Amanda Sharpe, Dreams of Glory

Ya know what's great? Rolling at value 8 for all of your checks. How do we do this? Dream Diary Holding two of these with 8 cards in your hand makes Essence of the Dream have a whopping 6 Place the essence under Amanda every other turn for great profit, both generating real card draw to power the cards in hand mechanic and . That's the whole deck, go home now.

Well I guess there's a few other things I can talk about:

Laboratory Assistant, Research Librarian, and Calling in Favors.

This package ensures real consistency in tutoring out the Dream Diaries with Research Librarian and then calling in a favor to get the Laboratory Assistant in play, having a larger max hand-size is great when you want at least 8 cards in hand.

Occult Lexicon with Blood-Rite.

This card is insane in high draw decks (which Amanda most certainly is) allowing you to do testless damage to handle enemies cleanly and consistently. This card really is not to be underestimated, it is the grease in the wheels that gets you out of an admittedly somewhat awkward scenario 1 and onwards to the glory of Dreams of a Child. It's also nice to have a 3rd target so that your Research Librarians don't get sad when you draw a Dream Diary before them.

Overpower and Vicious Blow

This is the other bit of our "Gah monsters engaged with my Seeker package" Also nice for popping the odd locked door. Vicious blow is a bit rough placed under Amanda as while the idea of getting an extra damage on all your attacks is great the deck struggles to hit them in the first place without the assistance of Essence of the DreamOverpower or Promise of Power. Speaking of...

Promise of Power Alongside Practice Makes Perfect

Is immensely powerful. We have no obvious ways to mitigate the curse tokens so be careful placing it under Amanda. If you do really want to go mad with power I recommend picking up Blasphemous Covenant asap, great choice for an upgrade if the first scenario was awkward and you failed to "interpret the dream."

Perception and Eureka!

It is truly mad how much card draw you can achieve in a single round while still effectively clueing lower shroud locations with these two. Don't bother placing it under Amanda if you're feeling crunched for time, it can be a bit of a greedy strategy and it's often best avoided in the tail end of a scenario. Putting the big stats under Amanda instead to really seal in those last minute checks and committing these on top of that to nearly guarantee success.

Burning the Midnight Oil and Cryptic Writings

Not much to say about these, helps ensure you have resources to power blood-rite as well as helping us to aggressively use our etb utility allies for soak and slam the next one without going shields down for long.

Deduction

Clues for the clue god!

Shortcut

It was a hard fought internal debate whether to go with that or Manual Dexterity as a damage mitigation tool. If you want to lean more into the Calling in Favors package you could also opt for a Medical Student in this spot. Ultimately I went with shortcut as it works to both progress the game more quickly and to mitigate damage by getting out of dodge after you evade.

Some finishing notes on the stuff I didn't choose Random Basic Weakness, Whispers from the Deep, and Obscure Studies. You will see one or both of your weaknesses every game, try and commit whispers from the deep on your turn if you can, or opt to slide it under Amanda on a turn where you're planning on repositioning or developing so that you can avoid committing it to any tests at all. Obscure Studies does a lot of interesting things but generally speaking you're looking to put something that adds an additional effect to Amanda's skill tests, but that you cannot immediately get full value out of, under her and then replace it with Obscure Studies allowing you to extend your Deductions and Vicious Blows more effectively over separate turns. Also having 5 in all your stats is great don't be scared to just place it under Amanda for raw power, there is quite a lot of value in this deck, don't be afraid to get aggressive with your resources.

Upgrade Guide: My philosophy is to try and avoid leaving XP behind where I can so I use a priority list that values getting something now over getting the best thing a scenario later.

1. The Eponymous Diary
   • 2x Dream Diary 6 xp (3 per)
2. The Broken Permanent
   • Ancestral Knowledge 6 xp Alongside the +5 deck size I recommend getting 3x Segment of Onyx 1 xp and Enraptured 2x if you have the spare XP, otherwise 2x Medical Student 2x Enraptured 1x Shortcut At any rate Ancestral Knowledge lets us draw an additional card for the first 5 turns at no cost, this can enable Dreams of a Child very very quickly.
3. I heard you liked Card draw so I put some more card draw in your cards that you draw
   • 2x Overpower 4 xp (2 per)
   • 2x Perception 4 xp (2 per)
4. Violence is rarely the answer, but today is your lucky day
   • 1x Occult Lexicon 3 xp
   • 1x Vicious Blow 2 xp
5. Risk mitigation for accursed cowards
   • 1x Blasphemous Covenant 2xp
   • 2x Justify the Means 6xp (3 per) (Cut the Shortcut and trim to only your upgraded Vicious Blow)
   • Automatic successes are the bees knees.
6. You can't remember how you got here, but you do remember the gloves
   • 2x The Red-Gloved Man 10xp (5xp per) (replaces Laboratory Assistant now that your card draw is better elsewhere) You haven't lived until you pull 2 curses and a -5 and still succeed.