Jim Recalls his Future featuring Young Rappers, demonstrating a Sixth Sense for emerging talents.

Credit: Dennis Calero

After a little break of 2 weeks, I am back with more decks. As decided by a poll on Reddit on which Jim Culver ended up far above everyone else, it's time to release my take on him.
This deck was inspired by @LordOfRavens, which sparked my long-time wish to make Jim work and challenge the community's opinion. Get on the hype train because this deck plays much stronger than it reads, up to the extent that I would comfortably place him in A-tier for Flex and True Solo!

After the 20k Series and its success, this 30k Series will focus on the investigators that are much harder to solve. Expect some jank, some outside-of-the-box thinking and hopefully some love for the underdogs of this game.

Click here to see all the previous decks. I will keep releasing a new standalone-ready deck concept every week on Friday, so stay tuned and keep pressing the ♥ button if you want to see more!

• Overview

• Main Strategy

• Don't Test Harder. Test Smarter

• Leverage Your Deck

• Other Cards

• Upgrade Path

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• Use the Ritual Candles and Recall the Future to mitigate the chaos bag, making any chaos bag significantly less threatening.

• Use Olive McBride safely on that weakened chaos bag for leveraging Sixth Sense (4) and benefit from crazy acceleration.

Pumping your stats is so 20th-century... In the future, people simply make the game easier on themselves.

• Ritual Candles turn every symbol token into an easier version of themselves. As in the future, no one cares much about the Trumpet anymore, we prefer candles in both hands.

  • With 2 candles out, symbol tokens are now usually from 0 to -2, which won't be an issue anymore.

• Recall the Future by calling a token that would turn a fail into a pass. Let's say you test 2 above the test value, and there are a -3 and a -5 in the bag. Better call the first, as it will change the test results.

  • By recalling the future, you are increasing your chances to succeed by a selected number, which therefore increases the chances of gaining a card with Crystal Pendulum

• When drawing a symbol token, Sixth Sense (4) allows us to get a clue from another location, picking the best shroud between the 2 locations. Use whatever shroud is lower to increase your chances of success dramatically.

• Brand of Cthugha (4) is an incredibly potent card, but its drawback can be pretty strong on Jim, who tests at lower values.

  • Keep Daring Maneuver in your hand as a safety net.

  • Use Recall the Future to call for a token that would cause you to succeed by 0 to prevent any mistake. It is worth it because you don't spend charges in case of failures, so in some cases, you better fail and try again than lose all your remaining actions.

  • By letting you choose among different tokens, Olive McBride also allows you to pick any combination that doesn't lead to succeeding by 0.

  • Altogether, with 2 Recall the Future and Olive McBride, you should be able to use Brand of Cthugha (4) 3 times a turn safely.

• Sixth Sense (4) is a monster at clue getting. During your first turn, open 2 new locations during set up and start investigating from there.

  • Olive McBride increases your chances of finding a token. You can get quite high in probabilities depending on which campaign and how far in the campaign you are.

    • If you want to do the math, follow this Link, entering respectively: 1. the size of the full chaos bag, 2. number of symbol tokens in the bag, number of chaos tokens revealed by Olive: 3, 4. Number of symbol tokens needed: 1

  • Eldritch Inspiration may seem like a relatively weak card, but it acts like a reactive Deduction in this deck. Use it when pulling a symbol token with Sixth Sense (4) to get additional clues.

• Deny Existence is a great way to avoid a bad pull on a treachery or avoid getting hurt by your weakness, but now think about its upgrade: Deny Existence (5).

  • This card turns your personal weakness into your actual signature. Use Olive McBride during the pull to get as many / as possible and turn these into healing!

  • As it has the spell trait, the Arcane Initiate will make it likely to find it before you hit your weakness.

• One of my biggest hesitations with this deck was between Deep Knowledge and Captivating Discovery for draw.

  • Deep Knowledge is fantastic when you have at least 1 candle out, but if you don't, it will very likely cause you to fail the tests when you pull the tokens. Play it even if you don't have the candles out, as it will get you closer to them, so you'll be more likely to have them in play when you face the tokens.

  • Captivating Discovery is a solid card, but it requires you to have a clue, which you can only do once you have found Sixth Sense (4). Because this is more likely to be an issue, I opted for Deep Knowledge.

• Take Heart is here for the treachery tests you will inevitably fail to get draw and resources for setup.

• Uncage the Soul, as always, is excellent for tempo and because there is a decent number of spells in the deck, though they tend to be cheap.

  • It is also a placeholder for Uncage the Soul (3), discounted by Down the Rabbit Hole, which reloads our Brand of Cthugha (4) fast.

• Spectral Razor, besides being a fantastic card, is especially important in Jim Culver because he has no other ways to deal with enemies than spells. In other words, without Brand of Cthugha and Spectral Razor, he is naked in front of enemies. Not great for his street cred.

• Voice of Ra is a more swingy resource engine, some will prefer Emergency Cache, but it fits well here because we can use Olive McBride to improve the yield, or commit it to a test if we have enough resources.

• Crystal Pendulum will bump your on top of feeding you with cards.

  • As a rule of thumb, it best is to call for success by whatever you are testing (so pulling a 0 modifier) because of the number of 0s in the bag, plus every , plus your . This will be even improved by your Ritual Candles turning certain symbols into 0s and potentially Recall the Future.

  • On the other hand, it is better not to use it on your Olive McBride test as she makes the results more swingy, for the best or the worst.

• Promise of Power is another big hesitation with Read the Signs. Both have pros and cons, but I prefer Promise of Power to pass treachery tests or scenario tests. Once you pull Sixth Sense (4), Read the Signs becomes more or less useless.

• Arcane Initiate of course shines in this deck. Best is to play her asap and replace her with Olive McBride once you pulled at least one fighting option and, most importantly, Sixth Sense (4).

  • In a campaign mode, with Down the Rabbit Hole, we can upgrade her to her non-doomed version Arcane Initiate (3) and buy a Charisma to have her permanently active.

• In the Thick of It brings 2 Brand of Cthugha into the first scenario, avoiding them from being taxed by Down the Rabbit Hole. We choose to take 2 horror.

• A bit more precision on Eldritch Inspiration:

  • Before we upgrade to Sixth Sense (4), it will not do much: replace the instead with another one, which means being able to choose a location 2 locations away instead of one. This can be useful in very specific cases, but otherwise, it will mostly be a commit before you upgrade your spell.

  • It can also be used on Recall the Future if you named a symbol token.

• Jim's Trumpet, unfortunately, is useless in this deck and will be a commit for complicated Brand of Cthugha (4) tests.

• Finally, Observed closes the upgrade path as an option in case you run out of upgrades and want to enjoy the beautiful design of the cards.

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Disclaimer: This decklist is published in the version that I tested. The upgrade path is just one possible way you could upgrade while maintaining the best experience and value of the deck. As these decks are made to be universally good, feel free to adapt them to your campaign and change the upgrade order around based on your experience.

Link to the 0xp deck

(View at arkham-starter.com)

Link to the full xp deck

To create your own guides, find the template I have created here