Win NotZ with Agnes Baker & Friends (Revised Core Set)

Agnes Baker

"Spelling It Out"

This multiplayer Agnes Baker deck focuses on dealing damage and stumbling over clues in the Night of the Zealot campaign. This is essentially an improved starter deck. It uses cards only from the Revised Core Set with no overlap when teamed up with Roland, Daisy, or Wendy. Played next to at least one of those decks (especially Roland), it should be able to confidently perform in The Gathering, defeat at least four cultists in The Midnight Masks, and thereby set conditions to win The Devourer Below by disrupting the ritual. Agnes is a good choice to be the lead investigator for campaign-specific reasons.

Inherent Advantages:

• Excellent Willpower
• Good Sanity
• Turns Horror into Damage

You may seem like a lowly waitress, but you have the blood of ancient sorceresses in your veins. As a Mystic, many of your cards will let you use your high Willpower to fight, evade, or have other effects. Your high sanity and signature ability let you dish out damage when you suffer horror.

Inherent Flaws:

• Poor Intellect
• Poor Combat
• Poor Health

You're a bit of a lightweight and not especially well educated. This means that traditional forms of combat and investigation are rather hard rowing. If you don't have your spells ready, you're not going to hit hard. You'll need some way to soak or heal both damage and horror to ensure you stay on your feet.

Game Plan:

You'll need to be patient and deliberate at the start of each scenario as Mystics, like you, tend to rely on combinations of cards and abilities more than raw stats. Your spells are really important. Mulligan strategically and focus on setting up your board in the first round or two.

Your signature ability is triggered when you suffer horror, which you convert into a machine gun of dark magic to spray at enemies. You cannot trigger this ability if you assign horror to an asset you control. It has to go on you, but only one point of it...

Your Intellect and Combat stats are poor, but your Agility is average. When your spells aren't ready, you are not very well suited to either combat or investigation. Instead, lean on Agility to get away from danger so you can cultivate power and come back with a vengeance.

Action Priority:

• Investigate: Conditionally (w/ a synergistic asset/event)
• Fight: Conditionally (w/ a synergistic asset/event)
• Evade: Conditionally (w/ a synergistic asset/event)

Deck Composition:

This section analyzes the proportion of cards in the deck before (and after) upgrades according to their primary role, as opposed to their type, cost, icons, or any other factor. The roles considered include:

• Damage: Cards that primarily help you defeat enemies.
• Discovery: Cards that primarily help you discover clues.
• Mobility: Cards that primarily help you move around and avoid enemies.
• Economy: Cards that primarily help you gain or save resources, actions, or cards.
• Support: Cards that help you or other investigators do things, but don't directly affect the state of play.

6 (↗8) Damage cards

• 2x Knife
• 2x Shriveling
• 2x Forbidden Knowledge
• (2x Blinding Light ••)

6 (↗8) Discovery cards

• 2x Flashlight
• 2x Drawn to the Flame
• 2x Perception
• (2x Rite of Seeking ••)

6 (↘4) Mobility cards

• [2x Blinding Light]
• 2x Cunning Distraction
• 2x Manual Dexterity

2 (↗4) Economy cards

• 2x Emergency Cache
• (2x Grotesque Statue ••••)

11 (↘7) Support cards

• 1x Heirloom of Hyperborea
• 2x Holy Rosary
• 2x Leather Coat
• [2x Arcane Initiate]
• [2x Dig Deep]
• 2x Fearless

Card Notes:

• Flashlight isn't now and will never be flashy, but -2 shroud makes a difference. As emphasized, your natural Intellect is poor. With a Flashlight, however, you are still practically guaranteed to discover clues in shroud value 2 or lower locations.

• Knife is a poor backup to your main damage dealing method (spells like Shriveling and Blinding Light along with your signature ability), but it should be sufficient for dealing with smaller enemies. You specifically don't have Baseball Bat here because it is in the Wendy deck.

• Shrivelling is your heavy weapon. You're going to fight using an unmodified Willpower 5 when you activate this. Shriveling can even hit for 3 damage if the chaos bag throws something spooky at you and you haven't used your signature ability yet this phase.

• Heirloom of Hyperborea is your signature card. If you've played it, it draws you a card whenever you play a spell. That's cool, but there are only 5 spells in the deck (7 after upgrades; 15-21% of the deck). Outside of this effect, the Heirloom unfortunately doesn't do anything else. So, don't play it! Commit this to a Willpower (or Combat) test and play Holy Rosary instead.

• Holy Rosary is a horror soak that gives you a static boost to Willpower. This is pure gas for your game plan. Because it competes with the Heirloom for your accessory slot, play the Rosary and commit the other.

• Leather Coat is a much needed damage soak and a spare Combat icon when called for.

