The Combo Queen | Ch2 Combo Cult

The Combo Queen

In this mini-series I'm delving deeper in the Ch2 card pool for interesting combos. Why have one combo, when you can have four?! Here Izzie uses Old Compass and Rabbit's Foot as fail tech, getting clues off 4 shroud locations with "Look what I found!". She gets testless clues with Will of the Cosmos, and places the doom on self-discarding Hunter's Instinct or Same Old Thing. She heals horror and damage with Consume Life kills paired to Cosmic Guidance and Fearless. Lastly, through double-dipping Do-or-Die with her ability then Izzie trivially recurs the ever-powerful Scrape By. How I got this all into one deck I'll never know!

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Series Decks

At a Glance

Stats
Clue-finding:	★★★★★
Consistency:	★★★☆☆
Enemy Management:	★★☆☆☆
Encounter Defense:	★★★★★
Survivability:	★★★☆☆
Simplicity:	★★☆☆☆

Overview

• (Clue) Combos: Firstly there's Fail Tech, as upgraded Old Compass allows you to get 2 clues off 4 shroud locations with "Look what I found!" and its -2 shroud redo. Rabbit's Foot draws a card for the privilege, and if you're certain you're going to fail a test (e.g. testing on 5 shroud before the redo) then On the Brink is both a cantrip or a boost when needed. Additionally there's Testless Clues with the superb Will of the Cosmos, which puts doom on self-discarding assets like Same Old Thing or Hunter's Instinct, with the latter synergistically recurring Cosmos. Finally there's Passing Impossible Investigates with Scrape By and Do-or-Die. With Izzie's ability you can double dip on Do-or-Die, giving an extremely trivial mechanism to recur Scrape By (and your self-discarding assets). Late in a scenario, if you have 10 or so cards, you'll see Do-or-Die over and over again and so recur Scrape By all the time (you can use On the Brink from your hand/discard pile as a second commit to better pass the Do-or-Die test). Of course you can use Scrape By to pass any test, but getting a clue more or less guaranteed is a good use-case!

• Complimentary Cards: Izzie thrives with some healing, both to fuel her ability and offset Breaking Point. For damage there's Consume Life with Cosmic Guidance, allowing for a two-damage heal in one action if you have both and kill an enemy - but also they standalone as there's plenty of enemies to kill or tests on scenario cards. While Consume Life is expensive, Same Old Thing funds its full cost - and it's nice to have a fight event for boss battles (with Hunter's Instinct allowing recursion). Canteen (with Relic Hunter for the slot) and one copy of Fearless are your vital horror healing - Canteen is completely standalone and Fearless works similarly to Cosmic Guidance. Canteen replaces Lucky Charm in the level 0 deck, which does the same job but a little worse - so this means you're not waiting on an XP purchase to function (though you do need to juggle the accessory slot clash in scenario 1).

• Staples: Timely Intervention is great by itself (especially for evades), but also allows you to sometimes fiddle Old Compass tests and increase the effective range of "Look what I found!". A single copy of Aleksey Saburov is included as a panic button - dialled down from two copies in the level 0 deck where he's more essential. Given he's unique, second copies are a bit of a dead card, and you also only play him if you need him as 3 resources is a little steep - his swap to Fearless is the final planned upgrade as Fearless is also a little situational. E-Cache is E-cache, with Hunter's Instinct you can re-use it if needed (but generally the deck is pretty cheap, as Same Old Thing covers event costs).

_{Thank you: 5argon and their thumbnail tool; Valentin1331 for his support over the years; the community creators of Arkham.Build (Felix), Arkham Cards (zzorba) and ArkhamDB (kamalisk) - linking their Patreons!}

Starting deck and planned progression

I did think about Ward of Protection in the starting deck, but you would need to cut skills to make space for it and I didn't want to do that - especially as the horror it provides is pretty unwelcome at the start. I'd also still swap it to Scrape By early in any case - it's an easy change to make though if you're keen.

0 XP starting deck is below (and link here):

A recommended order of purchases/upgrades is:

• 1 x Relic Hunter

• Unexpected Courage → Scrape By

• Perception → On the Brink ••*

• Lucky Charm → Canteen

• Old Compass → Old Compass ••

• 1 x Aleksey Saburov → 1 x Fearless ••

_{* Swapping Perception for upgraded On the Brink, i.e. card draw for card draw, is the right call for me - however it helps when you can buy at least one copy of On the Brink immediately after swapping out Unexpected Courage for Scrape By. Do what seems sensible vs. the XP you earn!}

Post-19 XP suggestions are:

• Timely Intervention → Timely Intervention •••

• Hunter's Instinct → Hunter's Instinct •• (for the icon and added Scrape By recursion...)

Playtesting Notes

I played this deck through two standalones: the Curse of the Rougarou, and Traces to Nowhere.

The Curse of the Rougarou: It's been about 4 years since I played Curse so I thought I'd dust it off, paying 2 player and on standard - though I think hard would have been fine.

