Patrice Hathaway - Teaching a Dog New Tricks

Introduction

Patrice just has a bad habit of picking up strays of... a dubious nature. She gets access to both Miss Doyle and Summoned Hound and can then run around with an army of magical familiars to do her bidding. These cards allow her to test at 5 for her non- stats for fighting, evading, and investigating. The addition of Quick Learner lets her dogs and cats test at the end of the turn more easily as well. Getting Summoned Hound using A Chance Encounter to avoid Summoned Beast is a pretty well-explored tech, so let's try to supercharge it!

Quick Learner

Who says you can't teach an old dog (or cat) new tricks? Whereas Stella Clark can make use of two actions at -2 with Quick Learner, two Summoned Hound can give you the equivalent of 3 actions with the sweet -2 difficulty tests! With otherwise lackluster action-compression, these two free actions can be useful in dealing with some weak enemies and finding stray clues, letting Patrice be quite versatile.

You can equip assets, move, use Drawn to the Flame, Scrounge for Supplies, or simply fail with Rabbit's Foot and/or Take Heart to avoid the downfalls of Quick Learner for your first action. Deny Existence can also help avoid some attacks of opportunity to get to your powerful third action skill tests.

Getting Summoned Hound into Play

A Chance Encounter is the main way to get Summoned Hound into play, but it requires some luck to draw them in the right order. Luckily, there are a couple of things we can take advantage of.

• If you draw both at the same time, you can commit the dog to a test and then pull it back with A Chance Encounter.
• You can use Resourceful to pull back a A Chance Encounter.
• And if the above fails, you can use Scrounge for Supplies to get Resourceful back to do the above.
• And if that all fails, just reset everything and with Quantum Flux.

Using

The release of Sword Cane is a huge boon for Patrice. Since Summoned Hound, or if you were to use Mind's Eye, take up arcane slots, Sword Cane offers a way to use Patrice's naturally high for handling enemies. Sixth Sense provides the ability for Patrice to investigate as well. You can also boost Patrice's mind with static boosts from Holy Rosary and Granny Orne.

Handling the Watcher from Another Dimension

The Watcher from Another Dimension is a scary weakness. 3 damage can really take you out of the game quickly if you're not prepared for it. Once you get Miss Doyle and Hope and Zeal, you can automatically succeed the test though, and the weakness feels a lot more tame. Note that Stray Cat does not work in evading the Watcher since auto-evades and auto-successes are different!

But before you get that first critical upgrade, I'm using a couple of different cards to mitigate the Watcher. These include:

• Deny Existence to cancel the damage altogether
• Quantum Flux (made more reliable with Scrounge for Supplies) to shuffle your deck before cycling through
• Leather Coat to just tank the damage
• Premonition and committing the plethora of cards Patrice has access to to guarantee victory
• Will to Survive to also guarantee victory by committing just enough icons

I think once you get access to Miss Doyle, you should upgrade out of Will to Survive, which is far too expensive.

Upgrade Options

Cornered is obviously a great card for Patrice to get to leverage her card draw and boost her tests. There's probably something with Déjà Vu and Flare as an alternative to get out Summoned Hound, but the combination is quite expensive. Relic Hunter and Grisly Totem could be an effective option as well. Or just upgrade your commit cards with Guts and Unexpected Courage.

Updates / Tweaks

2021-07-09

I've made a few revisions since I didn't quite like the upgrade path in the original deck and some of the cards in the original 0 xp deck.

Scenario 1 | Upgraded

From the 0 xp deck, I removed Scavenging since there aren't many recursion options and you always have Scrounge for Supplies to get back any assets you discarded and couldn't play. Also removed Will to Survive since it's too expensive. I think Holy Rosary provides more benefit for the 0 xp and upgraded decks than Rabbit's Foot and having 2 of them improves consistency. I replaced the two open slots with Parallel Fates which gives some support options, can be used for first action in the upgraded deck, and gives a pip you can commit to any test. Finally, I replaced Wither with Shrivelling to provide some limited offensive action compression. There are still arguments for Wither in my opinion since it's 1 resource cheaper (easier to play with perennially poor Patrice), and you won't be able to recur any of your arcane slots.

The upgraded deck changes the removal targets. Specifically, it removes 2x Granny Orne, Shrivelling, and Sixth Sense which just utilize redundant slots. And we remove a Leather Coat as Summoned Hound provides good damage soak. Without significant horror soak, Holy Rosary becomes more valuable as well here.