Carolyn Fern Squares the Circle (Undone)

Some (plot-free) notes, having finished the campaign:

This deck was pretty okay! (Stellar review, I know!) But read on, and I'll share what I've learned.

The biggest winners here were Survival Knife, Hallowed Mirror, Backpack, and Peter Sylvestre.

Goddamn is Survival Knife an awesome support weapon. And Pete is great economy if you can keep him alive (there are a number of tests in this scenario that can out right kill him with his single health). Hallowed Mirror is great and Backpack helps you dig it up (along with the knife and any other goodies that seem opportune). I'll also shout out Trench Coat, it does some work to keep you alive if Pete doesn't answer his phone.

Things that disappointed me: Hawk-Eye Folding Camera, Hypnotic Therapy, True Understanding (there are very few opportunities for this card to be used in this campaign).

I think the dream here is to get the St. Hubert's Key, Key of Ys, Peter Sylvestre, and Foolishness into play, with a pair of Hawk-Eye Folding Cameras and a Trench Coat, putting you at 6/7/3/4 with up to +3 additional to every stat from Key of Ys, putting you up to 9/10/6/7, but obviously that's a lot of luck and time to get online. It sounds like a good time.

I didn't get Kerosene or Key of Ys until the last scenario, and I never drew them; so I was unable to get a sense of Kerosene, but does seem like Carolyn would particularly enjoy setting things on fire.

I was never able to heal as much as I wanted, and I was unable to clue as hard as I wanted. It's on it's way to a solid flex deck with some tweaks.

Rational Thought sucks, and I think her suite of cards (including the promos) would be way better if Hypnotic Therapy wasn't so expensive to use. I also struggled with evasion later in the campaign. Unless I got Trench Coat and Pete into play, things could get dicey. I was considering a resource stat booster like Hyperawareness the entire time, but with my economy depending on healing, it was tricky to keep resources consistently available, as there were a lot of good cards to try to keep in play. I really wanted Logical Reasoning, but we just couldn't pull out enough XP, and it took a while for me to figure out where to steer this deck.

I also probably should have dipped more into the Mystic card pool, BUT I was playing with Diana, so it felt better to cover other bases. I'm also not sure how this would have gone if Diana wasn't such a beast at canceling card effects. I do think Carolyn and Diana have a lot of potential as a pairing with well tuned decks. They can both run flex builds quite well!

We also had some tremendously bad luck along the way, so I think I would have tried some different things if we had had more XP along the way. We pulled auto-fail a shocking number of times during this campaign, and since we ended up being XP starved, we were unable to prioritize sealing or blocking the auto-fail token. Which is to say: I think with better luck we could have seen a more successful run, but it was fun to play an experimental deck on a blind play through in a campaign that let you flounder a little. We were able to beat the final scenario, even if we struggled along the way.

Side Note: Also Dendromorphosis is an amusing weakness for her. My head canon is now that she has a family curse where her hands start growing fern seeds. (Bandolier is a good support item for Survival Knife and also protects against Dendromorposis.)

Side Note 2: I really like the Carolyn novella, and her cards are very flavorful, BUT To Fight the Black Wind is an awful, awful card unless you are always at an action advantage over the game and you have healing in play. For scenarios where there are only one or two long Agendas, it can be death sentence to your success. We were playing on easy, so I didn't mind the risk, but Foolishness is surprisingly tricky to get online (I believe I only managed this once in an early scenario, though his double wild icons are always useful).

Scenerio Logging Note: I fouled up my logging somehow, but the XP tracking is correct, and I believe the deck was correct along the way.