Card draw simulator
| Derived from |
|---|
| None. Self-made deck here. |
| Inspiration for |
|---|
| None yet |
Kal · 444
This deck was created for a two-handed run of The Feast of Hemlock Vale on Hard, alongside Kate Winthrop (decklist here), but with a twist. I wanted to do a standalone scenario during the campaign but it didn't really make sense, story-wise, to leave the Vale and come back again because of its three day narrative structure. So, instead, I decided to do the standalone at the beginning of the campaign.
The game rules don't allow for this, but I assume that's just because you're required to spend XP to do a side story and those rules were created before the addition of In the Thick of It, so I think doing it this way is within the spirit of the rules, if not the letter.
And the standalone I chose is one of my favourites: The Eternal Slumber. It's a particularly difficult one to take on at the best of times, but could it be possible to construct a pair of decks that could consistently get a good result from it with only 1XP to work with?
Part of my motivation for this exercise was to find out to what extent the modern card pool (and set of investigators) could mitigate the difficulty inherent in this scenario's design, and the answer is: quite a bit, but it's still really hard! I tried a bunch of different Guardians and other fighters before settling on Lily Chen, and I believe she has a lot of unique advantages in The Eternal Slumber in large part due to her card access, but also due to her Disciplines and stat line.
To avoid this article turning into an essay I'll try to keep my strategy discussion as brief as possible, but suffice it to say, it took a lot of playtesting and iteration before I settled on this list, and while I can't say that this is the best possible set of cards for the situation at hand, I think it would have to be pretty close.
I always tailor my decks for the scenario I'm about to do (keeping the campaign as a whole in mind) and I enjoy creating a pair of decks for any given campaign and then playing it from start to finish on ironman mode (basically, no taking back mistakes).
The Eternal Slumber is well-suited to this mode of play because it has a fun push-your-luck design which allows you to accumulate as much XP as you can before bailing out early, if you need to. It's possible to claim up to 9XP (excluding Delve Too Deep) , but realistically you probably won't ever defeat all six of the VP enemies in Act One.
In my playtesting I was most often able to defeat three of them consistently. Sometimes I'd only get two, and sometimes I'd get four, but never more than that. Add to that both copies of The Black Wind and possibly defeating Neith at the end, and I averaged 4-6XP.
Before I get into the card commentary I'll do a quick overview of the scenario's structure and our general gameplan for getting everything done.
The Eternal Slumber
The central mechanic in this scenario is called the Strength of the Abyss. It begins at two and it gets raised or lowered (mostly raised) in accordance with various game effects. The Skull token's negative value is equal to one higher than the current SotA, and it's quite common for it to reach -7 to -8, or higher, near the end of the game (or, indeed, much sooner).
The severity of various other bad effects depends upon the current SotA and you have a limited number ways to lower it, so a lot of the strategy here depends upon using those limited options to lower it at the right times.
This scenario is essentially divided into three distinct parts corresponding to each of its three acts. In Act One, you have to discover clues (from the five out of six locations that have them) and then spend two of them at a time to randomly spawn one of the six random VP enemies. Here they are:
The doom threshold for this agenda is only seven, so you need to set up very quickly and make the most of all your available actions to spawn and then defeat these enemies. This section is a real race against the clock.
In Act Two, any VP enemies in play disappear along with all the clues on each Cairo location, and you must then head out into the desert and perform the Explore action (from The Forgotten Age) to draw locations from a separate deck and put them into play. You need to discover six clues from the desert to be able to spawn the boss, Neith, back at the starting location, Streets of Cairo, which begins the third and final act.
In Act Three, all you have to do is defeat Neith. However, each Cairo location now has two damage tokens on it, representing Dreamers, and if you damage Neith while there are any Dreamers at her location, they absorb that much damage instead (and are then discarded). To counter this, there is an action on the act which lets you test or at X, where X is the current SotA, and if you succeed you can move one Dreamer damage token at Neith's location onto her.
I should also mention the four non-Elite enemies from the encounter deck. Here they are:
Two copies of Abyssal Revenant are set aside at the beginning of the game and they only get shuffled into the encounter deck when Act Two begins.
