Cursed Nightmares Agnes|20k Series|Deck Guide

Card draw simulator

Odds: 0% – 0% – 0% more
Derived from
None. Self-made deck here.
Inspiration for
None yet

Valentin1331 · 55089

Agnes navigates her Cursed Nightmares by the Candlelight.

Screenshot-2023-03-01-at-10-14-17.png

Credit: Falk Haensel


Introduction:

I never really played Cursed decks for 2 main reasons: your team needs to work around, not to be crushed by it, and the reward for adding curse never really felt good enough.

For the first time with this deck, not only did I really have fun, but thanks to the newly tabooed Ritual Candles, I had fantastic results.

This series is a celebration of the 20k points on ArkhamDB to thank you all for all the support received.
Click here to see all the previous decks. I will keep releasing a new standalone-ready deck concept every week on Friday, so stay tuned and keep pressing the button if you want to see more!

Let me know which investigators you would like to see next in the comment!


Table of Contents:

  • Overview

  • Main Strategy

  • Give in to the Curse

  • Use your nightmares to influence reality

  • Other Cards

  • Upgrade Options


Overview:

 
Difficulty: ★★★★★
Enemy Management: ★★★★☆
Clue-getting: ★★★★☆
Encounter protection: ★★★★☆
Survivability: ★★★★★
Economy: ★★★☆☆
Card Drawing: ★★★☆☆

Main Strategy:

Play with tokens:


Give in to the Curse:

It took a while for Agnes to see her nightmares not for what they were but for what they manifested. From there on, it became obvious that she should not avoid her curse anymore but rather encourage it.

This deck is mainly centred around the interaction between Spirit of Humanity, Ritual Candles and Soul Sanctification:

  • Thanks to the new Taboo, the Ritual Candles now interact with tokens. If you have 2 of them on the table, curse tokens are turned into 0s.

  • Spirit of Humanity is then used to bring to the bag, in exchange for some healing.

  • Soul Sanctification turns the heal into +2s.

  • Olive McBride will increase your chances of pulling a token when you want it, while the risks of failing with her are also mitigated by the Ritual Candles's effect on all symbol tokens.

  • Much later in the campaign, if the xp allows it, you can add Nkosi Mabati to turn any non- symbol into a , increasing the yield of your spell suite.


Use your Nightmares to influence reality:

Use your witcher's sense to find clues through the chaos:

  • The Eye of Chaos will collect clues. It has the same number of charges and costs 1 more.

    • At the beginning of a scenario, it will act like a risk-free Rite of Seeking.

    • Once you add with Spirit of Humanity, you will have the possibility to either use it free of charge or to collect a clue from a connected location.

    • When upgraded, this effect becomes ridiculous, having infinite charges and collecting clues from every connected location.

Unleash the Armageddon:

  • Armageddon is a more expensive, more limited Shrivelling. Besides having wicked art, it comes in handy in this deck.

    • Using Olive McBride and/or Favor of the Moon, you will be able to save charges or deal additional damage if need be.

    • Additional damage can be done in multiple ways, too, making the additional charge the better choice most often. The most reliable way to deal testless damage with Agnes Baker is Forbidden Knowledge. In complicated situations, we can also use Spirit of Humanity and add 2 .

    • When upgraded, the damage output can become swingy but has the theoretical capacity of being nothing less than the biggest weapon in the game by far: if you pull 10 , you deal 12 damage in one action. While it is very unlikely, I have already dealt 5 damage and added 2 charges in one action.


Other Cards:

  • Parallel Fates (2) and Foresight (1) is maybe one of my favourite combos, especially for investigators with a severe weakness. Agnes belongs to this category. Filtering out her weakness feels amazing.

    • Not only does this combo allow you to filter out your weakness, but it also brings many other advantages: you can tutor key cards, rearrange your deck to prioritise important cards, plan when you want to draw (place a Voice of Ra before Eye of Chaos) and also deals with basic weaknesses. Finally Foresight brings a discount and a free play action when used with an Asset.
  • Scroll of Secrets is another excellent way to add draw while mitigating your personal weakness even more.

    • Overall, you can filter over half of your deck with these 2 methods while only getting side benefits.
  • Crystal Pendulum can look weird when we already have the Heirloom of Hyperborea. But the pendulum is cheaper, provides a static boost and will probably give you the same number of card draws since this deck is light on spells.

    • I always forget about the Crystal Pendulum in the heat of the game, so my technique is to choose a number and always pick the same. For instance, "For every first test, if I succeed by 2, then I draw."
  • Familiar Spirit is cheap and adds an arcane slot, allowing us to have the 3 main elements: Spirit of Humanity, Eye of Chaos and Armageddon.

