The Natural

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Introduction Do you like True Magick? Have you tried to use it in a deck only for it to feel like 5 wasted xp when you never draw it? Have I got a deck for you!

Original Father Mateo is probably one of the most straightforward investigators to build for and play, but unfortunately he has very little rizz. Recent sets have buffed his build options with better Bless cards, but he still ends up feeling like a very vanilla Mystic. This deck is designed to make him feel like a true Natural with the arcane by leveraging Ascetic and Eldritch Brand.

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Table of Contents:

• Overview

• Main Strategy

• Piloting

• Other Cards

• Upgrade Path

• Without Taboo

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Overview:

Difficulty:	★★☆☆☆
Enemy Management:	★★★☆☆
Clue-getting:	★★★☆☆
Encounter protection:	★★★☆☆
Survivability:	★★★☆☆
Economy:	★★★★★
Card Drawing:	★☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

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Main Strategy:

Taking Ascetic grants us an additional 10 experience points at the cost of not gaining any experience for the remainder of the campaign. In the Thick of It grants another 3 (in exchange for some trauma). Mateo starts with 5, which gives us a grand total of 18.

Spend 10 on Eldritch Brand and 5 on True Magick to set up the main aspect of the deck. The final 3 go into Occult Reliquary to make sure we have 3 hand slots for the Rod of Carnamagos and 2 Ritual Candles.

Here is the real trick of the deck: We can still upgrade spells even without XP! Both Arcane Research and Down the Rabbit Hole REDUCE THE AMOUNT OF REQUIRED XP to purchase spells, with no minimum requirement of spending 1xp. That means after each scenario, you can upgrade one spell costing up to 3xp for free. You're a real Natural with magic.

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Piloting: Piloting this deck is quite simple: on important tests, pull as many tokens as possible. Here's how it works:

First Draw

First, remember to play True Magick with your Eldritch Brand before you draw your cards.

You want to prioritize getting both of your Ritual Candles out asap, so mulligan hard for them. After that, find the Rod of Carnamagos. Don't worry about the The Codex of Ages - this deck only really plays that card if it can't find the other 3 hand items. Luckily the The Codex of Ages is a Blessed item, so it also goes into the slot provided by Occult Reliquary if you don't have the Rod of Carnamagos in play.

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Tokens! Tokens! Tokens!

Success in this deck revolves around the Ritual Candles. Ritual Candles provides a +1 bonus to a skill test when you reveal a symbol token from the chaos bag. So, if you have both Ritual Candles out, every time a symbol is drawn that test gets a +2. This has traditionally been most useful in canceling out the effects of pulling a Curse token, but today's card pool makes it much more generically useful because we have a lot of ways to see multiple chaos tokens on one skill test. A recent clarification on the Ritual Candles also shows that they trigger for EVERY symbol revealed in a single test. If you pull 4 tokens and 3 of them are symbols, that's a +6 regardless of whichever token you end up using.

The main token generators are: Rod of Carnamagos - Did you know that you can activate the Rod in a player window in the middle of a test and the tokens revealed during its activation count as also being revealed during the test? Pretty crazy!

Olive McBride - We all know and love Ms. McBride already. Sadly we can't upgrade her in this deck. If only she was also a Spell!

Breath of the Sleeper/Eyes of the Dreamer - these spells can pull up to 4 tokens without any outside help, plus a nice bonus if you happen to pull identical tokens.

Dark Prophecy - instead of pulling one chaos token, pull 5. Don't mind if I do!

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What Spell Assets to Play

We want to hold onto almost all of our Spell assets with this deck and rely on True Magick to play them. In particular, Sixth Sense and Wither use no charges and do not exhaust, so you may use them multiple times in a turn with True Magick. When your hand gets full, play whatever Spell asset seems the most useful at the time, as it's still useful to have the assets in play for multiple action turns.

The only Spell assets you want to specifically play rather than hold in your hand for True Magick are Breath of the Sleeper and Eyes of the Dreamer. The benefit of these spells is spending multiple charges at once to pull multiple tokens, which you can't do if you're trying to use them with True Magic.

Other Cards:

• Scrying With no limitation on charges, Scrying becomes a very interesting encounter management tool. You can potentially just use this every round and become a mini-Gloria Goldberg, and that alone probably produces enough value to make this deck worth playing.
• Delve Too Deep No every group needs more XP, and this deck definitely doesn't. If your group doesn't need the XP support, cut this and replace it with Voice of Ra if you're struggling for resources for some reason, or some other useful level 0 card like Premonition.

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Upgrade Path:

It's probably most useful to upgrade your Ward of Protection's first. After that, just go with whichever spell appears most useful in your group.

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Thank you so much Valentin1331 for this amazing template!