Each time the agenda advances, the encounter discard pile is shuffled into the deck, which makes killing the Thing in the Sarcophagus a risky proposition because it will almost assuredly return again to ruin your day. It's very hard for Lily to deal with it with a 1XP deck, not least because most of her damage comes from melee actions, so our plan for handling it is basically to never kill it. Fortunately, during Act One you can get it to stay put in one location by leaving a clue there, but in Act Two all the clues get wiped away so it starts hunting any nearby investigators.
Our plan for the Creature from the Abyss is to park it out of the way somewhere since it doesn't have Hunter, then later on when the SotA hits five or more we go back and kill it to lower it. This can be a problem if the SotA gets very high, but, well, sometimes you just have to make the most of it.
And our plan for Humble Supplicant during Act One is to ignore them because we generally won't deal damage to any VP enemy except on the same turn we spawn them, if at all. In Act Two, if the Temple Courtyard has been revealed, they will have lost Aloof, so at that point we'll kill them.
The treacheries in this scenario deal a LOT of horror and damage when you fail their and tests. It's mostly in two-point hits, but because there are a lot of copies of each treachery and the encounter discard gets shuffled into the deck twice throughout the scenario, you can end up getting hit multiple times by each one.
To deal with this, each deck has some healing and some soak, but the #1 piece of advice I was ever told for succeeding at Arkham Horror applies here more than ever: damage not taken because the game ended sooner is damage you don't have to deal with! The point being to make your decks as efficient as possible to get through to the end before you inevitably succumb.
The last thing to mention here is that I used the standalone Hard token bag instead of FHV's because it doesn't really make sense to use its opening bag, and I used the Exploration rule from Return to The Forgotten Age where the Exploration deck starts off containing only locations, then each time you successfully explore you shuffle the top card of the encounter deck into it.
So, why is Lily Chen so good here? One thing I didn't mention earlier (and that you might not know if you haven't play this scenario before) is that the only Elite enemy in the game is the final boss, Neith. This means we can leverage a lot of powerful card effects which only work on non-Elites to deal with the VP enemies (and all the others).
Lily can hit the ground running at the start and defeat VP enemies with spells like Spectral Razor and String of Curses with Eldritch Tongue, then when the pressure is off in Act Two and Kate heads out into the desert, she can transition into her melee beatdown mode by playing a Dragon Pole and filling three of her arcane slots. The end result is that by the time Neith arrives, she can test at 9 without any other bonuses.
Lily's mulligan is for String of Curses, Eldritch Tongue, Speak to the Dead, and Scroll of Prophecies.
Both Lily and Kate generally move to the Cairo Bazaar on their first turn, to take advantage of its cost reduction for Items. After one turn of setup, Kate discovers some clues and you can begin spawning VP enemies (though most of the time I start doing that only on turn three, for various reasons, including investigator positioning and readiness).
Now it's time for some card commentary.
In the Thick of It: We take two physical trauma here because any spare sanity is worth its weight in gold at the end when you face Neith.
Discipline: We take Prescience of Fate first so that Lily can fight with 5, and she can also use its ability in Act Two to activate location abilities and potentially lower the SotA while Kate explores the desert.
String of Curses: As mentioned, you can use this twice to defeat a VP enemy without performing a test. If you don't get it early you can use it later to defeat the other non-Elite enemies.
Eldritch Tongue: This fills one of Lily's arcane slots for her Dragon Pole, and it lets you use one copy of String of Curses twice in a row to defeat an enemy. It feels especially good to do this to Nassor.
Speak to the Dead: This is the other way you can recover String of Curses, and I use all six offerings at once because the only thing that matters is getting one copy of that spell back. If you don't use it in Act One you can use it later to recover Spectral Razor or Ward of Protection.
Scroll of Prophecies: If you didn't get the above three cards in your opening hand then hopefully you got one of these. Lily quite often opens by playing this and then spamming it to draw through her deck quickly to find the cards she needs, and it can also be used on Kate if necessary.
Spectral Razor: This is the perfect tool for defeating Nadia Nimr, as Lily tests at 8 without any other bonuses. That's only three points above Nadia's fight value, but you can use the Wolf Mask or other commits to get you to +5. You can also use this spell to defeat the Creature from the Abyss in one action, provided the SotA isn't boosting its fight value too much. But if that's the case you probably have bigger problems.
Talisman of Protection: This is your third option for filling your arcane slots alongside Eldritch Tongue and Speak to the Dead, and it also provides some valuable soak. More than one game has come down to relying on this with Toe to Toe to secure the final shot on Neith.
