Card draw simulator
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| None. Self-made deck here. |
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| None yet |
HungryColquhoun · 4341
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I've been posting decks every Sunday with the new Hemlock Vale cards for the past few months, however this will be my final one! I hope you've enjoyed, 12 weeks worth of decks should give a lot of new combos and ideas for people to look over. The setup here thins your deck to just 10 cards, and then uses Prepared for the Worst and some other tricks to find the Cyclopean Hammer very early...
Overview
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Underworld Support gives a deck of 28 cards, Stick to the Plan thins by 3, Short Supply thins by 10 and your opening hand thins by 5. On Stick to the Plan you have Pushed to the Limit, Prepared for the Worst and Ever Vigilant. This gives a 10 card deck, so if the Hammer is in your deck then if you draw a card or wait until turn 2 then Prepared for the Worst finds it every time. If it's in your discard pile then Pushed to the Limit allows it to be shuffled into your deck with the first enemy you see (which Kicking the Hornet's Nest, "Let me handle this!", On the Hunt ••• and Smite the Wicked all help with), allowing you to target it with Prepared again. If it's not it your deck and it's not in your discard pile, then you've got the Hammer in your opening hand - great job!
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This deck gets a bit Blessy, with Ancestral Token, Purified, Righteous Hunt and Guided by Faith all adding in tokens. This justifies Nephthys, who not only makes the hammer hit harder but will allow juicy damage every once in a while. Note that with Cyclopean Hammer adding 5 with Purified happens quite a lot!
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In addition to Nephthys, there's Enchant Weapon, Vicious Blow, Guard Dog •• and Zoey's Cross to provide extra damage. This deck will cycle every scenario so anything you don't see now you will see later. Guard Dog is important to give Zoey physical soak, as there aren't any healing options on the deck.
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This deck has some card draw with Glory, Overpower and Guts, helping you cycle faster. Resource generation is reasonable with Zoey's ability plus On the Hunt •••, Kicking the Hornet's Nest and Emergency Cache.
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Lastly there's clue-tech here, with Sixth Sense providing a reliable option and then Scene of the Crime, Task Force, Kicking the Hornet's Nest and Guided by Faith all giving you further capacity. Your main role is hammering cultists into paste though - don't forget that!
Campaign starter and planned progression
With In the Thick of It this a 29 XP deck. No purchases are made with the In the Thick of It XP initially so you can get to Stick to the Plan faster. 0 XP deck is as follows (and link here):
A recommended order of purchases/upgrades for remaining cards is:
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Stick to the Plan (load with Emergency Cache, Pushed to the Limit and Prepared for the Worst)
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Enchanted Blade → Ever Vigilant (replace Emergency Cache on Stick to the Plan)
Final thoughts
I love decks which do specific things reliably, and when they can do these things without fail that's even better. Getting Cyclopean Hammer out guaranteed every scenario is amazing, and even if you don't have control over what else is discarded there's enough card draw here to cycle before long. Personally I'm disappointed if there isn't a janky Zoey deck with each new investigator pack, so hopefully this delivers!
Anyway, that's all for the series! Hopefully I lived up to my promise of showcasing interesting uses of Hemlock Vale cards, and you've found some combos you liked along the way. Not sure if I'll do another series yet in the future, they're a fair bit of work! Thanks in particular to Valentin1331 for giving many of these a once over behind the scenes (and for encouraging me to do better in some cases, as there's a lot of unpublished crap you haven't seen)! I will post a wrap-up thread on Reddit next weekend, listing all the decks as well as decks which never left the cutting room floor (I'll provide links but won't publish these). I'll also aim to keep publishing decks from time to time, just not a full series in the near future. Let me know what you think to this Zoey deck below as always, and thanks for reading!
