Old Keyring are what you'll rely on. Since Wendy doesn't have a high book value, though, you'll likely need to utilize cards like Look what I found and Lucky. If you're short on resources, you can simply commit Look what i found to a skill check to get the +2 to book. (In fact, this is why perception isn't in this deck.)
• Also, because you can only use Lockpicks once per round, boosting Wendy's base book value is important. This is where Granny Orne (3) comes in, though you won't be able to include her in your deck until have some XP.
• In light of that, you could include Live and Learn in this deck in place of something else (maybe Scavenging or Leather Coat).
• Rabbit's Foot, part 1: As for Rabbit's Foot, this deck doesn't revolve around failure. Instead, RF is meant to be there to help Wendy draw cards: without the requisite cards in play (e.g., Lockpicks, Flashlight, Old Keyring) she can't investigate all that well. If you draw Rabbit's Foot early on but not one of your key investigating assets, you're more likely to fail tests, which will then enable you to activate RF, which will speed up access to those key investigating assets.
• Rabbit's Foot, part 2: Another reason to include Rabbit's Foot is that it enables you to lean in to Wendy's special ability. If you have extra cards in your hand, you can more easily cancel a chaos token and re-draw.
• Scavenging is an easy way to get Old Keyring, Lockpicks, or Flashlight back into your hand.
• Peter Sylvestre's main role is to boost your evade value and, by doing that, boosting the effectiveness of Lockpicks. Getting 1 free horror removed per round is an added bonus.
• If you're worried about sanity, you could remove Scavenging and include Cherished Keepsake instead. Scavenging ends up being fairly situational: first off, you need it in your hand; second, there needs to be an asset in your discard pile that you want back; and, third, you need to succeed on a test by 2 or more. Later on when you have two allies in play, you won't need to worry about sanity as much, so there's an argument to be made for having Scavenging in your deck to begin with so that you don't have to pay the 1 XP cost to include it later.

Upgrade Path

• Lockpicks 2x → Lockpicks (1) 2x
• Leather Coat 2x → Granny Orne (3) 2x
• Charisma (3) 1x
• Remove Cunning Distraction 1x and Manual Dexterity 1x, add Cat Burglar (1) 2x
• Survival Instinct 2x → Survival Instinct (2) 2x
• Look What I Found! 2x → Look What I Found (2) 2x
• Lucky! 2x → Lucky! (3) 2x

Notes on Upgrade Path

• It's kind of a toss up if you go for Granny Orne or Cat Burglar first. Cat Burglar gives you test-less evade. It also boosts Lockpicks by giving you a boost of +1 to evade. It's also cheaper than Granny Orne in terms of XP. The main benefit of going for Granny Orne first is that her base version isn't that great with this deck and considering that Lockpicks can only be used once per round, there's a more tangible benefit to upgrading Granny Orne.
• Ally clog, Part 1: the fully upgraded version of this deck will have 6 allies. That's kind of a lot...I didn't have much trouble with that. I think this was because of the importance of allies to the engine of this deck: each ally boosts Wendy's ability to investigate. Wendy only has a base of 3 book and so it's crucial that she boosts that to make this deck work.
• Ally Clog, Part 2: you could potentially get a second copy of Charisma. That would make this deck really powerful BUT would be pretty expensive since these allies aren't cheap.
• My side deck includes the upgrades plus other ideas for this deck. For example, you could throw in Lone Wolf for resource generation. (Tho I tried that out and it just did not work for me.) However, ignore Fire Axe: not sure how that got in there. It really only makes sense for Wendy if she is able to gain a ton of resources.

Other Notes

• Why not include Newspaper since Wendy's base investigate value isn't great? Well, Newspaper just doesn't seem all that useful. It only kicks in when you have zero clues. So, how often do you have zero clues? Typically only at the start of an act (but not always!) In other words, for 1 resource and 1 action, you can get +2 to your base investigate value three times per scenario. Having said that, for scenarios where you are constantly shedding clues, Newspaper could be really useful.