This deck did what it was supposed to - getting clues automatically or through easy tests. Early on Old Compass was played, and and the -2 redo on it came in very handy at having a second bite of tests and facilitating passes. Izzie took on the titular Curse, and seeing as she had Canteen this allowed for easy healing off of horror (with Fearless also making an appearance to heal more). A nice feature of Izzie is the support she can offer other investigators through her skills, and at the end of the scenario she committed On the Brink to Daniela's fight actions vs. the Rougarou helping Vicious Blow over-succeed and deal max damage. Izzie did also find Consume Life and had cards to boost it - but as Daniela could hit a lot harder we let her get to it instead!

Overall it was a solid performance and what you expect - getting clues by attrition and playing a decent support role. It's less flashy than murdering a werewolf like Daniela did, but it's no less useful!

Traces to Nowhere: We played two player on standard. It can be a tough scenario so two player on standard is still a difficult experience. I'll aim to keep spoilers minimal! Play time was 2 and a half hours (there's randomness in the scenario, and we got some of the worst possible randomness). However it does mean the deck was more thoroughly playtested!

Izzie was awesome throughout, with almost all of her combos firing. I got Rabbit's Foot and Canteen in my opening hand, and drew Old Compass early through Rabbit's Foot - so I was off to a good start! There's plenty of low shroud locations in Traces, so Old Compass was always useful - and I did pair it to "Look what I found!" and the Compass's redo to crack a 4 shroud location (with this fail tech maintaining card advantage with Rabbit's Foot).

Early on I took 3 damage (you can spend clues as a action to draw a potentially useful card - in this case it was an encounter card enemy who attacked me for 2 damage, with Izzie already having one damage from elsewhere). Daniela disposed of the bad guy for me next turn. A few turns later I had Consume Life and Cosmic Guidance, and so killed a 2 health enemy engaged with Daniela to heal two damage. I then committed Cosmic Guidance out of my discard pile on a treachery later to full heal. There is a willpower test on a location card, and on several other scenario cards - so as stated there's plenty of opportunity to heal even without Consume Life tests. Dropping to 3 health early made be decrease survivability rating to 3 ★ as this deck is susceptible to RNG - if I hadn't found a way to heal you can see with a bit more bad RNG you can be defeated within the first few rounds.

Will of the Cosmos came in handy, I used it to get two clues and put a doom on Same Old Thing. This was the same turn where I played Consume Life (I played Will, moved to a connecting location, killed the bad guy), which used up the remaining supplies on Same Old Thing and triggered discard to remove the doom. Talk about efficiency!

But by far the best combo here was Do-or-Die with Scrape By. Traces to Nowhere does have some high difficulty Parleys which test a variety of stats, so Scrape By allowed me to pass an Parley very early. I used it to kill a two health enemy at one point using two basic fight actions (the first I passed with On the Brink). When Daniela needed breathing room late in the scenario, I engaged the big boss off of her and used it to pass the evade. As the scenario went on for a long time, eventually I had only a few cards in my deck and when I reshuffled Do-or-Die I would see it all the time - allowing me to constantly recur Scrape By (especially when you can further commit skills to Do-or-Die tests such as On the Brink or Timely Intervention to help pass). I think I must have played Scrape By about 8 times over the course of the scenario, when you consider you're often using it on crucial actions it's absurdly powerful. All in all, Izzie was the MVP this time by a mile!

Final thoughts

This deck almost broke me! I always wanted fail tech with Will of the Cosmos for testless clues, but that takes up around 12 cards (the aforementioned, then upgraded Old Compass, Rabbit's Foot, Hunter's Instinct, Same Old Thing and "Look what I found!"). On top of this, Scrape By with Do-or-Die is another auto-include combo. After all that, it was hard to put a deck around the deck!

Before this, I planned both an upgraded Meat Cleaver deck and an Arcane Initiate plus Shadowmeld (because it's cheap!) - still using Consume Life, Cosmic Guidance and Fearless on the second deck for testing. For the former, I could see it wouldn't work well without finding the Cleaver - and the level 0 Meat Cleaver is pretty sucky (plus the 3XP upgrade is a big jump). For the latter, there's vanishingly little room to include additional spell targets for Initiate, and Second Sight is both expensive and anti-synergistic with Old Compass.

This deck borrows bits from both, starting with Aleksey Saburov and Lucky Charm - but phasing these out, and then leaving Consume Life in to combo with Cosmic Guidance and Fearless (though crucially, none of these actually need to combo to function). If there's one negative to this deck it's card draw - as it's only On the Brink and Rabbit's Foot - but I think that's a general Izzie issue: to include skill cantrips (Guts, etc.) then it's harder to include skill cards. Upgraded On the Brink helps however, and if you do get Rabbit's Foot into play early than you're golden.

I guess I'm now "happy" with this deck, and honestly the Traces to Nowhere playthrough it was remarkably good. For those of you horrified by the photoshop, I'm British so I'm allowed (I think). It's a rather creepy image of the Queen in the first place (not AI - someone actually pained that). Hope you enjoy!