| 20 comments |
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May 05, 2024 |
May 05, 2024
For resource generation in particular, I didn't see a great need - Zoey's ability keeps you pretty flush and Ever Vigilant is a very nice discount as well. Further Kicking the Hornet's Nest provides another trigger for Pushed to the Limit and as you can't be sure what will be discarded with Short Supply it's good to play the odds with a few enemy spawning/recruitment cards - so I wouldn't cut it. For adding more assets in general (e.g. Bandolier plus Survival Knife, or Well Prepared) these are all more you need to install and resource - keeping things simpler tends to get you to your core functions more quickly. For Well Prepared, you're pretty good at passing tests already (especially on the Hammer) so I don't think it adds enough value - what you'd want it to do is use it with a card which supports and more IMHO. Leo De Luca is a little tempting, but he's also very pricey - so I'd pass on him unless you're making big changes to the deck (e.g. ditching Sixth Sense for a resource card, maybe adding in Leadership, etc.). Hope you enjoy trying it out anyway! Let me know if you have additional thoughts when you've given it a spin. |
May 06, 2024Congrats on this great deck and all the others. My involvement was very limited so all the kudos are for you! It was nice to see your series giving options for many investigators that I couldn’t find anything for in mine, Zoey being a perfect example, or a fresh take for some investigators that I did a while ago like Kymani and Darrell, and finally a better build on some I’ve tried my best with, like Skids! Thanks for the addition to the community, it’s been a great read. And I need to learn from you how to keep guides short. I appreciate your concise writing! |
May 06, 2024
Keeping guides shorter is always a bit of a struggle for me as well, but the 5 bullet point format on these has helped me a little bit! A bit of a goal for me was keeping these to a 5 minute read or less - which I think I managed for the most part. Glad I've hopefully added something to the community with this series and given people a few more options. I always like to keep notes on any deck I make as well as make an upgrade path, so realistically it's only a little more work to get it a sensible format for publishing. Thanks again and I'll look forward to your own next deck guide! |
May 06, 2024The other amazing thing is this deck achieves it's goal after earning extra 9xp. It's usually 2 scenarios, and that means everything after that is a little bit like luxury upgrades, and you can modify anything you want after getting your hammer and SttP. Maybe I would spend 1xp in the beginning for Ace of Swords so I can start my 1st scenario with extra sth. (Zoey's 4 can seem a little akward sometimes). |
May 06, 2024
For buying Ace of Swords sooner, it's a reasonable idea although Enchanted Blade, Runic Axe and .45 Thompson all come with at least a +2 boost so I found it worked fine enough without it (especially as the campaign starter has 19 icons for committing). Realistically it all becomes a bit moot when you get the combo of Cyclopean Hammer plus SttP anyway, and I'm always wary of the situation where I'm just 1 XP short of a big upgrade between scenarios! |
May 06, 2024This decklist looks great. What do you think about switching out Sixth Sense for Astounding Revelation ? It limits your ability to get clues but it would thin your deck even further as soon as you have stick to the plan and it would provide you with two extra resources right from the start. |
May 06, 2024
If it was still allowed it would have definitely been nice, as it would have thinned your deck down to 9 off the bat, however thinning to 10 is still very good! |
May 07, 2024Just realised this deck could also very well lean towards some sweet Synergy trait stuff. As it is right now, it is already a sweet home for Gang Up and Call for Backup, and it could definitely use a splash on Empirical Hypothesis (or Shrewd Analysis if you just want the colour). |
May 07, 2024
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May 07, 2024Maaaan this looks fun |
May 07, 2024
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May 07, 2024
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May 07, 2024
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May 12, 2024Oh i love this. A real innovation on the super slim deck zoey build. Took me a while to understand how it works, but i get it now. Not too much xp to get to combo working either, basically 6 (STTP) for any weapon, 11 for STTP + a big weapon (in this case hammer, but tbh can be whatever your wanting to play with). So i guess in a campaign that means its map 2 for 6xp, maybe map 2 or 3 for 11, depending on the campaign. And honestly thats really solid for a combo deck. A lot of decks have map 1 blues, and the easy solution to that here is to just have back up weapons in the early campaign that you xp over. You might want a little mitigation against asset loss (Corrosion or similar), but theres plenty of space for that. I think with the bless angle you either lean in hard, skip hammer and go for Blessed Blade (4)/Holy Spear and Parallel Zoey or tbh just lean in on smashy, hunter killer zoey stuff. I would add more draw with the savings, but tbh please dont see these as criticisms. they're just thoughts. I think the general engine/build/concept here looks really fun and shows people a concept they can adapt to their own playstyles really easilly as theres a lot of flex slots here to play with. Nice one! |
May 12, 2024
I had thought about Well-Maintained mitigation for Crypt Chill, Corrosion and similar - but usually Crypt Chill is the main one to watch out for and you'll very often have other stuff to discard. In terms of Parallel Zoey, she can't take Holy Spear so TBH I'm less keen on her for bless ironically (I think she's best running The Key of Solomon with Blessed Blade, and that's about it...). Ancestral Token is such a win for all Guardians as Valentin1331's review of it covered so well that I think it does have a nice home here (doubly so with the horror soak it provides), plus the Purified and Cyclopean Hammer combo is a nice when when you pull it off as the Hammer lends itself to big over-success. Honestly though, there's a shed-load of ways this could be built outside of the core combo and no real wrong answers - hopefully people go bonkers with it! |
May 16, 2024I had designed a Zoey deck with Underworld Support and Short Supply last year, this combo is really cool! But I don't know there will be a new card - Pushed to the Limit, so I use Scrounge for Supplies to retrieve my main weapon - .35 Winchester. This is my deck: arkhamdb.com and I wrote a article to share my deck with friends (in Chinese ) : vocus.cc |
May 16, 2024
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May 17, 2024
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May 18, 2024
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Awesome deck again for my favorite investigator! Thank You so much for this one, and all the others as well! Sad that the serie is over, but I guess all the good things comes to an end ;) A few things I might consider... 1. adding bandolier2 and survival knife 2: passive icon what we need, great combo with the dog, and another target for the enchant weapon...2. Brother Xavier: damage, soak, passive icon...maybe Leo for another bash every turn. 3: well prepared (look at those icons on the hammer and zoey's cross...4: sacred covenant towards the end of the campaign. 5: lone wolf/bank job instead of kicking the hornets 6: holy rosary2 for a passive icon and much less bless tokens.