Kate Winthrop (1XP) in The Eternal Slumber (Hard) + FHV

This deck was created for a two-handed run of The Feast of Hemlock Vale on Hard, alongside Lily Chen (decklist here), but with a twist. I wanted to do a standalone scenario during the campaign but it didn't really make sense, story-wise, to leave the Vale and come back again because of its three day narrative structure. So, instead, I decided to do the standalone at the beginning of the campaign, using the XP from In the Thick of It.

I chose The Eternal Slumber, for reasons I go into in Lily's decklist article. That article also contains an overview of that scenario and some details on the strategy I settled on along with information about the enemies.

Unlike Lily's deck, most of the choices I made for Kate here are ones I probably would have made for FHV anyway. Building this deck was my first experience with playing Kate, and she reminds me a lot of Ursula Downs, who also has fairly unimpactful deck-building rules and comes off as a bit vanilla, but who nevertheless has enough interesting mechanics and different Seeker card choices to make up for it.

I tried a few different Seekers and other clue-focused investigators before settling on Kate for this scenario. She probably isn't the best choice for the task at hand (which is to consistently get a good result and/or amount of XP out of this scenario with what is essentially a level zero deck) but she wouldn't be too far behind, and she does have a few distinct advantages here, including:

1. Good agility, which mitigates a lot of damage from treacheries in the encounter deck.

2. Being able to generate +2 skill value boosts without the use of other cards (apart from the ones you place clues on) helps mitigate a particularly rough token bag.

3. Her signature events, Aetheric Current: Yuggoth and Aetheric Current: Yoth, are useful for managing the enemies here.

4. Scout Ahead is a very useful tool here.

5. Her Map the Area has a high chance of success.

More on those last two in the card commentary section, which is... now!

In the Thick of It: I started out taking two horror from this but it soon became apparent that Kate really needs her sanity, so I dropped it back to one damage and one horror. She's surprisingly resilient against the treacheries in this scenario because one of them is a "for each point you fail by..." one which burns through her resources first, and the other lets you sacrifice an asset to avoid taking two damage.

Also, the only enemy which deals noticeable (or, rather, immediately fatal) damage is the Abyssal Revenant, and she has decent tools to manage it anyway.

Dr. Milan Christopher: It's hard to go past passive stat boosts when dealing with a difficult token bag, and Milan also provides a lot of resources even with his taboo. That along with Crack the Case ensures Kate remains relatively unaffected by the Swarm of Locusts treachery, which comes up a lot due to the fact that the encounter discard pile gets shuffled into the deck twice during this scenario.

Milan also provides some soak, though it can be expensive to have to replay him. Kate does take an inordinate amount of horror in this scenario because of her low and her weakness, Failed Experiment. This is the one thing I revised the most when iterating on her deck, and it took a while to find the right balance of soak and healing to get her through it in one piece more often than not.

Death • XIII: Again, a passive stat boost is hard to pass up. This is probably the best use for our 1XP.

Fingerprint Kit: This card provides valuable clue compression as Act One requires you to hit the ground running. I had intended to take this through FHV anyway (upgrading it to Fingerprint Kit at some point) because I think it's a good fit for Kate with it being a Tool.

Another reason it's good in The Eternal Slumber is that you don't need to discover a lot of clues in general in this scenario; you'll want probably 6-8 at most in Act One, and only six in Act Two, which is about two Fingerprint Kit's worth in total.

Magnifying Glass: A Seeker staple and lowkey one of the best cards in the game.

Dream-Enhancing Serum: This was a late addition, but I'm confident it synergizes well with the rest of the deck. It provides a couple more targets for Kate's ability and it doesn't compete for the hand slot, and since the rest of the deck consists almost entirely of two copies of each card, there are a lot of targets it can hit. And finally, Thorough Inquiry draws five cards at a time, which usually all go to Kate (Lily has her Scroll of Prophecies, which she can also use on Kate) so it has a good chance of triggering when you play that card.

Being able to restock your hand quickly is valuable here because one of the treacheries forces you to discard up to three cards each time it hits, and Kate will usually fail it.

Mouse Mask: I'm not sure I would have included this card if I was doing FHV by itself, but The Eternal Slumber has an Exploration deck which puts new locations into play and Kate will be venturing out into the desert by herself in Act Two, so she'll be able to use the mask on every investigate test she performs.

Flux Stabilizer: I like the narrative/mechanical intersection here, where Kate puts clues on her tools to indicate she's making use of them, as any good scientist would. It's an interesting mechanic as well, and a good fit for this scenario, as mentioned earlier.

Logical Reasoning: Also as mentioned earlier, Kate takes a lot of horror in this scenario. Two copies of this are essential for its heal (and there aren't any treachery targets for it anyway).

Thorough Inquiry: This is most often used to restock Kate's hand at the start of Act Two when she heads out into the desert, but it can be played in Act One if she needs to dig for her important cards like Fingerprint Kit or Deduction.

