Lola Hayes Performs Many Miracles

Deck Overview

This is the completed high-experience version of the Lola Hayes Performs a Miracle deck. At this point, the deck has everything it needs and any future upgrades only make a minute difference.

Lola Hayes is the only investigator who can take Will to Survive along with the full suite of extra action cards (Ace in the Hole, Borrowed Time, Leo De Luca, and Quick Thinking). With the boost from Dark Horse, you will be taking multiple 7-12 action turns where you automatically succeed at every test. While this would normally be an inconsistent gimmick, because Lola has access to high-level cards, we can draw through our entire deck in the first 10 rounds of a scenario with only 7 actions devoted to doing so. The result is a perfectly consistent, very fast, minimal setup deck that can almost entirely ignore the chaos bag.

This build is a result of fine-tuning on Hard in 2-player campaigns and standalone missions and has worked incredibly well, often trivializing scenarios.

Edit: Someone else posted a similar style of deck recently for Wendy that looks like it has the potential to be even stronger once it's set up. You might be interested in checking out Dai's creation as well: Chaos bag? Never heard of it...

Gameplay

This deck is designed to play very quickly with minimal setup. You should almost never use the “Resource” action (it’s a Dark Horse build) or the “Draw” action (your cards are more than sufficient).

At any point in time, your hand will consist either of cards that allow you be immediately helpful (Flashlight, Drawn to the Flame, and skill cards), all your combo pieces (which you should play), or lots of card draw that will quickly become one of the first two. Assuming you never “Draw” outside of upkeep or cards, you’ll get through your whole deck by round 10.

We’re not the best at fighting, but we have the tools to succeed at it. I try to reserve Unexpected Courage to pass the more difficult combat tests as we don’t have many cards to commit. Even then, our odds of success are often not too high, so the first time I use Will to Survive in a scenario is often to fight some nasty enemy. Speaking of which…

Don’t wait until the stars align to use Will to Survive. As soon as you have 3-4 difficult tests to take in a single turn, you should switch to , play it, and pass them. If you have cards that give you more actions, you need to do some minimal setup the round before. There are three options:

1. Have Improvisation in hand
2. Have Improvisation in your discard pile and Eidetic Memory in hand, then and your turn as
3. Play Emergency Cache and switch to

One more resource in the upkeep phase and you’re ready to play Will to Survive (or use Improvisation to play it), fight, switch roles to , play your Ace in the Hole / Quick Thinking, and take an impressive amount of guaranteed successes.

• If you have Borrowed Time in play, you can make this even stronger by storing actions from the previous turn. Unlike the other effects, this can be repeated each time you use Will to Survive.

In almost every scenario, you will take two 7+ action turns where you pass every skill test. It's hard to properly express just how absurdly powerful that is until you get a chance to play it. Playing in two-player, I frequently didn't get a chance to read the last 1-2 agendas because I ended the scenario too quickly.

Mulligan

The only cards you really need are Dark Horse and a weapon, but there are other cards I will often keep in my opening hand:

• Preposterous Sketches is 3 free draws instead of the one you'd get from mulliganing it.
  • Laboratory Assistant is similar, if you can afford to play her.
• Leo De Luca get better the earlier you play him.
• Drawn to the Flame / Flashlight so you can start finding clues turn 1 or 2.
• Improvisation or Emergency Cache if I have what I need, but will need more resources to play them quickly.

This deck has so much card draw that you should practically never keep Will to Survive or any of the cards that combo well with it, since you're practically guaranteed to see them in the first few turns of a scenario anyways. The only exception is Ace in the Hole, which is so good you might want to have it early.

Switching Roles and Crisis of Identity

When we draw a card in the Upkeep Phase, we risk Crisis of Identity discarding all cards in play of our current role. The general strategy is to switch to or at the end of the round before you want to play those assets, play them, then switch roles to avoid losing anything important like Dark Horse, our weapon, Leo De Luca, or Borrowed Time. This should rarely happen as the deck was built with this in mind:

• Other than Will to Survive (immediately followed by Resourceful to get it back to our hand), this deck has no cards to play or commit, so you only need to switch to while fighting enemies.
• Similarly, the only time you need to switch to is if you’re using Borrowed Time in preparation for playing Will to Survive or have just played it and want to use your other extra action cards.

We will spend most of the scenario as a (or when we want to play Drawn to the Flame). Since every one of our cards draws us more cards, we’re extremely likely to draw Crisis of Identity as a . This is why we run no assets we care about and you should very liberally take damage/horror onto your Laboratory Assistant and Mr. "Rook", as they aren’t going to be staying around for very long.

Card Choices

First, we have an assembly of cards that help us find clues with minimal setup:

• Flashlight makes low-shroud locations guaranteed clues
• Drawn to the Flame makes high-shroud locations guaranteed clues

Our cards are naturally focused around enabling Will to Survive:

• Resourceful acts as a 3rd and 4th copy, enabling us to use it early without waiting for all the combo pieces.
• Dark Horse boosts our base stats up high enough that we should be able to pass pretty much any test without committing cards once we play Will to Survive. Lola's well-rounded stats also mean we use all four stat bonuses fairly effectively.
  • Emergency Cache gets us just enough resources to play Will to Survive or just setup quickly
• We want to be able to fight without needing to switch roles, so we take weapons. Fire Axe combos nicely with Dark Horse and Baseball Bat has no chance of breaking if we don't pull tokens from the chaos bag.

Our cards are exclusively focused on giving us additional actions on the turns we play Will to Survive

• Leo De Luca also happens to just be a great card
• Quick Thinking is one of very few free action effects
• Lola is the only investigator who can then also take Ace in the Hole and Borrowed Time, either one of which is enough to turn Will to Survive into the best card in the game.

Our cards are entirely focused on drawing the above:

• Laboratory Assistant not only draws two cards, but also gives us a nice damage/horror soak.
• Preposterous Sketches is free and quickly fills up our hand
• Eidetic Memory can either replay Preposterous Sketches to quickly go through our whole deck or let us Improvisation again (either as a part of our Will to Survive combo or just to get a great discount on a card we want to play).
• Mr. "Rook" serves a similar purpose to Laboratory Assistant, but has an additional benefit: we actively want to find our Crisis of Identity weakness among the searched cards because it means it won't be discarding our weapons / Dark Horse or making us lose Leo De Luca + Borrowed Time. The quicker we can get them out of our deck, the less risky it will be to end our turn in or in preparation for our combo.

Luxury Purchases

Since we were running both Charon's Obol and Delve Too Deep (x2), you'll likely have some extra experience near the end of the campaign. While the deck already has everything it needs, there are a few more small improvements:

• Timeworn Brand is an incredible weapon.
• Upgraded Emergency Cache gives us even more card draw.
• Upgraded Leo De Luca makes setting up one action quicker.
• This deck already trivializes much of the game, so you might as well take Key of Ys for even greater shenanigans.