Toe to Toe: Speaking of which, this card is mostly here for its usefulness later in the campaign (one of very few choices weighted more for FHV than The Eternal Slumber) but it's useful for dealing with Dr. Wentworth Moore since you won't have a Dragon Pole out at that point so your might not be high enough to reliably fight him. And, yes, surprisingly, the other place I most often used it on was Neith, since killing her immediately ends the scenario. If the math works out (ie. if you have enough sanity to take her hit) it's the safest option.
Dragon Pole: This is our Act Two weapon. While Kate goes exploring, Lily will bring one of these online and hunt down each Humble Supplicant to create a clean slate for Act Three when Neith arrives. When I tested a few different Guardians, none of their Level 0 weapons (mostly guns) could match a Dragon Pole in terms of strength and efficiency. It's one of the main reasons Lily works so well here.
Meditative Trance: By the time you fill three arcane slots and have a Dragon Pole in play you will probably need a lot of healing. Two copies of this ensure you have enough stamina left to take on the boss at the end.
Bolas: My typical deck-building plan for the Edge of the Earth investigators is similar to that of the Dunwich Legacy ones: use the five level zero slots on cards you'll keep for the whole campaign and that don't have upgraded versions, the idea being that they will provide useful off-class functionality you can't get anywhere else.
So I was hesitant to try this, but on paper it really did seem like a silver bullet for one particular problem I was having. It was a late addition, and it actually did add some noticeable consistency to the deck's enemy management. Specifically, the management of one particular enemy: the Thing in the Sarcophagus.
Kate's deck plays Map the Area and she always tries to put one on the Streets of Cairo because a lot of stuff happens there. It's a central location that both investigators can hang out at when nothing else is happening, it's where both Nassor and Neith spawn, and it's also where the Thing in the Sarcophagus will spawn during Act One because it has the most clues out of all the locations (it's also the enemy I always pick to spawn alongside Dr. Wentworth Moore because I always try to clear his location so that the Thing will abandon him and move to the Streets on its first turn).
Anyway, while a Thing in the Sarcophagus is sitting at a location that has Map the Area, if you attach a Bolas to it, its evade value effectively becomes zero, which means an evade action will succeed no matter which token you pull (except for the auto-fail). The fact that it exhausts when it moves means that if it does happen to hunt you down, it won't attack you on that same turn because it's out of breath. Or energy, or something.
This card really was the final piece of the puzzle when it came to enemy management. It's worth noting that the Abyssal Revenant also has an evade value of two so you can do the same trick to it, but when it spawns its usually heading out into the desert to look for Kate so Lily doesn't often meet it.
Bolas and Kate's Transmogrify are the two main solutions for dealing with the Thing in the Sarcophagus and Abyssal Revenant without killing them, though Lily can bring down a Revenant with her Dragon Pole fairly safely if she needs to.
Ethereal Slip: This card gets some great value here. You can use it to "park" a Creature from the Abyss at a location for later use, even if its engaged with Kate. You can also use it to separate Dr. Wentworth Moore from his monster pet or a Humble Supplicant, or you can use it to dodge one of the hunter enemies for a turn or two (or again, disengage them from Kate). This card has a lot of uses!
Ward of Protection: Almost every card in the encounter deck warrants the use of this. One useful thing it can do is "block" a treachery that begins a test so you can ensure Lily can flip her Prescience of Fate that turn if it's broken.
Promise of Power: This card can be used on the parley actions of both Professor Nathaniel Taylor and Dr. Layla El Masri to add them to the victory display, and its just generally all-round useful for passing difficult tests at other times.
Ace of Swords: The 1XP we were able to spend is best spent here, as boosting your passive stats is one of the most effective things you can do against a token bag this nasty. Keeping it in the mulligan isn't as important as it normally would be because Lily won't need to use her until Act Two or Three, so you can always come up with the resources for it later.
Delve Too Deep: And finally, how could we take an XP fishing trip without bringing this thing along? I'll admit, it is functionally a dead draw so it seemingly goes against the prevailing theory behind the rest of the deck (which is to ensure we're as efficient as possible) but it does serve a strategic purpose here, which is to claim an extra point of VP or two if you know you can't go the distance and have to board the shame train.
That's it! Let me know if you have any questions about anything.
Final decklist is here, with a campaign report.