Team Covenant · 222
When I first Joe Diamond on stream with the help of chat, it came together like a lot of community built decks do - generically good cards that are traditionally associated with a particular investigator. After our deckbuilding stream though, Steven and I spent the weekend diving into deckbuilding for our new investigators.
As we were texting about our decks over that weekend, he sent me a concept that has totally changed how I build decks for Arkham Horror. Effectively, he was building his deck as though he already had 40 XP. This version of the deck is ultimately the deck is he was looking to upgrade into over the course of the campaign. To no one's surprise, knowing where you want to end up makes it a lot easier to get there!
So, I went started putting together the end-stage version of Joe Diamond for our campaign and it looked exactly like this deck (which would ultimately be the deck I ended up with by the finale of our campaign).
The key concept of this version of Joe Diamond is to draw a ton of cards through his Insight Deck with cards like Cryptic Research, Preposterous Sketches, and No Stone Unturned. This makes Curiosity very good and ensures he has a hand full of great cards to contribute to tests.
One of the most notable cards in the deck is Dr. William T. Maleson. He lets you avoid the worst cards from the deck at the cost of dropping a clue onto your current location. Joe has a lot of ways to make use of these clues, including Working a Hunch to simply grab it right back or Crack the Case on a high shroud location to gain a lot of resources.
This leads us to one of my favorite cards in all of Arkham, Deciphered Reality. From the moment I first read this card, I just couldn't get over it. Not only can it potentially be incredibly powerful depending on the scenario, but it pairs absolutely perfectly with a deck centered around using Dr. William T. Maleson.
While the deck is fantastic at gathering clues, I love that Joe is not a sitting duck when it comes to enemies. Between his natural combat skill of 4, his Detective's Colt 1911s, and cards like Vicious Blow, he can definitely deal with enemies when he needs to get the job done.
This deck is extremely good and easily one of the most fun I've played with its theme of having hunches throughout the game!
Zach