Dark Horse Duke (Solo) - A newbie learns the game

Any decks I share, at least for a while, will be more about the narrative of a new player trying to engage this game rather than much useful deck advice.

I'm a veteran gamer, but efforts to get into an LCG always failed due to lack of players. Arkham's soloability have finally given me a way to dig into one long term, so I recently bought a collection.

After playing Night of the Zealot with the recommended Roland build in the rules, this is my first effort to explore a posted deck and try tweaking.

The Dark Horse Duke deck looked fun, so I used it with just one modification because I didn't have the pack with St Hubert's Key. I swapped it for Rabbit's Foot.

Night of the Zealot: After one false start with The Gathering that went bizarrely badly, I did well in aretry, earning +4 XP and a mental trauma.

For upgrades, I dropped a Calling in Favors for Try and Try Again, leaving 1 XP in the bank. I'm not sure it was in the spirit of the resource-free design around Dark Horse, and indeed I never got the card out. It just never got in my hand in Midnight Masks, and in Devourer Below in came after my Dark Horse engine prevented me from getting resources.

Midnight Masks went quite well, with 6 XP (including the one leftover) to spend. This time I stuck with upgrading the core cards. The Lucky-Fire Axe- Dark Horse- Resourceful combo drove a lot of the success, so I spent 4 on upgrading the luckies. I put the other 2 into upgrading Peter Sylvestre who never ended up being as relevant as he should, mainly because I could never seem to draw him.

Which brings us to Devourer Below. I was hanging in there despite having trouble drawing assets, and it looked like I might eke out a win if I could just beat one cultist, a decent bet with a +2 fight advantage. I pulled the auto-fail, but exhausted Rabbit's Foot for a consolation card -- which was my Mob Enforcer weakness. This killed me and made me love this game, because of course just as I lose a fight (that I should have won) that might give me some hope of thwarting the evil cult, I catch a break which turns out to be a mob enforcer who apparently followed me into the woods to shake me down and shoot my dog. This is how Arkham should be.

That spectacular backfire notwithstanding, I otherwise got my money out of Rabbit's Foot. When I had no good options, I could always try a long shot test and at worst end up with a card as a consolation prize, which may have been what I'd spend the action on otherwise anyway. But man, Mob Enforcer is a terrible weakness for this deck. Pete's not the best in combat, and there's no hope of a parley.

Take-aways: I'm still learning the game, of course. The big lesson for me is that I need to manage action economy better. Duke has that great move-investigate thing, but there isn't much else in this deck to mitigate actions. I lost a lot of time to combats I probably should have just avoided. And I need to get better at sticking to the plan -- this deck works a certain way, and improvising can cause problems.

Next:

My plan is to bench this deck for a bit so I can explore some of the other investigators and card types. I'm thinking of trying Dunwich two-handed, possibly with Rex and Mark, using mostly decks I find here. Then I expect to be sufficiently experienced to build or modify on my own as I engage the next new cycle in real time.