Kate Winthrop in FHV (Hard) (65XP)

This deck was created for a two-handed solo run of The Feast of Hemlock Vale on Hard, alongside Lily Chen. The partner deck can be found here.

This was the starting deck:

Kate Winthrop (1XP) in The Eternal Slumber (Hard) + FHV

I did The Eternal Slumber on Hard with 1XP as the opening scenario (spending the other 2XP from In the Thick of It to pay for it). In this article I'll cover all the upgrades purchased after each scenario. You can find a full campaign report in Lily's decklist article.

This is the campaign plan:

1. The Lost Sister.
2. The Twisted Hollow.
3. Written in Rock.
4. The Longest Night.
5. The Silent Heath.
6. Fate of the Vale.

Kate's deck revolves around recurring Fingerprint Kit with Professor William Webb by using your second Magnifying Glass to discard it when it runs out of uses.

This is basically why I didn't include Tinker, and I think Kate works better without excess hand slot items because, for one thing, when you don't draw Tinker you can end up with a bunch of dead cards in your hand.

I spent some time on a different build that used Emergency Cache to resupply your Fingerprint Kit, and Fine Tuning to make it more action efficient. It was pretty good, but I think Professor William Webb is a better fit for Kate, for reasons I'll go into below. And Fine Tuning has some of the same problems as Tinker, where if you don't draw your Fingerprint Kit it's kind of a dead card. I also didn't find the extra activation it provided to be particularly relevant in most scenarios, especially after upgrading to Fingerprint Kit, but there were definitely times when it made a big impact.

As a sidenote, Fine Tuning is handy in The Twisted Hollow because you can attach it to the lantern to get an additional use out of it each turn.

Regarding the amount of Tool or Science assets in the deck, I spent time playing with different numbers and I think I ended up at the sweet spot, which is nine (including her Flux Stabilizer, and taking into account you usually won't have both copies of Magnifying Glass in play at the same time). The Surgical Kit is probably the card I'm most satisfied with, as it neatly shored up her asset numbers and provided her with an essential effect.

I tried out a few other allies in place of Dr. Milan Christopher but I kept coming back to him because he's just that good, and he's even better at higher difficulties because passive stat boosts are one of the best ways to counter tough token bags, and FHV has probably the ugliest token bag I've ever seen.

I also focused on developing and maintaining a high number of cards in hand but without any of the typical reward cards you might purchase when you go down that path (towards the end I was strongly contemplating Extensive Research to provide some testless clue compression).

The reason for that was mostly to enable Higher Education (to provide protection from treacheries) and to soft counter the copious amounts of discard present in the finale. The focus on skill cards was also made with an eye towards Act One of that scenario.

On the whole, I enjoyed playing Kate and I think she's quite powerful. Her free trigger ability often involves some interesting decision making, especially when it comes to spending clues on scenario card abilities, which this campaign features a lot of.

And now for the upgrades. I'll mention the amount of XP gained after each scenario, which includes any preludes. You can find more details about the campaign in Lily's decklist article.

The Eternal Slumber: 6XP gained.

Next Scenario: The Lost Sister.

Removed:

1 x Map the Area: I'm constantly trying to imagine ways in which this card could be used in every scenario I'm about to do, but for the most part the value just isn't there. It was fantastic in The Eternal Slumber but there aren't many spots (if any) in FHV where it shines.

Added:

1 x Professor William Webb: As mentioned in the intro, when a Fingerprint Kit runs out of uses you can play Magnifying Glass to discard it, then Webb can return it to your hand so you can play it again. You don't typically need to do this more than once per scenario but it was the reason I first considered him, and once I started playing with him I realized all of the other advantages he offers, such as:

• His three sanity provides a lot of soak for Kate, which is something she really needs because she'll fail most treacheries, and her weakness, Failed Experiment, is particularly dangerous.

• There are quite a few treacheries which force you to discard cards, including one that targets the highest cost card in your hand, which will usually be your Fingerprint Kit.

• There is also a treachery, Fungal Rot, which attaches to an item and blanks its text box, which you can often choose to put on a hand slot item and then get rid of with a Magnifying Glass.

• You can choose to commit an item to a test and then recover it again (on a future test).

• Similarly, when we purchase Unearth the Ancients later on he provides some protection against the auto-fail if you happen to have committed the cards you're attempting to play with it to its test (which you pretty much always want to do).

