Shadowboxing with || Front Lola - Deck Guide

Shadowboxing with || Front Lola

Highlights

• A high-powered, event-based fighter: Crush high-health enemies in one to two attacks. Fuel your engine with every kill.

• Unique Synergies: Start the game with six extra cards (Bewitching; Stick to the Plan) and four extra resources (Astounding Revelation). Exploit the synergy cycle with permanents from every class.

• The right tool ROLE for the job: Make the most out of card traits by searching your deck with Boxing Gloves and Arcane Initiate. Strategically plan ahead your roles to keep your economy up and your enemies down.

Overview

Parallel Lola introduced a whole new way to build her. No longer must we depend on static effects. Instead we can make use of , , and abilities from cards in play regardless of their role. With this in mind, I set out to make a fighter Lola relying on strong assets. However, while scrolling through the assets my eyes landed on old favorite - Boxing Gloves.

A search through spirit events also shows a surprising amount of overlap with spell events (all-stars like Ward of Protection and Spectral Shield) for another favorite in Arcane Initiate. These two traits already have some of the best fighting events in the game such as Spectral Razor, Sweeping Kick, and Toe to Toe. The overlap brings in the incredibly powerful Ríastrad and Radiant Smite as well.

Lastly, being Lola, we are going to want to use permanents and high-impact assets to take advantage of the suite of synergy cards at max value: Cheat the System, Gang Up (notably a spirit) and Call for Backup.

Starter Deck and Upgrade Path

In the Thick of It makes this a 29 XP deck. I'd recommend even split, but there is an argument for 2x horror since Ready for Anything is better than Second Wind and Arcane Initiate has two sanity. Level 0 deck is below and linked Here. If you need a bit more juice in the first scenario, hold off on the Charon's Obol and grab the first two upgrades.

Recommended upgrade / purchase order:

1x Read the Signs → 1x Brand of Cthugha

2x Bum's Rush → 2x Ríastrad

1x Ready for Anything → 1x Gang Up

1x Toe to Toe → 1x Gang Up

1x Faustian Bargain → 1x Cheat the System

1x Decorated Skull → 1x Cheat the System

1x Overpower → 1x [Sweeping Kick

1x Stick to the Plan

1x Second Wind → 1x Call for Backup

1x Overpower → 1x [Sweeping Kick

1x Bewitching

1x Faustian Bargain → 1x Ace in the Hole

More Upgrades

Meaningful / priority upgrades not included in 29 exp decklist (not really priority-order):

1x One-Two Punch → 1x Call for Backup

2x Boxing Gloves → 2x Boxing Gloves

1x Ready for Anything → 1x At a Crossroads

1x Astounding Revelation → 1x At a Crossroads

1x Decorated Skull → 1x Decorated Skull

2x Stand Together → 2x Stand Together

2x Ward of Protection → 2x Ward of Protection

1x False Covenant

2x Studious

1x Wolf Mask → 1x Geas or 1x Prophetic

If your team supplies enough tokens to make Radiant Smite worth it, I would build towards the following to keep your Stick to the Plan working:

1x Stand Together → 1x Emergency Cache or 1x Emergency Cache

1x Ward of Protection → 1x Radiant Smite

1x One-Two Punch or 1x Toe to Toe → 1x Radiant Smite

Notes on Strategy and Deck Building

• The Stat Problem: There are a couple hurdles to overcome here before we get a competent fighter. The first one is the 3/3/3/3 statline. Lola is not particularly good at anything. All our events utilize our stat so we augment the Boxing Gloves boost with Wolf Mask. Using events to do the bulk of damage is good since most events come with built-in stat boosts. On the other hand, we have a limited ability to push through failures. A bad token draw on a Machete is not a big deal, but a bad token on a One-Two Punch leaves us down a card and two resources. For this reason the deck will suffer from high variance and on higher difficulties. We will try to mitigate this by prioritizing events that give substantial stat boosts (Gang Up) or stack multiple stats (Sweeping Kick and Spectral Razor). We will also make heavy use of Brand of Cthugha for consistency. On top of being searchable with Arcane Initiate, being playable under two of our favored roles, and giving a modest boost, we only spend the charges when we succeed, making each copy a guaranteed six damage that plays well with enemies on other investigators. Overpower is a perfectly reasonable option that I haven't tried, but other skills are risky since we can only use them if we are in the right role. To reach higher stats later in the campaign, we can prioritize the upgrade for Boxing Gloves and consider picking up Geas (promise to not commit) or Prophetic (hits all of our events).

