Laser Daisy: The Kill in Yellow (Hard, 3+ Multiplayer)

No, I’ve not gone insane yet, and yes, you read the title correctly. While Seeker may be the class worst suited to playing kill, it’s certainly capable of doing it well. At its best, this deck takes 2 fight actions a turn for free at 4 damage each. If that sounds interesting to you, read on.

TL,DR: Strengths- massive single target and elite damage, while maintaining the ability to investigate for clues. Very consistent with powerful tutors. Play some cards you probably haven’t before. Weaknesses- Low spread damage. Not new player friendly, due to heavy punishment from doom mismanagement. Likely needs at least 1 other player at the table playing decent damage. Mulligan for Abyssal Tome, Abigail Foreman, Research Librarian, and Backpack. Watch those Doom thresholds, always have a reset plan.

The build-around here is Abyssal Tome. While dangerous to play wrong, this is one of the few ways to attack for 4 damage per attack anywhere in the game, and with a bit of synergy and support, provides the backbone for your kill package. This will be your first buy, and I would recommend taking In the Thick of It, just to make sure you have more kill consistency for that awkward first scenario. While it only fights once a turn, the bonus stat and damage it provides you are far above average for any weapon, especially at this level. Keep in mind, this fight action is free on most turns due to Daisy’s investigator ability, leaving you plenty of spare time to pick up clues with our great knowledge stat or to play any of your other damaging events. Alone, this tome may seem underwhelming and dangerous due to doom buildup, but our supporting package will see to that.

The other part of our killer combo is Abigail Foreman. At two copies each of her and our laser book, our deck comes fully online after only a total of 10 xp spent (7 earned with In the Thick of It), which often only takes a single scenario. Hand this diligent intern a copy of the book laser and she’d be happy to make it work an additional time per turn. This synergy even allows you to add the additional doom, ramping your weapon up in far fewer actions and dealing massive damage to single targets or multiple targets at the same location. Keep in mind she activates using the action on our book, which still doesn’t cost us any of our normal turn.

The rest of the cards for this deck break down into 3 categories: support for our combo, other damage cards for when the laser is offline, and group support cards. The quantities of these different card types will vary by party composition, but this build assumes you are not receiving significant support from other party members to power your engine.

The first of the doom support cards is relatively self explanatory. While I have always considered it a do-nothing, Moonlight Ritual is our only level 0 solution to the doom problem, and it does so fantastically. This card can be recurred with anything that hits spells (see Prescient and Dayana Esperence), but one in particular is quite relevant to this deck…

Queue De Vermis Mysteriis. At a single copy, this card is an incredible tech piece that is also searchable by every card we play to find Abyssal Tome. It recurs a very small portion of the deck, but having one vastly decreases the chances of fumbling doom management, as it hits both Moonlight Ritual as well as Occult Invocation. These events allow us to clear doom off of our book laser and fight on one of our downtime turns respectively, giving us much more flexibility in timing out our fight actions. It doesn’t solve the doom problem entirely (as you’ve probably noticed we are usually trading 3 doom for 1), but it gives you extra time to find your other options.

Our last piece of doom support is Sacrifice. While this is probably only our second best option, behind Moonlight Ritual, and costs us our weapon, costing our group 1 turn per player per doom is always worse. It then refills whichever resource we are out of, and can often dig us much closer to our next Abyssal Tome, or a way to find one.

This deck’s tutor package is actually what brings it viability in hard difficulty. With this level of build around, if there was no reliable way to find our Abyssal Tome, we’d be mediocre at best. Fortunately, Daisy has access to both Backpack and Research Librarian. Research Librarian can search up any tome we want, but essentially functions as an additional copy of Abyssal Tome 80% of the time. Keeping a copy in our opener guarantees we are set up to deal with at least 1 enemy going into turn two. He will frequently have Abigail Foreman replace him, but if he soaks up some damage or horror and dies, all the better for us.

Backpack level 2 is only slightly less powerful than our book-finding friend. Though it only looks at a mere 12 cards (usually half of our deck), it can pick up 3 cards for us to have access to for the rest of the scenario, and about a full third of our deck is items. This gives us all of our static stat buffs (Celaeno Fragments and St. Hubert's Key) and any of our tomes, but can also find Disc of Itzamna in a pinch if you are currently in an awkward reset phase.

The rest of our key pieces are other ways to fight from Seeker. Occult Invocation and Occult Lexicon give us ways to still do decent damage outside of Abyssal tome, and don’t necessarily require us to be picking up clues. At campaign start, "I've got a plan!" is almost certainly worth bringing, but I found it much less consistent as the campaign continued, but the number of damage events required likely varies a bit across campaigns.

There are a few things to consider when playing this deck during scenarios, and I thought they were worth bringing up.

Concerning the mulligan: Often the only cards worth keeping are combo pieces or tutors for them. Abigail Foreman, Abyssal Tome, Backpack, Research Librarian are the only cards you should ever be keeping. Studious can also help to relieve mulligan problems, so if you are having any consistency issues or have the spare experience, they are certainly worth taking.

Concerning doom buildup and reset windows: This deck can have scenario losing consequences if we mismanage our doom. Therefore, it is extremely important that we are aware of current doom thresholds and that we aren’t adding doom to our assets unnecessarily. If we don’t need 8 damage for the foreseeable future, it is often correct to leave our tome at 1 or 2 doom to hedge against unforeseen events. It is also important to always have some sort of strategy in mind for eliminating our accumulated doom, whether through a spell, or simply by overwriting our Abyssal Tome. Use spare actions to draw toward anything that will eliminate doom from play, even multiple turns before we will need it, and make sure to leave at least one action at the end of turns where a reset is necessary for either a spell or an overwrite. There are also quite a few scenarios throughout the game that have some very awkward doom thresholds, or which have Ancient Evils present in the mythos deck, or both. In these cases, be even more careful of adding doom, and remember that we can use Abyssal Tome to attack with Knowledge, even if only for a single damage. The deck is also able to rely more on event damage and powerful cancel effects like Ward of Protection to keep running during these times, but can’t do so for extended periods.