Card draw simulator
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| None. Self-made deck here. |
| Inspiration for |
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| None yet |
Sevifor · 46
This deck starts the campaign at 18 experience and ends a typical eight-scenario campaign with approximately 42 experience worth of cards. Sound intriguing? Read on:
Dark Horse+Déjà Vu are stand-ins for a new card from the Drowned City: Arcane Mark.
Geared Up is a stand-in for a new card from the Drowned City: Ascetic.
Olive McBride is a stand-in for a new card from the Drowned City: Katarina Sojka
The release of the Drowned City expansion opens up a truly unique experience for Father Mateo in tandem with his parallel front. He is the only investigator who can run this build, but even if another investigator could get away with it, I still think Mateo would be the best choice. He simply has the perfect tools for the job that all manage to synergize perfectly in a very satisfying way. Naturally, I haven't been able to playtest this yet, but I am eagerly anticipating the next expansion release to take this out for a spin.
Ascetic allows us to start the campaign with ten experience, but we cannot gain any experience for the rest of the campaign. In addition to the 3exp from In the Thick of It and the five bonus experience from Mateo's backside, we get to start scenario one with an eighteen experience deck! Fourteen experience allows us to start with Arcane Mark and Sixth Sense, which at present is a combo only Father Mateo can pull off, because Ascentic+In The Thick of It can only reach 13exp. This allows us to start every game with an upgraded Sixth Sense in play, which lets us investigate an unlimited number of times right from the first action with a skill value of six (appropriate: that's how many senses we have!).
We also need to pick up Ancient Covenant to make Mateo work, so that leaves two exp left over. You're welcome to change up the flex slots with the last two points of experience. I opted for Alter Fate so that I could later upgrade into Alter Fate as well as Four of Cups for the extra will boost.
Sixth Sense will also snag us an additional clue from a nearby location if a symbol token is revealed as part of the test. We can guarantee one trigger each turn by using Katarina Sojka, who allows us to keep drawing chaos tokens until we find a symbol token. As long as Katarina finds a token that's not the auto fail, we stand good odds of getting a bonus clue from somewhere.
Notably, while Ascetic prevents us from gaining experience, Down the Rabbit Hole and Arcane Research don't give us experience, they reduce the cost of cards we upgrade, allowing us to still upgrade cards that need 2-3 experience to upgrade. This makes Ascetic secretly a Mystic card. Together, we can upgrade a spell for three exp each and any card upgrade that would cost us one exp. This allows us to (potentially) upgrade even a card like Azure Flame all the way up to Azure Flame. My early picks for this experience cheating are shown in the sideboard alongside the checklist card for Living Ink. My recommended upgrade path would be something like the following:
Scenario 1: Azure Flame and one box for Macabre Description from Living Ink. Scenario 2: Azure Flame and one box for Macabre Description from Living Ink. Scenario 3: Azure Flame, and the final box for Macabre Description from Living Ink.
Scenario 4: Azure Flame, Eldritch Inspiration
Scenario 5: Brand of Cthugha, Eldritch Inspiration
Scenario 6: Spectral Razor, Living Ink for Eldritch Link
Scenario 7: Spectral Razor, Living Ink for final box of Eldritch Link
Naturally, your preference might vary. You might prioritize getting the Spectral Razors earlier to constantly recycle them with Parallel Mateo's ability, or you might be in a multiplayer team with strong monster hunters and grabbing Ward of Protection or Alter Fate earlier might be a better investment (Alter Fate in particular is not great in it's level one version, but becomes stellar in its level 3 version).
Let's talk card choices:
Keep Faith, Tempt Fate, and Guided by Faith are my concessions to needing to get at least one blessing into the bag to get Mateo's ability rolling. You will want to mulligan aggressively to find at least one of these at the beginning of the game. If you're relying on Guided by Faith, remember to immediately use your Ancient Covenant if you happen to draw one of the bless tokens while resolving its effect. That way, you can't accidentally draw out the second bless token before you have a chance to seal it on your investigator card. Once the bless is in the bag, seal one of them on Mateo. For the rest of the game, you will be able to release the bless from Mateo, use Ancient Covenant, and then immediately recapture the bless token on your turn. If you're playing multiplayer, and it sits right with your sensibilities, consider positioning yourself such that you will draw the last Mythos card each turn, reducing the chances of any of your teammates accidentally drawing your special bless token with their Mythos draws before you get to start your turn. This combo is how we can get away with running what is effectively a five health, five sanity investigator: Mateo's bless+Ancient Covenant combo provides a truly disgusting amount of protection against the Mythos deck if it should be necessary; he won't be getting accidentally killed off to an errant autofail on a Rotting Remains
I opted to go with Azure Flame as my offensive card because it can be upgraded to the level 5 version, allowing for efficient boss-killing in the lategame. The two damage from revealing an elder sign, +1, or +0 is painful, but we can play around this with Mateo's ability to draw a bless token and then using Ancient Covenant to stop the test there, ensuring we take no damage. Additionally, Katarina will guarantee a symbol token draw, which will usually also put us in the clear. It is possible to draw the elder sign token with her, which will still hurt us, but Serpents of Yig and The Codex of Ages can both seal that token, weirdly making the check much more safe.
