Kōhaku with His Hemlock Vale Technology | Hard | Solo

Credit: Fantasy Flight Games

This deck is for playing hard/expert level solo adventure compaigns. With help of Read the Signs, Spectral Razor, Fey and plenty of stats essentials, Kōhaku can easily reach 10+ skill values during investigation and fight. On the other hand, thanks to Kōhaku's cursed/bless card access, he can make use of high efficiency engines from different classes. Those make this deck stable to kick over and immune to chaos bag surprises.

This deck uses totally different strategy for the 0exp version (St. Hubert's Key & Cat Mask), because we require ~14 exp to get minimum required core cards to run the blurse strategy.

This deck is tested: I run it for the Dunwich Lagacy campaign in Expert difficulty.

Why do I recommend this deck:

• Different style of Mystic (rather than traditional spell-asset based).
• Strong on both clue-getting and fighting.
• Stable run thanks to the powerful card & economy engine.
• Good chance to experience (what I think) most powerful mystic cards in THV.
• NO ONE CAN COMPETE ME WITH THOSE UNIQUE() ASSETS!

What is the cons:

• High difficulty: it requires lots of thinking including action planning, chaos bag manipulation and skill value planning. No brainless choices even when there are 2+ and 2+ tokens (you may need to keep them and get the free action in the next round).
• Only for solo adventure: too many unique() assets.

• Overview

• Main Strategy

• Card Drawing & Economy

• Encounter Protection

• Other Highlighting Cards

• Upgrade Path

• Make Your Own Deck!

Mulligan

• Card-drawing the first. If no card-drawing cards in the opening cards, replace all cards for card-drawing.
• Keep Armageddon (to prevent you from getting stuck on annoying enemies at the beginning).
• Keep at most 1 copy of Rite of Sanctification / Faustian Bargain. FB > RoS unless you see Tempt Fate or Keep Faith.

Fight with Spectral Razor and Armageddon. Armageddon is used as backup of Spectral Razor, so generally there is no need to save its charges by manipulating . The exception is when the game is enemy-heavy, or you need to kill boss (SR is not good at handling Elites).

• Spectral Razor + one of Eye of the Djinn / Blasphemous Covenant / = 3 damage with 8-9. Extra 2 from each copy of Fey.

Investigate mainly via basic investigation actions with help of boosts from Gabriel Carillo and / tokens. Use Read the Signs to deal with difficult tasks.

• Read the Signs + one of Eye of the Djinn / Blasphemous Covenant / = 2 clues with 9-11. Extra 2 from each copy of Fey.

In average you have 4 actions per turn. Extra actions from Kōhaku's and Eye of the Djinn. After assets fully set, you can have 6 actions.

• +1 from Kōhaku's .
• +1 from Eye of the Djinn with manipulating 1+1.
• +1 from the 2nd Eye of the Djinn action with manipulating 1 .

Regarding the choices of Kōhaku's :

• In most cases, choose +1 action as long as you can. BUT there is exception: when you want this +1 action in the next turn (e.g. preparing for fighting).
• In case of a tie, usually > . But adding is also a good choice.
• For 0xp version, if you no longer need +1 action, you can choose not to trigger it to avoid chaos bag surprise.

Tips:

• Only play Tempt Fate and Keep Faith when you need the tokens. I know they are fast but just keep them in hand, please. Otherwise the tokens may be unexpectedly consumed during skill tests. The more tokens in the chaos bag, the more likely they get wasted.
• In case of potential enemies, do make plans! Either play Armageddon early, or keep 2+ resources to play Spectral Razor. Kōhaku is not good at evading, so you MUST kill the enemies in front of you before doing other things.

Total resources you need: 20

• 1 from Scroll of Secrets
• 1 from Favor of the Moon
• 2 from Book of Living Myths / Favor of the Sun
• 2 from Eye of the Djinn
• 4 from Armageddon
• 2 from Binder's Jar
• 4 from Gabriel Carillo
• 4 from 2 times of Read the Signs or/and Spectral Razor.

Total resources you can hopefully get until the beginning of Round 5: 23

• 5 from the initial resources
• 4 from the upkeep phase
• 6 from Rite of Sanctification
• 5 from Faustian Bargain
• 3 from Favor of the Moon

Number of upkeep / card-draw actions to draw the whole deck: 11

• -5 from opening hand.
• -2 from 2 copies of Tempt Fate
• -3 for each copy of Scroll of Secrets, Gabriel Carillo and/or Deep Knowledge.

2 copies of Ward of Protection + 2 copies of Deny Existence deny 4 encounter cards in a game as you wish, while only 10~15 encounter cards will be drawn in a solo game. It means you can counter not only Ancient Evils, but also annoying force-moving, action taking and lethal damage/horror.

Gabriel Carillo provide great help on both card drawing and boosting. Meanwhile, he is very likely to be the person mentioned in Kōhaku's background story as his partner.

Eye of the Djinn in this deck is possibly in best use, as there are 5 cards (BoLM, FotM, FotS) for synergy.

Rite of Sanctification typically may not be a good choice for resources - it heavily relies on synergy and thus hard to take effect at the beginning of the game when resources are really critical. But in this deck, its effect is guaranteed by Kōhaku's . In most cases, it provides 4-10 resources which is really awesome.

Binder's Jar was added because I want to fan out Weeping Yurei when I plan to recur the deck more than once. Meanwhile it makes protection to enemy attacks. Additional arcane slots is not used in this deck.

Call for Backup's healing ability is the only card among the whole collection to heal Servant of Brass (bonded to Seal of the Elders).

View the 0xp version here.

(View at arkham-starter.com)