• When we upgrade Fingerprint Kit and Deduction his ability to split the clue discovery between locations comes in very handy since most locations don't have more than two clues. You can also use him for this purpose with the base versions of both cards, it just doesn't come up as often.

1 x Charisma: This allows us to have both Milan and Webb in play at the same time. During the last two scenarios Dr. Rosa Marquez also takes up an ally slot, and if I needed to play her I usually chose an opportune time to replace Webb to do so (ie. when he had run out of secrets and/or had used up all his sanity).

1 x Magnifying Glass: The other part of the Webb/FPK combo. Being able to bounce it back to hand after you discard a Fingerprint Kit is one of its key selling points here, though to be honest this card is usually an auto-include in any Seeker deck.

6XP spent, 0XP left.

The Lost Sister: 10XP gained.

Next Scenario: The Twisted Hollow.

Removed:

1 x Map the Area: The second copy.

Added:

1 x Professor William Webb: Also the second copy.

1 x Ancestral Knowledge: Like Webb, this card provides multiple benefits and synergies for the deck. Later on, it will allow Kate to use Higher Education to boost an opening turn Unearth the Ancients if she needs to, and its draw effect provides an extra trigger for Dream-Enhancing Serum.

Here are the cards we purchase with its +5 deck size:

• 2 x Bizarre Diagnosis: This card is the main reason we purchased Ancestral Knowledge this early in the campaign. Kate didn't eat breakfast before setting out that morning so she begins the next scenario with three physical trauma, and The Twisted Hollow can throw out a lot of damage.

• 2 x Survey the Area: This card allows Kate to leverage her high , which is boosted further by Dr. Rosa Marquez and/or Simeon Atwood for most of the remaining scenarios.

• 1 x Mouse Mask: The deck now has two copies of this card and it's quite useful in the next couple of scenarios, but both copies will get replaced for The Longest Night.

10XP spent, 0XP left.

The Twisted Hollow: 9XP gained.

Next Scenario: Written in Rock.

Removed:

2 x Bizarre Diagnosis: It was short-lived, but it provided consistency when we needed it.

2 x Scout Ahead: This card was good in The Lost Sister and excellent in Act Three of The Twisted Hollow but it's completely useless in the next scenario because you can't leave the mine cart.

Added:

2 x Surgical Kit: If you thought The Twisted Hollow threw out a lot of damage, wait until you see Written in Rock! Two actions for three damage healed plus one horror and a card is not a terrible deal, and it also provides an extra asset for Kate's free trigger ability (and a slotless one at that).

Kate appreciates horror healing more than a lot of other investigators, which also raises its profile a small amount. It's testless too, which is quite important as the token bag becomes increasingly more hostile. Consider how many resources you might have to spend to pass a test, or how many actions you might lose to failed healing tests on other cards over the course of a campaign, and its double action cost starts looking better, not to mention that if healing is required it's often really, really required right at that moment, so the failure case is potentially that much worse.

Going forward, both investigators will need some amount of damage healing, and this card provides that capacity better than the other available options.

For some reason I felt like I had to justify this slot more than any of the others. It's definitely not a great card in a vacuum but in this deck and in this campaign and for this investigator, it's a very solid pick. I hope I've made my case!

2 x Hand-Eye Coordination: One thing Kate's deck lacks is a good amount of action compression, so eking out a bit more with two copies of this card actually turned out pretty well.

Apart from its obvious uses with Fingerprint Kit and Surgical Kit to simply gain one action, you can use it while engaged with an enemy to gain clues (perhaps to then use on Kate's ability to evade it) or heal so that you can tank a hit for a turn (the extra action on the Surgical Kit is an additional cost so you won't trigger an attack of opportunity by activating its ability).

This card opens up new lines of play, and while I won't say it was amazing, I was always glad to see it when it showed up.

9XP spent, 0XP left.

Written in Rock: 11XP gained.

Next Scenario: The Longest Night.

Removed:

2 x Mouse Mask: We need to free up a couple of slots and this card is a pretty poor performer in the remaining scenarios of this campaign.

Added:

2 x Unearth the Ancients: This card provides a huge jolt of energy to Kate's economy, and it's not just amazing on the opening turn of the game, it's great anytime it shows up and you have an asset or two you want to play.

As mentioned earlier, if the cards you're playing have icons you can commit them to the test, and you should have enough skills to get you the rest of the way, with or without a small boost from Higher Education.

