AMINA turns DAVID into a Servitor

Amina does mundane tasks while the Servitor does the work!

Credit: Alexander Karcz & Martin De Diego Sadaba

Amina Zidane has been a big challenge for many to build for and to play.

Many campaigns favor compression or dedicated strengths. Amina's stat line puts her at the disadvantage of her 3 stat line needing a lot of work for comfortable tests. In this deck, we let the minion do the heavy lifting.

• Overview

• Main Strategy

• Key Cards

• Other Cards

• Example of play

• 18 xp version

• Upgrade path

Piloting

• The Main Strategy revolves around Summoned Servitor and therefore hard mulligan for it. Ideally Play David Renfield to bring forth Summoned Servitor, because he pays for it. After which you have access to two actions per turn with a base test of 4, which is already better than Amina's base stat.

• Amina should then spend her drawing from her deck, or playing cards, or even clearing doom. The majority of the tests should be kept to the servitor.

• The next two assets boost the value of the servitor: Dream Diary & Empower Self. When you have these out, you should be able to take 2 tests at 6, not including Essence of the Dream.

• At best, Amina has 2 skills at her disposal that can take 2 tests at 6 from round to round, although technically you may be using the move as well. As they are 1 fight, 1 evade or 1 investigate, it is important to spread out or interweave the order of the Servant's actions as appropriate with Amina's own actions.

• Typically Arkham is balanced for an investigator to take 3 , usually between Investigate, Move and Play/rectify Mythos. With this deck you will find that Amina with Servitor out has WAY more actions than is generally afforded.

Amina's ability analysis

• This deck has a very flexible output, and should be accounted for as such. Her ability effectively gives a discount of 3 resources a turn. A usual comparison is to Emergency Cache - 3 resources, an action, and a deckslot. Amina's ability saves that action and the deckslot. As long as she plays something every turn, she gets 3 resources of value, leaving her resources for other things such as Arcane Studies.
• Because of the action intensive nature of Arkham, if you spend all your turns playing assets, you don't progress and are likely to loose momentum. So generally it is best to balance out between setup and progressing with what you have. But if you that approach, you limit Amina's resource discount usefulness. Thus we have the Servitor taking progression actions while Amina spends her days playing assets, removing doom or drawing cards.

Campaign Appropriate

• This deck shines for action intensive or action diverse campaigns. Without spoilers: TSK, EOTE are great candidates, but I'm sure it can work well with others. Campaigns it might struggle are those that require fighting big bads in one way, which I shall not spoil. Evading enemies needs to be useful prospect to get value out of this deck. Be very cautious about Scenarios that take investigators from one place and place them in another, as the servitor can be left behind.

Summoned Servitor:

As mentioned above, Summoned Servitor is the key card in this deck. It will already require 2 to put it into play, but the value you get simply outweighs the setup. On a proportional of actions where 3 is the norm, 5 actions a turn feels plenty.

I start campaign putting 3xp into the following: Armored Carapace. to offset Amina's low health. Wings of Night to provide some value to the servitor's movement. And generally will be useful as long as the scenario is not simply a straight line. Be aware it can only move once per turn, and it cannot travel through the Open Gate. Jaws that Snatch As there is very limited capability of doing large amounts of damage, evading is a better option for enemy management. At the very least, with Trench coat out, the servitor can at least stun-lock the enemy (Evade for 5 every round).

There are some important notes about playing with Summoned Servitor.

• Servitor goes on your location and is independent from your player board. It is already a weird feeling to have to track your asset at the location as opposed to your play area.
• Servitor can only move to revealed locations. There's much benefit to running in multiplayer so that locations are first uncovered.
• If Amina decides to split up from Servitor, the XP into Wings of Night aren't as valuable.
• Further, some scenarios change locations and pluck the investigators from one location to the next. THESE will leave the servitor behind as it is not an investigator. Very important to be aware of keeping a second copy.
• That said, there's a lot of value in keeping a big enemy stun-locked at one location while Amina goes off to the destination. You can commit cards, and your Empower Self can effectively boost 2 locations: Amina's and the Servitors. Don't underestimate that flexibility.
• Playing Servitor: Even if the asset at hand is not David Renfield, playing it for free with doom and then playing Servitor is still a viable option.
• Be aware of the value that Moving OR Investigating with the Servitor takes no attacks of opportunity. Also be aware it can evade any enemy at the location, without peeling off other investigators with an Engage .

Finally, I always wanted to make Summoned Servitor work, and I'm glad this deck explored it well. I loved playing old RTS games commanding multiple units. This is a small step in that direction, where location, placement, direction and support expands beyond just one character.

Dream Diary:

• Dream Diary Dreams of a Madman was picked, simply because with the available Evade boosts, lack of efficient damage, there will be high likelihood of Amina being engaged with an enemy. Interestingly, The Essence of the Dream committed to the Servitor can be boosted as long as Amina herself is engaged with an enemy. This goes along all the shenanigans of Empower Self and Trench Coat boosting Servitor somehow...
• Grisly Totem works great with Dream Diary. Even if not-engaged Amina can get a once a turn3, which puts her quite healthy to take tests of her own.