Eldritch Inspiration works as a weird Deduction-style effect in this deck, allowing us to gain the benefit of Sixth's Sense's ability to investigate from an additional location. I've seen some people suggest that doing so will allow you to get two clues from your location and two clues from a nearby location because the effect goes off twice, but I'm not quite convinced. For sure, though, you can investigate your location, and then use Eldritch Inspiration to also get a clue from two different nearby locations instead of just one.
Spectral Razor cleanly answers Serpents of Yig, and Spectral Razor can use the Mateo+Ancient Covenant trick to ensure that it always returns to hand (so long as you only do this once per turn).
Crystal Pendulum is a good stat boost and you can also predict the outcome of whatever test you're using the Mateo+Covenant combo on in order to 100% draw an extra card every turn.
Ritual Candles are a cheap asset to help protect your Sixth Sense against discard effects, is just a pretty solid card in general, and mitigates the "downside" of Katarina.
Living Ink fulfills a similar role of providing a stat boost and being cheap fodder to help protect the Sixth Sense. Once you upgrade it with Down the Rabbit Hole three times, the Macabre Depiction upgrade will allow it to stick around indefinitely with the Mateo+Covenant combo.
Ward of Protection can upgraded to level two and is just a solid mystic card, as is Guts, while Deny Existence is a cheap concession to things going wrong, because this is still Arkham Horror.
Let me know if you have any recommendations for improving the deck. Any thoughts on how to spend the leftover 2xp at the start of the campaign? Another option could be Blur. You can even get extra spicy with Power Word, which is a Spell upgrade card, allowing you to level it up quite quickly. This would also allow you to run Refine for some additional experience cheating. The "Thrice Spoken" upgrade allows you to go up to three copies of Power Word, so if you take that as your last upgrade, you can use the third copy to replace your Refine and not get stuck with a dead card in the late game. I was a little hesitant to invest heavily in the tabooed version of the card, but I'd love to be proven wrong!
| 7 comments |
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Feb 07, 2025 |
Feb 07, 2025Ah yes, you're quite right. I'm used to splitting my Down the Rabbit Hole experience upgrades on non-spells and then using the two from the Arcane Enlightenment to upgrade my first spell afterwards for a 1-1-2 split. I see that I have made a clerical error. That'll eat into the "having the cake and eating it too", but it's not a dealbreaker. It does make me want to swap out Alter Fate for Brand of Cthugha in the initial deck, though, since we're locked into "spending" 3xp anyways. I will make the appropriate changes, thank you! |
Feb 07, 2025
Could go 2 x Shrivelling •••, 2 x Clairvoyance •••, 2 x True Awakening and 2 x Four of Cups, with Ward of Protection, Read the Signs and Spectral Razor as extra Arcane Research targets. Still though, the 4 mental trauma is pretty galling here, and you can't take Fearless •• to make it more palatable (though True Awakening and things like Holy Rosary do help). |
Feb 07, 2025Actually scratch True Awakening - Mateo can't take it. You could maybe replace it with Fearless •• in that case. |
Feb 07, 2025
You don't need to take four mental trauma. In the Thick of It can be physical trauma or it can even by 1 and 1, giving you a starting statline of 4&6, 5&5, or 6&4, at your discretion. While I agree that it's a rough start, and that certain campaigns will punish you for it with testless damage and horror, I do believe Ancient Covenant+Mateo's on-demand bless token makes this much less of a risk than it looks on paper. However, there are certainly ways to mitigate this. You could opt to run Holy Rosary instead of the Crystal Pendulum. A free card draw every turn with the Pendulum sounds powerful to me, but it the emergency horror soak could well be better. Fearless is an option, or you could even spend for Fearless with your initial extra 2 exp. You could also choose to invest one point in Earthly Serenity and make that a priority upgrade to Earthly Serenity. I think that I'd prefer, if I'm worried about the trauma, to put both points into Physical Trauma and then find room for two Drain Essence. I wouldn't cut the Spectral Razors, since those are such clean answers to our weakness, but Eldritch Inspiration, as fun as a situational "extra clue" card, could easily be cut, as could Four of Cups, because between Pendulum, Candles, and Living Ink, it's probably overkill. |
Feb 07, 2025This deck is awesome! As soon as we saw the leaks yesterday, my group started thinking about weird Ascetic hacks, and I can't believe none of us thought of Mateo/Kymani. Eighteen xp on scenario one is absolutely crazy! I really love Arcane Mark and can't wait to bring it to the table, but I must admit the 10xp cost is even harder to stomach when it's 10 of the only 13-18 flexible xp you're going to get a whole campaign. But hey, it's just a matter of planning and deciding what you can commit to, and as a frequent Sixth Sense spammer the idea of starting every scenario with it in play sounds really great. Though there's always Eyes of the Dreamer now, and while it has limited-use compression per scenario compared to Sixth Sense (4), you could always throw in other token manipulation or recharge effects in order to make it as good or stronger! plus that frees up more of your AR triggers for spell events, and 4 of your starting xp for a neat synergy card like Sign Magick. |
Feb 07, 2025
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You can't split your xp reduction from Arcane Research. They both trigger on the first spell you upgrade, as does the first use of Down The Rabbit Hole, regardless of whether it would reduce the xp cost of the upgrade below 0, as 0 is the minimum.