Akacho Onyele (Tom) Carcosa

New investigator for me, I've not played with her, nor had much experience building decks for her, but she's from the set we're playing with an impressive base stat line. She's got a decent baseline and stats so she can hold her own which is a bonus. Where she clearly really excels is . At a five she's one of the strongest in the game. Her big weakness is , but there are some tricks up her sleeve. We can also mitigate that a bit with my character build if necessary.

Her special ability (+1 charge) makes all of the headline spells better, which explains why I've turned over a third of the deck to them. It also makes her a really strong generalist character. If you need to pick up clues we can use Rite of Seeking, if you need to kill monsters, good ol' Shrivelling.Alchemical Transmutation lets you cycle resources if necessary, and Clarity of Mind gives you a heal option (albeit only horror). Mists of R'lyeh gives you the option to run away which is useful for some of the shenanigans that will be thrown at us. So, here's where i admit being in two minds. This feels like a lot of spells, and (given you've only got two slots) it might be too many. As she can take 8 horror, it might be that you don't need two Clarity of Mind. Given you'll probably want Shrivelling out most of the time, does she need to be able to run with that additional effectiveness (as she already has a base stat of 3 does she really need 2 Mists of R'lyeh in her deck. My sense though is that if you don't have a spell in both Arcane slots you're probably not getting the most out of her. Her special card Spirit-Speaker is really strong, letting you pluck a spell out of a slot; that might mean that you're pulling something back to free up the slot so you can get a better spell for the situation in, or it might be pulling shrivelling back into your hand with one shot left on it, to put it straight back down fully charged. You can't really build to it, because you've only got one copy in the deck, but once you've got that out she's going to be a machine.

Flashlight and Knife are there because she's got two hand slots and may as well use them. The little combat boost might be useful, similarly the little boost to investigations might be handy to have, but I don't think either are essential. Holy Rosary is there to make her 6 making it extremely unlikely she'll fail any spell cast that you really want to go off. I dithered a bit about Arcane Initiate, they take a doom going into play, but they should let you fish for the card you need and if doom becomes a worry, she can take a damage for you and she's gone so it's not insurmountable.

Blinding Light is there in case of emergencies but on reflection, it might be further evidence you don't need the two Mists of R'lyeh because these basically achieve the same goal, run away testing instead of . I might sub that out in the next draft to further mitigate her weak ; let me know your thoughts. Talking of mitigating her weak , Drawn to the Flame is there for emergency clue gathering. Spells are costly so I've chucked some Emergency Caches in there for extra money. Given her high horror, Ward of Protection feels a valuable investment. I've gone with Fearless, Guts and Unexpected Courage to make sure she doesn't fail checks, but it may be worth taking out Mists of R'lyeh and adding a couple of Perceptions to boost those books, or an extra Flashlight/Knife.

I think we might reserve the right to make a few additional substitutions to the deck between games as we get a sense of what works (even though it's not strictly legal) because I wouldn't want to saddle either of us with a turd right out of the gate. The other obvious weakness is no ability to heal physical damage, so we might want to cut an Arcane Initiate, Ward of Protection or Alchemical Transmutation, and put in some Painkillers. Again, I'll have a muse.

Given her spellcasting specialism, the upgrade tree is pretty obvious here; focus on getting the higher powered versions of Shrivelling and Rite of Seeking into play, and replace the Knife with Spirit Athame.

That's draft 1 anyway. You will see its rough at the moment, but I think it's got the basis of being a lot of fun if your inclined to the magic users. If you'd rather try someone else, I've enjoyed the deck building so I'm happy to take another swing.