Card draw simulator
| Derived from |
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| None. Self-made deck here. |
| Inspiration for |
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| None yet |
Ruduen · 914
The Power Word Posse
Agnes and So Many Friends
Clue: 8 | Fight: 8 | Support: 7 | Resilience: 8 | Consistency: 8
Want friends? Agnes can make friends. Just talk at them using your blood, and have them follow and do whatever would be helpful at any given moment!
Double || Agnes is a strong Investigator for Power Word. Her slimmer deck size helps with consistency, and her ability helps mitigate the rather high resource cost involved. The damage can hurt, but you can maintain your health Power Word during the normal sequence of events, and then hit an end-game equilibrium cycling through Spectral Razor, Read the Signs, or even Deny Existence to reuse your important spells every turn.
This deck is based on one I had run earlier. As a quick trial, I have tested (and hit R1) on Bad Blood on Hard with this in true solo, so I think it holds up fairly well.
Strategy
Keep Arcane Initiate, Scroll of Secrets, and Heirloom of Hyperborea. If you have at least two of the above, also keep whatever you might need to fill an early role (including Power Word, which helps you fill multiple roles).
Find 3 'safe' enemies to slap Power Word on, and use Cower/Go/Distract and Engage actions to latch on to them. From then on, you can spend your first action having them cower and do something else useful. At an easy spot to investigate? Confess. Have an elite enemy to deal with? Betray or Distract. Don't have much else to do? Mercy to heal yourself and recoup all of the health you've spent.
Since one of your actions will generally be locked up with the Parley, make good use of the other ones to rack up whatever movement you can for free. Dowsing Rod and Summoned Servitor are both reasonable ways of sneaking in an additional move action when you have time.
Have too much doom? Remember, Summoned Servitor can help remove one of your doomed assets, while you can always cast a spell in order to put a damage on Arcane Initiate. And don't forget, the Servitor is always a card under your control - meaning even if it's not at your location, it can be assigned your damage.
Hallowed Chalice is there to round out the pre-word defensive options. While 1 healing isn't the most powerful option around, it can still represent an effective 2 resource gain in your favor - and when doom's about to tick, you can always squeeze a bit of extra healing out of a clean chalice.
Other Useful Cards
This build represents the 'core' build, since the first XP should likely go towards getting Power Word as high as possible. However, both before and after that, there are cards worth considering, that you can swap in or out:
Before Power Word:
- Arcane Research/Refine/Delve Too Deep - Bonus XP! Get Power Word ready faster! (Note that prior to getting any XP on it, I recommend only keeping 1 copy of power word.) While Down the Rabbit Hole can be valuable, this deck prefers to not start with Summoned Servitor and wants to swap in enough replacements that it is not a top pick.
- Explosive Ward - Good as a level 0 option, less so when Power Word will handle almost every non-Elite.
- Shrivelling (0)/Azure Flame (0) - If you need more anti-elite options, you can go this route.
- Eldritch Initiation - Reasonable draw card. This deck runs enough, but if the consistency still feels bad, it's not a terrible substitution.
After Power Word:
- Counterspell/Time Warp/Alter Fate (1)/Alter Fate (3)/Deny Existence (5) - Good defensive spell options. Special thanks goes to Deny Existence for cycling itself for a positive benefit if it's preventing 2 damage.
- Mind Wipe (1) - Make your posse more friendly! Mind Wipe (3) is also an option, but note that using it means you will lose out on Mercy efficiency.
- Sixth Sense (4)/Shrivelling (5)/Azure Flame(5) - These are still very solid spells that you can hold if your events aren't doing enough.
- Blood Eclipse (1)/Blood Eclipse (3)/Ríastrad/Gaze of Ouraxsh - If you need more damaging spell events, these will do. Just remember that each of these have unique costs, so you'll want to pick the ones that you can bear the most.
- Astral Mirror - If you want to go with a hand slot focus, you can. I've found this to be a little bit expensive from a resource/play perspective, but it's not the worst choice around.
- Sin-Eater/Moonlight Ritual (2) - Luxury upgrades, but you can squeeze out a good chunk of extra value from Dowsing Rod/Hallowed Chalice/Arcane Initiate if you try.
While this version of the deck uses the || back for the consistency, it is worth noting that the original back has a few tricks to consider as well:
- Bandages - One of the various defensive/resource options that works well with Agnes.
- Schoffner's Catalogue - Another tool to help with the hand-slot build, if that is used.
- Jessica Hyde/Peter Sylvestre - Very strong defensive options, and Jessica can even help with costs. However, Arcane Initiate is almost required for these builds, so since Charisma would be necessary, they would be later luxuries rather than earlier sources of power.
Thanks
Thanks for looking through this deck! This deck has gone through one campaign and received some initial refinements, but comments and feedback are appreciated!
| 8 comments |
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Jan 14, 2023 |
Jan 14, 2023
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Jan 16, 2023You're right, thanks for setting me straight! |
Jan 16, 2023Can I get your advice on how to play with a fully upgraded power word? I just tried it, and it felt like I was wasting all the commands on go and cower. Do you keep them with you at all times? That way at least you get to drag them with you when you move, but then you have to use one of the commands to cower each turn. Otherwise they attack you, right? If you don't keep them with you, do you find it hard to catch up with them to be able to trigger parley? I guess what I'm asking is practically, where are your minions: with you or not, and what does your parley look like? Is it always cower + one thing? Or do you spend two actions on parley? |
Jan 18, 2023
Yes, I keep all of the enemies engaged to me and move with them as much as possible. I rarely use 'Go', and in team games, I will often take an engage action to make sure that enemies which have engaged others is in my play area. I almost always use one command for 'Cower' every turn to prevent attacks, often combined with Confess/Betray/Mercy. Two parley turns are rarer, but do happen - those turns tend to be Cower+Confess+Mercy+Betray/Distract. The frequency of how often I pick the actions is:
An average turn for me often looks like:
Does that make sense? |
Jan 18, 2023To put it another way, having Cower + Useful Action every turn can be thought of as, "One of my actions every turn is locked into automatically discovering 1-3 clues/healing 1-6/automatically dealing 1-3 damage/automatically evading 1-3 enemies, with conditions". It's going to be rare that you'll get 'full efficiency' off of all of that. However, for me, it was very common that my 'committed cower+action' would be enough to get me 2+ clues/heal 3+/deal with an enemy every turn without any tests. To me, that would be an 'action' that I would willingly take every round. (And since healing a health is effectively gaining 2 resources for spell events, Agnes can get ever better efficiency from that on top.) A lot of the play can be about manipulating yourself and the posse into a location where you can get the most benefit from that - and it's much easier to do that with the crowd attached to you than trying to move them and yourself separately every round. |
Jan 31, 2023I'm testing a version of this deck in prep for a TSK run. Power Word is incredible!! In yr previous comment you say you don't use Go much? Surely you need to in order to keep them with you as you traverse the map? Or, are you able to forego Go because of the Summoned Servitor? (which, I assume, doesn't trigger an Attack of Opportunity if you and all the enemies engaged with you move with it? |
Jan 31, 2023You don't need to use go! Cower only exhausts them, but doesn't disengage them, so they follow you around when you move. |
Is there a bug in ArkhamDB? It was my understanding that upgrading customizable cards costs 1xp / 2 boxes, and that each card gets the upgrades. That would make this deck cost 7xp right?