Agnes Baker Denies Reality

The thought process behind the deck is very simple: what if an Arkham character just say “nuh uh” to all the bad things that happen while also being good at basic things? Look no further than the “Agnes Baker Denies Reality” deck. This deck was born in the deep doubting despair of Carcosa as we go into the final scenario tonight.

First off, we have Cyclopean Hammer (ik typical right) for offensive capabilities. with a deck size of 25, your odds of pulling on at initial setup is 67% with a full five card mulligan if needs, which is pretty good odds. I did think of taking Versatile and then Short Supply to get down to 20 cards but 25 seems to be my sweet spot. Next up we have Eldritch Brand which I branded Sixth Sense to for cluing coverage, making both fight and investigate a 7.

Now onto the meat and potatoes of this deck. Agnes’ Bad Blood ability allows her to decrease the cost of spell events by 2 resources and allows shuffle the played card back into your deck. Moreover, the Heirloom allows her to draw a card whenever a spell is played, constantly allowing for card drawings if spells are played. The catch? Take a damage. Most people would look at this and think “that’s cool but how am I going to use this reliably without some serious healing in my deck or teammates, especially starting out with 2/2 trauma?” However, Drowned City has now provided the perfect solution to this quandary. Spectral Shield allows you to cancel a damage that would occur to the card it’s attached to (aka Agnes in this case), and pulls a charge from a spell asset to do it. This can get tricky as most spell assets do not have many charges. Enter Breath of the Sleeper: a 0xp spell asset that costs 3 resources and had 9 total charges. With both in your deck, you can cancel 18 total inflicted damage done to you or your Heirloom if you only want to use it for your ability. Obfuscation is also present for a small pool of charges if you happen to not pull Breath of the Sleeper.

Now that we’ve set the stage for investigator setup, it becomes really easy to see where this is going. Hit things and investigate as needed, and when you or an investigator needs something canceled, you can do it for cheap or free using Agnes’ ability, and then shuffle it back in to get a new card to use. Someone pulls an autofail? Play Time Warp. Someone gets a straitjacket and has to give up their hand slots? Ward of Protection it away. Each spell is only taken once as the assumption is that Agnes will always be using her ability to play spells, meaning less deck space and xp need to be dedicated to them. Dayana is also there to provide support by attaching a spell event to her which gives three uses, which has come in handy for attaching Storm of Spirits to. Cards like Hand of Fate are useful too as the current campaign has an investigator using Key of Solomon to help with healing.

The only real downsides to this deck is the initial startup cost will lose you about 2 turns total and is expensive to pay for, which is why both Emergency Cache and Voice of Ra are in the deck. However, once passed the initial cost of setting up the deck becomes very cheap to run.

If your table is tired of getting bogged down by the Mythos deck with unfortunate tests no one can pass or horrible player-altering misfortune, consider the Agnes Baker Denies Reality deck to make the Eldritch Horror slightly less-so.