Zoey and her Bag of Knives

Basic things:

You've got some knives. You've got a Bandolier to hold your knives, you've got a Backpack to store your knives when you're not using them, a weird tooth and your mate Charles who can get you knives on the cheap.

The gameplan is basically to use your knives as much as possible, you dont really care about taking damage or drawing treacheries or anything, in fact you generally want to be taking as many encounter cards as possible since encounter cards convert at a good rate into Knife Opportunities. You handle the application of knives, so your teammates can handle the... non-Knife activities. Tooth of Eztli helps here because you really want to not care at all about the cards you draw, and ideally to be able to "Let me handle this!" them off your teammates. On the Hunt helps here too, you want to draw enemies because drawing an enemy refunds the resource cost of the event and puts the encounter card firmly in your wheelhouse... or knifehouse.

"If it bleeds..." is there because realistically we will be tanking some number of hits from some scary things and 6 sanity isnt all that much a lot of the time. Ideally this will be upgraded out though.

Upgrade path:

There aren't any upgraded knives that we can take, tragically, which means the priority upgrades for this deck are cards to let you deploy the 0xp knives more effectively.

Ever Vigilant is a great card in most guardian decks and its great here too, you can play so many knives!

Taunt helps us get into Knife distance of our enemies quickly, the upgraded version is nice, though be wary of drawing a punishing weakness right before fighting a bunch of enemies.

Vicious Blow, our knives may not do as much damage as the typical guardian heavy-hitters but with upgraded vicious blow we can still get 4 and 6 damage actions when we need them.

but if that's not enough... Blood Eclipse can get us the rest of the way. Zoey has the highest willpower of a guardian so far, and 9 health to boot, making her the perfect candidate for blue's first spell.

Some other options include Brother Xavier, since you want to be following your clue-getters around anyway you can get a lot of value out Xavier and you can actually afford to play him since you're saving so much money on weapons. And since you're playing a tank anyway, why not spend some of the exp you're saving not buying superweapons on Armor of Ardennes, this preserves your health points for those big Blood Eclipse turns and lets you use Heroic Rescue with abandon.

In terms of other exp sinks, we also might consider Monster Slayer to help us with the big enemies that 2 damage chips with Machete are too slow for. Or for more resilience, First Aid gives us something to do with the spare actions we'd otherwise be wasting not using our knives, and lets us tank more hits from the enemies that would otherwise be threatening our less combat inclined friends.

And of course, as mentioned above you may want to upgrade out the "If it bleeds..." for an "I've had worse…"

Good Investigator Pairings

Uhh honestly anyone who can gather clues effectively since we cant do that at all. Luckily we dont rely much on our partner for anything else since we bring combat and healing to the table and can even take care of their treachery cards for them, though someone with access to "You handle this one!" certainly helps in that regard.

Possible Changes

Scene of the Crime combines well with On the Hunt if you really need to gather clues for some reason. Evidence! too. I'd suggest going down a few copies of some combination of "If it bleeds...", "Let me handle this!", Dodge, Heroic Rescue depending on your investigator composition and campaign.

Smoking Pipe could go in place of Liquid Courage if you want to include something like Shortcut as one of your five out of faction slots.

If you're really taking too much damage you could include Emergency Aid though honestly without Beat Cop or Guard Dog its harder to get value out of this card. If you really want to play it, cut "If it bleeds..." or "Let me handle this!" or maybe Liquid Courage if damage is much more of a concern than horror.