I Just Can't Put That Bloody Book Down

Card draw simulator

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Derived from
None. Self-made deck here.
Inspiration for
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Sassenach · 173

Please note that Old Book of Lore is a proxy for Occult Lexicon to allow me to publish the deck

This deck is my entry for the latest Mythos Busters competition. The challenge is to build a deck centred around a card that most of the community regard as being crap. The card I've chosen is Research Librarian. Now, as it happens I'm not really sure how the community feels about that card overall, but I know that I never play it myself and glancing at the published decklists on here that do include the card, they're about 95% Daisy decks and the remainder seem to be for the most part rubbish FFG starter decks, so I'm guessing it's not universally popular. As such I think building it into the centrepiece of a non-Daisy deck probably qualifies. I've made a 19xp version for maximum efficiency but it would work more or less the same at 0xp, just not quite as good.

The main plan behind this deck is to get your Occult Lexiconin play as early as possible and then to get multiple uses of the Blood-Rite spells that are bonded to it. In this case btw, multiple uses would ideally be more than the three cards that you get, but I'll come to that. Blood-Rite is a phenomenal card for something available at level 0. Draw 2 cards then either keep them or discard 2 cards to gain 2 resources or discard up to 2 cards and spend up to 2 resources to do testless damage. Inflicting 2 testless damage for 1 action and 2 resources is really good, especially since it doesn't provoke an AoO. In this deck Blood-Rite is going to be the combat option, so we're going to want to draw it early and often.

Enter the Librarian

The problem with Occult Lexicon is that you can only include 1 copy in your deck, so you're highly likely not to see it until late game or not at all. This is where Research Librarian comes in. He's a level 0 ally that lets you search your entire deck for a tome and draw it. Under normal circumstances for non-Daisy investigators this is a big yawn because most tomes are rubbish, but when you have one very powerful tome like this one to fish for it suddenly becomes extremely useful. Between the book itself and the 2 copies of Librarian you now have 3 ways to guarantee getting that card into your hand, and with the enormous amount of draw that this deck includes you also have a way to plow through the deck quickly and fish out all the copies of Blood-Rite to be used liberally as circumstances dictate.

But wait, what if you draw the Lexicon before either of your Librarians, doesn't that now make them worthless cards ? Au contraire. You see, there are two tomes in this deck. The King in Yellow is a brutal weakness if you happen to draw it at the wrong moment, such as when you really need to commit cards to a crucial test but you just chucked in all your big pip skill cards the round before. However, if you can choose the moment to draw it then it's trivial. Just about to tackle a high shroud location and planning to commit a lot of cards ? Great, why not drop your Librarian first, fish for your signature weakness and get rid of it immediately, leaving you free from anxiety for the remainder of the scenario (or at least until you cycle through your deck, which is quite likely to happen at least once).

Blood Rite Recursion

There are only 3 copies of this bonded card, and 2 of them get shuffled into the deck when you play the Lexicon. That shouldn't in any way prevent you from playing it more times than that though. When the Lexicon leaves play all copies are removed from the game, so all that we need is a means of getting the Lexicon back from our discard pile to replay it, which will immediately add another copy of the card to our hand and two more to fish for in the deck. There are two ways of doing this. The first would be to run right through the deck and then drop another Librarian to immediately grab it back again. A better way though is to make use of Scavenging. Succeeding an investigate check by 2 shouldn't be a problem for Minh. This opens up a nice combo with Magnifying Glass(1). The ability to return it to your hand means that if you've used up all of your Blood Rites or simple don't have one to hand atm and want one then simply fast play the glass to your hand, dislodging the Lexicon, pass an investigate check (which the glass helps with anyway), then pull it back to open up the hand slot again to replay your Lexicon, instantly gaining another copy of Blood Rite and 2 more in your deck.

Rest of the Deck

The remainder of the deck is built around the standard Minh stuff, with lots of skills and double pip cards. For enemies that you can't kill with testless damage the go-to option is likely to be evasion. Minh only has 2 evade but her powerful ability to boost pips on committed cards should allow that to go much higher if needed. Economy is provided by Crack the Case and a single copy of Drawing Thin. One copy should suffice here since we'll be drawing a lot of cards. I only included single copies of Pathfinder, Scavenging and Grisly Totem for the same reason, you're going to see them fairly quickly with the number of cards that you draw. There are two copies of "Look what I found!" for action compression. This should work well in combo with Drawing Thin as the added difficulty will make it more likely that you fail the test and also provide the resources to pay for the card.

Finally, I've added a couple of copies of Guiding Spirit as a lovely cheap int boost and horror soak. These can be used to bump out your Librarian once he's served his purpose and because they're non-unique they can in theory be stacked to provide a double boost and spread out the horror to protect against exile.

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