Cursed Art Therapy: CurSefina | HC 2P Guide

CurSefina

Hello everyone! After my recent series I thought I'd post a few new decks from time to time released as a two player pair. For this Cursed Art Therapy duo, on the art side we have Sefina with Rod of Carnamagos paired to Read the Signs and Spectral Razor (with the Rod almost guaranteeing recursion when it's used in their test windows). Eye of the Djinn further makes use of tokens for extra actions. This deck is paired to Carolyn Kills (link here), which I've also posted today - enjoy!

Overview

• Rod of Carnamagos pulls a huge amount of tokens in a test window, essentially more or less guaranteeing you recur Read the Signs or Spectral Razor. Read the Signs and Spectral Razor are recurred on any symbol token being revealed, not just tokens, and so your chances of recurring these become very large when using the Rod in the same action.

• This deck has 5 hand slots with Astral Mirror and Occult Reliquary, with Mirror also giving you a free action to play hand assets. This is used to take Eye of the Djinn, Thieves' Kit, Rod of Carnamagos and two Ritual Candles all at once. If you use Eye of the Djinn with Rod of Carnamagos, you become very likely to get an extra action while testing with a meaty base 5 for any stat. Any Eye of the Djinn test is boostable to 9 with Promise of Power, making you supremely flexy. While having all assets out is nice, there's a lot of power in just the Rod and the Eye together, and so the upgrade track reflects with - with Occult Reliquary and a second copy of Astral Mirror featuring lower down.

• Friends in Low Places with the Experienced and Clever allows you to manipulate your deck like a dream - looking at the top 9 cards, spending resources to take items, and then putting them back on top of your deck as you choose. You can use this to push Stars of Hyades to the bottom of your deck, especially if using The Painted World for extra copies of Friends. If you had the bad luck to not draw Friends in Low Places in your opening hand and then Stars of Hyades pops up, odds are Friends in Low Places will come up sooner or later from the subsequent reshuffle - making this reliable. Versatile as a later upgrade allows you to draw spells.

• Faustian Bargain, Promise of Power and Accursed all give you means to add to the bag, with Faustian Bargain in particular being a persistent means to do this with The Painted World. Favor of the Moon gives you a guaranteed if you're using Spectral Razor or Read the Signs without activating Rod of Carnamagos (e.g. no non-Elite enemies in play, or you've already used it).

• For synergy with Carolyn's deck, Sefina provides a lot more enemy management here (damage with Sneak Attack and Spectral Razor, evade actions, Rod of Carnamagos) allowing Carolyn to pick and choose enemies to kill with Wicked Athame. Sefina can also tee-up a good Dynamite Blast action from Carolyn by evading multiple enemies and moving to a different location. On top of that, Sefina has the usual splashy actions of a Rogue (with Eye of the Djinn and Leo De Luca providing up to two, and Astral Mirror providing a further one for playing items) and they can ace any test with Promise of Power and the Eye - meaning there's very little to cause you alarm.

Campaign starter and planned progression

Two Arcane Research makes this a 30 XP deck. There's one point of overlap between this and the partner Carolyn deck, and that's Occult Reliquary. If you don't want to proxy a permanent card, Carolyn can take Relic Hunter instead. 0 XP deck is below (and link here):

Candidate spells for Arcane Research upgrades are below, and should be upgraded whenever is convenient:

• Read the Signs → Read the Signs ••

• Spectral Razor → Spectral Razor ••

A recommended order of purchases/upgrades is:

• Friends in Low Places - Clever

• 1 x Drawn to the Flame → 1 x Four of Cups

• 1 x Leather Jacket → 1 x Moxie •••

• 1 x Delve Too Deep → 1 x Astral Mirror

• Friends in Low Places - Experienced

• 1 x Rod of Carnamagos → 1 x Rod of Carnamagos ••

• 1 x Delve Too Deep → 1 x Rod of Carnamagos ••

• 1 x Storm of Spirits → 1 x Eye of the Djinn

• Occult Reliquary

• 1 x Storm of Spirits → 1 x Astral Mirror

• Friends in Low Places - Versatile keyword 'Spell'. While this doesn't give you the resource-less draw which Versatile can offer, it does allow you to draw both Spells and Items instead.

• 1 x Diabolical Luck → 1 x Favor of the Moon

• 1 x Diabolical Luck → 1 x Moxie •••

Final thoughts

Read the Signs •• and Spectral Razor •• are huge additions to Sefina's card pool, especially when paired to Arcane Research so they're 0 XP cost and doubly so on a deck to boost recursion. Sefina is an unusual potential user who doesn't actually need spells in Arcane slots to function well, so you can fill your hands with Curse tech like Rod of Carnamagos •• and Eye of the Djinn - with Eye of the Djinn in particular rarely finding a home in other Curse decks. The Rod's perfect synergy with Spectral Razor and Read the Signs makes this all sing, with Astral Mirror rounding this all off by eliminating the action cost to get assets into your hands. Overall I think this is a strong way to run Sefina in any curse team, so I highly recommend!

In terms of a partner, naturally this deck doesn't use any Seeker tech. Carolyn is quite a nice partner as she can take most of the Seeker tech and The Key of Solomon plus unused Mystic curse tech like Wicked Athame, giving her some bonafide enemy management. Carolyn is also perhaps stronger at clue-finding than Sefina, while Sefina is good at setting up Carolyn's kills with her own enemy management, so they compliment each other really nicely. A full write up of the Carolyn Kills partner deck is here. Hope you enjoy the pair and consider giving Cursed Art Therapy a try!