Preston Fairmont and the Red Gloved Butler

This is a theorycraft: advices are welcome. I plan to test this asap. This is the first deck i publish, and english is not my main language, so be merciful.

This list should be the final form of the deck. You can see the "base/0 exp" deck in the previous deck tab.

The deck is meant to bypass Preston's awful stats: main goal is minimize chaos bag by testing against 0 (Flashlight), autosuccess (Stray Cat/Cunning Distraction), or test with very high stats (abusing The Red-Gloved Man and the stat boosters). Because of that we are dropping "if you fail" stuff as soon as we get our pieces togheter (see below: exp purchases).

This is not intended to be a solo deck (as you noticed we are running 1x "You handle this one!" as emergency button): the list can do pretty much everything due to Red Gloved versatility, but still are better at evading stuff instead of fightin it, so you could use some help. If you want to play true solo i guess you drop 1x YHtO for 2x Elusive or something along the lines.

As per title, we are hiring The Red-Gloved Man as our butler, and making him do stuff for us.

We use recursion (from Calling in Favors, A Chance Encounter) to play our Red Gloved Butler as many times we can, using our endless stream of funds to fuel the engine.

We can use Resourceful to get back A Chance Encounter for more recursion. Resourceful should be invested only to get back A Chance Encounter after we purchased our butler.

You can also use Double or Nothing with Resourceful (even better if you do that while testing with The Red-Gloved Man enhanced stats, to increase your odds of success) to get back both A Chance Encounter to keep the recursion alive, so we can let the Red Gloved butler do stuff for us til the end of the scenario. Doing this can let you play 9x Butlers which is the point of the deck (even so you cannot realistically expect to get max recursion every game).

Early in the campaign the recursion engine can be used with the Stray Cat to keep enemies at bay. Fire Axe should be used to kill cultists or hunters. If you expect to be in need to kill a lot of those, you should be spending resources in your pool first, using the ones on the Inheritance after (so you can do +1 dmg more consistently).

EXP PURCHASES BY PRIORITY:

The deck actually needs 10 exp to work as intended. Until you hire your personal Red Gloved Butler, you are just planning to survive so kill enemies you cannot evade with the Fire Axe and get clues asap with Flashlight and "Look what I found!", helping yourself with Dig Deep and Lucky!. Elusive will be there if things go south.

Charon's Obol: this one is up to personal preference, you can skip it if you are scared to die. I included it because the deck is very exp hungry (as 10 exp just to get 2x of THE core card is a lot) and in my experience it is worth it. Being defeated in the early stages of a campaign to an unlucky streak is very possible, but usually I just restart the campaign without much remorse. After the Butler is up and rolling you should be safer.

The Red-Gloved Man (subs ""Look what I found!""): high priority ofc, as the deck revolves around him. Our butler can really do everything, and he is our main way to soak the evil encounter deck too. "Look what I found!" can be dropped as whenever Flashlight is not enough we can start investigating at 6-9 (with Streetwise and The Red-Gloved Man).

Streetwise: this is high priority as resources are not a worry for Preston and testing at 4-7 is way better then testing at 1. Intellect and Agility are very important to survive and keep progressing. (this overrides Dig Deep a little, but i guess you still play DD if are struggling with Willpower). WIth The Red-Gloved Man up this is nuts.

High Roller (subs Well Connected): I don't expect WC to be much more than +1 in most cases with this deck, so we are dropping it asap after we get our resource sinks in Streetwise and Butler-recoursion). High Roller is a no brainer at this point for Preston.

Sure Gamble (subs Lucky!): we are stupid rich so spending 2 instead of just 1 is nothing. SG is imho way better than Lucky! as almost guarantees DoN, which we use to double Resourceful too.

Lucky Cigarette Case (subs Rabbit's Foot and "You handle this one!"): this should maybe be higher on the list. After you get the Butler rolling you should not be failing that much. Rabbit's Foot early inclusion was meant to get to the Butler out of the deck faster (as when you have no Butler you are failing tests much more on average) but looses value after we play him. I think Lucky Cigarette Case can be nice as we are planning to succed at tests by a noticeable margin with the Butler and/or the statboosters, and we need the card-draw to keep rolling. "You handle this one!" can be dropped too after The Red-Gloved Man purchase as you no longer fear damage/horror from the encounter cards when the Butler is out.