Blessed Patrice as featured on drawn to the flame 275

Blessed Patrice as featured on the drawn to the flame podcast

Or at least as vaguely recalled by Peter in episode 275 while describing our glorious success in the new fortune and folly scenario at the Edinburgh Arkham nights event. The brief Peter had given me going into the event was a blessed deck which was not Zoey, Silas or Darrell. I wanted to try changes to the mystic cards made in the last faq which changed voice of Ra and ritual candles to be any symbol token and the new more reasonably costed Signum Crusis which lead me to Patrice who as a musician was clearly going to be legitimate cover for the heist.

.So what do you buy for the girl with a magic violin? An enchanted bow. The other thing I wanted to try was enchanted bow in Patrice. On the face of it this a terrible idea as the bow takes up both hand slots and without taking versatile for a bandolier you can’t have both the violin and the bow however I channelled my inner startswiththename and went for the pun over good sense. It turns out the bow is both strong and versatile for Patrice. The main benefits are that its cheaper than other attack spells and does not, with some careful management, run out of charges. The flexibility to deal with aloof enemies can also be very helpful when you are say trying to rob a casino. Finally it give you a spell button which can be used to deal with your weakness enemy as required without needing to spend charges

Blessings

Keep faith gives 4 fast bless tokens, signum crucis and predestined committed to suitably easy to fail tests encounter test or a high shroud location can give similar results. Normally the down side to this would be that giving away so much deck space would harm your tempo however with Patrice this is not an issue and you can quite easily keep the bag between 5 and 10 blesses without the help of other investigators.

Counting your blessings.

As well as using significantly raising the chance of passing a test both by drawing blesses naturally or by using ancient covenant to pass the test you also increase the symbol token density for both voice of Ra and the macabre deception upgrade on living ink. A 0 cost +1 will asset is everything Patrice is looking for and with the depiction it will stay out almost indefinitely with a high density of bless tokens. Subtle depiction can also be used to prolong the ink on turns when you are just running away possibly with all the loot.

This version is on dark horse but could be adapted to have BMOC or granny orne. you swap dark horse and Labranche for orne and lWIF

Finally grizzled is a 0 XP solution to the watcher from another dimension. Monster is one of the most prevalent traits in the game and while extradimensional is rarer its almost guaranteed you will see one at some point at which point grizzled gives you 5 pips to evade it or shoot it with your bow as the mood takes you.

improvisation on a theme

At the start you mulligan for assets to try and get some set up while the table is reasonably clear. The violin and the bow are clear target as is cornered. Everything else can normally go as you will see it soon enough.

Piloting Patrice is all about making the best use of your resources each turn. The deck is skill card heavy if you have a lot of skill cards you can’t use hang around your team mates. If you draw bless cards and the bag running low go first to give benefit to the team. If you draw a clue event go for it. Patrice more than anyone is about living in the moment and just going for it.