Stella Clark | The Chainsaw Chain (29 XP Legacy)

This deck is largely inspired by Oops! I made an Oops deck!, so credit goes to TomásAmi for posting it.

It's also worth mentioning Going Postal|Revised Core+OG Starter by HungryColquhoun who built a similar deck before Chapter 2 was released.

The Chainsaw Chain

The basic principle is to intentionally fail an attack with Chainsaw, triggering a chain of reactions that ultimately turn that initial failure into a surprisingly productive turn.

• With 2 copies of Quick Learner in play, your first fight action with Chainsaw tests at 3, making it very likely to fail.
• When you fail, you can:
  • Gain an action from your Investigator ability,
  • Place a supply on Chainsaw,
  • Draw a card with Rabbit's Foot,
  • Draw cards and gain resources from Take Heart,
  • Trigger Daniel Jameson's ,
  • Play Live and Learn,
  • Play Oops!(2).
• The repeated tests from Daniel Jameson and Live and Learn still benefit from the increased difficulty from Quick Learner, so you're testing at 4 and 5 respectively. Those tests are still quite likely to fail, in which case you can:
  • Place another supply on Chainsaw, meaning that in the worst-case scenario you end up with two more supplies than you started with. In fact, you may actually want this, as it effectively refills your Chainsaw.
  • Play Oops!(2) to deal the attack's damage anyway.
• From there, you can take three more Chainsaw fight actions: one testing at 5 (commit cards to this test), followed by two testing at 7, thanks to the reduced difficulty from Quick Learner.

Note: If the enemy has Retaliate, you cannot safely trigger the Chainsaw Chain™ as it would mean taking multiple hits. Instead, you have two options:

• Commit Neither Rain nor Snow to your first fight action, testing at 6 and cancelling the retaliation.
• Start with a basic evade as your first action, then begin your Chainsaw attacks from your second action onward. Fortunately, very few enemies in the game have both Retaliate and Alert.

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Hunter's Instinct

The next combo piece of this deck is Hunter's Instinct(2), which provides powerful event recursion. You can recur:

• Firepower against enemies: Oops!(2) and Live and Learn
• Clue support: "Look what I found!" and True Awakening
• Economy: Emergency Cache and True Awakening
• Healing: True Awakening

The fact that True Awakening is a valid target for Hunter's Instinct(2) is what convinced me to include it in the deck. Its flexibility is amazing: it can simply sit in the discard pile until a specific situation calls for it, at which point Hunter's Instinct(2) lets you bring it back.

Once Hunter's Instinct(2) has run out of uses, it can itself be recurred with Resourceful, giving you another round of event recursion.

Upgrade Path

All the key upgrades are available at 17 XP (considering In the Thick of It) with Chainsaw, Backpack(2) and Quick Learner.

Although card draw is strong in this deck, I believe Backpack(2) is important for consistently finding your Chainsaw and fulfilling your role as the fighter. It also makes Sparrow Mask more worthwhile as an additional item target.

From there, the remaining upgrades are mostly about recurring upgraded events with Hunter's Instinct(2).

[0 XP deck]