Joe Diamond plays three decks, one of them cursed (49XP)

Joe Diamond, with a curse deck where i tried to make the Cryptic Grimoire work with his Insights. This deck went through Innsmouth, Rougarou, Excelsior and Outer Gods, so it has a bit more XP than usual. But on the other hand, i lost 4XP to Unsolved Case, so whatever. For the "regular" version without the XP from the side scenarios, remove Studious and downgrade the Vicious Blows. That'll put the deck at 42XP which seems perfectly fine.

The deck was played alongside Dexter Drake, also with a curse focus. Standard difficulty, two-handed solo. Link to Dexter deck: https://arkhamdb.com/decklist/view/32571/cursed-dexter-post-innsmouth-and-more-69xp-51xp-1.0

Let me start off with the two biggest things i learned from playing this deck: 1) Playing three decks (regular deck, Hunch deck, Ancestral Knowledge deck) is super fun. 2) That Grimoire is ... just not very good. I should've gone Farsight instead, i would've gotten a lot more mileage out of that.

With that out of the way, the deck is actually fairly straightforward. Dexter was supposed to do most of the killing, so i went easy on the weapons here and focused on clue stuff.

The Hunch deck is Extensive Research, Sketches, Shortcut, Working a Hunch and Deep Knowledge. I threw a bunch of additional "free" clues into the deck. Originally i also had Scene of the Crime but when i decided that i would want to move it from the Hunch deck to the main deck, i swapped it for Evidence!(1). A trade i am happy with, would do that again. I think i am actually going to consider Evidence(1) a lot more in the future, it was quite good here.

A whooping 14 skills in the deck means that i can randomly pull out 5 for Ancestral Knowledge and still have enough targets for Practice makes Perfect in the deck.

The deck plays a couple one-offs but never had an issue with finding them, it draws an obscene amount of cards if it wants to. Having AK deliver my upgraded core skills and Eureka right to my start hand is nutso. Despite playing almost 60 cards instead of the usual 30, the deck is very consistent in its draws.

Final verdict: Interesting deck. Started out wanting to be a curse deck, but ended up more as a curse support that fed curses to Dexter. Except for Gaze of Ouraxsh (which is excellent) and Fey (which solves a bunch of problems for Joe in particular) there's not much payoff for curses here. Grimoire is super inconsistent and not worth the XP. I kinda stumbled into the AK & tons of skills thing and that ended up being the real star. I can see myself picking up the idea again but coupling it with hand size payoff instead of curse stuff.