Charlie Kane, Master of Occult Hounds (Expert Multiplayer, C

Overview

Charlie Kane deck with a focus towards combat while also possessing the power to bring in clues by using power of his faithful Summoned Hounds:

Solid combat power once developed, with Gang Up adding solid boss killing power with a little bit of xp

Able to quite easily get 1-2 clues/turn once the Summoned Hound engine is setup

Short supply + recursion adds much needed consistency

Great at enabling synergy cards

Vulnerable for the first couple of turns before setting up

Exhausting allies to pass treacheries can limit options during the following investigator phase

The most important thing to remember is your greatest strength is the amount of power you bring to the table once you're setup and your greatest weakness is that you need a bit of time to get setup. As such, pairing Charlie with someone who can relieve that pressure for the first couple of turns if enemies do appear such as a high agility rogue can work very well.

The key combo

Due to the interaction between A Chance Encounter and Summoned Hound, you're able to put Summoned into play without any risk of betrayal since A Chance Encounter bypasses Unbound Beast getting shuffled into your deck. Those extra actions generated by Summoned Hound at a base stat of 5 and no extra downside are the heart of Charlie's power in this deck. Especially combined with Bonnie Walsh, you'll be able to very consistently turn Summoned Hound into a couple of clues/damage each round without spending any actions

The power of teamwork

Once you've gotten the crucial early buys of Chance Encounter/Summoned Hound, the other thing Charlie is fantastic at supporting are synergy cards. Gang Up in particular adds some much welcomed power for dealing massive damage to big enemies.

Discard Recursion

One of the other core mechanics of the deck to help with consistency is Short Supply along with all of the cards which can dig up the discarded cards (Resourceful, Scrounge for Supplies, Chance Encounter). With all of these in your deck, the only cards you're not able to get back from your discard pile are cards which aren't level 0, aren't survivor and aren't allies, which will only ever make a small portion of your deck. Also, keep in mind you can use the recursion cards to drag up other recursion cards: Scrounge can get Resourceful and Resourceful can get both Scrounge and Chance Encounter depending on what you need.

Discard Math

To give an idea as to the consistency Short Supply adds, lets use weapons as an example.

Only 2 weapons on a fight focussed character would usually be considered very risky. If you typically keep 2 cards during your mulligan when you don't have a weapon, you'll fail to get a weapon roughly 55% of the time in a 33 card deck with 2 weaknesses. If you don't get a weapon in your opening hand, you'll also fail to get a weapon in the first 8 cards of your deck around 50% of the time. If you combine the two, over 25% of the time you'd find yourself unable to find a weapon within your first 8 draws, leaving you vulnerable for quite a while.

In contrast, if you have Short Supply in the same situation, while you'll still only get a weapon 45% of the time in your opening hand, when you don't start with a weapon you'll discard a weapon from Short Supply around 60% of the time, leaving it to be easily recovered with recursion. If you also don't get a weapon discarded with Short Supply, you'll still be able to draw one within the first 8 cards over 72% of the time. If you combine this all together, you'll be able to get a weapon within your first 8 cards, provided that you have access to recursion, around 94% of the time, which is massive considering you're only running 2 weapons. This principle can also be applied when fishing for allies and other important cards.

Mulligan

As you'd expect, allies, weapons and econ cards are all things you're looking for during the mulligan. However, also heavily consider keeping recursion cards since they can be used to dig out what you need from the discard pile when the game starts.

Suggested Upgrades

• A Chance Encounter and Summoned Hound should almost always be your first buys.

• Due to how easily Charlie can hit the higher bonuses, getting synergy cards early is often a good idea. The ones which Charlie has access to with this deck are Gang Up Strength in Numbers and Call for Backup

• Beat Cop is still top dog for a fighters favourite ally and can easily replace the other guardian allies

• The Black Cat is great when you have more experience due to it's pips and because it's ability doesn't care about being exhausted

• Charisma is still fantastic for Charlie as a way to further increase the number of allies he can have in play.

• Even though it's far less good without access Hit and Run, The Red-Gloved Man is still worth considering.

• Once you have everything important in the deck, supplementing it with exiile cards can also be very nice towards the end of the campaign. In particular, Flare is fantastic on Charlie

Final Note: Calling in Favours and Miss Doyle

Both of these are cards that I'm sure a lot of people will be running on Charlie so I just want to mention why they haven't been included up to this point.

With Calling in Favors, while it's a fantastic event in ally heavy decks for long term value and I use it for several different investigators, it doesn't actually help all that much when trying to get setup as quickly as possible, hence why it isn't included.

With Miss Doyle, while she does work well by giving you a slotless ally in addition to herself, the main issue is that you're hard capped at 6 allies even with 2 copies of Charisma and, once you've got all your important buys, it doesn't seem like she's quite good enough to fill any of those slots if you prioritize synergy cards by giving 2 of those slots to Medical Student/Gregory Gry since you'd usually rather be filling the remaining 4 with Bonnie/Summoned Hound/Beat Cop/Black Cat