Card draw simulator
| Derived from |
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| None. Self-made deck here. |
| Inspiration for |
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| None yet |
MuKen · 340
Overview
On its surface, this deck is a basic Blood Magic Parallel Agnes deck. The aim is to play lots of spell events by sacrificing health to recurse them back into your deck and pull them right away using Heirloom of Hyperborea. You aim to get that out as quickly as possible, and then burn your deck down until there is only 1 card left so that you can quickly redraw the spells you play.
The interesting thing is that instead of paying for this the more common way with Hallowed Mirror, you will instead use Memories of Another Life to pull Bianca "Die Katz" into play. Then you will piss her off to get Bianca "Die Katz" chasing you, and then sacrifice health to Deny Existence her over and over every time she attacks. This costs 1 health, and you get 2 back, for a net effective 1 healing every turn, and 1 more every time you get an AoO, which can pay for all your spellcasting. Even better, there's a huge number of enemies from the encounter deck and from other investigator's weaknesses you can just hoover up and deny all day so you never have to bother killing them. A bunch of them will even give you free health and sanity, and possibly other things too.
This is built at 22xp as a basis to build on top of, but there's lots you can add to it with more xp.
Endstate
To get fully "set up", you want to have Heirloom of Hyperborea in play and Bianca "Die Katz" engaged with you. You want one card left in your deck, and 8 cards in your hand. Any one of those 9 can be the one in the deck, but in total those 9 should be:
The rest of your cards should either be in your play area or discard pile.
Now, since you have a library of 9 spell events, and they all cost 2 or less resources, you can use Agnes Baker ability to sacrifice one health every time you play one. This makes it free, and means it will always get shuffled back into your deck instead of discarded (note that per rules errata, in order to benefit from this, your deck cannot be empty, thus the need to have a rotation of 9 events, and double up on any ones you want to be spammable). Immediately afterwards, you can trigger Heirloom of Hyperborea to draw one of the two cards in deck. Skip this part on your last casting of the turn so that you will have room to draw one during the draw phase without emptying out your deck.
Now, you may be thinking, 3 or more health per turn is a lot to spend, and you're right. Fortunately, Bianca "Die Katz" is engaged with you, and every time she attacks you can spend 1 health to Deny Existence to get 2 health back. Since we have two of these, even if it remains in the deck, we will always have one in hand to play again. This means you get 1 health every turn during the enemy phase, and you also get 1 every time you move, investigate, do location actions, etc. That 1 health can pay for Read the Signs so that investigating for 2 clues is always free.
Pretty much you only won't get one health when you are dealing with enemies, since attacking won't give an AoO. Which is fine, because you can deal with those enemies by casting Drain Essence which pays for itself and gives you one more health besides (remember than you can transfer 2 damage even if they only have one health).
Note that with this, there will be many turns where you get more health than you need. This is fine, there's extras we can spend that on. For one, when you attack an enemy, you can force an AoO by preceding that attack with Cosmic Revelation, and choosing your free play to be your attack spell. This will cost an extra health, and get you an extra health, so there's no reason not to do this with every attack. As a result all your teammates will get either a free play or draw, this is huge for table economy. In fact, you can toss this in before all other spells too if you don't mind losing the extra health (because you can't get two AoO off the same action).
Next, if you have health to spare, you can use Spectral Razor instead of Drain Essence as your attack to kill enemies faster. Though keep in mind, there's lots of enemies you can freely just let you follow around, Denying Existence all day to get even more healing. This makes this build great for some of those scenarios where for whatever reason you might not want to kill everything.
Finally, you can spend a health any time someone in your vicinity messes up to save them with Time Warp. This greatly adds to the security of your table.
Getting set up
Your topmost priority during mulligan and early in the game is to get Heirloom of Hyperborea into play. Once you have it, you will have a huge amount of draw that very quickly finishes the rest of your setup for you. So mulligan hard for your signature, for tutors like Backpack, and for extra draw like Scroll of Secrets and Arcane Initiate.
Since you won't have Bianca "Die Katz" until the last part of your setup, rely on soak from your allies and your two Talisman of Protection to pay for all the spellcasting you intend to do. At some point you will get Memories of Another Life, it may be tempting to try to get Bianca "Die Katz" right away, but do keep in mind if you fail the skill test you don't get her. So try only to do this when you have Time Warp to cover for you. Remember also you can do this on other investigator's skill tests if someone has something more reliable to try on.
Once you do have Bianca "Die Katz" in play and have whittled down your deck enough to be confident in always having Deny Existence on hand, feel free to grab 5 free resources from her and fail the test to get Bianca "Die Katz" in play.
Spending more XP
There's obviously many things you might want to spend XP on to improve, basically the entire set of spell events represents juicty targets. Here's a few high priority ones that will do a lot for your efficiency:
- 6xp: Swap your 2x Talisman of Protection and 1x Arcane Initiate for Occult Reliquary, Hallowed Mirror, and 2x Eldritch Initiation. The Eldritch Initiation have 3 arcane slots for 3 draw, until you play Hallowed Mirror at which point they go back to 2. Still a very good way to accelerate the deck setup, and the Soothing Melody themselves will help with the health mitigation to make up for the soak you gave up.
- 5xp: Swap out 1 Drain Essence for another Memories of Another Life. Assuming you already did the earlier upgrade first, you probably want to be keeping Soothing Melody in your spell rotation now instead of that Drain Essence anyway, just as a backup in case something goes wrong. You can use the extra Memories of Another Life to pull in a free Leo De Luca for an extra action per turn. Actions are great, since all other costs to playing your spells are already mitigated.
- Interesting options for your spell library: Up to you what you want to give up to make room for these, but I find Ward of Protection handy to give your teammates some protection from the encounter deck. Moonlight Ritual can help clean up a bunch of problems, and also let you play some more doom heavy assets yourself. Storm of Spirits can be great for dealing with crowds (although given you already have such great enemy management, maybe not a priority). If you have some way to generate bless, Radiant Smite can be a nice card to spam at the boss whenever he shows up. One thing you could consider towards that end is playing Tides of Fate every single turn so that all curse is always bless. Recharge is a great card if you want to start toting some chargeable assets (3x Segment of Onyx comes to mind here...) and remember you can charge your teammates with this too.