Lola Hayes is the very worst investigator to put this card in. Change my mind.
To clarify this discussion, I’m going to make a distinction between the Investigator you start the game as (the Base investigator) and the investigator you Transfigure into mid-scenario (the Landing investigator). My comments all have to do with Lola as the Base investigator, and apply to both pre- and post-taboo Lola.
With that out of the way, let's get to why Lola is the game’s worst possible Base investigator. There are three clear drawbacks to Lola as a Base:
1: She can’t take level 4-5 cards. Sure, you can do a lot with level 0-3 cards, but if we’re going to be giving up high level cards I would expect to get something pretty great in return and Lola has very little to offer in exchange.
2: Lola’s larger-than average decksize means she’s less likely to draw Transfiguration in her opening hand. Also her limited ability to combine draw effects from multiple classes hinders her ability to dig through her deck quickly if she doesn’t draw it early.
3: Her weakness (Crisis of Identity) can discard your cards before you even get to play them. Crisis discards cards from the top of your deck as well as your hand and/or play area, so there is nowhere a card is totally safe from being trashed by Crisis. The worst case is that Transfiguration gets discarded before you can play it, but even after you’ve Transfigured, Crisis might discard whatever cards you were using Lola to get. On top of all this, Lola also has two copies of Crisis, doubling the chances for things to go wrong.
There are other Base investigators who face some of these drawbacks, but Lola is uniquely situated to face all three drawbacks every scenario. And all of this is on top of the fact that she has a difficult-to-leverage statline and an investigator ability that is all downside. Any combo that can be set up by another Base will always be better set up by that other Base, since that investigator comes with fewer drawbacks and more strengths to lean into.
The only upside to using Lola as a Base is her broad card access. The things she offers that other Base investigators can't is 3+ class combos, or combos of multiple level 3 cards (and not all examples from these categories are unique to Lola). And I cannot think of a combo that fits this criteria that convinces me to risk all the negatives of starting out as Lola.
That said, the number of possible decks available to Lola are nigh unlimited, so I certainly haven’t considered every possible option. If people would like to comment below their best examples of cards that they would put in a Lola + Transfiguration deck I would be interested to hear them. So far, despite lots of chatter on the internet, I have yet to hear a single example of a Lola-specific setup that would make me consider taking on all her negatives.
Hit me with your best Lola + Transfiguration builds. If you post something truly awesome maybe you'll be the one to change Pseudo "Tough Crowd" Nymh's mind!
Until then, I stand by my opinion that Lola is simply the worst possible investigator to take Transfiguration.