Dreams of a Madman: Improv Boxing

One of the biggest problems facing Nathaniel Cho is his potential to run out of events. As the scenario draws to a close, you're likely to run out of Clean Them Outs and Counterpunchs to throw at the Mythos, forcing you to either draw to force a reshuffle, hope and pray that you draw the , or spend your turns saying "I test to deal 1 damage."

There are two solutions to this problem, one obvious, the other requiring a little more thought. The first solution is simply to pack in more card draw so that you can keep drawing back into your events. The second solution is to take advantage of Blessing of Isis and the support got in The Feast of Hemlock Vale (i.e., Ancestral Token) to fish for the to consistently recur your fight events.

Then there's the solution I came up with, shown here: double Versatile (or, with a bit of XP rejiggering, DerBK's custom Versatile (5) from the Unofficial Return to the Dream-Eaters) to take two Improvised Weapon.

In most investigators, Improvised Weapon is considered a bad card; when not played from your discard pile, it lacks the all-important text "This attack deals +1 damage." However, Nathaniel Cho gets around that, turning its base form into a pseudo- "You get +1 and deal +1 damage for this attack" and playing it from your discard pile gives you another valuable source of 3 damage. Granted, Boxing Gloves can't tutor Improvised Weapon, but by the time you need to start relying on Improvised Weapon, your deck should be out of Spirit events anyway. Improvised Weapon is your "bottom-of-the-barrel," "we've exhausted all other options" damage-dealer, even if it's a very good one.

The rest of the deck is pretty standard: Nathaniel's toys, Beat Cop for and damage, Tetsuo Mori to fish for your Items, Handcuffs so that you ideally only have to deal with one of the most boring weaknesses in the game once. Guided by Faith is a really weird pick, mainly meant to provide you with some clue-gathering potential that, unlike Scene of the Crime, can be fetched with your gloves. Stick to the Plan finds Ever Vigilant and Prepared for the Worst to give you a better start, with the 3rd card either being Toe to Toe for a "break glass in case of emergency" card or a copy of Improvised Weapon to make it more likely for Boxing Gloves to find something they can fetch by filtering out cards it can't grab.

There's obviously plenty of room for improvement; putting Improvised Weapon on Stick to the Plan raises the question of why we need the second copy, and thus the second Versatile, and Guided by Faith is really shaky as an inclusion given Nathaniel's base 3 . But the point of this deck isn't to be the best, or even to be good; it's meant to share the idea, to start a conversation. If someone manages to make a better version of this (something that won't exactly be hard), I'll be happy at having contributed something to the community, even if it's something they laugh at and go "Did he seriously think this would be any good?".

Thank you for suffering through this abomination of a deck and the wall of pretentious text accompanying it. Let me know what you think and I hope you enjoy!