Deck Summary

This is a William Yorick deck that is completely enemy management focused, with some economy and bless support included as an accidental side effect. The general game plan is pretty simple: Put a gun in your hand. Use Keep Faith/Rite of Sanctification to earn enough money to keep a gun in your hand while you amass an army of Very Good Boys using Yorick's ability. Use your gun and army of dogs to kill Cthulu. Simple as.

But why?

I really like dogs.

In fact, I like a lot of animals. So I've constantly been on the lookout for any reason, however tenuous, to stuff animal companions into my Arkham decks.

Unfortunately, my teammates do not share my predilection for obtaining a mass following of furry critters. They prefer that I do things like "look for clues" or "deal damage to enemies" rather than spend half the game trying to set up the preconditions for a hokey recurrence combo with Cherished Keepsake and Mysterious Raven that nets less clues for more effort than just installing a Flashlight.

To be honest, it's kind of hard to blame them sometimes. Like when we're fighting an eldritch abomination that deals five damage a pop and I have Miss Doyle, Augur, and a Stray Cat sitting quietly in my ally slots watching us get slapped around, and my teammate wants to know why Aquinnah (3) isn't here to bail us out despite him asking me to put her in my deck, and my response is "But I wanted to have a lot of cats in my deck!"

...But I digress. Fortunately, this deck is quite effective at what it sets out to do, and at its peak, it can have more animals in play than any other deck I've used! Everybody wins!

Detailed Piloting Instructions

Opening Strategy

As much as I want to tell you that you should hard mulligan for as many sled dogs as possible, the sled dogs ultimately take too much support and too many actions to get online. Even after they're online, they exhaust after use, so having 2 or 3 sled dogs up still leaves you with less damage output per round than shooting your .45 three times. On top of this, your best consistency tool (pulling weapons out of the trash with Yorick's investigator ability, while starting with ten cards in the discard pile off of Short Supply), is quite hard to trip if you don't have a weapon. All this unfortunately means that your first priority is finding a weapon, not finding your dogs. So if you don't see a gun, drop every one of your cards that isn't Scrounge for Supplies and look for one (Because you've got Short Supply, a Scrounge for Supplies in your opening hand is basically one action to search the top 10 cards of your deck for a level 0 card. Much improved odds to find a weapon over dropping it for the chance to draw one more).

Sadly, even when your weapon situation is sorted, it's still not time to jump on the doggo train. Priority #2 is economy -- you can't put your dogs in play if you have no money, and the Keep Faith/Rite of Sanctification train needs some amount of cash to start up; even if you had Baseball Bat and Sled Dog in your opening hand, I'd be a little bit hesitant to play them both and leave yourself flat broke; some bad encounter pulls and a broken bat are all you need to be flat on your ass.

Powering Up

Now that you have a gun and some starting cash, we can finally lean into the gimmick of this deck. Because Keep Faith is fast, Rite of Sanctification can be played with Yorick's ability, and Sled Dog can be played with Yorick's ability, we have all we need to start actionlessly setting up our crew of canines. Any dogs discarded by Short Supply can be easily played as you kill things, and dogs that you draw can be played if you have the breathing room, or committed and later played out of the discard if you don't. We can use any actions not spent killing things or moving towards things to kill on recurring Keep Faith to keep Rite of Sanctifications in play, or Calling in Favors (how does a dog answer the phone?) to search for more dogs, so our doggo level (and subsequently our power level) will steadily continue to rise throughout the scenario.

Wreaking Havoc

Once you have two sled dogs in play, you can start dealing Real Weapon-tier damage without having to worry about ammo or replacing your gun. The dogs can cover you if you need to reload, save you ammunition when killing small things, and ferry you all over the map so you're in ship-shape condition to lay the beatdown on whatever scary Mythos creature is threatening your Seeker. (You could also use the 2/2 soaks to eat hits for you, but that would make you a Very Bad Person). Go nuts! Have fun! Cackle madly as you deal the final blow to an extradimensional horror with your horde of fuzzy fiends! The possibilities are endless.

Upgrade Considerations

• Charisma: Needed to have enough slots to allow for maximum dog.
• Chainsaw: Self-explanatory. The only good (IMO Old Hunting Rifle is far too inconsistent) three-damage option available to Yorick.
• Ancient Covenant, Favor of the Sun: A ridiculously powerful combination, especially considering that you can fuel the Bless engine with Keep Faith. The on-demand autosuccess helps shore up Chainsaw's low fight bonus.
• Emergency Cache (3): Reloads the chainsaw, improves the efficiency of your moneygathering. Despite your recurrence ability, I feel it's important to have something that can put fuel in your damage engine right goddamn now when needed, especially as you get later into the campaign and things start taking more and more hits to kill.
• Nine of Rods: Yorick has mediocre willpower, and no real way to boost it with this deck. I refuse to allow my precious sled dogs to be Abducted by some hory encounter card; I haven't bothered to do any sort of analysis into whether or not this is actually worth the experience, but my emotional stability requires me to have something I can do to protect my dogs from the evil evil encounter deck.

...And that's pretty much it! A rootin' shootin' dog sleddin' deck that (I think, anyways) is pretty straightforward to pilot. I hope you have fun with this deck, and remember: No matter what your teammates say, even if everybody died a horrible traumatic death and Earth has been swallowed by the tentacles of an incorrigible horror, if you got all four dogs out in any given scenario, you're a Real Winner!