Officer Mandy on Service (19 XP)

This is a classic seeker deck that tries to utilise some interesting interactions between Mandy and certain cards while contributing to the team with good clue-gathering capabilities and a fair share of enemy handling. It features Alice Luxley, Dream-Enhancing Serum and Three Aces, all of which I believe are good in Mandy if used in the right way. Let's talk a bit about these 3 cards:

Alice Luxley: While this is a Guardian, it's not really great for Guardians. Guardians don't discover clues all that often, making her ability rather situational and making it a suboptimal card on them. On the other hand, a seeker like Mandy can make good use of this card, as her main job is to investigate and if you pack more damage options, it becomes rather useful.

Dream-Enhancing Serum: This card is rather situational as you have to build your deck around it to make it useful. You have to see it early to make full advanatage of it, if you expect to get some card draw out of it. I think it's actually good in this deck, because, even though it's larger than usual, you don't really want to see it early, as you don't want to get a lot of card draw out of it. What you actually want is the increased handsize capability. In general, Mandy doesn't want to draw a lot of cards via regular draws, she wants to draw via searching. This means that you don't have an urgent need to play this early, as you can expect to get only a little bit of card draw and get the benefit of the increased handsize, which is what Mandy really wants, in my experience.

Three Aces: There is truly no investigator other than Mandy who can reliably assemble all 3 pieces fast enough to make it count. The sad thing, is that Mandy can't turn this benefit tons of damage like other rogues can do, but she can do other things. She can use it discover a ton of clues or pass a difficult scenario-specific test that is important for the progression of the scenario. The reward is also really awsome.

So, on to the deck:

Early game: Early on you need to get Mr. "Rook" as soon as you can. If you don't have him in your opening hand, you 're gonna have a bit of a rough start but we have ways to compensate. Eureka! can dig for him, Easy Mark can help you draw, and another ally (ideally Research Librarian) + Calling in Favors can help you search for him. Watch out for Shocking Discovery though, as it can ruin your plans. If you think you'll need more tutoring support you can also include one copy of No Stone Unturned in the deck.

Investigating: Mandy's 5 intellect is good enough right off the start, but make sure to get your Magnifying Glass soon enough. If you also manage to get Alice Luxley early, you 'll get yourself covered for most shroud values. Fingerprint Kit and Deduction speeds up clue-gathering as needed and enable some interesting combos.

Enemy handling: Alice Luxley's damage dealing power can help your teammates with enemy handling, but you also have Blood-Rite and Small Favor to deal with the harder stuff. Additionally, Pendant of the Queen is superb for automatically evading.

Encounter Protection: Not a lot of stuff here, but Tooth of Eztli is your best friend, as (even though costly) it will boost your defensive stats, but you also have Curiosity and/or Eureka! for further defense. In a pinch, Three Aces can also be used to pass a particularly hard encounter test.

Caveats: You should be aware that this deck contains quite a bit of card draw, which can make you draw your Astounding Revelations if you don't find your search engines soon enough. That's a risk you must be willing to take and be prepared to face resource-management issues. On the postive side though, any accidentally-drawn Astounding Revelations can be used as discard fodder for Blood-Rite. Additionally, Double or Nothing, while good, will have limited uses as it more or less functions as payload for Three Aces (see beow).

Interesting combos:

Alice Luxley + Pendant of the Queen: Move to any revealed location, get a clue and deal 1 damage to an enemy as a fast action. This can be very effective against Acolytes and Whippoorwills.

Alice Luxley + Mr. "Rook"/Eureka! + Occult Evidence: Search your deck as a free action, pull Occult Evidence and deal 1 damage to an enemy at your location. Then, you can finish them off with Blood-Rite or Small Favor.

Three Aces + Double or Nothing + Deduction and/or Fingerprint Kit: Collect a ton of clues from your location using a combination of these cards. Three Aces can always be used on a particualrly hard test, but it wouldn't be good enough if you didn't have a payload for it.

Lucid Dreaming + Myriad cards: At first glance, Lucid Dreaming seems not particularly good on Mandy, because she has great searching capabilties, but if you use it in conjunction with the Myriad cards it works really nicely, as it will basically pull the other two copies of the card. You can get really fast all copies of Segment of Onyx, Easy Mark, Three Aces or even Blood-Rite this way. This also makes one of the reasons why I think Dream-Enhancing Serum is good in this deck: Because there a lot of cards you want to be able to keep in your hand at the same time.

That's the main stuff you need to know about this deck off the top of my head. It's not really a powerful deck, but it's more like a fun one. It basically uses some out-of-the-box ideas pulled together to make a playable deck and that's about it. Thanks for reading and I wish you a lot of fun if you try this out! :)