"Ashcan" Pete maximum stats hard difficulty plus

Sort of a maximum stats to try and aim for the lower stratosphere with your stats, and I mean all of them, baseline is that all of the stats can get a min +2 static bonus at pretty much all times between duke base 4 a beat cop and dark horse. Your First 9 exp is basically Charisma and double upgraded Peter Sylvestre, this buys you an enormous amount of durability, and with peter, beat cop and dark horse and a single magnifying glass, it puts you on a 6/6/6/5 effective stat line. With the high investigate skill, scavenging will pick back up discarded items with a strong consistency which only gets better. The idea is that with your opening hand your digging hard for Dark Horse, an obvious power house in the deck. Scavenging is also nice is it powers the Duke train.

Why some cards and not others

With this build 4 of your 5 cards are spoken for in static upgrades, the last was a toss up for St. Hubert's Key which I ultimately decided against because there will almost for sure be someone else fighting for it and it may be strait better for someone else. Its also costly at 4 resources which can be tough to hit once dark horse comes out.

The last card Delve Too Deep was chasen because I ultimately want to build toward bigger things which will take some extra XP, worst case I can always pick it to duke.

I chose not to include "Look what I found!", the 2 cost can be awkward and it feels like it gets pitched to duke or used for extra books more often than not so I cut it in favor of backpack which is really more of an attempt to future proof cause at some point Im thinking I want to upgrade to Key of Ys. Survivors are particularly good at using this card because you have so many ally options to absorb sanity hits while preserving the key(thanks Peter Sylvestre ). Late in a campaign at the end of a mission you might have a 9/10/10/8 effective stat line with the ability to preserve the key through several sanity hits. Which by the way would be stupid and the dream(it might happen but that's pretty unlikely and requires a lot to go right).

Backpack was a choice to dig up items to scavenge out, also it helps for later in Champaign when you looking for Key of Ys or maybe some Newspaper. With those added in it gets you to 14 items it can hit which should be fine for deck thinning.

The goal is to be able to get high enough stats you can still constantly succeed at fight and investigate test with the occasional evade on hard or harder difficulties.