A deck with suspiciously high amount of 2 cost events for On Your Own synergy. On Your Own also take Will to Survive down to 2 cost, which we pour 6 XP into getting 2 copies on the later half of campaign, to support Old Hunting Rifle / Baseball Bat together with Live and Learn.

Leather Coat + Elder Sign Amulet take the soaking duty while you are On Your Own with Perseverance, and you have Scavenging and Perception to extend your 5/6 5/6 lifestyle. You can't do that with allies!

► About "2 Packs Deck Guide"
　A series of decks made with the new distribution model in mind, requiring a Revised Core Set box + just 1 more Investigator Expansion box. Φ character on the deck's name means the additional box it uses is The Forgotten Age Investigator Expansion.
　It maximizes the chance of newcomers being able to build and learn to play the game, enjoying the story on Standard difficulty ASAP. They can then get into deck-building later if they wished to do so. See other decks in the "2 Packs Deck Guide" series here.

(View at arkham-starter.com)

☆ : You would get mental trauma due to scenario and Voice of the Messenger, to a certain point it is not comfortable to use Ward of Protection anymore. The replacement to Elder Sign Amulet is designed to protect 3+ mental trauma you may have at this point. If you are still comfortable with your sanity, you may remove Take Heart instead.

Got more XPs?

(I typically don't include cards in Side Deck much past 29 XP, but I used this deck and did arrive at TFA Scenario 6 Standard with 34 XP.)

You can add 2x Alter Fate (3) in place of 2x Take Heart. At late campaign you may want to tone down the draw if you are nearing danger zone and don't want to risk anymore Voice of the Messenger you would have avoided when not drawing excessively, so removing Take Heart make some sense. (And Lucky! (2) upgrade might not be a good idea since it adds the draw.)

Replace 2x Leather Coat with 2x Bulletproof Vest is possible but it has cons of 2 resources, a number that meant quite a lot in this deck, it is up to you.

You can do something to 2x Flashlight and 2x Perception if the upgrade is still beneficial to Scavenging. Some example in bigger card pool :

• The Path to Carcosa : Newspaper (2), same icons as Perception and now can be Scavenging for more commit.
• Revised Core Set / The Circle Undone : Eucatastrophe. Since the icon is , this is quite a safe replacement to Perception with new feature.
• The Dream-Eaters : Scavenging (2) would be straightforward upgrade.
• Edge of the Earth : Plucky (3) is an excellent soak that does not disrupt On Your Own, with relevant boost for Scavenging and even matches Calvin's horror boost. Put it down to cover your 5/6 horror.
• The Scarlet Keys : Flashlight (3) would allow Calvin to use either damage or horror side to do the job.

How to play

In my opinion, this deck is probably the most chef's kiss 2 packs deck I have made so far. Most of limited pack decks are naturally lacking in synergy due to lack of choices but TFA did give a lot of "Calvin card" that it is possible to make quite a tight deck. Lack of variety of boost assets is also often a problem in limited pack decks, but Calvin has his built-in way to get to 5 stats.

Old Hunting Rifle added in this Investigator Expansion is very similar in style to Baseball Bat. With 4 cards of the same kind in the deck, I would like to build a deck geared for 2 handed weapon with failing effect. (The rifle replaces starting Knife, not the Baseball Bat.)

To mitigate the risk, this deck uses the newly added Against All Odds to hand-pick a success, without getting the or . Live and Learn can also let you go one last time even after the weapon became not functional. (Baseball Bat : Break, Old Hunting Rifle : Out of ammo / jam.) Though, don't Live and Learn on Retaliate enemies! (It's a budget Lucky! after all.)

What would glue everything together is On Your Own, which discounts Against All Odds, "Look what I found!", and Perseverance to 0 cost.

The classic Will to Survive follows later to round out the deck, this card is not usable before you have On Your Own for discount in the deck. Trust me, you will not want save up 4 resources and spend them all to play it when Perseverance on hand meant "2 resources = alive". 0 resources when you are near death is very scary!

