[Taboo 2020] Henry Wan goes Infinite

Card draw simulator

Odds: 0% – 0% – 0% more
Derived from
None. Self-made deck here.
Inspiration for
None yet

suika · 9269

Introduction

This started out as a way to maximize Henry Wan, and chanced into another way to go infinite. No skill tests required. Fully taboo compliant (for now). All it requires is a Gilded Volto.

Note: without Gilded Volto (e.g. in a standalone), stopping time is still possible with another Versatile for Inspiring Presence, but this way is jankier and funnier.

The first building block is the interaction between Henry Wan, Lucky Dice, and Seal of the Seventh Sign:

  • With the sealed, Lucky Dice will never remove itself from the game, and can be used infinitely until you run through the entire bag
  • Lucky Dice isn't restricted to skill tests, so you can cancel every during Henry's ability, and go through the entire chaos bag for a small profit, as are usually less than half the bag.
  • That small profit balloons massively once you flood the bag with 10 and 10 tokens. For an action each round, you can gain +20~ cards/resources from Henry Wan's .
  • Seal of the Seventh sign doesn't even lose any charges as every bad symbol is canceled.

All the money you can't spend

That's well and good, but what to do with the entire deck in our hands?

  1. Swift Reflexes is, as of the current taboo list, the only action gaining card that can be used more than once per round, with the max-once-per-round taboo on Quick Thinking and Ace in the Hole. We have the resources and draw to play two of these. This gives us two .
  2. Henry Wan exhausts. No problem, we'll take an action to play another copy of him over himself, effectively readying him. Then, we activate Henry again, gaining +20 cards/resources, drawing back the discarded Henry Wan and and Swift Reflexes. Put the horror you take from drawing through your deck on Henry.
  3. Go to step 1.

You'll need to build up a small starting pile of cash before starting this loop, since the initial loops of this combo is resource negative — you'll need to choose drawing cards over gaining resources from Henry to draw through your entire deck and pull back Henry and Swift Reflexes from the discard. On subsequent loops, your deck is already in your hand, so the combo becomes cash positive, and consequentially, can go on forever. You now have nigh infinite resources.

Stopping time

Infinite resources is nice, but we haven't gained any actions yet. We spent to play Henry and to activate his ability, and gain per loop from Swift Reflexes. To gain additional actions, we'll need to make Henry Fast. Unfortunately, Dexter's ability is only once per round.

  • We need Gilded Volto to make Henry Fast, and we can make Gilded Volto fast with Joey.
  • Unfortunately, Dexter doesn't have Joey (3), so we still need a way to discard Gilded Volto.
  • The easiest way to discard it is with its own ability by making a fast non- test. Not many of these exist, and I don't think any exists within Dexter's normal cardpool, which is why Versatile's here for for the Cryptographic Cipher. It exhausts as well, but we can simply discard it by fast playing any hand slot asset over it with Joey, drawing it from discard, and fast playing it with Joey.

Since Henry Wan now enters play as Fast, we gain an action each loop (spending some of our nigh infinite resources).

Winning the game with nigh infinite resources, nigh infinite actions, and guaranteed success (thanks to Three Aces) is left as an exercise to the reader.

10 comments

Feb 10, 2021 mattastrophic · 3057

Gilded Volto! Love it!

However, there's one small problem here...

Unique ()

A card with the symbol before its card title is a unique card. There can be no more than one instance of each unique card, by title, in play at any given time.

A player cannot bring into play a unique card if a copy of that card (by title) is already in play.
If a unique encounter card that shares a title with a unique player card would enter play, discard the player card simultaneously as the encounter card enters play.

Feb 10, 2021 suika · 9269

Huh, you learn something new everyday.

Well, there's still the less janky way of simply making a Cryptographic Cipher test with Inspiring Presence and 3 Aces to ready and heal Henry in a fast window instead of replacing him instead of doing this mask jankery.

Feb 10, 2021 suika · 9269

Or alternatively with the Volto, commit 3 Aces to the Cryptographic Cipher test, cycling the deck an additional time and killing off Henry.

Feb 12, 2021 Tyranix · 1

I don't think you actually need either Volto or Versatile? You can kill off Henry Wan with horror from drawing your deck out twice, and actually play Swift Reflexes four times per Henry loop.

If you have Henry in play and activate him, you draw out your deck and he takes 1 horror. Then you play Swift Reflexes twice, and two Tempt Fates to force another reshuffle and kill Henry, picking up your Swift Reflexes again and playing them. If there are more than 7 curses in the bag, you can play Tides of Fate to remove them so that Tempt Fate can still draw cards.

Then you go back and play Henry again and use him, picking up your entire discard pile and giving him the horror.

Feb 14, 2021 koaexe · 25

Following @Tyranix's train of thought, why not use Occult Lexicon for the splash slot from Versatile?
It should go something like this:

  • Action 1: Play Henry Wan
  • Action 2: Use Henry to draw everything and deal him 1 horror
  • Player Window: Play 2 copies of Swift Reflexes for 2 additional actions
  • Action 3: Play Blood-rite to draw the Swift Reflexes(es?) back and kill Henry with the second reshuffle.
  • Player Window: Play 2 copies of Swift Reflexes again
  • Rinse and repeat, each loop granting 1 extra action

According to the rules on Play:

Any time an event card is played, its effects are resolved and it is then placed in its owner's discard pile.

During Action 3, Blood-rite cannot draw itself because its effects haven't finished resolving, and thus is not placed in your discard pile yet. So Blood-rite will only draw the 2 copies of Swift Reflexes assuming they are the only cards in your deck or discard.

Add a Calling in Favors or two to reset Henry when you're swimming in actions but have other cards in the discard and it's pretty much all set, at least I think so.

Feb 16, 2021 Gator_Investor · 1

Sadly this deck doesn't work since Seal and Henry care about when a token is revealed, not when it resolves. Dice doesn't stop the token from being revealed (it even says its effect triggers after the reveal).

Feb 16, 2021 koaexe · 25

Not really. Lucky Dice has been errataed to say "When a non- token is revealed, ... ", so it can ignore the symbol tokens before they have any effect on the game state. (Rules on the term "When")
Seal is also fine because you can just use the dice or Three Aces on any skill test and it literally will never lose a charge. Besides, Henry's ability is not a skill test.

Feb 19, 2021 Gator_Investor · 1

Alright by the errata it works. Annoying that it's impossible to know the true rules by reading the cards.

Feb 20, 2021 Zinjanthropus · 224

@koaexe Is it possible you could pull that off with just Scroll of Prophecies? It does draw 3 cards for one action (and discards one). You do run out of secrets eventually, but IDK, perhaps cycling Enraptured could fix that.

Oct 11, 2023 Emmental · 87

With TSK, you can now use Hit and Run tomake henry wan , removing the need of Versatile/Gilded Volto.