Card draw simulator
| Derived from |
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| None. Self-made deck here. |
| Inspiration for |
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| None yet |
jericho · 259
Built (and played) for an at-home play of the 2023 Mythos Busters' The Innsmouth Conspiracy Ironman. This Description includes several scenario spoilers for Innsmouth, so Please consider not reading if you're hoping to preserve a blind play through.
Background
I played this with a friend's William Yorick for an ironman playthrough of the complete innsmouth conspiracy. We had about an average result, completing the campaign in 10 hours, getting 9 of the 15 flashbacks, and receiving a "win the campaign!" result. We slightly undershot the XP amount I was expecting for this campaign, I'll mention the upgrades that were missed down below.
I have compressed the levelups into basically two checkpoints: end of scenario 4 and end of scenario 7. I'll talk about what to take for each scenario for Adaptable below as well as the upgrade priorities. the version of the deck I ended up playing on the day of the ironman had "I'm outta here!" in place of Guard Dog for scenario 1, but it did not end up being necessary due to us basically bricking the first two scenarios, so I didn't include it here.
Overall I was very pleased with the performance of the deck, we had no issues handling monsters or clues for most of the campaign, and only struggled with having enough "time" to do everything due to a slow start in scenarios 1 and 2 delaying key upgrades until after scenario 4.
Summary
Clueing: ⛦⛦⛦ Fighting: ⛦⛦⛦⛦ Mobility: ⛦ Mythos: ⛦⛦⛦ Consistency: ⛦⛦⛦⛦
Mulligan
Before you have stick to the plan:
- Dig for: a weapon (or Prepared for the Worst), an ally, and Flashlight.
- Keep: any econ cards
- Ditch: Skills, Events that aren't economy.
After stick to the plan:
- Stick to that Plan: Emergency Cache, Contraband, Prepared for the Worst
- Dig for: economy, allies other than Agency Backup
- Keep: clue events, .45 Thompson, Calling in Favors
- Ditch: other weapons, skills, Agency Backup.
Leading Your Taskforce
The general gameplan is to leverage Leo's excellent statline in combination with automatic effects from allies to both collect clues and fight. You have no movement compression, so it's relatively important for you to be careful to be in position at the end of each round so whatever the mythos throws at you, you are prepared to deal with it in a way that lets you still get clues and help your fellow investigators.
Leo should be able to hit 6 skill/+1 damage without issue with fight attacks the entire campaign. While this deck is able to have 4 intellect early and up to 6 intellect in the final scenario(s), for most of the campaign Leo is somewhat limited in ability to investigate above 2-3 shroud, try to save the automatic discovery effects for 4+ shroud locations accordingly.
Leo has an incredible amount of soak, don't be afraid to leverage it. Charisma is to hold Alice Luxley and Mitch Brown in play at the same time, all the other allies are meant to be disposable, although obviously with Mitch out you can keep up to 2 of them in play as well. In general I wouldn't worry too much about Bought in Blood - there's little reason to hold anything other than a second copy of Alice Luxley in hand and you'll basically always have several allies in play, so it's rare for the weakness to take more than one unimportant ally when you reveal it.
.45 Thompson is pretty much how we pay for the rest of what we're doing, especially if you can Contraband it with a full clip. You'll spend 10 resources on this combo but it eventually pays you back 10, so it's kind of like having spent 0 resources on your fighting, freeing you up to spend "all" your resources on Allies and Events. That said, I ended up taking basic resource actions 2 or 3 times in most of the scenarios, usually early. Fortunately Innsmouth has very generous Doom Timers, so this wasn't typically a problem, and the deck has a lot of action compression from fast-triggers on allies once you're set up, so you should be able to make up the time anyway.
Upgrade Priorities
- Charisma (3)
- Adaptable (1)
- 2x .45 Thompson 2x .45 Thompson(3)
- 2x Flashlight 2x Field Agent(2)
- Stick to the Plan(3*)
- 2x random stuff 2x Agency Backup(5)
- 2x Enchanted Blade 2x M1918 BAR(4)
- higher level versions of cards already in the deck (e.g. Emergency Cache(2), Evidence!(1), Beat Cop(2), etc.)
as you can see I didn't get through everything I planned, winding up about 8-12XP short. The M1918s ended up being unnecessary (fortunately!) because my partner could also fight effectively, so we basically never needed more damage than the two of us could put out together in one round. If Leo's partner is more of a pure Cluever I think it's probably better to skip or delay the field agents and upgrade to the M1918s earlier, possibly even before the Agency Backups although they're really excellent in Leo.
