Necklace Akachi

Card draw simulator

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Derived from
None. Self-made deck here.
Inspiration for
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Ektheleon · 198

Goal of this deck is to use The Hierophant • V (and the wide range of exciting accessories Akachi gets access to) to power up Dragon Pole and get unlimited fight actions at 7+ for 2 damage each. This is usually plenty to manage things on standard, and the focus on fighting synergizes with Empty Vessel and Decorated Skull.

Notes on some of the individual card choices:

  • Relic Hunter This doesn't directly contribute to the game plan (since the extra accessory slot doesn't count towards the number of arcane slots filled), but if you don't get Hierophant out early, it's still useful to be able to play an extra item while you're digging for it.
  • Familiar Spirit Some would say that you should still run Arcane Initiate here, but those people are cowards who only want you to have 5 arcane slots instead of 6.
  • Backpack Secretly best card in the deck. It's important to mulligan really hard for Hierophant, but always keep Backpack, since your whole plan (besides Hierophant itself) is Items, and can be grabbed by Backpack.
  • Emergency Cache You could probably make a good argument for running Uncage the Soul here instead, there's enough spell assets to make it useful, and it's got better icons. But Cache can pay for setting up your necklace rig, and gets grabbed by Backpack, so it gets the pick here.

Q&A

What if I'm running this in a campaign instead of as a standalone?

You'll probably need to start out with more spell assets at level 0, you certainly can just swap the 4 higher-level accessories out for 2 Holy Rosary and 2 Crystal Pendulum, but without Hierophant, that doesn't really do anything for Dragon Pole, you just end up with a very high will and nothing to do with it. Probably this also means you go for Arcane Initiate instead of or in addition to Familiar Spirit, and possibly go to 2 copies of Arcane Research instead of In the Thick of It (or do both, between Wish Eater and Hallowed Mirror, you can be pretty durable once you're up and running)

You might also need to keep more spells in the deck as you upgrade, just so you have enough to reliably clear Angered Spirits when it comes out. In standalone, you can simply give a dry chuckle when you draw it and completely ignore it for the rest of the scenario.

Isn't this a lot of assets to run? How do you get set up?

Backpack helps a ton with your consistency, and you don't need to get the whole rig out to start doing work. Shrivelling and Spectral Razor help keep things under control before you get set up, and The Red Clock can also help a lot, both in allowing you to contribute to the scenario before being fully ready, and also in giving an ongoing stream of extra resources to help afford things.

3 comments

Feb 16, 2022 FlarkeFiasco · 1

This deck seems very difficult to progress into if you're not building it standalone. I'm not sure it's powerful enough, before it hits critical mass, to work well in a campaign that slowly creeps towards the complete build. I could be wrong though!

Either way, really cool deck. Why Akachi over other hierophant users, cuz she has access to the best accessories?

Feb 16, 2022 Ektheleon · 198

More or less, yeah. You could probably put a version of this in another mystic, (Moon Pendant, Crystalline Elder Sign, The Hierophant • V, are still available to everyone), but I really like what the off-class stuff brings to the table for Akachi? Thought about Dexter, but it's a lot of assets that you don't really ever want to replace, which seems wasteful.

Agree about the campaign build, I started out trying this in a campaign, and ended up having to put a bunch of XP into non-Dragon-Pole-related things to get the deck to stabilize before I felt safe trying to make the central plan happen. I definitely think I'd be able to do it better now that I've got a clearer idea of what the end goal is, and how the deck feels when it's working right?

But it's definitely got like, 15 ish XP of "core cards" that you need to make it start working, and that don't do much on their own. Which does feel awkward to build piece by piece.

Feb 16, 2022 FlarkeFiasco · 1

Care to link a level 0 version, and an upgrade path, that way we can benefit from your insights and tinkering you've tried? I'm drawing a bunch of blanks, and since I don't really ever play standalone, it's a hard sell for me to sit down and work out, not only a level 0 version, but also an upgrade path that keeps the deck chugging as best as it can, until, like you said, it hits that critical mass.

From prior experience, I played a lily Chen deck that liked to just load up its arcane slots, so things like talisman of protection (fast) was really helpful, and even scrying just because it's only a dollar.

I think that's ultimately the most awkward thing about dragon pole is cheap arcane slot enablers, thag you LATER want to turn into actual real arcane slot cards. Makes it double awkward in THIS deck because arcane slot enablers are cool, sure, but once you get hierophant, then you're looking to go accessories instead of arcane slots, so you'll need to not only jam in the core pieces of the build, but also look to remove the riffraff enablers from before the build has the tools to reliably come online from accessories (two copies of hierophant probably isn't enough consistency on their own, to warrant swapping all arcane slots out and then just praying, lol)