Consider this example: it's turn one and you want to play Dr. Milan Christopher and Fingerprint Kit. The test difficulty is 9, but you start the game with Dr. Rosa Marquez in play so your is 5. You commit both cards to the test, raising your test value to 8, then you commit Survey the Area, raising it to 13, then you commit Deduction (since you can gain clues from the test, unlike with the base version of the card) and now you're at 14, then you spend one resource from Higher Education to take you to 16 and you've covered every token in the bag except the auto-fail.

(Of course, you calculated all this before committing the cards so you spent the resource for Higher Education in the player window right after the test began).

The end result is that you've spent one action and one resource and put nine resources worth of assets into play and gained two clues. This is the sort of thing you can do routinely with Unearth the Ancients, and it only gets better when you can start using Kate's free trigger ability on boosting it. It's an outstanding card.

1 x Higher Education: This card's main purpose is to provide Kate with some resiliency against Mythos phase treacheries and her weakness, Failed Experiment. Supporting crazy Unearth the Ancients plays is just a bonus.

1 x Fingerprint Kit: This is an expensive card in both XP and its resource cost, but it provides a very powerful effect. And, you know, we have ways around the resource cost.

11XP spent, 0XP left.

The Longest Night: 7XP gained.

Next Scenario: The Silent Heath.

Added:

1 x Fingerprint Kit: The second copy.

1 x Studious: This card synergizes well with what the deck is trying to do. It gives us a better mulligan, it provides more fodder for Unearth the Ancients, and it provides more flexibility for meeting Higher Education's hand size requirement.

7XP spent, 0XP left.

The Silent Heath: 21XP gained.

Next Scenario: Fate of the Vale.

Removed:

2 x Transmogrify: This card is still useful in the finale but we need a couple of slots for some new cards and it's the best place to find them.

Added:

2 x The Eye of Truth: 4 is a juicy amount, and it becomes 8 when you boost it in Act One of the finale. This obviously supercharges Unearth the Ancients, but it also goes a long way towards making sure we can advance the act after only two turns, which is usually how things went.

This card can also pin Kate's weakness to the victory display but the deck probably won't cycle more than once per game anyway so that was never a big selling point for it.

As a sidenote, I had a lot of fun with The Eye of Truth in a Return to The Path to Carcosa game with Rex Murphy and Winifred Habbamock. My Winifred deck took Copycat, which can rip The Eye of Truth out of the victory display (leaving the treachery it dumpstered there) and put it back into Rex's deck, and he can then play it again with Practice Makes Perfect. In the finale of that campaign it got committed eight times.

2 x Perception: Nothing fancy, just increasing the number of icons on the card. At this point there's not many free slots left in the deck to add new cards, so investing XP into the existing ones becomes more appealing.

2 x Deduction: Same again, though we also get an additional clue out of it.

1 x Studious: A second copy goes a long way towards sustaining your hand size in Act One of the finale.

In conclusion, I'll quickly just mention a few cards I saw in a lot of other Kate decks but which I didn't rate for various reasons. They might be good in other decks, but they weren't a good fit here.

Empirical Hypothesis: Succeeding by three is not a reliable trigger condition with the Hard token bag here (except perhaps in Act One and Two of the finale) and dumping more XP into it did not feel good as none of the other trigger conditions are particularly reliable either. I think it can probably be made to work, I just think it lacks consistency compared to other options.

Alchemical Distillation: This one takes up a hand slot so I dropped it as soon as I removed Tinker, and the deck was better for it. Unearth the Ancients ate its lunch in the economy department and Surgical Kit was a much more reliable option when it came to healing.

"Fool me once...": I saw this one in a lot of Kate decks because it removes her weakness from play, but I think spending two slots just for that is a bad idea when you consider other possible mitigations, and it doesn't do nearly enough against other treacheries to justify the purchase. I can understand it if you're planning to make a standard Seeker Deck Cycle build, but I'm always skeptical of decks like those (and other combo decks) being consistent (or even viable) on higher difficulties.

And one final note about Kate's basic weakness, Arm Injury. It wasn't a problem most of the time, but when it was a problem it was a really big problem, mostly with regards to triggering scenario card abilities. The Surgical Kit was her only way to remove it, but you still can't take another activate action on the same turn you remove it.

I just realized Hand-Eye Coordination gets round its restriction because you're not actually activating the kit, you're just resolving an action on it. Huh, that would've helped a lot in the finale when her action economy got all jammed up by it.

And that's it. Let me know if you have any questions. Lily's deck can be found here.