Card draw simulator
| Derived from |
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| None. Self-made deck here. |
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| None yet |
HungryColquhoun · 12386
Baker Broils Byakhees
This is the final deck in the series where I've been looking at balanced, somewhat flexy decks which are "always current". These use only the revised core (RC) and standalone starter packs. Here, Agnes uses Azure Flame to broil byakhees - while being no slouch at clue-finding either...
Overview
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They See Me Broilin', They Hatin': Azure Flame ••••• is a tricky card for the notoriously low health Mystics to handle, however at the time of writing Shrivelling ••••• isn't current environment. What allows Agnes to handle Azure Flame better than most is the Leather Coat • access, plus only less common chaos bag symbols trigger its damage in the first place. Throw in level 0 Shrivelling and with a hard mulligan you're 81% likely to have at least one of the these damage-dealing assets to hand. If you don't yet have your Leather Coat in play, then if you have the choice between Shrivelling and Azure Flame you can play Shrivelling to be on the safe side.
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Investigator Ability: Agnes's ability provides more damage on top. Ward of Protection can deal you horror in the Mythos phase, and then Forbidden Knowledge can trigger in all phases. Shrivelling will also occasionally deal you horror when fighting enemies, helping you conserve charges. One horror must be placed on Agnes for damage to be dealt, so Fearless is included to make this more comfortable.
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Horror Soak: As this is a lot of horror you'll be taking (with Clairvoyance ••••• adding even more) the deck is stacked full of soak, with two copies of Arcane Initiate, Granny Orne and Holy Rosary. The latter two also boost , giving you high test values without needing to commit cards. Granny Orne is also useful against treacheries which have a negative effect for each point you fail by (making you fail by 1 less).
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Clues: There's a lot of ways to clue-find here, with Clairvoyance ••••• being foremost. When you're not using that, Old Keyring is a great fallback and gets 2 shroud locations to zero tests. "Look what I found!" •• has a very big margin of error and combines well with Granny Orne, while Drawn to the Flame gives more coverage for clues.
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Economy: Card draw is very modest, with Arcane Initiate really doing the heavy lifting here through spell tutoring and Take Heart helping too. As there's built in duplication here of clue-finding and damage-dealing assets, generally you should have enough useful things in your opening hand to make card draw less important. Resource economy is Take Heart, Voice of Ra and Forbidden Knowledge - which provide enough cash to be getting along with.
Campaign starter and planned progression
0 XP deck is as follows (and link here). In terms of side deck, there's Rite of Seeking •• which you could replace Old Keyring (keeping "Look what I found!" at level 0). Generally though Old Keyring is easier to use and cheaper, and I like the simple upgrade track as it is (level 0 Rite of Seeking is Dunwich and so not current, so you would need to squeeze its XP purchase in somewhere if you want to use it). A Test of Will was also tempting, but I like Ward of Protection just a little more to outright cancel treacheries that you draw.
A recommended order of purchases/upgrades is:
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Azure Flame ••• → Azure Flame ••••• (19 XP here for standalones)
Final thoughts
What made this an Agnes deck over Jacqueline is Agnes has so more clue tech from the Survivor splash as well as actually useful allies like Granny Orne, and of course she has that killer ability. While Agnes does have Dark Memory, her damage and clue compression is so good that arguably it's worth the one skipped round (if you cancel Ancient Evils with Ward of Protection you might be net neutral anyway). I wanted to close out the series on her as I think she's far too good to pass up, and definitely a Mystic powerhouse even when built with this limited card pool.
Anyway, that's it! I think this goes to show that even with the revised core and investigator starter packs you can build some interesting decks, and the high compatibility of these decks with one another (with each deck working with at least 3 others) is a big plus - people playing two-player will eat well! Valentin1331 graciously looked over these and provided input - thanks as always!
I guess this mini-series may be slightly premature, as FF might shift what is considered current (and/or introduce new starter decks or booster packs which are also considered always current). However, even if that's the case, I'm fairly certain the revised core and starter decks will remain current environment so the premise works. Hope you've enjoyed the series and it inspires your own current environment deck building. P.S. I have another series tested which I'll post in the near future, no prizes for guessing what it is...