Ashcan Pete's 'Dark Horse'

Aschan Pete's 'Dark Horse'

"“I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men.”" H.P. Lovecraft - The Outsider

Ashcan was always a favorite character of mine since we started playing Mansions of Madness 1st edition and when I started out with Arkham Horror LCG and bought my first cycle The Dunwich Legacy I was very excited to see my good friend among the available investigators! Looking around AHdb I found some nice strategies for using him with Dark Horse, so here we go.

Assets

Make sure that you run your assets as fast as possible, because they really carry this deck. Obviously this costs us a lot of tempo, but the fact that Duke is out when we start playing and also gives us the option to freely move before investigating can compensate for a big part!

• Dark Horse is the main buffer in this deck. Ashcan has a ridiculous statline if you consider Duke part of it. This effectively makes him 4-4-4-3 and Dark Horse raises this to 5-5-5-4. A lot of other cards in this deck raise this even further. When you're all set up, testing shouldn't be too much of a problem anymore.

• Fire Axe is the go-to weapon card when using Dark Horse in a deck, so who am I to do any different? When Duke's exhausted and you have no resources in your pool (which you will almost never have) you can easily beat those pesky enemies!

• Magnifying Glass is an easy, fast card to lay down to raise our statline 1 more for investigations.

• Ritual Candles isn't fast, but the additional +1 on a test helps a lot in a lot of situations!

• I can't think of a Survivor decklist that doesn't contain Rabbit's Foot, but that may just be me. There will definitely be failed tests when you're setting up your game state, so Rabbit's foot can take easy advantage of that to compensate a little. Also, what else will we use the accessory slot for?

• Pete doesn't have all that much health or other tools to evade enemies, so he's going to have to take a lot of them head on. To guarantee some damage and horror soak, I've introduced Leather Coat and Peter Sylvestre in this deck.

• You won't be able to run both of them in the beginning, but Madame Labranche is a good resource provider when you do need that resource in the middle of your turn.

"The broad-shouldered young man exudes the sort of confidence one only finds in youth." - Peter Sylvestre, 2016

Events

The deck runs mainly on Assets and besides that on Skills, but there are some critical events I would never leave the house without.

• "Look what I found!" is just plain good. Even if you manage to fail an investigate action, you can play this, grab another card with Rabbit's Foot and go on with your journey.

• Emergency Cache helps us pay, since some of the assets are kind of expensive.

• I know I said that I wouldn't leave the house without certain cards, but come on.... Lucky! has to be the main priority in any Survivor deck. We'll definitely upgrade this soon!

"You can never be too prepared." - Emergency Cache, 2016

Skills

The other aspect that makes this deck shine. We want to be consistent in succeeding at as many tests as possible while playing solo. These cards will help us do so.

• The basic skills Guts, Overpower and Perception are here because we will be doing all 3 kinds of test while playing. We just want to do better and also draw some cards!

• Inspiring Presence is a real fun skill to use with Duke since it synergizes so well! When you're in a pickle, you can assign a damage or horror to Duke if needed, because this skill lets you not only remove that damage or horror, it also lets you ready Duke so you can utilize him again in the same turn!

• Some of the cards are just too good to be played only once, so Resourceful gives them back to us. Can you imagine playing 4 Lucky!'s in 1 game? Bonkers!

"Stay back! I'll handle this." - Guts, 2016

Campaign upgrades

• 2x Peter Sylvestre 2x Peter Sylvestre because the stronger twin brother because he furthers boosts our Willpower. Also he can take more horror.

• 2x Lucky! 2x Lucky! because it's even more Lucky this way!

• 1x Charisma so we can finally have Madam Labranche with us as well. Or even better as a second ally...

• 1x Jessica Hyde 1x Leather Coat since she can handle damage way better than the Leather coat can.

• 2x Stroke of Luck 2x Overpower. You won't be using Overpower all that much, is more there as a back-up so it's also easily replaceable for a better card like Stroke of Luck.

• 2x Lucky! 2x Lucky! for EVEN MORE LUCKY!!!

If you made it this far, thanks for reading! I'm in no way a well experienced player of this game (yet) but I love to build decks. Any feedback is highly appreciated!