Dog Detective & Friends - One Core+Dunwich

This Pete deck (except with a knife instead of a Manual Dexterity, which was never equipped) was used to solo play through the core campaign, beating the first mission with ease, having trouble with the second mission's agility checks and the time lost because of them and getting 3 cultists, and then failing a single agility check on the last scenario that would have won the campaign with the 1a ending.

You often don't need the fire axe's or baseball bats with Duke around, but equipping one or the other for when an enemy REALLY needs to be dead and using the rest for just their skill test pips worked out very well for me. Scavenging allows you to get those back after using them that way as well, but after only getting to use it once in the first scenario and not at all in the second, I traded that out for higher level cards.

The added cards from other classes generally help with Duke's investigating since the Survivor cards lean more towards combat, aside from Think on Your Feet which is I think the best level 0 card for getting out of a bad situation, especially since it works on Elite enemies when very few other similar cards do.

The cards I added in after getting some experience was the improved version of Peter Sylvestre (the extra permanent Willpower helps a lot with encounter deck checks), Close Call for getting rid of high health hunter enemies, Will to Survive for making any turn of skill checks auto-suceeds, and the Improved version of Lucky!.

Lastly, aside from the knife->Dexterity change already made, I rarely used Deduction in my solo campaign, as many locations only had either one clue on them total or had just one clue left by the time I drew Deduction. If you're playing a solo campaign, you may want to swap it out for either something else that rewards you for using Duke (like Vicious Blow or Evidence!), another skill (Guts or another Manual Dexterity), or simply a powerful card from another class (I thought about Leo De Luca, but I suspect you would want to take out at least one Peter Sylvestre as well if that's the route you want to go down).