The Summoner

INTRO:

This deck builds off of the concept of playing Summoned Hounds from your discard pile using A Chance Encounter to bypass the accompanying weakness. Originally designed for Patrice, I thought it might be worth while seeing how the same idea performs with the other Investigator who can take both cards.

The results? Not as effective as just playing spells in the straightforward way, but let's not be boring. The way I see it, Agnes has two advantages to utilizing the dogs that Patrice lacks. 1) She has a smaller deck and can thus get them into play more reliably. And 2) Her ability allows her to take out a 3 health enemy with two dog bites and a Forbidden Knowledge ping.

I'm not 100% sure where the rules remain in playing the dogs in this way, but regardless, it is very fun when you can pick up clues and/or tear enemies to pieces and still have a full turn of 3 actions to do whatever you want. The ordering of your actions in Arkham Horror is extremely crucial, and the dogs allow you a certain luxury that otherwise would see you doing things in a restrictive way to avoid damage or other consequences for bad positioning correctly. Though it probably won't happen often, but you can even trigger the dogs in the enemy phase before you are hit (if I'm understanding the rules correctly).

HOW TO PILOT:

Since the goal is to get the Summoned Hounds into play ASAP, we're taking Short Supply. If we can hit Dark Memory then great, but odds are you'll have to keep a couple of resources on hand for when it shows up. However, I noticed that the doom was extremely irrelevant with this deck since the dogs will dramatically make up for lost time.

The first 2-5 rounds will likely involve some degree of fiddling with your deck to get the cards where you need them, but like I said, you will move like lightning once you do so don't stress about the time. Focus on getting at least one pooch and a forbidden knowledge in play.

In an ideal sense, you'd have both dogs in your discard pile from short supply, and both copies of Chance Encounter in your opening hand, along with a Take Heart (which is generally easy enough to trigger on an investigate test since our is low). More realistically, we try to get Scroll of Prophecies and use it to dig through the deck for the cards that puts the pieces into play. You can discard dogs, Glimmers, Moonstones, or any other, nonessential tech.

If the situation is really not working, you can use Quantum Flux to course correct, but generally, you can get one dog in play without much hassle and use Resourceful to get A Chance Encounter back into your hand for a repeat play. Scrounge for Supplies can retrieve resourceful or most other tech that you would want back into your hand from an unfavorable discard.

Generally, I play Scroll of Prophecies, Take Heart, and Forbidden Knowledge on turn 1. From there, it's a matter of assessing what cards I have, what are stuck in the discard pile, and which I still need to see.

CARD CHOICES:

You've no doubt noticed some missing staples like Ward of Protection. So here's the thing: because the hounds will give you a massive health soak, you're sanity is extremely limited and ward will be extra pressure on your sanity. This problem is compounded if you decide to go with Moonstone for the agility bonus (and the synergy with Scroll of Prophecies) as opposed to Holy Rosary. I personally prefer the extra and the freed up action since it enables me to get away from enemies in case my set up is taking too long or the enemy has high health. But to each their own.

Classics like Lucky!, Deny Existence, A Test of Will, etc., can be sacrificed to the discard if necessary, but obviously it is preferable to go with a duplicate of something you don't need. And these cards will serve a similar function as ward and Live and Learn (which I don't recommend since fail consequences aren't the best with this deck).

On this note, don't forget that you can simply commit a dog to a skill test to get it into the discard pile if you really need. And no, I did NOT play through the entire campaign forgetting about this option...

XP PATH:

This deck needs 9XP at minimum to be functional so you'll have to play a bit of a weird frankenstein for the first scenario. Use basic spells to get by, run Delve Too Deep and such to get yourself in shape as early as possible. You could take In the Thick of It but if you do, I'd actually recommend picking at least 1 physical trauma. Trust me, you need the sanity.

Once you're stable, I like Sacrifice quite a bit. You can use it to replenish your resources after you've used up Scroll of Prophecies and the flexibility to choose among cards or resources makes it a good replacement for Take Heart. Glimmer of Hope works but Ice Pick's give far more value. They conflict with the scroll but you only need one of those in play at a time, and rarely do you need to play it a second time. If you decide to go Moonstone, then I think Fearless lvl 2 is essential, otherwise take Survival Instinct lvl 2 first instead.

If you are swimming in XP, then Deny Existence lvl 5 is a great choice to help heal off some horror to keep your ability free. And if you do that, you can afford to get little crazy with Versatile. You draw plenty of cards such that the extra 5 cards isn't too noticeable. I like Inspiring Presence to squeeze an extra dog trigger. And for the rest, you can go with Unrelenting to ensure you are drawing plenty of cards, and put back in whatever you might have taken out.

FINAL THOUGHTS:

I took this deck through Dunwich with Calvin Wright and we basically did a speed run, finishing scenarios with 1 (sometimes even 2 or 3) agendas completely untouched. It's a dangerous style because you don't have much in the way of sanity soak, your weaknesses are liable to hit at least once, if not twice, and the first couple of rounds you'll be a little vulnerable, but if you are curious to try something new, I think it's worth a try.

Happy Investigating!