Hanks was boring. But that's until he found a fun gift from Nodens

Credit: Tiziano Baracchi and Adam Doyle

As always, don't forget to press the ♥ if you like the Deck and want to give visibility to my work :)

Hank is one of the main reasons why I didn't do a deck series with every investigator from the Feast of Hemlock Vale expansion. No matter how much I tried, I couldn't make anything fun out of him.

This changed with the release of the Gift of Nodens in the following expansion. I have tried this card in a few different investigators, but I found it particularly at home in this Hank build, where it adds depth to what is otherwise a very dull investigator.

This deck was built both with Ascetic and in a legal Standalone xp threshold, and has a suggested upgrade path so it can be used in as many situations as possible.

• Overview

• Main Strategy

• Plough Through Your Deck

• What? Hank is Evolving

• Other Cards

• Upgrade Path

• Final Thoughts

• Draw through your deck quickly to find Gift of Nodens and have skills in your discard pile

• Use Gift of Nodens to commit your best skills from your discard pile, and loop them infinitely, never re-shuffling your deck.

Power draw

This deck packs a lot of draw, to go through most of your deck as fast as possible:

• At a Crossroads, Glory, Daring, Overpower, Take Heart, and Unrelenting combine for a total of 22 cards.

  • With 1 , Take Heart is easy to use at any moment and worth it even if you use an action for it.

To thin the deck, we also use Short Supply, which is in my opinion a great card for most :

• Improvised Shield, Profane Idol, Improvised Weapon and Persistence can be used directly from your discard pile, making it a second hand.

• The main risk is if you throw away your only Gift of Nodens. To mitigate it, we have:

  • 2 copies of Resourceful

  • And in the unfortunate scenario when Gift of Nodens and both Resourceful are thrown by Short Supply (2.2% chance), we have a last resort with Scrounge for Supplies.

Because Short Supply will inevitably mill some of your draw options, it will in practice take a little longer to run through most of your deck, but it should still happen in about 10 rounds.

Setup

After running through most of your deck, you should be able to have:

• A lot of soak with the combination of Improvised Shield and Profane Idol

  • Because Hank Samson is a natural health/sanity sponge already, you can wait a little before setting them up, but you also take the risk that the pressure becomes too high at the end of the scenario. My recommendation is to just wait for these inevitable moments when you have nothing to do as a fighter and leverage these turns to play your assets.

• Reliably deal with the scenario tests thanks to your good defensive stats supplemented by Sparrow Mask

• Be ready to fight any foe with Meat Cleaver + Profane Idol, or go hard with Brute Force + Long Shot

• As soon as you have Gift of Nodens on the table, phase 2 begins.

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Whether you made it to Assistant Hank or Warden Hank already doesn't really matter that much, what really makes the difference is that you have a discard pile full of great skills and Gift of Nodens on the table.

• Your primary targets are:

  • Brute Force for its raw fight power

  • Resourceful to recycle Brute Force

  • Unrelenting to re-fill your hand with discard fodders

Your loop should look like this:

1. Commit Brute Force from your hand
2. Commit Resourceful from your hand to get Brute Force back
3. Commit Brute Force from your hand
4. Commit Resourceful from your discard pile with Gift of Nodens to get Brute Force back
5. Commit Brute Force from your hand
6. Commit Brute Force from your discard pile with Gift of Nodens
7. Commit Unrelenting to draw Brute Force and Resourceful
8. Repeat

For this loop to work, we need a couple of things:

• Tests to commit Resourceful to. This can be Meat Cleaver, Improvised Weapon, the second copy of Brute Force or any scenario test.

• Cards to discard from your hand:

1. During the initial power draw phase, you should collect a bunch of cards that have little value, like second copies of your assets or cards that can only be played from the discard pile like Improvised Shield. Hold on to these cards so they can become discard fodder for Gift of Nodens when you have it.

2. At one point, you will run out of cards in your hand to discard, and this is where Persistence comes into play.

   • You can commit it from your discard, and it goes in your deck, so once you draw it again, you have a card to throw and add to the loop. With it, you can make sure that you never empty your deck.

   • I recommend using it from your discard pile as soon as you go under 4 cards in your deck.

   • Persistence is the best card in this role because it is the easiest to use from your discard pile as it can be committed to any test, compared to Improvised Weapon which requires an enemy to fight. However, for the perfect loop, it is best to have a second discard fodder that you shuffle into your deck. This can be Improvised Weapon that you play from the discard pile, or if you can afford it, the second copy of Persistence.

   • Fortunately, Gift of Nodens places the card at the bottom of your deck before Persistence/Improvised Weapon are shuffled into your deck, so if you commit Persistence to a test and use Gift of Nodens during the same test, and your deck is empty, you will be able to shuffle Persistence with the target of Gift of Nodens and end the test with 2 cards in your deck.

