[A Watchful Peace] The Fun Ends Here

OVERVIEW

This is an abusive flex deck that will teach you to appreciate the encounter deck and how important it is to the experience of playing the game. We'll do this by freezing it with disgusting survivor recursion. Best used in a 3 or 4 player team. I also suggest you play a campaign with generous experience gain (TFA, TCU, TIC).

The superstar of our deck: A Watchful Peace. I have no doubt this will be tabooed very soon. Have your "fun" while you can.

LEVEL 0 VARIANTS & TECH

• Granny Orne Madame Labranche. The ally doesn't matter much, at least not until later when you can afford Granny 3.
• Unexpected Courage Fine Clothes if you know parleying is needed.
• Stunning Blow or Unexpected Courage Guts or Manual Dexterity or both. Card draw is very important to this deck.

UPGRADES

CORE

The core upgrades are listed as a side deck, however it's listed alphabetically. Here's the order:

• 6XP: 2x Overpower 2x Drawing Thin
• 2XP: 2x Rabbit's Foot 2x Unrelenting
• 3XP: Granny Orne Grisly Totem
• 4XP: 2x Winging It Signum Crucis
• 3XP: Track Shoes A Watchful Peace
• 8XP: 2x Quick Learner
• 3XP: Meat Cleaver + Stunning Blow A Watchful Peace
• 6XP: 2x Perception 2x True Survivor

FURTHER UPGRADES (NO PARTICULAR ORDER)

I will not list most replacements here as they are dependant on what role you've landed in and what's expected of you. Don't blindly buy every card here - determine what your team's weaknesses are and buy accordingly.

• 5XP: Meat Cleaver Timeworn Brand
• 3XP: Granny Orne
• 2XP: Ancient Covenant
• 2XP: 2x Butterfly Effect
• 6XP: 2x Lucky!
• 4XP: 2x "Look what I found!"
• 6XP: 2x Alter Fate
• 6XP: Relic Hunter + Rabbit's Foot
• 2XP: Scavenging
• 4XP: Scrapper
• 2XP: 2x Sharp Vision
• 2XP: 2x Expeditious Retreat

GAME PLAN

MULLIGAN

Keep every piece of card draw (Drawing Thin is biggest priority) and throw away everything else. We can afford one-of assets because we're finding them extremely fast and resetting deck often.

PILOTING

Before you've assembled the combo pieces, you're just doing standard Stella things - finding ideal flashlight/keyring locations, bashing enemies here and there, and of course helping allies with NRNS, Lucky, Granny, etc.

COMBO SETUP

Once you have both Drawing Thin and Grisly Totem in play (and hopefully Quick Learners), and A Watchful Peace and Signum Crucis in hand, you can start. From this point on, make sure to go last every round whenever possible to conserve tokens.

COMBO

On your first action, take the most difficult test available. It's passively buffed with the Quick Learners, use Drawing Things as well to make it a total of +6 difficulty and commit Signum Crucis while activating the totem on it. If you are for example investigating a 4 shroud location, you are adding 8 tokens (remember - Signum Crucis counts against your base skill, not modified). Unless you somehow draw a ridiculous amount of the tokens just added, you will fail, and Signum Crucis comes back to hand. Now you can keep adding every round forever, as fuel for A Watchful Peace.

The rest of your turn is up to you. Hopefully you don't chain too many tokens on your other tests. Play A Watchful Peace in the mythos phase, and from here on, just keep returning A Watchful Peace via Resourceful and True Survivor. You are able to skip drawing encounter cards as long as you can keep the recursion going. But your deck naturally has great card draw so at the point where you're out of Resourcefuls and True Survivors you should be resetting your deck and drawing these pieces anyway.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Once you've got the core deck rolling, I'm sure it will only take a few scenarios before you're just bored of how easy the game gets when threats are eliminated like this. If you think the encounter deck is unfair maybe this will give you a new perspective :).