  • Olive McBride is also rather cheap, and helps fishing for tokens. In general, she really helps either when you are close to the test difficulty (meaning testing with the same skill value, or +1) or when testing with much more, +5 and above.

  • Favor of the Moon will help with 3 things:

    • Of course, tutor tokens when you need them to save charges, for instance.

    • It brings resources when used, for a net total of 2 fast resources.

    • It seals some tokens so that your teammates will not have to deal with them.

  • Live and Learn is great fun in this deck: it will help a lot when you start to add tokens when not having both Ritual Candles on the table yet.

    • When pulling tokens while using your spells, Live and Learn will allow you to use the side effect, for instance, adding a charge back or a testless damage, and perform the test again with higher chances of success and potentially another chance to draw tokens.

    • It helps dealing with the , unless it is during a treachery test.

  • Voice of Ra is great to turn the tokens into resources and be committed when you have enough.

  • Prescient is an absolute mvp in this deck. Choosing "symbol", even without Favor of the Moon, gives you extremely high chances of succeeding with it, and it brings back your Armageddon and Eye of Chaos.

    • Why is it so important? At the beginning of a scenario, before you have the chance to add tokens to the bag, you will run through your spells surprisingly fast, and you cannot do anything without them. Prescient will also be a great backup option, also in case your second copy is far at the bottom of your deck.

    • Later in the campaign, we upgrade it into Uncage the Soul, which is far more versatile, never whiffs, discards the spell if it is still in play, and provides a discount.

  • Promise of Power is always good, but especially here. Secure some early tests, and the "downside" is actually an upside in your case.


Upgrade path:

Link to the 0xp deck.


 Cost  Total
Core Upgrades 0 XP
   In the Thick of It  →  Spirit of Humanity •• 2 XP 2 XP
   In the Thick of It  →  Favor of the Moon 1 XP 3 XP
   Tempt Fate  →  Favor of the Moon 1 XP 4 XP
   Tempt Fate  →  Spirit of Humanity •• 2 XP 6 XP
    →  Charisma ••• 3 XP 9 XP
 
Consistency Upgrades 9 XP
   Olive McBride  →  Parallel Fates •• 2 XP 11 XP
   Crystal Pendulum  →  Parallel Fates •• 2 XP 13 XP
   "Look what I found!"  →  Foresight 1 XP 14 XP
   "Look what I found!"  →  Foresight 1 XP 15 XP
    →  Soul Sanctification ••• 6 XP 21 XP
 
Luxury Upgrades 21 XP
   Eye of Chaos    Eye of Chaos •••• 4 XP 25 XP
   Eye of Chaos    Eye of Chaos •••• 4 XP 29 XP
   Prescient  →  Uncage the Soul ••• 3 XP 32 XP
   Prescient  →  Uncage the Soul ••• 3 XP 35 XP
   Armageddon    Armageddon •••• 4 XP 39 XP
   Armageddon    Armageddon •••• 4 XP 43 XP
   Crystal Pendulum  →  Nkosi Mabati ••• 3 XP 46 XP
    →  Charisma ••• 3 XP 49 XP

(View at arkham-starter.com)


Link to the fully upgraded deck.



To create your own guides, find the template I have created here

16 comments

Mar 03, 2023 cabalpaxiarch · 54

How does ritual candles nullify cursed tokens? Don't you still get -1 and draw another token? It doesn't replace the token drawn with +1 does it?

Mar 03, 2023 Valentin1331 · 55089

@cabalpaxiarch sorry that is not so clear in the guide indeed! The new taboo gives +1 to all symbol tokens, including . So when you have 2 Ritual Candles, it basically turns every curse token into 0s.

Mar 04, 2023 lok1686 · 8

I think jewel of Aureolud is better then Crystal Pendulum

Mar 04, 2023 lok1686 · 8

And the Hierophant.V can replace charisma

Mar 04, 2023 Valentin1331 · 55089

Hey @lok1686, thanks for the suggestions :)

I considered both cards carefully and here was my thoughts behind not including them:

  • The The Hierophant • V costs 6xp for 2 copies and 3 resources when you don’t have them in your starting hand. And it is not really your first priority, the spell suite being way more important. The Familiar Spirit in comparison is 1 resource and costs only the 3xp of Charisma.

  • I actually play tested the deck with the Jewel of Aureolus, but I figured out that the basic boost of the Crystal Pendulum was really useful, making it less appealing to spend 3xp and 1 additional resource into more draw, when I felt like the deck already had enough draw the way it currently is.