If you are playing this deck as a replacement for a lost investigator, you actually have one more experience point to use thanks to the combination of Ascetic and In the Thick of It! So you could add:

• A second Persistence for the reason explained just above.

• Nature of the Beast if you want a few more options to get clues.

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Ascetic / 9xp Standalone deck

• I recommend using In the Thick of It with 1 damage and 1 horror, so Meat Cleaver can give +2 from turn one.

• Meat Cleaver is great in this deck, as Hank Samson can be in the 3-sanity zone for a long time, while being perfectly safe as he still has a full transformation coming.

  • You can get a horror and heal it with the first form of Hank Samson, or even assign it to the Profane Idol and heal the first form. Because Profane Idol is so cheap and so easy to re-play, it almost feels like playing a 0xp Timeworn Brand.

• Sparrow Mask is great in this deck because you can choose when you want to receive pings from Meat Cleaver and refill it. Don't forget that it gets an offering even if you assign the Meat Cleaver horror to Profane Idol. With 3 base skill value in your defensive stats and the mask, you should be able to pass most and tests a scenario throws at you.

• Improvised Weapon has 2 roles in this deck. It is a backup weapon for when you run through your deck the first time, before you find Brute Force and Meat Cleaver, and in phase 2, you should try as often as possible to put one back in your deck to use it as discard fodder.

• Stouthearted is great, if you can afford the resource cost. To be fully fair, I committed it more than I have actually played it. But when I do, it always feels great. I recommend keeping it in hand until the second half of the scenario, when your setup is complete and the pressure on your resources is decreased. I liked it most as a panic button when we draw more enemies at once than our team can handle in a single turn.

• Quick Thinking is great in this deck for this case that always seems to happen: you are missing exactly one action to clear the board, because you had to engage the enemy first, drew more than one enemy this turn, or even because you had to move to the enemy's location first.

• True Understanding is a good way to leverage your high defensive stats for some easy clues.

  • As you have little control on where and when you will have to take a scenario, if you can spend the experience, I prefer Nature of the Beast, as it is extremely likely that at least one investigator will easily deal with one treachery card out of 3 (especially considering Hank's defensive stats), and a clue at any revealed location is almost always helpful.

19xp Standalone deck

While playtesting, I actually preferred the deck with 10 more experience points even if it means one more weakness. The advantage with this deck is that you never re-shuffle your discard pile into your deck, so once you dealt with your weaknesses once, you will never see them again.

• A second copy of Gift of Nodens helps with having it in play earlier, so you can start to loop your powerful skills earlier.

• I really liked Jessica Hyde instead of Improvised Shield, as she also comes with a static , which helps landing your 3-damage Brute Force.

• As mentioned earlier, Nature of the Beast can bring some good value in this deck, with almost no downside, especially as it can be re-triggered any time with Resourceful.

This is what the deck looks like

Campaign deck

With more experience, you can upgrade the deck in a direction that gives it more flex options:

• Replacing Profane Idol with Plucky (3) makes you a 4-4-4-4 investigator if you choose the Assistant form and it can be refreshed by your unlimited stream of Resourceful if defeated.

• Add Dark Horse (5) and you are 5-5-5-5 when you have no resources, which you don't need once you have your few assets in play.

• Finally, with Scrapper (3), you can now spend a resource to boost all four skill values.

• After that, you can do some quality of life upgrades like:

  • "Look what I found!" (2) instead of True Understanding to get clues on 3-shroud locations with your leftover resources.

  • Upgrade Improvised Weapon (2) so when using it, you replace the card that was discarded by Gift of Nodens, making the loop easier to maintain.

  • Nightmare Bauble as a -guard, with a downside that you should easily be able to deal with.

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Link to the 0xp deck

(View at arkham-starter.com)

Link to the full xp deck

After a little while trying different versions of Hank Samson, this is the first time I actually play something that I would qualify as really fun with him.

At first I wanted to run this deck with Improvised Shield, Profane Idol and Gift of Nodens as the only assets, but it was not reliable enough and Meat Cleaver really added a lot to the viability of the deck.

I have played variants of this deck, centred around Gift of Nodens with Calvin Wright (link) for a more flexy deck, but Calvin Wright is really not so good with Ascetic and Standalone... However, if I were to take Calvin through a campaign, I would use this deck!
I also tried with Stella Clark to also interact with her signature, but I ended up preferring Hank Samson because it gives something to an otherwise lacklustre character.

Overall, I was happy to use this card, which is my favourite of the Drowned City Investigator Expansion, and I hope this will remain a solid legacy deck for future players!

Oh and shout out to @ethereal64 for the deck name inspiration.

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