Lola: Brawler, Sorcerer, Gravedigger, Imp

Overview

Inspired by zozo's 'Opening Night' beginner Lola deck, both in its focus on three roles and in its challenge to build a deck with three packs.

This differs in that it looks to make a generalist, rather than a specialist.

It also aims to mitigate the downside of Crisis of Identity: By switching roles rarely, you can save Lola's free action for the player window just before card draw in the upkeep phase when you have assets crucial to the next turn. And if your survivor setup is totally trashed, you can still do the basic activities from rogue.

A few experience points in card purchases significantly improve the deck, as mentioned below.

It differs from the 'Opening Night' deck also in the packs used: one core set, the Carcosa expansion and the first Carcosa pack. It has in mind a relatively new player who skipped to Carcosa and wanted to try some of the new player cards in there.

Ideas

1. Cards with constant benefits, so that Lola doesn’t have to worry about triggering them. Only Leo and rosary to begin, but you should add more when upgrading if possible.

2. Plan not to switch constantly between roles but to able to do the two basic things (clues and fighting/evading enemies) from one of two main ids for this deck: survivor or rogue. Depending on your needs and the cards you draw, you will spend most of your time in one of those. That saves your switch role free trigger for when you really need it.

3. Skill check avoidance: shovels and lamps can be chucked and returned with resourceful. Elusive and mystic events also fall in this category.

Mystic is there for the willpower boost and skill icons, and for some cards when you’re in a sticky situation: blinding light, ward of protection, astral travel.

You can avoid some skill tests: chuck the lantern or shovel and get them back with resourceful, or use Drawn to the Flame if you dare.

The Baseball Bat is there to have a way for extra damage in the survivor role. Not ideal, but it made the most sense to me given the restrictions. A neutral weapon than boosts damage would be ideal, but the knife only does so when discarding.

Save Improvisation for putting down expensive key cards (Leo) or in those ideally rare times when you need to switch your roles twice per round, or just need the skill icons.

Whether to spend your time as a survivor or rogue depends on what you get in the draw. The lantern and shovel make a decent fight-and-investigate setup. Rogue is better if you want more evasion options, but really only after you add the cat burglar.

Hard knocks is there to give you a moderately reliable way to deal two damage in rogue, either by increasing the chance of landing knuckleduster or by an evade/sneak attack. Given Lola's deck size, you should consider adding another of these if you have two core sets.

If you do have Dunwich, consider taking some damage-boosting assets from there. Neutral assets such as Kukri could be good, especially if you end up with a second Leo. Fire axe would be good of course too, but worth swapping a shovel for? I don't know.

First upgrade should probably be a Lockpicks—a very useful card—followed by perhaps a Cat Burglar or another Leo, swapping out a flashlight and something else.

In solo: I would strongly recommend a Bulletproof Vest as an early upgrade, or the Elder Sign Amulet.

In multiplayer, this deck allows you to be a generalist, and you might change it up a bit based on the other decks.

Drawbacks

Not much in the way of additional damage. If you're playing solo that can catch up to you.

You can't generally rely on getting Hard Knocks and Knuckleduster together because of Lola's deck size, but you can rely on getting some combination of those two or the shovel, lantern, and bat.

Low-ish health and sanity are a problem, especially in solo. Use your assets wisely.

Crisis of identity is a big bummer. If you haven't seen it yet and have key items out, it might be worth switching roles to something you don't have cards for. But that’s not ideal.

On the other hand, if your survivor setup is ruined, the rogue and mystic cards still give you ways to handle enemies and find clues.

If possible, avoid playing cards until you must to hedge against crisis of identity. Again, you can be caught out if you draw an enemy from the encounter deck.

The two desperate skill cards do come in handy to help close out the game.

Play-testing (no spoilers)

I played all scenarios mentioned here on standard difficulty and solo mode, typically more than once. My random basic weakness was the Silver Twilight Acolyte.

The two scenarios in Path to Carcosa are pretty tough in solo with this deck. There are just so many ways to lose health and sanity, which start to pile up.

When dealing with just one enemy, everything was fine in most cases. Multiple enemies are a problem since the deck has few ways of handling that, and I found evasion a weak tactic in general for Carcosa. I imagine this would be less of a problem in multiplayer.

The approach overall worked as expected though:

Cruising in one id for longer stretches, with a few switches at key moments, worked well in the sense that I very rarely wanted to switch roles when I couldn’t and almost always had some support for clue finding or fighting/evading.

And the generalist approach generally worked in that I almost always had decent ways of fighting and clue-finding, with a few high-powered Mystic cards or useful skill cards showing up as needed.

With a couple of notable exceptions, I also avoided being totally crippled when Crisis of Identity showed, using the approach described above.

The large deck size means it could take a while to reach cards you really want to see. The skill cards and Improvisation give good draw options, but then you risk drawing into crisis of identity at an inopportune time.

As noted above, the desperate skill cards definitely were useful near the end of the scenarios.

Night of the Zealot was much more doable.

For that campaign, I used experience to purchase a Lockpicks, an additional Blinding Light, Cat Burglar and a Bullet-proof vest.

I removed a Flashlight, Sleight of Hand, Astral Travel and Emergency Cache. Contrary to what I had expected when putting the deck together, rarely did I want for resources to play things I wanted to play.

Comparison to another generalist starter deck

It's worth a few moments to compare this deck to a Jenny Barnes generalist, which I have not played but like the look of.

Ignoring the cardpool differences...

Jenny over Lola:

• Better health and sanity
• More extra-damage-dealing
• Signature weakness for Jenny is far less punishing
• Smaller deck size means you are more likely to see your good cards

Lola over Jenny:

Mainly, the ability to include strong non-rogue cards. Jenny can include up to five from any class, and this Lola deck has 15.

A larger number of such cards not only allows you to include more good cards, such as the Mystic events, but also to import some simple interactions from other roles --- such as the shovel/lantern and Resourceful recursion in Survivor. Many more strong non-rogue cards

Since 1/33 < 2/40 you are both more likely to see both the good and the bad of Lola's signature cards than you are to do so with Jenny --- though the difference really is negligible.