• Arcane Initiate helps soak up horror, enabling your signature ability, but she comes at a cost. She's going to add doom to the situation when you play her. That downside is bad. An extra point of doom is like taking away 3 actions from every investigator. Timing is everything. Play her only during the round before the agenda would advance anyway so that this downside is effectively blanked. In addition to acting as a horror soak, she can help you search for Shriveling or Blinding Light.

• Dig Deep is not very efficient to play, but gives you another source of icons that are relevant to your game plan.

• Forbidden Knowledge looks like an economy engine with a steep hidden cost, trickling out 4 resources over four rounds for the 0 you spent to play it. It also slowly drops 4 horror on you in the process. In your hands, however, Forbidden Knowledge is a weapon. With each activation, the horror you take allows you to trigger your signature ability. Once in play, this almost reads: ": Gain 1 resource and deal 1 damage to an enemy at your location."

• Blinding Light gets quite a bit better in its upgraded form, but even at level 0 it gives you a way to put an enemy on its back and land some damage on it at the same time. Use this to disable a tougher enemy's retaliate ability and soften them up for Shriveling or another investigator's attacks.

• Cunning Distraction is a pricey event, but one that can completely reverse your fortunes when you play it. More often you'll commit it to skill tests. It features exactly the icons you're looking for, after all. As the "red Dynamite Blast", there is a situation in The Devourer Below where this may be just the trick you need to power through to victory.

• Dark Memory is your signature weakness. It's an event that ramps up doom on the current agenda (and checks doom, potentially advancing the agenda) or hits you for 2 horror each round if you don't play it. There may be narrow situations in which you can afford to play it but keep it in your hand anyway. Either way, you're going to pay a price when you draw this megrim.

• Drawn to the Flame lets you pick up two clues by risking an extra draw from the encounter deck. Since your Willpower is so naturally strong, this is a bet worth taking.

• Emergency Cache trades 1 action for 3 resources.

• Fearless is your version of Guts. It only offers one icon, but by healing horror it gives you more depth for activating your signature ability and dishing out damage.

• Manual Dexterity helps you evade the natural way when you need to put a little distance between yourself and an enemy. Use this to break away so you can prepare a spell or to handle one of the Agility testing treacheries.

• Perception is effectively a one-shot Flashlight activation that replaces itself in your hand when it succeeds. It's one of a few ways for you to investigate.

• Haunted is the basic weakness included in the original Agnes starter deck in the Core Set. Because your most critical stat, Willpower, is so high to begin with and many of your effects aren't dependent on your other stats, this isn't totally backbreaking. It takes 2/3 of a turn to get rid of it, which you may or may not feel is necessary depending on the situation.

Mulligan Targets:

These are the cards you most hope to see in your opening hand and should consider mulliganing something else in hopes of drawing.

• (Willpower) Holy Rosary: This takes your main stat from excellent to nigh-unstoppable.

• (Damage) Shrivelling, Forbidden Knowledge, Blinding Light, or Knife: This is your offensive suite. You want at least one of these, if not two in your opener. Blinding Light is not a first choice here until after you upgrade it.

• (Clues) Flashlight, Drawn to the Flame, Perception, or Rite of Seeking: You've got a few ways to discover clues. Any one of these should do the trick. Once you've got Rite of Seeking, it ought to enter your is list of priorities here, although you really want to have Grotesque Statue with it or save its activation until the last action of your turn.

Ideal Hand:

You probably don't mulligan anything if you see an opening hand like this:

• Shrivelling
• Holy Rosary
• Forbidden Knowledge
• Drawn to the Flame
• Fearless

Upgrade Path:

Night of the Zealot is a short three-scenario campaign. You're only going to pick up a spare handful of XP before reaching the finale. At most, you might be able to earn 16XP or so if you're especially successful in The Gathering and The Midnight Masks. This leaves fairly little room to evolve the deck, so these upgrades focus instead on gaining incremental value, emphasizing a key strength or shoring up a weakness. Buy these in any order you wish.

• 2x Blinding Light → 2x Blinding Light •• is a solid improvement over the original version. It now costs less and hits harder. This goes from playing a mobility role to a damage role after the upgrade.

• 2x Dig Deep → 2x Grotesque Statue •••• puts something very potent in your hands: the ability to manipulate the chaos bag. Using the Statue, you reveal two tokens instead of one and apply the one you prefer. This sort of agency makes your spells a lot less risky by helping you avoid the symbol tokens. Once you've got this thing, it becomes one of your top mulligan targets right next to Holy Rosary. Because the Statue effectively lets you avoid failure and thus save one or more actions, it is considered an economy card in this deck.

• 2x Arcane Initiate → 2x Rite of Seeking •• expands your clue finding package. This lets you investigate with an unmodified Willpower 7 and pick up 2 clues when successful, putting high shroud locations within your range. There's just a chance that this wipes out all your remaining actions, so you'll probably want to save this rite for the last action of your turn or have Grotesque Statue in hand.