Tooth and Nail

"Where did you get that thing?" Marie asked.

Her voice is melodious, even when not singing–it reminds Lily of the way the monks had spoken, those not under a vow of silence, as though every word were its own precious sound that would echo off into eternity.

The singer gestures down at the fang resting in Lily's lap. It is long, savage, the base wrapped in red leather to serve as a handgrip and the edges honed slightly to make it a more efficient blade–honed but once, for it had remained perfectly sharp ever since, as though neither time nor use could dull its cruel power.

After a pause, Lily speaks, staring off over the gambrel rooftops of Arkham but not seeing them, exactly.

"The monks who raised me...they had a habit of peering through time. One day something peered back."

She is silent for a moment.

"I took a tooth from its head, and with that tooth I took the creature's life...but not before it took the only family I had ever known."

Marie places one hand on the warrior's shoulder as they watch the sun set.

Hey everyone! I'm back with another weird and wacky thematic deck build. This time, it's Lily Chen, wielder of a stolen fang from the head of a Tindalos Alpha she managed to slay with her bare hands after it killed everyone she'd ever known. That's pretty metal, if I do say so myself!

The card that spurred this deck's creation was Fang of Tyr'thrha, an incredible new Fight event from Edge of the Earth. It allows you to cut through space and either strike from across the map or teleport to enemies before dealing a whopping 4 damage. The downside of this fabulous card, though, is that it's only a one-use Event and Guardians are limited in their ability to recur, so how do we make sure we draw it frequently enough to justify building a deck around it?

The answer to that question was Lily Chen. Quiescence of Thought enables her to draw large chunks of her deck for the low price of emptying her hand. To facilitate this I built around a series of Fight events, and adding deck-filtering in the form of cloth wraps for her hands and memories of her monastic training. The result is a fast-drawing, fast-playing Event Guardian who can output a considerable amount of damage at very high speeds.

Thematically, Lily is not just wielding the Fang when playing the event itself. Rather, the Fang serves as her primary weapon, an extension of her hand in her more basic attacks or the arcane focus in her more supernatural ones involving witchfire or blood magic. But it is when she uses the Fang to cut a path through the angles of time and space that she is at her most powerful–and her most dangerous.

While Quiescence is the first Discipline you want to grab, to accelerate your deck, you want to hit 15xp as quickly as you can so as to pick up Balance of Body. This epic Discipline enables Lily to combo multiple fight events into a whirlwind of pain and defeat, and can be combined with Fang of Tyr'thrha to teleport her across Arkham and lay out the enemies plaguing a formerly-distant ally.

Possible variations of this deck include:

• Swapping out the Boxing Gloves for Dragon Pole or Butterfly Swords and having her use the Fang only in emergencies, allowing for more consistent damage.
• Swapping out the Boxing Gloves, as above, in order to trade your Spirit Events for more utility Spells that can be found with Initiate (with the added bonus of reducing overall XP cost).
• Adding in Michael Leigh, Sleuth, and/or Bruiser (and appropriate synergies) in order to use Gang Up and Call for Backup.
• A Blessed Warrior Lily who uses the Guardian bless-production events (like Righteous Hunt) and Nephthys to keep the bag blessed. She can then use Blessing of Isis as a payoff to keep her Disciplines Unbroken without needing to adhere to their difficult restrictions, or combine Favor of the Sun with Prescient to reliably return Fang of Tyr'thrha to her hand to strike again across space and time.

Thank you so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed, and until next time–

Strike hard, strike fast, no mercy!