Empower Self:

• Ordinarily Empower Self is an expensive setup. And even then you don't need all 3 copies because you're not boosting all 3 stats. In this deck, the Servitor can benefit from each copy. Additionally, the Servitor can be boosted by them even at different locations.
• One sneaky trick is you can play Empower Self with Amina's doom, use Empower Self, Use Sin Eater to transfer the doom and then ready Empower Self to add to that test again, giving a whopping +4 without any commits.
• When you purchase Empower Self, make use of the Myriad trait - 3 cards with a one-off cost, as opposed to Down the Rabbit Hole making each card cost 1 more. Use that opportunity to remove cards you find less effective, ie. Trench coat, Open Gate.

• Arcane Studies is a valuable resource sink. Due to Amina's innate ability, she should be rarely spending her resources, and can build up a pile that can contribute towards a few end scenario big tests.

• Grisly Totem is a useful combo card with Dream Diary and the cantrips, because you will likely constantly need to commit cards every turn. But with the Empower Self boosts, it's often not as necessary. It's hidden value is giving flexibility with Amina taking tests herself because each commit will put her into test of 6 range. The upgrade becomes less of a priority because Amina has so many actions she can afford to spend those additional actions into draw, and will likely have cycled her deck before the end of the scenario. Therefore I didn't feel the need for Grisly Totem.

• Obsidian Bracelet is useful because Amina does not have many tools to deal with the Mythos, she therefore needs the soak offered by the bracelet. With In the Thick of It she already has two horror trauma. Her consistent ability to evade means she should not be taking much damage/horror from enemies.

• Open Gate was included as this was partnered with a Mystic. I find it's value comes in with a single copy in the other investigator's deck, and now the players (who have built for flex) can spread out and still be connected to each other.

• Trench Coat helps The Summoned Servitor evade at 5 right out of the gate.

Warning: Word of Weal and Word of Woe are dead draws. They do not contribute to anything in this deck.

Example 1: Enemy might be one location away at a revealed location with an important test. Amina has the Dream Diary and the Servitor at her location.

Amina 1st plays Empower Self() with doom.

Servitor 1st moves itself and Amina to the enemy, which automatically engages her.

Servitor 2nd evades that enemy, committing the boosted Essence of the Dream to become +4, totaling at 8.

Amina 2nd to take the location's test. Exhaust Empower Self to boost. transfer the doom to Sin-Eater to ready Empower Self. Exhaust Empower Self to boost again for +4, totaling at 7.

_Amina 3rd to Sin Eater and clear the doom.

• Non essential cards here are Sin-Eater and Arcane Studies (2). Remove and downgrade to level 0 and you get the 18xp version. I ended up with 30xp for the end of my campaign with Amina having nothing better to do than clear out doom, hence the inclusion of Sin Eater.

• I will note that the doom play becomes very different without Sin-Eater. Deck slots are incredibly tight and it can be argued for another path to have Moonlight Ritual to upgrade to Moonlight Ritual. Once you have Sin-Eater, they lose their usefulness, because Amina has abundance of actions.

• Standard doom considerations for non sin-eater doom play include counting the rounds you have available, whether Ancient evils are in the encounter deck, and having a strategy to remove the asset with doom when required. Consider it essential to include Moonlight Ritual without having Sin-Eater.

• In general, it is better to have no doom across your board and let the weakness wiff, than to stand with 1 off from agenda popping, and then you draw your weakness - effectively shortening by 2 rounds. Hence it's another reason why the difficulty greatly increases when there is no Sin-Eater.

• Upgrade Path - This is a very quick startup deck working at full build 19xp INCLUDING bonus from Down the Rabbit Hole, but does need xp sunk into Servitor as soon as possible. Down the rabbit hole contributes xp into it constantly, but once you have Dæmonic Influence, it really sings.
• However, until you get Dæmonic Influence, you will feel very underpowered and may need a good partner that can work well from 0xp.
• Dream Diary is the other upgrade that Down the Rabbit hole contributes to.
• Finally, adding Empower Self does cost 3xp, but because it is Myriad, you get 3 cards instead of the regular one - a great deal!
• The only cards that will cost an additional xp are Empower Self and Sin-Eater. You would therefore be penalised 2 xp, at the benefit of lots more xp!

Link to the 0xp deck

(View at arkham-starter.com)

• Took this deck through the blind run of The Scarlet Keys Campaign, and it turns out it fares really well! Who knew that the conceal mechanic benefits decks around flexibility of test types?

• I hope this deck helps de-mystify Amina Zidane and Summoned Servitor because they're two cards that the community have had a lot of challenges building for.

• There can be variations to this: Elle Rubash, or concetrating on David Renfield, but I ran this version through The Scarlet Keys and the deck felt solid without needing Charisma. Feel free to let me know what you come up with and if it was with any success!

  ---

Thanks to Val for his published deck template.

To create your own guides, find the template I have created here