The Stoic and the Sophist

Hello friends! Whether you've come from my Eldritch Sophist Primer or are simply browsing ArkhamDB, I hope you enjoy this decklist. This is an untested "concept" deck, intended more to showcase an experimental build and interaction than to provide a balanced and well-tuned deck to play, so the write-up is a little less structured and in-depth.

The core concept is to ensure a steady supply of Secrets with Eldritch Sophist, Mind's Eye and Forbidden Knowledge, and transfer them onto the copies of Cryptic Grimoire in order to use their ability as often as possible - once working at full capacity, it should be usable more than once every other turn. It also includes a number of Curse-adding tools to trigger Cryptic Grimoire's innate secret-generation ability, and the rest of the deck is built around economy (to assemble the core combo) and encounter management (so that any troublesome enemies or treacheries that do get through the Cryptic Grimoire firewall can still be neutralised). WIth Daisy's base intellect of 5 and Encyclopedia, she can still provide solid clue-gathering while more or less ignoring the encounter deck.

Some variant options are available; Mind's Eye doesn't provide that many secrets for its cost (3 resources, 1 action, 3 cards for 7 secrets isn't all that impressive), so it could be omitted entirely or swapped for Truth from Fiction. Enraptured can help keep the secrets flowing, and Practice Makes Perfect would be a good fit if that's included. Finally, Backpack (2) and maybe a couple of copies of Astounding Revelation would help find the combo pieces quickly; if you replace Burning the Midnight Oil with Emergency Cache, there's 12 targets for Backpack (including the second copy of itself) in the deck and it can help get Daisy's Tote Bag out as quickly as possible.

You could also use the Parallel Daisy front and swap Encyclopedia for Dream Diary; this would enable the build to make better use of Mind's Eye and have more Willpower and Sanity in order to fear the encounter deck even less than before.

Good luck out there - it's a benighted world, but a little sophistry goes a long way...!

(p.s. There is some controversy over whether it's possible to place or transfer secrets onto cards that do not have Uses (Secrets), which would include the Cryptic Grimoire (4). The query response quoted for Archaic Glyphs makes it clear that doing so is within the rules; see that page for more.)