Win NotZ with Daisy Walker & Friends (Revised Core Set)

Daisy Walker

"Shook by a Look in a Book"

This multiplayer Daisy Walker deck focuses on discovering all the clues in the Night of the Zealot campaign. This is essentially an improved starter deck. It uses cards only from the Revised Core Set with no overlap when teamed up with Roland, Agnes, or Wendy. Played next to at least one of those decks (especially Roland), it should be able to confidently perform in The Gathering, defeat at least four cultists in The Midnight Masks, and thereby set conditions to win The Devourer Below by disrupting the ritual. Daisy is a good choice to be the lead investigator for campaign-specific reasons.

Inherent Advantages:

• Excellent Intellect
• Excellent Sanity
• Free Action with Tomes

Your Intellect is exceedingly good. You will be able to cut through the highest shroud values and discover clues. You have a huge pool of sanity to help absorb any horror that slips past your average Willpower. You get to use your books for free once per round, making them high impact assets.

Inherent Flaws:

• Poor Combat
• Poor Agility
• Terrible Health

You are unimpressive in almost any physical confrontation. Your health is very low, exposing you to real risk of defeat if you are caught by enemies and can't escape or get help. Your low Agility leaves you vulnerable to some treacheries as well. Physical trauma over the course of a campaign could threaten your whole game plan.

Game Plan:

You are the dedicated cluever, the vacuum cleaner of truth, looking, reading, note-taking, comparing, contrasting, and ultimately revealing the terrible, no-good, very bad, dirt-cheap, and dirty deeds of the Mythos. You will move. You will investigate. You will advance the act.

You will practically not fight at all. Only in very narrow circumstances should you consider the fight action. Your Agility isn't great, but you've got the cards and icons in this deck to at least attempt to evade. Ultimately, this is a multiplayer deck, so you can afford to specialize away from combat. Your heavily-armed friends need someone to find all those clues, after all.

You need to stick close to those friends unless you've got your evasive tools in hand or in play already. Your first priority, however, is getting your books out. Either of the tomes you'll run in this deck offer some impressive advantages to your team, especially since they do so without costing an action.

Action Priority:

• Investigate: Always
• Fight: Rarely
• Evade: Conditionally (w/ a synergistic asset/event/skill)

Deck Composition:

This section analyzes the proportion of cards in the deck before (and after) upgrades according to their primary role, as opposed to their type, cost, icons, or any other factor. The roles considered include:

• Damage: Cards that primarily help you defeat enemies.
• Discovery: Cards that primarily help you discover clues.
• Mobility: Cards that primarily help you move around and avoid enemies.
• Economy: Cards that primarily help you gain or save resources, actions, or cards.
• Support: Cards that help you or other investigators do things, but don't directly affect the state of play.

2 (-) Damage cards

• [2x Knife]
• (2x Disc of Itzamna ••)

6 (↗8) Discovery cards

• 2x Magnifying Glass
• 2x Dr. Milan Christopher
• 2x Deduction
• (2x Seeking Answers ••)

6 (↘4) Mobility cards

• [2x Barricade]
• 2x Mind over Matter
• 2x Manual Dexterity

4 (↗6) Economy cards

• 2x Emergency Cache
• 2x Old Book of Lore
• (2x Encyclopedia ••)

13 (↘11) Support cards

• [2x Scrying]
• 2x Research Librarian
• 2x Arcane Studies
• 1x Daisy's Tote Bag
• 2x Ward of Protection
• 2x Guts
• 2x Unexpected Courage

Card Notes:

• Knife is a simple weapon, but enough to help you keep small enemies at bay. You're not meant to be a fighter in any way, however, so you won't hold on to this long.

• Magnifying Glass doesn't cost an action to play, but it takes up a hand slot. You're probably only using one tome at a time, however, and the Intellect boost offered by the Glass is a nice one. You want your Glass out, especially when you don't have Dr. Milan Christopher in play.

• Old Book of Lore may be tattered and weathered, but the knowledge it contains could unravel great mysteries. This is an absolute staple for you, since you get to activate the Book's ability for free. It's effect is enormously useful, allowing you or another investigator at your location to draw a card from among the top three cards of their deck and shuffle the rest back in. This is card selection galore. Because you get to use this ability without spending an action and its effect reduces the need for yourself or another investigator to spend actions drawing cards, this is considered an economy card in this deck.

• The Necronomicon is your signature weakness and it is indeed a copy of the blasphemous opus of the mad Arab Abdul al-Hazred. Its contents are as horrifying as they are alluring to you. The effect here is a relatively simple one: all of your Elder Signs are now Autofail/Tentacles . You can get rid of that by reading the tome, taking a total of 3 horror and either spending 3 actions (or 3 uses of your signature ability).

• Scrying requires two actions to get rolling, but it allows you to do something very useful when there are no clues nearby or on those occasions when clues are not as important. Scrying lets you manipulate the top 3 cards of the encounter deck (or any investigator's deck). This means you can set up the next several draws to your liking. While quite helpful, this effect is not very efficient, so you'll swap out this spell in upgrades.

• Dr. Milan Christopher is a bug guy and a good one. A fellow Miskatonic faculty member, the professor's erudite counsel gives you a static boost to your Intellect. Moreover, he rewards your discoveries with a resource. (Note that if you play with the Taboo List, his ability now requires you to exhaust him when he does this, so the resource bonus only happens once per round. It's still fantastic.) Dr. Christopher is not much of a damage or horror soak, and you should only redirect to him if it saves you from defeat or if clues have become irrelevant for some reason.

