Mandy Thompson and the Infinite Pendant

I played this deck in a 3 player Innsmouth campaign on hard difficulty with my friends Dane and Ben. Check out their Wini and Daniela decks too. For more about these decks, our Innsmouth playthrough, and our trip to the twin cities for Arkham Nights 2021, listen to Episode 83 of our podcast, Miskatonic University Radio.

The goal of this deck was to restore the golden age when we could abuse the hell out of Pendant of the Queen. Until very recently you could play a 30-card Mandy deck, usually with rogue subclass for Three Aces and Easy Mark, and just reassemble the pendant every few turns with a fresh set of 3 charges each time. You'd freely teleport around the map, evade elite enemies without even doing a test, and hilariously scoop up random clues from anywhere. It ruled!

Fast forward to June 2021. The new taboo list mutates the pendant so that it removes itself from the game when you run out of charges, preventing Mandy from simply reassembling it a turn later. This is a completely reasonable decision by the design team, but obviously I feel a sacred responsibility to do whatever it takes to circumvent this limitation and keep the dream of ridiculously overpowered Mandy decks alive. If we can't reassemble the pendant, we'll have to assemble it just once and then keep replenishing its charges so that it never goes away even if we use it on most of our turns. Winds of Power from the new Edge of the Earth investigator box is a good tool for this, but we can also just commit Enraptured a million times. Switching to mystic subclass is an acceptable price to pay because most of rogue Mandy's favorite cards like Three Aces have been taboo'd into irrelevance. Mystic subclass also provides great defensive cards like Deny Existence and Ward of Protection as a nice bonus.

Like all powerful seeker decks, we maximize our clue efficiency by raising our intellect really really high, using Deduction and Archaic Glyphs all the time, and minimizing the number of actions we spend moving or playing out assets and non-fast events. We have a ton of fast movement (Shortcut, Pathfinder) and nearly all of the non-skill cards in this deck are fast. To make the deck even faster, we could have kept the third Astounding Revelation instead of upgrading into Ariadne's Twine, which is very fun but kind of unnecessary here. To avoid even spending actions on Archaic Glyphs, we could include Knowledge is Power and just fast activate the glyphs from hand. I really wanted to try Eon Chart to get even more actionless movement and clues, but I couldn't quite fit it in. Most of the cards in the deck are really good already and I didn't want to cut any of them. Depending on the level of risk you're willing to accept, maybe going down to a single copy of Deny Existence would be okay? But I definitely played that card very frequently in our Innsmouth run.

Higher Education is a great way to succeed by a million when using Archaic Glyphs or to beat any willpower treacheries that you can't just deny. You've got an incredible set of actionless money cards to fuel it forever, and you're cycling your deck constantly so you get to play them over and over again. Studious is incredible as always. Blasphemous Covenant isn't very good, but the other two investigators in this group both had Accursed Follower as their basic weakness, so the chaos bag was often full of curse tokens. Upgraded Logical Reasoning is a nice one-of because you're taking a horror from constantly replaying your single copy of Ward of Protection and from recycling your deck every 3 turns. If you have willpower-challenged teammates who get completely wrecked by cards like Frozen in Fear, they'll really appreciate it too.

The only real wrinkle to playing Mandy effectively is to try to control when you hit Shocking Discovery. This weakness is the reason I don't bother playing upgraded No Stone Unturned. You really want to find Mandy's weakness under these conditions:

1. During a search
2. But not a really good search, like a Practice Makes Perfect with Mandy's double search ability activated
3. When you have some way to deal with an enemy if you draw one. In this deck, that basically means either using the pendant on it or whining to your teammates until they come rescue you.

With a little bit of practice you'll learn the unique rhythm of seeker excellence: constantly speedrunning through your deck, traveling without moving, collecting incredible amounts of money and spending it on higher ed so you can pick up literally all of the clues, ignoring about 90% of the encounter deck, and just generally being rad as hell. Magnifying Glass is the strongest card in the game. Stay thirsty my friends.