You can tell a shark by its Finn

This is a Finn Edwards deck that uses his access to Illicit cards to pick up the Guardian .45 Thompson, and make use of its significant resource gain to acquire a large pool of resources for Well Connected. This in turn lets him use his extremely flexible statline to investigate, fight and evade as the team requires.

Faustian Bargain and Deep Knowledge are included as strong economy cards, and they may help get Tristan Botley into play via their tokens, though that's more of a nice-to-have - if Finn is otherwise set up and has the resources to spare, playing Tristan the normal way is entirely fine. The main reason to use Tristan Botley is the flexible stat boosts - if the team needs multiple enemies dealt with, for example, or you're fighting a boss or a Retaliate enemy, you can pick Agility and Combat to evade and then gun down enemies. If there's no monsters around, you can switch to Intellect to investigate together with his skill cards. If for whatever reason you only need one stat in a given round (e.g. investigating with no enemies to fight, or just shooting a single enemy, or not needing any stat because you're just moving around this turn), you can choose Willpower as the other stat - not a great boost but it might save you a horror from Rotting Remains if nothing else, and together with Tennessee Sour Mash it can give you a fighting chance of passing! Tristan is also stronger in larger groups, since you can use his Response to put him into play after any skill test, even one performed by another investigator - and more investigators means more tests and more opportunities. This deck would work particularly well alongside a curse-based Mystic or as part of a team using the Bless/Curse tokens in general, but does not rely on those synergies to work.

Mulligan priority is a little flexible - I would never drop Smuggled Goods, Lucky Cigarette Case, Deep Knowledge or the .45 Thompson, but otherwise between the skills and economy you should be able to draw through your deck quite quickly and contribute to the scenario before you're fully set up.

This list shows the deck as it is firing on all cylinders. The starting deck can be found here; the upgrade priority from there to here is upgrading the .45 Thompson, then Pickpocketing, then Tristan Botley. Relic Hunter, False Covenant and Momentum can be taken whenever you have the spare exp for them, but they're less crucial. Once you feel like your resource economy is in a strong place, take Adaptable to swap in Well Connected.

Further upgrades after the point shown here would be Another Day, Another Dollar, a copy or two of Tennessee Sour Mash (3), Lucky Cigarette Case (3) and then upgrading the skills - Daredevil (2), Manual Dexterity (2), and potentially Skeptic if playing in a full-on Bless/Curse team. You could also use High Roller in place of, or alongside, Well Connected, giving you more flexibility in the amount of resources you need to keep around and providing more boosts to any tests.

For variations on the build shown here, you could take Tempt Fate in place of some of the skills or Tennessee Sour Mash, particularly if the team is leaning into Bless/Curse tokens some more and needs more ways to fill up the bag. A copy of The Moon • XVIII or Trench Coat could help ensure those evade tests land. You could also drop Practice Makes Perfect, adding in a few more events including a second copy of Act of Desperation and allowing greater flexibility in your skill selection. That is likely to make the deck more expensive, meaning High Roller might be the way to go, but Breaking and Entering and Slip Away would be good for helping keep enemies locked down - say, in TFA - while Contraband (2) and Pay Day would synergise well with Smuggled Goods. The deck isn't particularly intensive in terms of exp, but if things are going poorly in terms of experience through the campaign and/or you're playing through Dunwich or something, Fence is an inexpensive economy option for the multiple Illicit cards in the deck, particularly if you lean into the trait with 2x Tennessee Sour Mash, Contraband, Pay Day, and .18 Derringer as a backup weapon.

The price of going wide in terms of flexibility is lower maximum potential - if playing on higher difficulties, be prepared to fail some tests and rely on the luck of the token draw. However, this is a pretty fun deck to use, particularly if you're looking for something a little unconventional. A Cursed, Illicit-trait synergy, big money, flex, combat, Skills + Practice Makes Perfect Finn deck - it's (slightly) less crazy than it sounds!