this is every winifred deck i play tbh

so - this is my generic winifred that represents the default way i play her (usually on hard in multiplayer). i know a lot of other people are very up on event wini, and this is not that, crystallizer does not appear anywhere in the deck. it's largely a skill-focused build trying to capitalize on her ability by just drawing an insane number of cards. by the end of the scenario you should be shuffling through your entire deck every turn even on scenario 1, and as you add more xp the number of deck cycles per turn at the end of the scenario should increase. obviously you'll spend a good chunk of the middle of the scenario not drawing quite that much, but your card draw should still be higher than just about any other investigator throughout.

the basic strategy: this is a generalist build who compensates for middling stats by committing a ton of skill cards. you should be taking a bunch of tests and, unless there's a really really good reason not to, you should be committing two cards to every one of those tests and activating the card draw ability from that. try not to "save" skills - you can commit a lightfooted even if there are no other enemies to evade, i promise you will draw back to it. similarly, you ideally want to be playing your assets early as you find them, but if it looks like you won't be able to afford an in-hand asset for a while, feel free to commit it safe in the knowledge that you'll roll back to it.

there are six icon skills in the deck for the sake of flexibility in committing. when committing to a skill test, start with matching icons and then go to when you're out of those (unless you have opportunist in hand in which case you can commit that to everything until it goes away). your most powerful skill is agility and you'll want to use it whenever you can - she loves evading and is extremely good at it, and thieves' kit you'll probably be using agility most of the time. accordingly, agility is the most common icons amongst skills you have.

so your turn is like: evade an enemy, committing two skill cards, drawing a card from it, and then activating any pickpocketings you have on the board, and maybe a lucky cigarette case if you have one. then you can fight it with a gun or investigate it with the thieves' kit if you need money or pilfer if you have money. rinse and repeat.

your low willpower LOOKS scary but it really isn't. you can commit a couple skills to basically any test the game throws at you. anything you can do and unexpected courage solve any willpower test in the world, especially when you upgrade one into savant, and if you don't have them in hand, there's a you handle this you can hold onto for when it's scary.

your pockets go on your trench coat so go on and commit those if you haven't drawn the coat, and one of them is going to hold a hand slot and one is going to hold one of your lucky cigarette cases, so make sure to steal one of those. so by the end of the scenario, you should have four card draw assets on the table, and you're getting even more than that from skills and ability. money is coming from your assets and the occasional grift, which you're using to pay for assets, pilfers, and using lonnie on the coat every round you can to prevent your deck cycling horror from getting out of hand.

you WILL have moments running this deck where it stalls out and you run out of cards and you have to spend like two turns just taking draw actions because you just don't have enough commits to do anything. that's normal, feel free to take some draw actions to get the engine purring again, as long as that only happens once or twice per scenario you're doing it right, it has enough tempo while running to make up for some slowness. also as you level up, these instances will get more and more rare.

at level 0, this deck is pretty good and gets things done! it starts to really shine very quickly with some xp though. the side deck contains basically every upgrade she'll ever want, so here are your priorities:

• upgrade both of your pickpocketings as soon as possible. the amount of extra value you'll be getting out of them being fast and paying you money is insane, genuinely as soon as you have two of these down the deck will never be slow again.
• charisma + leo de luca. he's only not in at level 0 because of the ally slot. leo is really good and with the aforementioned pickpocketings you can afford him.
• card draw card draw card draw! manual dexterity is an EXTREMELY valuable upgrade in this deck, all in is expensive but a very effective way of getting started faster.
• actions actions actions! more actions = more tests = more cards committed = more cards drawn = more actions. blur, haste, dirty fighting, .41 derringer, all are powerful ways to get more done, but more than any of those, as soon as you're drawing cards at a decent rate, ace in the hole is three extra actions for free every single round for the cost of absolutely no setup whatsoever, it's REALLY good here.
• defensive upgrades. you'll be taking some horror from deck cycling, so having some defense is pretty good to have. precious memento is an extra horror healing per turn and having a moxie and a savant each help you with your willpower.
• from there you can start going into luxury upgrades - upgrading your hand assets, grabbing some stat boost allies who can sink your money, take an observed, whatever sparks joy.

there are a couple of basic weaknesses which, if drawn, completely ruin this deck in all cases: amnesia, doomed, narcolepsy, offer you cannot refuse, overzealous, psychosis, through the gates. it looks like a lot but it's only about 14% of the weakness pool, so you're most likely okay? if you do end up with one of those you basically just need to upgrade into a different style of winifred than this deck guide recommends, which is outside the scope of this analysis. paranoia is pretty nastly as well and probably means you'll need to drop the pilfer, and if you get dread curse you just let all your teammates know at the top that the bag will always always have ten curses in it and pick up a false covenant.

anyway that is winifred according to me, have fun, get messy.