Immortal Zoey

awsome!

That's a nifty combo. All it requires is Mystic (0) + Survivor (1) access, so Agnes and Patrice can pull it off too.

More than just these two: Pete Akachi Calvin Kohaku Amina Hank Charlie Lola Parallel Jim

Yeah, all of those could work :) (although Patrice might struggle with the timing of spectral shield because you must play the cards with charges first)

I went with Zoey because guardian is the class that benefits the most from being attacked by enemies.

Gonna have to Versatile a Spectral Shield onto Daniela Reyes now! Nice.

The full combo looks awesome to pull off, but there's not a lot of card draw or tutoring effects to get it together reliably. You could get a good bit of draw out of Runic Axe - Inscription of Glory, but a little extra Glory couldn't hurt.

Brand of Cthugha is a brilliant idea for a backup weapon that also feeds into the shield, and can still be equipped despite the big two-hander, absolutely love it.

One last Harebrained Idea is that the current setup has a lot of upgradables and only a handful of cards that need outright buying. You could max out your exp greed with In the Thick of It to ignore some of the Rabbit Hole penalty, and then slide in Hunter's Armor to be constantly working towards upgrading the axe and the armor after every scenario. Since you -want- to be hit, Hunter Armor has good value, and Hexdrinker lets you tank Treacheries while drawing cards.

Customizable cards are also just cool shit, but this is a very, very greedy approach to the build. Could be fun though. There's a lot you can do with this.

The primary combo I used with Zoey was to use Eyes of the Dreamer to pull double-duty between randomly having additional investigation tools that work at no cost, randomly having investigation tools that can hit checks normally beyond Zoey without further investment, and randomly having up to 9 additional soak.

The only consideration I'd have is to confirm whether or not Guard Dog works, given Spectral Shield cancels damage getting taken, which means I'm not sure Guard Dog actually hits the 'dealt damage' timing point.

@Ruduen Fortunately the rules as written work in our favor for this combo. When you take damage, there's 2 stages to resolving it, Assigning and Applying. When you would take damage, you -may- first assign it to eligible cards, and then in step 2 it is applied to all assigned cards simultaneously.

It also specifies " Abilities that prevent, reduce, or reassign damage and/or horror that is being dealt are resolved between steps 1 and 2". So you get to assign damage onto assets first, and any abilities that reduce damage are resolved afterwards.

@PaperCryptid well I remember it working that way with an ability such as "after being assigned damage" to it such as Guardian Angel. But Guard Dog is specifically looking for "dealt damage".

Double Checking the Q/A under Guardian Angel makes it clear:

A: Yes, Guardian Angel can be “assigned” the damage, causing bless tokens put into the bag, and then the damage can be cancelled or ignored before it’s actually “dealt” to Guardian Angel.

So as long as at least 1 damage/horror from the enemy attack gets through to step 2, Guard Dog can trigger.

@McJames Ah, I may have gotten my wording wrong and miscommunicated by accident. How I interpret Spectral Shield working is that in step 1 of resolving an attack, you assign the damage between cards you control with health/sanity pools. Then any damage that got assigned onto your investigator card specifically is blockable by Spectral Shield (up to 2 of course).

I don't believe the guard dog triggers unless you actually make it take 1 damage, but you should be freely able to choose to do that during the assigning phase? This doesn't matter too much for this variant of the deck but I'm designing a variant that's all about doing little chip damage thorns effects to make enemies slowly kill themselves. I'm hoping Spectral Shield doesn't outright get in the way of willingly letting your Assets get damaged.

I'd appreciate if people could take a look at the deck as well, it's the first time I'm designing one since I've started the hobby.

So, since Spectral Shield only cancels damage to the card it attachs to, can anyone can shed light on how you can both cancel damage and have guard dogs trigger? Do we have to get Guard Dogs out first and then attach Spectral Shield to them?

Anyways, I think I'll just replacing Guard Dogs with Backpacks. Since this deck, I feel like, desperately need a way to tutor out the combo pieces as soon as possible.

@Tilde4ever You just assign more damage on the Guard Dog than can be blocked by Spectral Shield. Some examples assuming you're taking 2 damage from an enemy attack:

1) You have Spectral Shield on yourself (Zoey) and you have Guard Dog.

You can split it such that 1 damage goes to Spectral Shield (triggering its forced effect) and 1 damage to Guard Dog so it deals 1 damage back.

2) You have Spectral Shield on Guard Dog

You will need to assign 2 damage on Guard Dog otherwise it won't get to the step of taking damage from the enemy attack because one of that damage has to be canceled from Spectral Shield's forced effect.