Minh Thi Phan in Innsmouth (Hard)

This deck was created for a two-handed game of The Innsmouth Conspiracy on Hard, with Sister Mary (decklist and campaign guide here).

Not having a lot of experience with Seeker decks, this is what I imagine a fairly standard one looks like, but there are a couple of insights I'm going to claim as my own. Well, one, anyway : No Stone Unturned.

Mulligan : Analytical Mind > No Stone Unturned > Dr Milan Christopher > Dream Diary (this shoots to the top once it's upgraded).

Dream Diary x 1 : This might as well be Minh's signature card. I cannot overstate how amazing it is to play the upgraded version of it on the first turn of every scenario, which is why I've included...

No Stone Unturned x 2, Eureka! x 2 : These are our primary card searchers, and they make sense when you consider Minh's deck has not one but two extraordinarily impactful cards in Dream Diary and Analytical Mind. Games with one or both in play feel very, very different to those without them. We'll be upgrading NSU fairly early in the campaign, and it's never wasted because Mary can use it too.

Grisly Totem x 1 : This is a distant third in terms of impactful one-ofs, but it's still always a welcome draw and we'll try to upgrade it if we get some spare XP later on.

Inquiring Mind x 2, Unexpected Courage x 2 : Wild icons galore! Both are very handy for when The King in Yellow shows up, but they'll get pitched early to guarantee an investigate action if necessary. They're also our best options for helping Mary line up a shot, but in practice I didn't use them for that very often.

Dr. Milan Christopher x 2 : The only economy card you'll ever need.

Magnifying Glass x 2 : There have been a bunch of other Seeker assets that provide an investigation boost since the core set but I think this one fits best here. A fairly common early turn was to play Milan and one of these and start investigating at 6.

Keep Faith x 2 : This is our main Bless token generator and was great in the first half of the campaign, but with some of Mary's later upgrades it actually really dropped off in usefulness.

Resourceful x 2 : Right now it really only hits Keep Faith (note that it's not optional so you shouldn't play it if you only have Winging It in your discard pile) but in the second scenario it will begin recurring Sharp Visionn, and that is what I like to call Pure Value.

Winging It x 2 : Whenever I flicked through my storage box and saw this thing I would shake my head and wonder how it could ever be playable, because in a vacuum and when only considering the Survivor lineup a -1 Shroud effect seemed pitiful to me. After playing it with an investigator that never fails an investigate action, however, I now understand its true value (and my own stupidity). This is honestly one of the best cards in the deck and performed incredibly well at all stages of the campaign.

Deduction x 2, Perception x 2 : I'm sure I don't need to elaborate on these. Minh loves skills, and these are both great, if unexciting.

Mind over Matter x 2 : Very useful throughout the campaign. Minh could boost her Intellect high enough to pass anything (which actually makes the upgraded version kind of a downgrade) and I most often used these to evade in a pinch or bust open a Locked Doorr (something a Guardian should ordinarily have no problem with, but alas, Mary). They were also great for those times you get caught in the Undertow, but they weren't really worth using on most of the Mythos phase treacheries that only hit for one point.

"I've got a plan!" x 2 : A late addition, and much like how we could afford two slots in Mary's deck for clue-grabbing, we can afford two slots in Minh's for monster killing. In my past dabbling with the Seeker class I always found this card to be really awkward to play, mostly because I could never boost my Intellect high enough to make it reliable. Minh doesn't have that problem, though, and they were surprisingly effective at taking some of the burden off Mary at opportune times (so kind of like a mirror to Scene of the Crime).

Shortcut x 2 : Another late addition, and this is where it all came together. The Pit of Despair was finally solved. I shouldn't get ahead of myself too much because I only ran through it a few times before proceeding with the rest of the campaign, but in a scenario with very high variance in possible location layouts, just having a couple of these proved remarkably effective at stabilizing the entire game. I guess it's true what they say : Intellect is the only stat that actually wins the game, so the less Minh was impeded, the sooner we were out of there.

As with Mary's deck, there were a few cards didn't make the cut...

Take Heart x 2 : This was in my first few revisions and it's a fantastic card but it just simply doesn't work if there are Bless tokens in the deck.

Lucky! x 2 : A deck that can take Lucky but doesn't? As I mentioned before, Minh basically doesn't fail investigate actions, or at least she was rarely short of resources so badly that she had to take significant risks, and failing any other actions in the game never felt particularly problematic, at least when taken on an individual basis. This campaign was unusual in that it didn't have any agenda or scenario cards with difficult tests on them or I might've considered it, and I know it can potentially save you from committing other cards but it has no icons and it does have a small cost, so in practice I found it sat in my hand most of the time.

Beloved x 2 : Looks great on paper, but in practice it's kind of awkward without a Bless token guarantee effect like Favor of the Sun. You either commit it and hope for the best (a fairly incorrect way to play Arkham Horror, I feel) or you commit it with enough other cards to pass the test anyway, in which case why did you bother? It's also effectively eclipsed by Ancient Covenant if you're running Favor of the Sun, but I wasn't planning on running either in Minh's deck.

The Truth Beckons x 1 : At first glance it looks like binder fodder but I actually had some really good experiences with it in The Pit of Despair because as I've mentioned, the location layout is highly variable. It was also pretty decent in the second scenario, but over the many, many playthroughs I went through I found it would sit in my hand a bit too long to keep justifying its slot. There were times when I was kind of holding it back for more value... just a bit more value, which might have contributed to how it felt, but I eventually dropped it and never looked back. I do see how it could be useful again in some of the later scenarios, and it's kind of cool how they design campaign-specific cards every now and then.

The campaign report for this run, along with Minh's card upgrades, can be found in my (Sister Mary decklist and guide).

For reference, here's the fully upgraded deck :

Minh Thi Phan in Innsmouth (Hard) (40XP)