• Research Librarian is your able assistant, rushing to find whatever obscure text you request. Effectively, he is your (rather more expensive) third and fourth copy of Old Book of Lore. As soon as Dr. Milan Christopher shows up, this fellow should fade into the background.

• Arcane Studies are something of a hobby of yours as a dabbler in the occult. This level 0 talent can be fairly slow and expensive to play and use, but it offers you icons relevant to your game plan if you're short on cash and decide to commit it instead.

• Daisy's Tote Bag is your third copy of Unexpected Courage for Willpower and Intellect tests. Playing it only gives you more hand slots to carry more tomes. Since you're only running a few tomes in this deck because of the highly restricted card pool, just commit this when you need those icons.

• Barricade is a peculiar card to play, allowing you to control the movement of hunter enemies or even allow another investigator to disengage from an enemy by moving into the barricaded location. Its other purpose is to provide you a diverse range of icons to commit to skill tests. You'll swap this out in upgrades.

• Emergency Cache can be very important to your early round plays when you're trying to get your books out and pay for Dr. Milan Christopher. Outside of that it refills your pocket book nicely.

• Mind over Matter is one of your solutions for evasion, letting you put all your brain power into finding an answer to a sticky situation. You could use it to fight at an unmodified skill level of 5, which should be enough to hit lesser enemies, but you'll only do 1 point of damage.

• Ward of Protection is a spell (You're something of a witch yourself, remember?) that lets you blank a non-enemy treachery that comes off the encounter deck at the cost of a single point of horror. Ward offers a great trade off for you. Save this for a treachery that forces you to take a high difficulty Willpower or Agility test (which will be many of them, considering your stats) or especially a treachery that adds doom to the agenda.

• Deduction lets you trade a card for a clue because you are practically guaranteed to pass the skill test you commit this to.

• Guts will help with any Willpower tests you face, but it's also here to help out some of your potential companions whose mental defenses leave a lot to be desired (looking at you, Roland).

• Manual Dexterity is another piece in your evasion support package. Ample icons and the ability to replace itself when you pass the test is all one could ask for.

• Unexpected Courage gives you whatever icons you need at the time. Don't forget it's also great for helping a fellow investigator with a Combat test.

• Paranoia is the basic weakness included in the original Daisy starter deck in the Core Set. It blanks your entire pile of resources, which could be very harmful or not at all. You have no events that cost more than 1 resource to play, so play your assets as soon as you can afford them and you should be reasonably well insulated from this.

Mulligan Targets:

These are the cards you most hope to see in your opening hand and should consider mulliganing something else in hopes of drawing.

• (Intellect) Dr. Milan Christopher or Magnifying Glass: The professor offers you nothing but upside for a reasonable price. If he's not in your opening hand of 5, consider mulliganing almost the entire hand to try to get him (only keep Old Book of Lore or Research Librarian). He is a round 1 play unless you have to use the Research Librarian first to find your tome of choice. His reaction ability should set you up to play Old Book of Lore on round 2. A shadow of Dr. Christopher, but still a welcome sight, is the Magnifying Glass. If you've only got that, you should still be off to a good start.

• (Tome) Old Book of Lore or Research Librarian and Emergency Cache: The Librarian is a distant second to Old Book of Lore. If you get the Librarian but not the Book, play him in round 1 to tutor up the Book and then play it. You want Emergency Cache in addition to the Librarian in order to afford the good doctor mentioned above as early as possible. After upgrades, the priority tome becomes Encyclopedia.

• (Agility) Mind over Matter or Manual Dexterity: Either of these gives you an option for evasion should you need to do so early in the scenario.

Ideal Hand:

You probably don't mulligan anything if you see an opening hand like this:

• Dr. Milan Christopher
• Magnifying Glass
• Old Book of Lore
• Mind over Matter
• Ward of Protection

Upgrade Path:

Night of the Zealot is a short three-scenario campaign. You're only going to pick up a spare handful of XP before reaching the finale. At most, you might be able to earn 16XP or so if you're especially successful in The Gathering and The Midnight Masks. This leaves fairly little room to evolve the deck, so these upgrades focus instead on gaining incremental value, emphasizing a key strength or shoring up a weakness. Buy these in any order you wish.

• 2x Scrying → 2x Disc of Itzamna •• is better than the ponderous Scrying at dealing with your chief worry from the encounter deck: enemies. It offers a nice assortment of icons as well. Strictly speaking, the Disc doesn't cause damage, but because it effectively removes an entire enemy, this is considered a damage card in this deck.

• 2x Knife → 2x Encyclopedia •• is a tome offering a fantastic benefit for your whole team. Once per round in the investigator phase, it lets you boost a single stat for one investigator by 2 for the rest of the phase. Encyclopedia becomes your mulligan priority (or your Research Librarian target) over the Old Book of Lore. Because you can activate the Encyclopedia for free and its effect helps you or another investigator avoid failure (and thus the need to spend more actions to successfully do something), it is considered an economy card in this deck.

• 2x Barricade → 2x Seeking Answers •• allows you to investigate nearby locations without physically being there. This means you can investigate at a lower shroud location and discover the clues in a connecting high shroud location.