Lola 'Synergy' Hayes

Alright, sorry I wrote a whole response to this like 3 days ago and then it got deleted.

So I thought about Short Supply for a long time before I made my variant. Basically a free permanent is definitely worth considering. I ultimately decided against it for 2 reasons: First, I wanted to run Mr. Pawterson, because it made sense as an accessory slot to help keep me alive. Second: because a large percentage of our deck will become Synergy cards, we're going to be milling a decent amount on average. Additionally, Sled Dogs become bad mills, even if we are running Scrounge for Supplies. I think the odds of us hitting a combination of cards that are very bad for us are SUPER likely to happen over the course of a campaign, and because of this, I decided against it.

Adaptable is a solid swap for Charon's Obol if you're in a campaign where you know what to swap, or just are afraid of dying.

I really hate the improvised cards (Impromptu Barrier, Improvised Weapon, etc) with the exception of MAYBE Winging It. I don't think these cards are good in survivor decks, much less in Lola Hayes where we won't be the proper role for them. Optimistically, you mill all of them off of your Forced Learning and Short Supply, but even then they're basically spend 1 resource for +1 skill? Which is questionably bad anyway? There are very few enemies with 1 fight / evade. There is usually at least a 1 shroud location for Winging It, but even then the action seems inefficient. I would just straight replace them with the rest of the desperate cards you're missing. I do love the A Glimmer of Hope in this deck, though.

My main concern with this build is how many survivor assets you're running in conjunction with the events. I think in this build you just drop the survivor assets since you already have a survivor card on board with Short Supply. Scavenging is hard to trigger, even in normal difficulty with Lola Hayes, I think. Dark Horse is expensive, and having that die to Crisis of Identity can be a problem. Leather Coat is really not needed, you already have a survivor card on board and you'll be dying to sanity much faster than health. Cherished Keepsake is the biggest blow, but you're also running 2x Rod of Animalism and not in threat of actual death without Charon's Obol. Finally, I get why you chose the Guard Dog, but I'd probably shift that to a Stray Cat. It's gonna be really hard to proc Guard Dog because we have to be guardian role for it. I think something that enters and leaves the board quicker like Stray Cat will be much easier to use.

Otherwise, I think this build is questionably better than mine. I think it has higher risk higher reward. My biggest issue is that you want to try and mitigate RNG as much as possible, and as I mentioned earlier, I think there's a fair few combinations of cards you don't want to mill with Short Supply, and while any one of them is unlikely to happen, I think the odds are favorable to have 1 or 2 over the course of a campaign happen. (Bad combos of cards to hit are: any amount of Gang Up, 3x Sled Dog / Scrounge for Supplies, 2x Rod of Animalism, large amounts of exp cards, etc.)

@Searns Regarding the discard recursion: Shrine of the Moirai is going to be the solution to any bad starts with Short Supply. I chose to add Scavenging because losing the Boxing Gloves to Crisis of Identity is also likely. Then going for a A Glimmer of Hope/Desperate Search/Winging It/Resourceful/Dark Horse boosted investigate is going to bring those essential gloves back. Shorting the deck also has the possibility of getting rid of one or unlikely two Crisis of Identity!

The improvised cards are mostly a backup for the unlucky situation where dogs are exhausted and failed, the second attack fails, then maybe going for an evade or attack using the improvised skills could be nice to have. Also #'upgrade space'

Guard Dog is there for flavor! Works with Toe to Toe, or just a tank before getting the 3rd Sled Dog out.

The fun part of Forced Learning is that you discard half of what you draw. You probably choose to discard the asset and choose the event while there are still Crisis of Identity in the deck. Once those are gone, having Dark Horse and Scavenging in play can save you by recurring the Cherished Keepsake and Leather Coat that you didn't choose to draw earlier.

Charon's Obol is probably fun, but I'm not suicidal! Isn't 3 sanity bad enough!?

Doesn't Forced Learning open up the possibility of drawing two copies of Crisis of Identity? i.e. Let's say you started off as rogue, then you draw both during upkeep. You discard all your rogues cards and discard the top card (let's say survivor card gets discarded), then you're forced to change into survivor, and the second Crisis of Identity activates, forcing you to discard all your survivor assets.

It could, but you can also just only draw autofails :). It is a game of luck and bad luck after all, just lean into it.

I did the math on the odds of this, and the odds of this happening are almost exactly 1% (~1.02%). 50 cards in deck after drawing starter means there's a 1/49 chance of the card appearing in succession like this (we don't care where in the deck the first one is, only where the second one is in relation to the first).

There's a chance the two cards fall on an 'odd/even' version of the deck meaning we might hit the first card on our second draw. So there's basically a 50/50 shot that they get split up that way (1/2) which halves the 1/49 odds to 1/98, which are our final odds.