Desperate Pete, No Horse

Second pair of decks I have put together. Last time around we were both mystics. It was a good time, but it was very reliant on getting particular assets in place. I wanted to try something that was a little more flexible in terms of being able to do things even without getting a copy of card 'X'. I also wanted to try to play with more skill cards. Ashcan looked like a lot of fun. Dark Horse does not look like what I would want to do, but the desperate skills seemed to have a lot of fun synergy. St. Hubert's Key turns that on immediately, Meat Cleaver also permits forcing sanity condition and is improved by the lower sanity, Yaotl loves all the icons (and paired with ashcan's investigator ability can make use of desperate skills even at max sanity), etc. I went back and forth on a lot of the fail cards (Take Heart, Rabbit's Foot, etc., etc.) They are obviously good in the right set up, but I am playing in standard difficulty and both halves of the duo are set up to be putting blessings in the deck. Last duo only one player reliably put any blessings in the bag, and there were still a number of skill tests that unexpectedly passed. The blessing cycle of putting benefits into the deck for a gamble/pay-off later really ticked the right 'fun' boxes for me. Taking tests with a reasonable chance to pass on standard difficulty with a bag full of blessings seems to be a pretty notable non-bo with the fail suite. The only card I am using from that category is "Look what I found!". Two clues is an enormous upside, the card only triggers AFTER the failure (rather than being committed and hoping it fails) so it can't be wasted on a lucky run of blessings, it does not take an action, and it has two relevant icons on it, so it can be used as a commit if necessary and Yaotl also benefits from the card hitting the graveyard. The deck looks expensive (particularly with a desire to use the permanent, Scrapper, and therefore includes Lone Wolf for money over time and Emergency Cache. The latter is designed to be rather immediately replaced with Nothing Left to Lose which is just an incredible looking card. After yaotl, scrapper, nothing left to lose and ancient covenant, the rest of the upgrades feel like vanity upgrades. Lucky level 3 is neat if nothing else evokes any interest, otherwise weapons like Chainsaw or Timeworn Brand seem attractive to replace the meat cleaver with something more effective.