I hope this helps understanding my reasoning, but of course there is never one way of building a deck and there are many possible declinations possible. For the sake of publishing, I do need to make some choices.

Mar 06, 2023 ilksvorbern · 75

Having not played Agnes for a long time, this makes me really want to pick her up again. How would this deck cope solo? Are there any tweaks to make? Seems to have a good balance of damage, clue-getting and survivability!

Mar 06, 2023 Valentin1331 · 55089

Hey @ilksvorbern, I would say that because of the nature of curse tokens and the impact it can have on investigators that do not have access to the or covenants, this deck is particularly good in true solo, without any change. Just make sure that you mulligan hard for Eye of Chaos.

Mar 06, 2023 ilksvorbern · 75

Fantastic, thanks! I'll sleeve it up :D

Mar 06, 2023 Valentin1331 · 55089

Cool, can't wait to know from you how it went!

Mar 06, 2023 david6680 · 56

This is the first curse deck I've really wanted to play. I never considered Spirit of Humanity in an Agnes deck before. I'm likely going to steal this idea.

My biggest concern is drawing critical cards early enough (only 2 cards for getting clues and 2 for fighting).
I'd be tempted to try short supply with scrounge for supplies and resourceful to help get the cards quicker. Thoughts?

Mar 07, 2023 Akalabeth · 1

This deck is for independed of campaing?

Mar 07, 2023 captainfire · 197

I love how you manage her weakness (probably the worst in the game), will try it for sure !

Mar 07, 2023 Valentin1331 · 55089

@david6680 thanks, I hope you have fun with it too!

I have considered Short Supply indeed but there are too many variables: you want your 4 spells and 2 candles to take the most out of the deck, also the deck space is really scarce in this one…

I had the same concerns and I don’t like underestimating consistency, so my reflex was to hard mulligan for Armageddon in case I draw an enemy and then power draw my way to spells. Parallel Fates helps greatly and so does the Arcane Initiate. Overall I works better than it looks, at least in my opinion.

@Akalabeth it can be used for both! It is published in a standalone friendly version, but you can also find at the bottom of the guide an upgrade path and a 0xp deck to start a campaign with. So it’s up to you!

@captainfire thanks!! As usual let me know how it went! This deck was really one of my favourite in this series so I’m happy to have people interested too!

Dec 03, 2023 thakaris · 193

I run thru RtTCU solo with this deck. First of all, this deck creation is one of the most creative curse decks I ever saw on ArkhamDB at all, still I had to do some slight modifications to protect my 3rd arcane slot from the TCU Encounter deck (Unhallowed Land so I went with the Binder's Jar (which went way better than I thought it would) and Living Ink for the +1 WP. My experience all in all was mixed. The deck engine is ridiculously good once in play. You are almost unstoppable, but early ion the champaign, before spell upgrades, without Parallel Fates etc. the deck had a lot of flaws. Especially without Soul Sanctification I really had issues to pass some key tests or to compensate missing candles.

Two think I experienced in almost every play was :

  1. The Deck is very slow. Before you don't have the candles, you cannot mass curse yourself because you fail on every test, so basically you require both candles, Armageddon, Spirit of Humanity, the 3rd arcane slot, Olive, A favor of the moon would be good, etc.. before really starting tackling the scenario.

  2. Agnes' weakness is the most brutal in AHLCG by far. It costs you 2 resources, an action and a turn. Some TCU scenarios are very time intensive and drawing her weakness is brutal, so in a lot of situations I used Parallel Fates and Foresight to protect me from that and not speed up my deck.

All in all it is an interesting idea resulted in a very well rounded deck given the circumstances. For standalone scenario play, it is pretty great, in champaign play the start is to rough of a challenge. I wonder, if Father Mateo would be the better investigator for this deck, since he can take SoH as well and his weakness is less crippling if you play solo anyway.

Thanks for sharing and keep up the great work

Dec 03, 2023 thakaris · 193

I have to add another comment. I just happened to see the text on one of the new Hamlock Vale investigatiors, the Mystic named Kōhaku Narukam. He is seemingly able to pick up Spirit of Humanity as well and also blessed and cursed cards up to lv.5. I wonder, if he might be the guy for a cursed deck like this one.

Dec 13, 2023 Drostt · 26

Despite the fact that spell upgrades are classiffied as luxury, I don't know if experience-wise it wouldn't be better to take Arcane Research anyway. You can save as much as 8 xp through whole campaign after all, comparing to 3 xp from in the thick of it.