Bob Jenkins, Multi-level Marketer (Deck Guide)

Can three poorly perceived permanents join together to become greater than the sum of their parts? Geared Up pales in comparison to Ever Vigilant for most guardians since so many of their powerful assets are of the non-item variety (Safeguard, Beat Cop, etc) and reloading is often more efficient than playing more guns. However, in a Bob Jenkins deck, we can really lean into an dense items strategy for potentially a huge amount of savings on the opening turn. But is it worth the cost of bloating the deck with 5 additional cards, starting with 2 mental trauma, and throwing away all our first turn actions?

Since Geared Up allows us to play as many items from our hand on our opening turn as we can get our hands on, at a discount no less, we can maximize our opening potential with Backpack/Backpack and Black Market which both allow us to play cards "as if they were in your hand". Combined with a Schoffner's Catalogue or two, this should allow for a huge tempo savings by playing many low cost items as part of our opening turn. With any cash left over, you can even help another investigator to play an item out of their hand for even more tempo.

Short Supply has such a low impact cost that it is included to enable better Scavenging. Of course, you may want to skip this for a certain campaign. Having a guaranteed card for Cheat the System doesn't hurt either.

Investigate: Moderate

Decent starting but little in the way of action compression. Flashlight and Old Keyring helps to keep churning out clues while leaving a hand free for fighting. Both can be recursed using Scavenging

Fight: Moderate/Low

With only a starting of 3, weapons were selected that were cheap and gave at least +2 while leaving our other hand free.

Evade:Moderate/Low

Track Shoes provide the deck's only boost so evading is possible but not reliable. A decent number of foot icons are spread throughout the assets to boost this in a pinch.

Support: High

The real strength of this investigator is in the supporting role, both through healing and monetary assistance for items. With Shrewd Dealings and Black Market, you can get decent if not ideal tools into the hands of other investigators who failed to draw their critical assets such as tools, weapons, soak, etc.

You will want to mitigate the two starting sanity trauma each scenario asap to avoid a bad combination of early Greed and treachery draws.

Misc. Tasks: Decent

Anyone who's played Arkham knows that the game requires more than just investigating and fighting. Numerous challenges require drawing, discarding, paying resources, parleying, etc. After the initial opening turn, Jenkins should be able to amass a small nest egg to help with these challenges. Likely, you'd want to stockpile resources anyways to help mitigate his signature weakness Greed.

Movement: Low

Track shoes are unlikely to provide much in the way of saved movement actions but its always possible to get a nice draw from the bag. If no other high agility investigators are in the group, consider dropping a few of these for other items.

Eon Chart and Eon Chart can help here, being sold and recursed through Scavenging. See Valentin1331's High Frequency Trading Bob for more on using Scavenging, Joey "The Rat" Vigil, and cycling items for profit.

Mulligan

The deck starts with 10 non-item, non-weakness cards that should almost always be tossed out on the opening hand. Toss any cards that aren't Schoffner's Catalogue and Backpack. With any luck, you should still start with some investigative or fighting items to call on.

Try to keep at least 1 resource if possible on the opening turn to mitigate an early Greed pull. You should be able to see if Greed got discarded by Short Supply during your opening turn.

Upgrades

Black Market, Joey "The Rat" Vigil, and Lucky Cigarette Case are probably the highest priority upgrades. Relic Hunter should also be given a decent priority to ensure the accessory slot doesn't get locked up holding a cigarette case.

Another Day, Another Dollar provides a third class of permanents for Cheat the System to trigger off of. Eon Chart can provide access if its play. No card seems appropriate to splash in, the most likely contender being Blur.

Pay Day is decent with Bob Jenkins since his ability is a bonus action. May not be worth the non-item slot depending on how much you value resources on hand. Decent item recycling with Joey "The Rat" Vigil may cover building up the necessary funds to fuel the big money rogue cards.

The Black Fan, Well Connected, Money Talks should provide a nice general efficacy boost once you get enough economy boosting cards. Unscrupulous Loan might be worthy of consideration. Although unlikely to pay off without a few turns of buildup, The Black Fan being an item certainly synergizes well with the deck.

While Lockpicks combo nicely with Lucky Cigarette Case, its performance isn't much higher than Old Keyring or Flashlight while being useable only once a turn.