You might be wondering why I wanted to take the M1918 BAR but didn't also plan for Swift Reload: this one is easy, I don't happen to own TDE myself. It's super good otherwise, if you have 10-12XP for 1-2 reloads and 2 BARs, absolutely take it, probably replaces Contraband in this deck.
Adaptable
Scenarios 1-4 all have a resign location, so "I'm outta here!" is worth considering, especially in scenario 4 where it will enable you to resign even after the boat has left play.
Scenarios 2&3 have Parleys, although I'm not sure how Fine Clothes helps you knock down Barriers.
This also lets us delay taking Contraband and Inspiring Presence until we have reasons to want them.
so here's what I did:
- "I'm outta here!" instead of Guard Dog for scenario 1.
After buying Adaptable:
Entering Scenario 2
- 2x Vicious Blow 2x Fine Clothes
Entering Scenario 3
- 2x Fine Clothes 1x Guard Dog, 1x Inspiring Presence
Entering Scenario 4
(I made no changes, but if I could do it all again I'd think about swapping out the enchanted blades for 2 Cheap Shot because the The Terror of Devil Reef is a huge pain in the butt.)
Entering Scenario 5
(if you swapped in Cheap Shot for scenario 4, I'd consider either upgrading to M1918 BAR first, replacing Cheap shot, or use Scenario 5 to swap back to your Blades.
Entering Scenario 6
(at this point I made no further changes via Adaptable, if you haven't already added Contraband you should now have enough XP for Stick to the Plan and should swap 1 e-cache for 1 contraband now.
Other Considerations
There's an argument to be made for Handcuffs for scenarios 5, 6, and 7. I think in 5 Handcuffs are kind of a lame way to cheese the scenario rules, we had enough damage output in 6 that I wasn't worried about Deep One Bull, and Scenario 7 it's really only the Priest of Dagon and I wouldn't take them at this point just to have to remove them again.
Going into Scenario 8 Elusive and/or Scout Ahead might also be worth considering instead of Vicious Blow, the Act 2 map is pretty big and there's two hunters who are on the map the rest of the scenario, so having some ways to get out of their way may be helpful. If I hadn't been tired I might have put more effort into optimizing at this point, but we'd crushed scenarios 6 and 7 already so I was on cruise control at this point, having hit like, hour 9 of play.
This concludes the actual deck description, below is just a brief play-log of the iron-man.
How it went for us:
Pit of Despair: and Despair we did. Bricked this, both took trauma, only managed 4 XP after interlude 1, missed out on Dawson and the ability to kill the Terror of Devil Reef. We removed just one from the bag. I was very worried that we were about to have a short campaign.
Vanishing of Elina Harper: Bricked this one too, 3 XP (I upgraded just one Thompson), we didn't get anything right in the accusation which ended the scenario early (but fortunately no one was out for blood.)
In Too Deep: first successful scenario, through dumb luck the Jail was the correct location in scenario 2, so the Black key was on the Jail from the start, making that easy. Collecting 5 keys was also easy, and then due to timing on treacheries the Conga-Line of bad guys had the Angry Mob at the head, so we ended up getting all 7 keys and getting that much needed +1 token. 7XP (14 total, but we couldn't spend yet).
Devil Reef: Despite the unkillable Terror, we managed 2 of 3 Relics, a successful resignation, and a sum of 6 more XP following Interlude 3. (20 total), The version of the deck I had at the end of this scenario is the first upgrade checkpoint.
Horror in High Gear: We chose a single car to avoid cheesing the scenario, which overall went relatively smoothly thanks to finally having good compression on Clues with the Field Agent and the car taking care of moving us. We did have one Cliffside Road where we had to take a full (4) test to avoid blowing ourselves up, but Yorick passed it in flying colors. Unfortunately we only got 3 XP due to how the deck broke and never finding the Winged One. (23 total)
Light in the Fog: Another smooth scenario for us, finally felt like we were hitting on all cylinders. Both of us Resigned from The Moon Room for diving suits, pulling a further 5 XP (28 total)
Lair of Dagon: we chose to focus on getting a good resolution here and left several XP behind to do it (turned out we had time to spare so we shouldn't have left the XP behind), disrupted the ritual, but Dagon woke up and we only got 2 more XP (30 total).
Maelstrom: This is one of the easier finales in my opinion, it only becomes difficult if attempting to get 100% of flashbacks, since that adds several requirements to the scenario that you don't have to worry about otherwise. We had already missed multiple flashbacks so we didn't bother, we had 3 of 4 keys for act 1 at the start of the scenario, the first key we found was the 4th critical one (Green iirc), and we dove in basically immediately. This gave us plenty of time to finish up Act 2a ver.I, which, due to leaving the 3 optional keys behind, was the only version of Act 2 we could complete, so we had plenty of time to spare.