To perform Scavenging, use 2x Flashlight and 2x Perception. You should not remove Perception, otherwise you can only scavenge on 1-2 shroud even when you have max 5 horror. Flashlight is not enough as it does not allow scavenging while you are holding either Baseball Bat or Old Hunting Rifle.

2x "Look what I found!" is also retained til the end so he get either 1 or 2 clues on failed Scavenging attempts depending on how hard you get the minus, and it is also good with Take Heart and On Your Own.

Campaign tips

On Your Own can also defend against treachery that rid you of resources, you will always have 2 kinda hidden resources at all times regardless.

On Your Own + Perseverance is what warms your heart. Seriously, even when you have 5 5 5 5 stats and some combination of Leather Coat and Elder Sign Amulet (partially used up?), you can get a -5 or on fail-by treachery and suddenly dies, or got all your asset destroyed. But with Perseverance, you can voluntarily put all those fail-by damage / horror on you instead of on the assets to get the defeat, and cancel them all out. Your soak assets stays as they were! Since On Your Own readies in Upkeep Phase, you are almost guaranteed to not get defeated by a random fail-by damage / horror treachery in the upcoming Mythos Phase if you have Perseverance ready.

When you get and have to decide whether to heal to take more, look at used up treachery and try to guess what's left, or looking at the special symbol token if taking that damage / horror would allow you to "cover" them or not, or looking at enemies whether the heal would allow you to take some hits and get your stats back where they were or not.

For example in my TFA run I have 2x = -3 which cause 1 horror when failed, together with 2x more -3 in the bag. That's a lot of -3! It meant if I have 5 , I can repeatedly investigate 2 shroud with no commit without worry. Since there is a 2 shroud location that needs picking clues up right now, I decided to take my horror to 5/6. Conversely, in TFA the token jumps from -3 to -5 with no -4 in between. If the boost would grant you +4 advantage over the test instead of +3, then it does not improve the odds.

Beware of weird effects which reduce health (lowering maximum HP) because in that case and you are hovering at 5/6 health, not even Perseverance or Until the End of Time can prevent your defeat!

Will to Survive tips

This is your trump card when you have either Baseball Bat or Old Hunting Rifle. Not only that they will not break, you know for sure you can burst the enemy down if you have the stat equal to enemy's. And these weapons gives high boost of +2 and +3. Most enemy goes up to 4 .

It is expensive, but it does have a useful icon you can use to land a hit and survive sometimes.

Calvin kinda have "adjustable" . That means for Baseball Bat (+2 ), you need 2 damages on Calvin to win against most things with Will to Survive. At the point you bought Will to Survive in, I think you will have 2 physical trauma or more already.

That goes together that the fact that on the turn you wanna Will to Survive, you don't want to Move. You want to test, test, test, win, win, win!

To do so, you may need your friend's help to bring the enemy to you (no friendly-fire risk since you know you win the test), or have to take some hits by moving to the enemy in the earlier turn. Especially vs. Elite that you want to surely remove 6 HP+ from it the next turn without touching the bag, this Move preparation maybe worth the gamble of having to withstand one more Mythos Phase.

You can use this intentional hit-taking to raise Calvin's stat to the required number before striking back with decisive Will to Survive.

Other tips

• Perseverance : It says "up to", so sometimes you can choose to take some of the damage / horror for your benefit as you are willing to risk it. This often let you lands at exactly 5/6 5/6 for the ultimate life-and-death showdown.
• Take Heart : It can also give stuff to other investigators as it says "the performing investigator". Leo Anderson in the same expansion would love the draws and the resources so his Ally keeps pouring in.

Other popular soak cards

You may have heard about Cherished Keepsake, Peter Sylvestre, Jessica Hyde, etc. that are popular for keeping Calvin alive. Those cards are not in Forgotten Age Investigator Expansion.

You may modify this deck to include them as you like if you have those expansions. But in this 2 Packs Deck Guide series, I wanted to prove that a functional Calvin deck could be made with minimum spending.

(Other than Elder Sign Amulet, RCore also gives you Aquinnah (3) for same XP cost, or use Yaotl from Forgotten Age. But this deck is themed around On Your Own, so Elder Sign Amulet is the only choice.)