Let's Break Silas Again

Hello everyone and welcome to Let's Break Silas Again.

Intro: In our playgroup's opinion, S-Tier means Silas-Tier. Silas is a terribly busted and mechanically problematic investigator and is locally soft banned due to his enabling of the following types of decks. These combos have been taboo'd for good reason. Academically, we are always on the lookout for new ways to suplex the game with our favorite shirtless sailor.

Example 1: This deck abused Eucatastrophe, turning any skill test into a trivial math problem. This deck is an odd one in that it gets better when the difficulty is high and barely functions properly on easy:

https://arkhamdb.com/decklist/view/14853/silas-marsh-can-only-fail-upward-hard-mode-1.0

Example 2: This deck is a variant played by one of my cohort, who doesn't publish lists on ArkhamDB. This similar version was posted by Deathcombo. The list abused Signum Crucis and A Watchful Peace to remove the encounter phase, usually for several turns in a row:

https://arkhamdb.com/decklist/view/30688/popeye-s-peaceful-protection-endgame-1.0

This deck:

I know there are lots of fancy and in depth deck descriptions out there but this one is fairly simple. Silas handles bad guys and has some limited clueing. He can use Resourceful and the to fish stuff from the discard pile.

The gimmick:

1. Play Strong-Armed on a melee attack, fish for the token you want, return Strong-Armed to your hand. Repeat every round. We want the token fishing effect, not the extra damage.
2. Don't die.

It's likely that we don't need to trigger Strong-Armed's token cycle on most tokens, so the self inflicted wounds should be manageable barring statistical outliers. As for absorbing the punishment, we have Jessica Hyde/Bandages/Idol of Xanatos/9 base health should keep you alive.

The rest of the stuff is either enabling or just personally interesting choices.

I added some clueing for flexibility and solo players would use Resourceful to recurse those cards. The gimmick combo of token fishing provides a non-zero chance of just landing on an to get Resourceful back and reuse key pieces.

Idol of Xanatos and Meat Cleaver hopefully keeps sanity up, but that is my biggest worry. Feel free to adjust to your liking.

Over-success cards like Opportunist and Nimble were considered, but I decided to pass on them since there wasn't any interesting way to take advantage of them. Nimble would require something like Ornate Bow to take part in Strong-Armed token fishing, and Opportunist actually feels like a -2 skill card without the other over-success pieces. But that just means there's some busted combo just lying in wait, maybe in a future expansion.

Quick Thinking is enabled by the token fishing, so it can stay.

This deck doesn't really need In the Thick of It because Silas is already pretty strong at 0 exp, but I included it for brevity. Mad props if you go with 2 sanity trauma and add desperation skills or something.

The shopping list here is just a small sample. The broken combos that Silas got taboo'd are still pretty good investments, even if they are boring and fair now. The Signum Crucis and Ancient Covenant pieces fit exceptionally well, just pull a with Strong-Armed then use the covenant to stop the skill test. Since there are so many blesses, we also might as well skip a couple encounter phases each scenario as a bonus.

Anyway, since Silas is soft banned in my play group, I'll never have a chance to try this deck. If you do try it, let me know how it goes.

Have fun!