Darrell reminds you he can't fail tests of zero.

Darrell is probably the strongest investigator in the Scarlet Keys. He is an unparalleled cluer who will make short work of any board. Boasting the high draw, high resource gain and high soak from the survivor pool, he is a surprisingly durable cluer with a high amount of clue acceleration. His weakness is that he will lean into having someone to protect him and is not very efficient at enemy management. Note this is not taboo friendly, but could easily become so with a few changes. (Whatever you want for drawing thin and replace once the exp cap is met, William T Mabelson in place of Mr. Rook for the soak).

Overview Darrel has many different tricks to reduce a shroud to a total test of zero. Tests of zero cannot be failed unless you draw an auto fail by the way the rules work. That means you can about as safely as you can in arkham stack his tests on ones you know you will certainly pass. Old keyring opens up any shroud location of 2 or less to this essentially auto pass. When his Kodak enters play, this increases further to a shroud of 4 (further still to a shroud of 5 when the Old Keyrings are upgraded). This reduction is independent of difficulty level as it affects the shroud's testing ability and not your own. He can further prey off of the higher locations he cannot fully get to 0 using "Look What I found", which insures that again as long as he gets it to two or less and doesn't draw a tentacle, he is still going to discover a large amount of clues.

Item selection

Old Keyring- This is a superior version of flashlight as the charges do not remove if you fail, and when it is out of charges it auto-discards, making it easily recurred through scavenging.

Leather coat- Cheap and makes up for his health of six. Can be recurred through scavenging.

Idol of Xanatos- For the rare damage that gets through Mr. Rook. I picked it instead of cherished keepsake just to try new things, but you could honestly probably sub cherished keepsake in for this.

Early game Priorities

Darrel will be able to hit the ground running basically on turn one with very little to no prep. Mulligan should be for his Kodak, as the faster that's in play the more benefit you get from it. With the kodak note that there is no slot pressure with keys: it doesn't take any slots. You want to avoid using winging it unless its from the discard pile, and his high draw from Eureka, Drawing thin and perception (or just drawing thin and take heart) should help insure you're above hand size at the end of your turn. When you aren't moving or clueing, play one of his few assets.

Mid/late Game

Use scavenger, resourceful and scrounge for supplies to get cards you need back into your hand. You should try to only use resourceful on events/skills, and only use scrounge on resourceful, as scavenging should be more than enough to keep the keys refreshed. Use soak from allies, the coat, and your chosen neck piece to stay alive. This build lacks any way to heal damage once its done, so keep that in mind especially in campaigns with high direct damage/horror.

Weakness

Darrel's weakness is mild at best. With Idol you can basically take one horror from it and move on with your life.

Upgrades

-Your first upgrade should really be against the mythos deck, and as such you want to go for whatever skill your campaign has a lot of. The great thing about survivors is they have access to pretty much any boosts they need. If you're going into a game with high will checks strongly consider Plucky to make short work of them. If its more might, consider scrapper. For agility, consider Dig Deep. You have options to pass as you need. -Once sufficiently insulated from the mythos, you have a ton of options. I think priority is getting Old Keys to rank 3 for even more clueing. You could increase his draw by taking the level 2 perceptions, buff his movement with pathfinders, or foolproof his deck by swapping out keep faiths for eucatastrophe. You could also lean fully into a faith build with ancient covenant and swapping out Signum Crucis for keep faith, using the drawing thins on a high shroud to generate an ungodly number of blessings.

Support

This deck's main weakpoint is lack of enemy handling, and a second weakpoint is inability to heal direct damage. It pairs quite well with guardians which tend to offset both of these. Although he will be able to move around a lot, its critical he is protected as otherwise enemies will eat him quite readily.

Conclusion

I've really enjoyed making this deck and I feel like Darrel is an extremely powerful investigator. I hope you'll have the same experience I had with it, where basically every action he's discovering at least two clues from even shroud six locations like its nothing.