The Adaptable Preston Fairmont in The Circle Undone (Hard)

This deck was developed for a two-handed run of TCU. Here's the partner deck (Akachi Onyele).

At the beginning of this campaign you have to choose whether or not to "Accept your fate" or call bullshit, and I chose the acceptance path. It means we have to add two garbage cards to our deck in the form of The Tower • XVI and Ace of Rods, but Preston is pretty well suited for an acceptance run because 1) his signature card is a permanent so his regular deck size is 31, so he can very slightly better accommodate the inherent drawback from having an increased deck size, and 2) The Tower - XVI doesn't impact him a whole lot because he doesn't do a lot of commits anyway.

Leo De Luca x 2 : Your #1 mulligan target in every scenario. Preston can afford him, which is a big part of why he's good here, and Preston wants extra actions because Intel Report is so incredibly strong, and thus recurring Intel Report, even with an inefficient card that takes an action like Scrounge for Supplies, is also strong. Later on we'll get some cards that do nothing except generate money, so it's good for mitigating that opportunity cost, and the extra action is also obviously useful for those times when we have to push the button on Family Inheritance.

Intel Report x 2, Small Favor x 1, Decoy x 1 : The 'Preston Card' trio from TCU. Intel Report does most of the heavy lifting for clue-gathering and it was most often used as a 4-cost, 2-clue action, but the 6-cost jumbo package afforded a lot of flexibility ("we have all the clues we need but I can always grab the last two for the VP from afar later on") and it came in handy on the locations in The Witching Hour that hurt you if you're present when clues are discovered. It also gets around that scenario's initial restriction which prevents you from moving to locations in front of the other investigator since the locations are still connected to each other.

As for Small Favor and Decoy, I tried various combinations of them before settling on one of each, and it was mostly because with zero of both it felt like Preston's enemy handling capability was just not quite enough to get him comfortably past the first two Acts of The Witching Hour where you can't meet up with your partner, and two of each card was too many. Of the two, Small Favor flexes in and out for the remainder of the campaign but Decoy is essentially obsoleted by our first upgrade, Streetwise (3).

Streetwise x 2 : And speaking of Streetwise, it was immediately obvious after my very first run at The Witching Hour that this deck needs this card. Without it, Preston has nothing to do when he doesn't have any of his proactive cards in hand. With it, he can investigate and evade. Less efficiently, sure, but at least the option to perform useful actions is on the table.

"Look what I found!" x 2, Old Keyring x 2 : Preston will always fail an investigation on a 2-shroud location, which makes LWIF a guaranteed 2-clues. Old Keyring is here primarily because of its interaction with LWIF, where it bumps up the guaranteed 2-clue threshold to 4-shroud locations (and it doesn't remove a key from the ring because you failed!) The Keyring is good on its own, too, as it will guarantee you a clue from any 2-shroud location the same way Flashlight does.

Failing investigate actions to get clues can sometimes be awkward on Haunted locations, but once we upgrade to "Look what I found!"(2) we get some flexibility with where we actually perform the action (and some locations that have Haunted effects connect to ones that don't).

Scrounge for Supplies x 2, Resourceful x 2 : Scrounge for Supplies is a weak card, but Intel Report is such a high value target it makes up for it. Resourceful's sole purpose was to recur Scrounge for Supplies but it grabbed LWIF a few times as well. And there were also times when circumstances were, uh, of a nature to warrant a different choice, such as...

Cunning Distraction x 2 : A supremely powerful effect on a card which is never played because of its prohibitive cost. The reason it's so strong is because it works on elites. The first time you exhaust two elites and four other enemies in a single action you will have experienced something that no other card in the game can offer. And then you do it again on the next turn. Its value is a bit dependent on the number of players in the game but even with only two I think two copies is absolutely the right number, because even though it may sit in your hand for a while it is very often a Get Out of Jail Free effect even if it only hits 1-2 enemies. It's also at the very least a double Willpower commit for Preston, which is pretty useful in TCU.

Dig Deep x 2, "You handle this one!" x 2 : And speaking of Willpower, this is how we deal with the fact that Preston has only one point in that stat. Dig Deep is a big drain on even Preston's resources, and I would frequently decide to not spend anything even when it was in play, but you really have to take each treachery on a case by case basis so I don't have a general rule for handling it other than that you should just evaluate the potential tempo loss of failure and err on the side of caution. It's also worth noting that a lot of the Willpower treacheries in this campaign have nonbinary failure conditions, so it's sometimes beneficial to boost your skill value without intending to actually pass.

Take Heart x 2, Rabbit's Foot x 1 : Our primary card draw support, of which there were surprisingly few options when I searched the red and green card pool (Preston can't really take the neutral cyclers like Perception). Still, they're both good, and Preston's stats work particularly well with Take Heart such that he has zero chance to pass almost every test in the campaign without some kind of boost. So that's good, I guess.

Rise to the Occasion x 2 : This was a late addition because I didn't think it looked too good on paper but when you think about it, it's actually worth three resources on any Dig Deep test, and it's the same cost as a Streetwise (3) test, which is not nothing. As rich as Preston is, it's still important to carefully consider the costs of your actions, and much like Take Heart this one has pretty good synergy with his stats so that you can commit it to a huge number of tests. In practice it was very good, though I replaced it fairly soon after adding the XP money cards.

Trial by Fire x 1 : This is here because due to the choice we made before the first scenario, +2 is the minimum number we want to be at on skill tests, which is actually quite lenient. It's a 73% chance of success, with +3 pushing that to 80%, and +4 is 87%. And looking at the possible locations (we only consider the VP ones - more on that in the campaign report) there are a few 2-shroud locations with two clues, one 3-shroud location with four, and one 1-shroud location with four.

Performing 3-4 single-clue investigate actions in a turn is not ideal, but it is viable and a useful supplement to our other clue gathering tools. And it's a lot cheaper than boosting multiple times with Streetwise. Note that you can only play it during your turn, so it won't help you during the Mythos phase.

Sneak Attack x 2 : So on all of my test runs I resolved The Witching Hour by grabbing all of the clues, but I only realized when I made it to the final scenario that if you want the resolution associated with the "Accepted your fate..." story choice you have to actually defeat Annette Mason in that first scenario instead. So that necessitated a bit of a rethink of my offensive options. Small Favor was out because it doesn't work on elites, but Sneak Attack does. And since by this point I was very comfortable with the flow of this scenario I was confident I'd have drawn enough of my deck to have at least one of these in hand alongside a Cunning Distraction, so the plan was for Preston to simply contribute some damage towards Annette's 8HP to take the pressure off his partner. The fact that it was more testless damage was icing on the cake, but like Scrounge for Supplies this is another card which I don't think is generally good, because in a vacuum it's usually going to be two actions for two damage.