The Tide Always Returns

Silas Marsh has always loved skill cards. This deck asks a simple question:

What if we could use the same skill cards over and over again?

The deck is built around turning Silas's Net and Sea Change Harpoon into more than just weapons. Their ability to return committed skills to your hand allows Silas to repeatedly commit the same powerful skills, creating turns with surprisingly high damage output while barely depleting his hand.

At the same time, the deck uses Track Shoes, Lie in Wait, Drawing Thin and Take Heart to turn additional skill tests into an economy engine.

The result is a Silas deck that doesn't just benefit from skill tests — it actively creates and recycles them.

The Core: Harpoon, Net & Long Shot

The main combat engine revolves around Sea Change Harpoon and Silas's Net.

Long Shot is particularly important. Normally, committing Long Shot gives you a single point of extra damage. Here, however, you can commit one or even two copies to a Harpoon or Net attack, return all the weapon to your hand to get all skills back, play the weapon, and then do it all over again.

A good turn can therefore look something like:

Attack or evade → commit Long Shot(s) + other skills → deal bonus damage → return all skills + the weapon → play Harpoon/Net → attack again → commit the same skills again.

In the best world, when you have both weapons, you can just attack twice retrieving both weapons.

This turns Long Shot from a modest damage boost into a repeatable source of damage. With the right hand, Silas can produce some very explosive combat turns.

And because Silas can pull back a committed skill with his investigator ability, you have an additional safety valve when a test looks like it is going south.

Generating Tests: Drawing Thin, Track Shoes & Lie in Wait

One of the less obvious ideas behind the deck is that not every skill test needs to be something you actually want to pass.

Track Shoes isn't primarily here for the movement or agility boost. Its most important job is generating an additional skill test without spending an action. That gives us a perfect opportunity to trigger Drawing Thin and, when available, commit Take Heart.

We can deliberately turn an otherwise inconsequential test into cards and resources without wasting one of our actions on a test we intended to fail.

Lie in Wait serves a similar purpose. Besides its obvious use as enemy management, it creates another test that we can exploit with Drawing Thin. This makes the card much more than a situational way of dealing with enemies: it becomes another piece of our economy engine.

With Take Heart, these expendable tests become even better. Failing is no longer necessarily a bad outcome; sometimes it is exactly what we wanted.

This is an important part of the deck's philosophy:

We don't just get value from the tests the scenario gives us — we actively create additional tests to extract value from Drawing Thin.

The skill test itself can be a resource.

Skill Recycling

The rest of the deck leans heavily into Silas's greatest strength:

Skills don't necessarily stay discarded.

Resourceful important Survivor cards, while Harpoon and Net can return entire piles of committed skills. Silas himself can pull a skill back before the chaos token resolves.

The result is that committing heavily to a test isn't nearly as expensive as it would be for another investigator.

Don't think of your skill cards as consumables.

Think of them as ammunition.

You load them into a test, fire, pick them back up, and load them again.

This is especially important with cards like Long Shot, where repeatedly committing the same copy can translate directly into additional damage.

Enemy Management

The deck also has tools to control when and where combat happens.

Stalk Prey and Lie in Wait help Silas manipulate enemies rather than simply waiting for them to come to him. This makes it easier to set up favorable situations for the Harpoon and Net.

Lie in Wait deserves special mention because it performs two jobs at once: it provides enemy control while simultaneously creating another skill test for the Drawing Thin engine.

That flexibility is exactly what this deck wants. Even cards that appear situational can contribute to the larger engine.

How to Play

Early on, your priority is getting your engines online.

Drawing Thin provides your economy, while Sea Change Harpoon or Silas's Net unlock the deck's combat recursion.

Don't be afraid to use Track Shoes or Lie in Wait tests purely as fuel for Drawing Thin and Take Heart. You aren't necessarily trying to pass those tests. Sometimes the cards and resources from failing are more valuable than succeeding.

Once Harpoon or Net is online, start thinking differently about your hand. Instead of asking:

"Which skill should I spend on this attack?"

ask:

"Which skills can I use on this attack and then immediately use again?"

That's where the deck really comes alive.

A hand containing multiple useful skills — especially Long Shot — can suddenly turn into a huge burst of damage because Harpoon or Net allows those same cards to contribute to multiple attacks during the same turn.

The Tide Always Returns

This deck is ultimately built around getting more value out of every skill card and every skill test.

Create tests when you need economy.

Use Drawing Thin and Take Heart to profit from tests you don't care about passing.

Commit aggressively when fighting.

Then use Silas, Harpoon, Net, and Resourceful to bring everything back and do it again.

Silas doesn't win by having better cards than everyone else.

He wins because the tide always returns.