A Loooong String of Curses

Sefina Speaks to the Dead

Spells, Rituals and Parley have recursion now. So we're theory-crafting Sefina.

Goal

• Kidnap enemies and make them tell you where the clues are. So what if Interrogate is a blue card? We paint our own Interrogate. Our version might be slightly more brainwashy.

• Use String of Curses a billion times with The Painted World, Double, Double, Speak to the Dead and Eldritch Tongue.

"What fine clothes you have, grandma!" said the Gug

"All the better to drain your essence with" replied Sefina

Synergies

• Wicked Athame puts cursed tokens in the bag for Speak to the Dead while also potentially giving it another offering. Olive McBride turns single offerings into triple or quadruple offerings depending on level.

• String of Curses and Power Word only interact with non-elite enemies. Spectral Razor, Vamp and Drain Essence have special interactions with non-elite enemies. Kicking the Hornet's Nest is specifically designed to find non-elite enemies.

• "Confess" only works if the health value of the attached enemy is higher than the shroud value of its location. Kicking the Hornet's Nest incentivises choosing a high health enemy as doing so will net a larger number of resources.

• Power Word and String of Curses give testless clues where there are enemies. Vamp and Power Word move enemies around. Vamp and String of Curses control doom on enemies.

• Fine Clothes help us succeed on our Vamp and Drain Essence tests. With upgraded Vamp we can test every skill at 0 as long as Fine Clothes are in play.

• Faustian Bargain, Accursed and Promise of Power add cursed tokens to the bag for Speak to the Dead. False Covenant and Accursed can help protect our teammates against Cursed tokens.

• Speak to the Dead can recur Ethereal Form, Power Word, Read the Signs, Spectral Razor, String of Curses and Drain Essence.

• Eldritch Tongue can recur Power Word, String of Curses, Vamp and Drain Essence.

• Dealing with enemies is scary as a 5 health investigator. Drain Essence buffs our survivability along with our potential damage output.

• 2s are usually wasted in a stat line. 2s in and are particularly difficult to utilise. Read the Signs and Spectral Razor allow us to benefit from our 2s.

• Double, Double not only doubles the potential value of our events. It also works as a safety net, making sure we don't waste our spells and actions pulling only tokens. If our first attempt fails because of tokens, we get to try again with fewer of them in the bag. More tests on our turn can also help reduce the amount of tokens our teammates have to deal with. Adding a bunch of tokens and playing completely testless is really good if you can pull it off, but it's not very fun for your teammates.

• Pickpocketing activates after we evade an enemy. String of Curses is a testless evade. Ethereal Form and Vamp also help with evading.

• Drain Essence and String of Curses allow us to deal with enemies while in our Ethereal Form, or with enemies who have already been evaded through String of Curses this round.

Options

• I'm very on the fence between upgrading Olive McBride and adding Gené Beauregard. Olive McBride buffs our recursion and makes it easier to deal with cursed tokens, but Gené Beauregard helps make sure enemies and clues are where we want them to be. Adding her also means we don't have to spend an extra action bringing our Power Word subject to a new location.

• Prescient is more spell recursion and synergises well with all the cursed tokens we are adding.

• Vamp is technically our only recurrable event that can only be recurred through Eldritch Tongue. Therefore I'm not quite sure Eldritch Tongue is worth it in this deck. We generally want to avoid removing our other parleys from the game as they can be recurred through Speak to the Dead. Eldritch Tongue is still great as a panic button and much better for action efficiency than Speak to the Dead. But if we choose to omit it, we can also get rid of Binder's Jar and double down on Speak to the Dead recursion through Eldritch Inspiration.

• Eye of the Djinn is a nice way to get more actions. It is particularly useful if your survivor is running Token of Faith. Which is probably best for everyone to be fair. Setting your skill value to 5 is especially useful for Read the Signs and Spectral Razor as the primary skill for those tests are and respectively.

• "Bonded" might as well be "Tongue Twister". I truly can't tell what will be better for this deck. I know "Thrice Spoken" is the most popular in Sefina, but I'm really only planning on brainwashing one enemy at a time and if I run out of copies I'll just recur them.