"Calling Glori-aaaaa" to Guard(ian) the encounter deck

Gloria's ability to mess with the Encounter deck really seems to make the Guardian cards appealing. Here's my tryout of Guardian Gloria, whose main job is to rifle through the Encounter deck at every opportunity to rule the Mythos Phase, while chipping in on clues and monsters as needed. Was fun to play and she's surprisingly defendable, while being relatively cheap in cost (Alyssa and St. Hubert notwithstanding).

Hand Slots

The newly tabooed Scroll of Secrets is perfect and cheap for GG to start her fiddling. Once you upgrade it's even better of course. Sword Cane is to make that evade when you need to or pop that extra bit of damage and save spell charges.

Arcane Slots

Experimenting with throwing Alchemical Transmutation there and hopefully get it out early to load up with some money, later to give away. Scrying and Shrivelling are the main combo.

Accessory Slot

St. Hubert's Key is nice with GG's normal 9 Sanity and two horror soaks as allies.

Allies

Charisma will work great with these two in messing with the encounter deck for the duration of the campaign, I think.

I only used Alyssa Graham in tandem with GG's natural ability to weed out Encounter cards and avoided putting any Doom on her, and I think it worked just fine, fantastic in fact. You could always double-trigger by timing Doom placement when the Agenda's going to flip anyway. If you wanted to use AG with Doom, adding a couple copies of Moonlight Ritual in place of the Fine Clothes and another card of your choice might be an idea.

Events

The two Mystic events, Deny Existence and Ward of Protection, will help in the short term with particularly nasty encounter cards. Otherwise we're all Guardian to start, with "Let me handle this!" and First Watch as ways to add onto GG's already-great natural ability with the encounter deck. Second Wind will help manage her soft spot and also provide some protection during Alchemical Transmutating. The last two are personal preference, I like Dynamite Blast for the craziness of it with her, and Teamwork which could get used even with the amount of money she'll hopefully snag. Alternatives for the last two Guardian slots could be Delay the Inevitable, Dodge or a skill like Inspiring Presence.

Skills

You could also ditch D-Blast and Teamwork for a couple of Guts cards here, a little extra draw and boost. Otherwise Enraptured to add a couple of charges to a spell and Take the Initiative to help her manage tests during the Mythos phase that she controls with her beautiful aged hands.

Upgrades - easy peasy

22xp will get her in great shape, simply getting higher level versions of the things in her hand and arcane slots (e.g. Alchemical Transmutation (2), max levels Scrying and Scroll of Secrets), a Charisma and Ward of Protection...Shrivelling would do fine with her stopping at the L3 version I think, but you could go all the way to L5 for another 4 xp on top of that.

As for other upgrade options...

If your campaign has more xp to give, here are some other options.

• boost Deny Existence to L5 • maybe swap in a couple copies of Time Warp (2) for the D-Blast, Teamwork or Fine Clothes • maybe Stargazing...max level Recharge...upgraded Guts...even "Fool me once..." from the Guardian set.

Tried this build once with a Mandy double on TCU and it was pretty fun.