Power Pete - Failure's Not An Option

Pete isn't here to muddle through with half-measures. He's crazed and intends to crush his skill tests, and then take a well-deserved smoke break.

This deck is cheap to set up and fast to start. You start with Duke in play and otherwise there's only 4 different assets.

This is intended for multiplayer. Mostly because Newspaper is more likely to benefit. Also there's opportunity to commit skill cards to help another investigator before using Yaotl for Pete.

Desperate Right From the Start

In the Thick of It means Pete starts every scenario with 2 mental trauma, which has the benefit of enabling all the desperate skills from turn 1.

The drawback of course is that Pete starts dangerously close to defeat. Early on he relies on spreading horror onto various soak assets, possibly recurring Yaotl with Resourceful. Or playing the second copy after Yaotl is defeated. Later on in a campaign Earthly Serenity is added to the deck for actual healing.

In order to preserve sanity, keep a Test of Will handy for treacheries like Rotting Remains that can inflict 2+ horror.

Between the bonuses from Duke (+2) and from the desperate skill cards (+4) we can expect to earn a fair number of free draws from Lucky Cigarette Case. And for Pete every card is a great card since it can always be spent to ready Duke or Yaotl.

Immigrants Are Welcome in Arkham!

Yaotl lets Pete benefit from skill icons on the top card of his discard pile. Ideally it's something like Desperate Search that can be exploited over several turns.

Don't forget that you can choose to ready Yaotl instead of Duke. For example, against a 3-health enemy you're better off readying Yaotl if you just played Reckless Assault, since that grants +4 compared to Duke's +2.

If you get most of Pete's important assets in play (or in hand) you can use Yaotl opportunistically in hopes of blindly discarding weaknesses. It's not likely, but if you know there's still a weakness somewhere near the bottom of a small draw pile it's absolutely the right play.

Tricks You Learn on the Road

A Glimmer of Hope might as well be called "Neverending Puppy Chow". Its sole purpose is to be discarded to ready Duke. And one action pulls up to 3 copies back into your hand. This is super efficient draw and helps delay reshuffling.

Newspaper helps find clues and it stacks with Duke. In multiplayer spend all of your clues to advance the act whenever possible, since this enables the bonus for having no clues.

The rest is usual Survivor hijinx such as LwIF/Live and Learn to grab multiple clues with failure and then go back for more with the same action.

Advancement

Down the Rabbit Hole gives heaps of free experience. Make sure to only upgrade two cards in between scenarios since you'll run out of targets towards the end of a campaign.

Plucky (3) is your first upgrade, which adds more soak and static stat boosts. Then probably a Newspaper (2) to grab multiple clues. After that it's really up to personal taste.

If you ever have a scenario with very little XP remember that you can always improve Lucky! (2) to Lucky! (3) to use up the free experience.

Earthly Serenity (1) is worth an early add, and it can be later improved into Earthly Serenity (4) to help Pete and his fellow investigators stave off defeat.

Safer Variant: Peter Sylvestre

If you're particularly worried about horror you can skip Yaotl and start with Peter Sylvestre. However this variation loses the ability to get multiple uses from the skill cards...