• Fueling the Machine: Another risk with event-based fighting is running out of cards and resources and being unable to get the job done. Rather than running a lot of card draw, we rely on the engine of Boxing Gloves and Arcane Initiate to keep the events flowing. Once you have six extra cards every game from Bewitching and Stick to the Plan you will not be lacking for cards. Our money problems are primarily handled by the absolutely busted Cheat the System, giving us 5 resources at speed. We also make great use of Astounding Revelation since we search our deck so much (including two searches right at the start of the game once you pick up the aforementioned permanents). We supplement this with our unique card, (Improvisation, the searchable Stand Together, and the odd use of Decorated Skull. Draw/Economy purchases to consider are the role-agnostic At a Crossroads and upgrades for Stand Together (recommended) or the Decorated Skull. Note that the deck is quite cheap, so don't overprioritize resource upgrades.

• The Art of Not Dying: With 5/5 soak after our In the Thick of It, we are a bit squishy for a fighter. Since we plan on running Charon's Obol, we absolutely need to commit deck slots to staying alive. We have a pretty powerful healing option in Call for Backup (definitely consider a second copy), but most of our soak will come from our single copy of Spectral Shield, which is both a spirit and a spell so is double searchable. We have one searchable battery (Brand of Cthugha) and one rechargeable battery (Decorated Skull) to keep the shield up indefinitely. While Second Wind and Ready for Anything are searchable healing targets, we want to be wary of using reactive cards in || Lola. We typically plan on being a when we draw monsters, so Ready for Anything is the more reasonable. For passing mythos tests, we rely on our ok stats (5 with Wolf Mask) and the searchable Ward of Protection which we will happily fire off anytime we start the round a and draw something even slightly threatening.

• Core Permanents: The goal is to have a permanent of every class so we always max out the synergy cards. For the starter deck, we can grab Short Supply and Shrewd Analysis with no cost for /. I recommend taking The Great Work and In the Thick of It for Charon's Obol to fill out your / requirements. If you or your group doesn't want to play with the 'permadeath' permanents, you can instead rely on the and assets already in the deck to fill this need. Paradoxical Covenant or False Covenant are also reasonable depending on what your teammates are doing and the requirement will be filled by Bewitching eventually. Most of our assets are , so we hold off on a permanent until we pick up Stick to the Plan. As for the two 'start-of-game-search' permanents, my STTP usually has Sweeping Kick, Toe to Toe, One-Two Punch while my Bewitching has Cheat the System, Sweeping Kick, and the copy of Ace in the Hole specifically picked up for this purpose.

• Classes, Roles, and You: Keep in mind that our deck needs at least seven cards of three classes. While nothing says you must keep the same classes, we will always have seven , , and cards. During gameplay we will switching between these three classes, generally focusing on and for the bulk of our assets and combat events. The || front Lola MUST switch every turn so you cannot be two turns in a row. Be wary of doing a setup turn in when you don't have either Brand of Cthugha or some / combat events. s, Crisis of Identity, and Improvisation all change the calculus a bit so you do have to stay on your toes and keep your options open.

• Playing with Others: You will hugely benefit from another investigator putting tokens in the bag, not just for the well-needed stat boost, but because this turns on the doubly searchable Radiant Smite as a combat option. You will be packing the bag with tokens using Ríastrad, so using False Covenant to protect yourself and your team is a good move as well. Consider prioritizing At a Crossroads or Safeguard / Stand Together upgrades based on team requirements and the campaign. You can also grab more Read the Signs and Call for Backup for a bit of help on the clue front.

• On Lola's Full || and Replacement Cards: Parallel Lola's reverse side limits class upgrades to level one, while allowing two favored classes to go up to level four. This does not impact the deck too much since most of the impactful upgrades are already level 1. Full parallel with / focus is definitely an option. This also allows some pretty big buffs, like max level Brand of Cthugha and Ever Vigilant. The biggest downsides are a requirement for six cards of every class and increasing the base deck size to 40. In my opinion, the consistency hit is not worth the higher level cards. If you do pursue this option, is the weakest link. Make heavy use of dilemmas (At a Crossroads) and cards like Hand Hook that get around Lola's restriction. In addition, Lola has the option for replacement unique cards. While the five Leading Lady cards are quite strong for flexible action economy, the weakness Samuel Blake is both disruptive and incredibly dangerous. If you decide to play with these, definitely throw in Blood Eclipse as a doubly searchable, clean way to deal with him once he is in play. Since the standard uniques are solid (Taboo'd Crisis of Identity is not a big deal in this deck - in fact it can be a positive!) I highly recommend not playing with the replacements.