The Hunting Pack - Hard and Blursed

Welcome dear reader,

today I won't to present you one of my favourite investigators of all time. Namely, Patrice Hathaway. Since the start she's been a very solid, needing nearly no setup to get started and a fast and furious play-style. A big thing for her though has been a lack of action to get rid of all her cards, to get the ideal Patrice turn with 0 cards in Upkeep. To come up against that weakness, this deck plays Summoned Hound. Additionally this deck runs a bunch of Innsmouth Bless/Curse tech to turn the Chaos Bag to your favour and get a bunch of Auto-Successes with Ancient Covenant.

Slots:

Hand: Patrice's Violin; Sword Cane.
Accessory: Definitely Token of Faith, and later also Moonstone with Relic Hunter. A second Relic Hunter is definitely also worth it, to keep the bag constantly blessed.
Ally: One or two Summoned Hound, which is definitely possible, because this deck doesn't run any additional ally slots.

Release the Hounds!

Playing the Hound directly from your hand is usually not a good idea, obviously because it shuffles an annoying weakness in your deck, which, with Patrice's insane card draw, you could end up drawing it very soon.
But (big but here) the hounds ability reads: 'As an additional cost to play this card'. When the hound is in your discard pile, you can play A Chance Encounter(2), which reads: 'Put that asset into play ...', which doesn't count as playing the hound, thus giving you a free Investigate/Attack, every. single. turn. Which, especially in solo, is a huge tempo buff.

If the pieces don't fall into place correctly, you have Resourceful to get back your the spectral encounter from the discard pile into your summoned hound. This may seem inefficient action-wise, but it's worth any cost to get the hound into play.

Blurse Gen

Your main Bless/Curse gen comes a card called Tempt Fate. Gives you 3 Blesses and 3 Curses, and a card. Neat and simple, practically reducing your deck size 43 cards. Additionally you have Keep Faith and [Promise of Power](/card/07032.
Keep Faith is a great card to keep the bag generally well-blessed, which can be re-cured with cards like Resourceful. Very standard and strong in Bless deck.
Promise of Power a very, very strong card in any deck, but especially good when your running curse tech. The four -icons permit you to boost any of your stats to a very high amount any time.

Then, to round the pack out you have Token of Faith to turn some of your curses into blesses. That card may seem a bit weak on first glance, but it is definitely worth its cost, with the amounts of bless tokens it can generate you.

General test passing

If we look a the skill-icon chart, you will notice that this deck has a total of 27 Wild-icons, plus allot of other cards that have good universal uses.

Then, you also play another awesome Patrice card, namely Cornered. This does a great job in emptying your hand, while turning every card you toss into an Unexpected Courage.

Honorable Mentions

Patrice's Violin: Possibly one of the best signature cards in the whole game, fitting her play-style perfectly. It is a great resource engine for the whole team. Never use the reshuffle on your Elder Sign, before you have this card in play.

Sword Cane: Super strong hand slot. Great tool to handle an apparent enemy, turning your stat line into a 4244, once per turn.

Drawn to the Flame: Great clueing tool, considering that Patrice is very resilient against anything that the encounter deck throws at you. Gets you two clues from any location. If it's not necessary it also gives you two quite nice icons.

Spectral Razor/Ethereal Form: Two very strong spells that can get you out of sticky situations. The also put you at a high stat, which is great to handle her weakness, which should be get rid of as quick as possible.

Lucky!/Premonition: Great ways to unconditionally counter the chaos bag. Auto-includes in Patrice imo.

Last Chance: Hate to say it again, but another strong include in any Patrice deck. Can get you easily get you 5-Wild-Icons, with discard cards like Cornered and Patrice's Violin in play, and a generally aggressive play-style.

Fearless: With all your card draw you can usually stack up quite a bit of horror. Summoned Hound offers a great damage soak, so Fearless offers a bit of horror cover. When you already have such a big deck size, why not have a solution for everything?

Take Heart/Predestined: Two fail-by techs that are usually worth the action to commit. Take Heart especially for the resources. The card draw is a bit counter intuitive, but this deck has such a high commitment rate and up to two Summoned Hound's that you can usually still use them. Compared to that Predestined is a bit of a weak include, which could very well be replaced by a Guts.

Upgrade path

Your first two buys should be Cornered and then a Relic Hunter. Then your Summoned-Package costs 6xp. With these cards the main deck is already assembled.

At lvl 0 I usually go for a few spells like Sixth Sense and possibly another damage option like Shrivelling or an evasion spell like Mists of R'lyeh. To round it out, Madame Labranche is a super strong lvl 0 ally that offers good soak and more resource gain.

From here on I go to Ancient Covenant, which can turn any of the many blesses into auto-success, considering that your not more then two down.

Then Charisma is also very good buy, because the more hounds you have, the better.

With all the curses and blesses, Premonition can easily whiff into a 'reveal another token'. In this case Third Time's a Charm is a great Patrice card to pass an important test.

Like I said Predestined is a bit of a weak part of the chain here. For some reason I really liked Unrelenting in this deck, as another 'pass a test'-tech.

Outro

As always, thanks allot for getting to the end to another of my decks. This one has a been was definitely very fun to play, so I would really appreciate a like and a comment, to share this to even more people. Have nice day!