Father Mateo's Church of the Surfing Saints

Card draw simulator

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

Gandalph · 34

DISCLAIMER: this is more of a thought experiment, since I cannot test the deck right now (and I have yet to play with the blurse mechanic). If you find it interesting and are in the mood of taking it for a ride please do and let me know how it fares!

The idea behind the deck is keeping a steady wave of 10 blesses in the bag to abuse Mateo's great elder sign with Blessing of Isis, possibly with the Favor of the Sun shining on you. This is done thanks to Dayana Esperence and Tides of Fate, with secret surfing moves provided by Eldritch Sophist and Forbidden Knowledge and a trendy swimsuit Robes of Endless Night.

Tides of Fate is very flexible with when you can play it so you can spam it, basically never changing the blesses to curses, or keep the curses around if you need them and change them at the right moment. Sadly it's not really clear how it really works: do you remove all the curses and then add blesses as much as you can, or do you substitute every curse one by one until you run out of blesses? Probably the second, knowing that Arkham hates you. Another question is how the precise timing works: it's great that you can see which encounters you draw before deciding to play it and convert all the curses, so that if you need the curses for an Armageddon or Eye of the Djinn play you can leave them in the bag and if your teammates want to go before you or if you draw a nasty encounter you can turn the tides straight away, but the really cool thing would be to play it after you draw a curse during an Armageddon/Eye of the Djinn play so that you have a really good chance of succeeding with all the newly transformed blesses. When you draw a blurse token the sequence resets to the draw a token step and there is a player window just before it so it's fair to assume you can play it between tokens. If not then the curse spell suite it's not really worth it and you're probably better off with a cheaper suite, maybe Clairvoyance and possibly Shards of the Void to seal some 0s and see more of your interesting tokens, and without Eye of the Djinn, although with Favor of the Moon it's really great and it can help until you're set up.

The set up time is in fact the biggest problem: the deck is expensive and requires many pieces. Spirit of Humanity is key and if you manage to get both down with the Dayana combo you get 4 blesses and heal 2 damage and 2 horrors every turn for free. Obviously you need more arcane slots and this is done with THE HIEROPHANT ยท V, tossing the Crystal Pendulum when you're set up or buying Relic Hunter to have space for your combat and investigation spells.

You need a lot of card draw (you probably will use your first elder signs for a card and a resource instead of an action) and Crystal Pendulum should be mostly easy to trigger with Ancient covenant right from the beginning and then with the automatic successes of your elder sign, but since you are going to use Olive McBride a lot it's not certain (if you reveal only one bless and then use favor of the sun to trigger Isis, you still have to count one of the other two tokens even if the success is automatic, so you cannot predict your skill value for certain). You should try to use Favor of the sun only if it translates into an elder sign, or possibly include a Quantum Flux to bring them back as soon as possible if you run out too early. I've included two Rite of Sanctification to pay for your toys, I don't know if it is enough or overkill or if it is anti-synergetic since you wanna have as much blesses in the bag as possible.

Priest of Two Faiths is a very good card for this build, allowing to have a boost of blesses, a constant drip of tideable curses or two rounds of blessing Spirit of humanity if you are not set up with Dayana yet or a good target for Calling in Favors to go find her. Sadly you cannot have enough Charisma to keep him around in your church as you really need Olive McBride to safely align your elder stars and the sophist to feed Dayana.

Without trying the deck I struggle to find space for a lot of good cards (e.g. Ward of Radiance ), but maybe if you renounce to the Eye of Djinn/Favor of the moon/Curse spells suite you open up some slots to experiment with. I'm now going to work on the 5xp basic version of this (with probably Ancient Covenant, 2x Favor of the Sun and maybe 1x Favor of the Moon?), which probably would include 2x Delve Too Deep and I'm not sure about 2x Arcane Research: you're going to want a little bit of extra buffer for Spirit of Humanity and there's not a lot to upgrade (if you go with the curse suite it's particularly bad, as it doesn't save you more than 2 xp per card, so probably 8 xp total).

Sorry for the kinda sloppy notes, I wanted to write a somewhat more detailed and funnier description and a more accurate and tried decklist but for now this is it, maybe someone can expand on this idea (the Dayana + Tides thing should be interesting in Dexter too, who can add 10 curses on command with that card that makes you promise not to draw, play or commit).

1 comments

Jul 01, 2021 elkeinkrad · 470

If you expect your bag has lots of , and you want to utilize curse-spell, how about Paradoxical Covenant? My experience is that curse-spell is good with Paradoxical. You can also auto-success to stop at Olive test with Paradoxical, but Ancient may not.