I used this deck during a full Night of the Zealot campaign. Here are my notes.

Carolyn

Carolyn can handle herself pretty well as a seeker / sanity healer. The first game was tight in resources for her as well, but the second, with Dr. Milan Christopher out as first action, was a pool of resources waiting to be used (for parley, clue gathering, …).

Her signature card seems really slow to properly benefit from it, and occupies the Ally slot, where you really want something else, be it Dr. Milan Christopher or Peter Sylvestre or else. In our campaign, we did not manage to use it efficiently.

In the third scenario, she managed to heal a lot more horror, meaning I didn't have resources issue, especially since she packed 2x Stand Together both played on the first turn ;-)

She probably is a descent seeker / support, but all in all I think she's better in groups of 3-4 than in 1-2.

The Gathering

We easily cleared all the locations with maybe a pretty clement encounter deck.

With .32 Colt, Survival Knife and Lita Chantler, Ghoul Priest died during the enemy phase => R2.

Opinion about the deck: everything seems expensive, but in this short scenario, that was not an issue. Carolyn couldn't use her power enough to fuel my economy.

The Midnight Masks

Upgrades:

• 2x Beat Cop => Beat Cop
• 1x Vicious Blow => Vicious Blow

Only 3 cultists saved. The start of the game was pretty fluid, until we managed to be engaged by 3 big monsters in a single turn… with Mark on the last munition of its .32 Colt.

We managed to tempo a few turns, Elusive was used but did not buy enough time to get enough resources to put down others assets => R2.

Opinion about the deck:

• Everything is really expensive.
• Emergency Aid is great, but First Aid seems too expensive both on resources and action. I never managed to put True Grit down, because I needed to put down allies or weapons first, and in retrospect, I should have taken one additional turn to setup, since it's impossible to do it in the middle of a combat.
• Shortcut is really great in this scenario, with so many places to clear, Elusive is a great panic button, but if you need to use it, you likely won't have enough time to collect enough resources to play your toys against hunters, which was the case here…
• "Let me handle this!" and Dodge are great tempo cards, but don't do enough when several monsters are there.
• You don't need more skill cards, Mark's (I.e. Sophie's) capacity is enough, but you need to do more damage. So Inspiring Presence to do more with your Beat Cop (2) can be an option, I think. Replacing Dodge by Heroic Rescue may be an action compression solution as well (arguably, exchanging self-damage against action (engaging) and damage). I don't think it would have saved us, but who knows?
• I lost some actions engaging monsters to protect Carolyn, so Taunt is an option.

So many options, so few slots ;-)

The Devourer Below

Upgrades:

• 1x First Aid => "I've had worse…"

The idea behind the "I've had worse…" upgrade was both to limit the amount of healing I would need and to help with the resources as well. With not enough XP to upgrade to two of it, luck would factor in this game… and luck was there: I had it in my starting hand after mulligan… and it was discarded randomly (with an Emergency Aid…), since "Midnight has passed"… The start of the scenario was not so good, since I had no weapon as well.

And… we died miserably, without even being able to resign (too many monsters on the location, attacks of opportunity would have killed us).

Mark Harrigan

Luck of the draw: the three times I had my weakness as the first or second draw, meaning I never took a single sanity damage from it. Otherwise, I would have been forced to play around it, and considering how we miserably failed our scenarios, it would have been a pity ;-)

In the end, Mark does not really have 9 hit points, since you really don't want to have more than 4 damage on him, so managing his 4 hit points, 5 sanity is really tricky. But that's what makes this game fun, isn't it?

He can handle himself in combat very well, but IMHO lacks Agnes Baker or Zoey Samaras "no action damage" to be as efficient as he could be. Beat Cop (2) is really great to help with that, but it is not enough. I'm wondering if adding Improvised Weapon to be able to consistently deal a +1 damage further along in the scenario is good idea.

The deck

• As I was paired with a (almost dedicated) seeker, I removed any card like Evidence! or Flashlight, to add a weapon (Survival Knife helped me, but is not sufficient at all in itself, especially for Mark when taking health damage can mean you lose 1 to all your characteristics).
• As Mark is already at 5 power, I packed .32 Colt instead of the usual .45 Automatic.
• Shortcut and Elusive are great, but Elusive has always been used as a last resort, and not as a movement accelerator. In this last game where I was full of resources, a Dynamite Blast would have been much more useful.
• I always used "Let me handle this!" on monsters to avoid Carolyn to have to evade, but by doing this, I didn't have any turn without being engaged, so I couldn't play any Ally or healing Asset… maybe I should have thought more to develop myself, and not always to protect my teammate.
• The deck here was inspired by "Sophie Harrigan's guide", and I adopted its approach of not using skill cards. Problem is: if you abuse Sophie's ability, then you need to heal yourself… which cost resource / actions that you don't always have… So maybe still pack some Guts instead of First Aid, as in this campaign, a lot of punishing willpower tests happen? Or, considering you often use Sophie's power during the mythos phase to handle encounter cards, use the new Take the Initiative? You lose the draw, but you pack some serious help.

My conclusion

In the end, I played poorly, and did not always enjoy my time with Mark. But I'll be back!