Map the Area: I go into this more in Lily's decklist article, but I try to put one of these on the Streets of Cairo every game because one of the VP enemies and the boss both spawn there, and it's a central location that both investigators can hang out at in Act One while they don't need to be anywhere else. That matters because it reduces the difficulty of any Mythos phase treacheries as well, and it helps against the dreaded Slumber.

Also, Lily's deck contains Bolas, which results in the Thing in the Sarcophagus having an effective evade value of zero as long as it's at the mapped location. We don't ever want to kill one of those things, so this is an effective way to manage it.

Transmogrify: The other way we manage enemies we don't want to kill (like the Abyssal Revenant which often hunts Kate by herself while she's in the desert in Act Two) is this card. It's really amazing in this scenario.

Aetheric Current: Yuggoth, Aetheric Current: Yoth: These cards don't generally show up reliably (unless you have a Thorough Inquiry handy) but when they do they provide a couple of unique ways to manage the enemies here.

Moving a Creature from the Abyss to an empty location to save until later for when the Strength of the Abyss is five or above is a valuable thing to have up your sleeve (Lily can accomplish something similar with Ethereal Slip), and while shuffling a Thing in the Sarcophagus or Abyssal Revenant back into the encounter deck doesn't provide a permanent solution by any means, it can be helpful in a pinch.

Scout Ahead: Often when Act One ends and all the clues disappear from the map, if the Temple Courtyard has been revealed then each Humble Supplicant will have lost Aloof, and since I usually try to spawn them at the Outskirts of Cairo they often end up blocking the way for Kate to get out to the Expedition Camp. This card lets her bypass them, and it also simply provides an efficient way for her to get there from any other non-adjacent Cairo location.

Then, when she's finished her job in the desert, she can use it to get back to the Streets of Cairo quickly (where we advance to Act Three and spawn the boss, Neith). And if any monsters happen to be in her way, she can leave them in the dust.

Well-Funded: The other skill cards are all pretty standard fare, but this is a new one and for Kate it's always an Unexpected Courage since her Flux Stabilizer begins in play each game. It doesn't take long to bring this up to 3, which makes it very useful in Act One to cover most of the cost of parleying with Professor Nathaniel Taylor or Dr. Layla El Masri. And at other times it's simply a very good skill value boost.

Failed Experiment: Ok, this one is bad, and it caused Kate's untimely demise on enough occasions that I spent a fair bit of time adjusting a bunch of other cards in the deck to account for it. I suspect it's probably fine in FHV for the most part, but I'll definitely still make allowances for it there.

I can't end this article without mentioning a few cards I tried which didn't make the cut, the most disappointing of which was...

Testing Sprint: I wanted this one to work so much! I resisted taking it out of the deck for so long, but as soon as I did things went noticeably smoother.

So, the Streets of Cairo has four connecting locations, I always try to use Map the Area on it (which applies to each Testing Sprint test), and she has Scout Ahead to quickly reveal the other locations at the start of the game (plus she has Lily to help). On top of that, Kate's ability to provide +2 skill value boosts comes into effect once you start sprinting. Oh, and if the Streets are mapped, the shroud values you have to test are 0-1-2-2-3.

If Kate gets most of the cards she needs to play Testing Sprint on her second turn of the game this should be a very efficient way to grab clues quickly (up to five for two actions) which is exactly what we need to do in this scenario. And to top it all off, at this point in the game the Skull token is only -3! Testing Sprint should add consistency by providing additional, effective means for discovering clues quickly.

But, of course, it didn't. The token bag is simply too rough for it to work without a lot of other mitigations which you can't afford with a level zero deck. For every time I succeeded in grabbing 4-5 clues I failed after 1-2 due to bad token pulls, and I'm skeptical that its actually an efficient use of her actions in the first place considering she can discover four clues with two uses of her Fingerprint Kit.

I tried Testing Sprint in FHV with Luke Robinson but I was also running Seal of the Seventh Sign. It was really effective in The Thing in the Depths, but you don't really need many clues there, and the one scenario where it would've been amazing for him (Hemlock House) doesn't let you discover clues from locations without investigators. In the end I dropped the Seal of the Seventh Sign from that deck and put all that XP elsewhere, and the deck was better for it. I do think FHV is probably the best campaign to try running it with all the grid layouts it uses for its locations (and it was actually quite good in The Twisted Hollow) but I still think the card is more bait than bite on the whole.

Laboratory Assistant: I tried this for a while instead of Milan, for the burst card draw in Act One and cheaper soak. I went back to Milan though because he was fairly obviously simply better, and because putting clues onto allies with Kate's ability is kind of counter-productive because one of the main tasks allies perform is soak, and if they get defeated you have to place their clue on your location.

Inquiring Mind: This one is good in Act One for the parley tests but there are only two VP enemies you can use it on for that purpose, and Well-Funded was already covering that (not to mention Lily's Promise of Power). It was also good as a general skill booster, but its big problem was in Act Three when there are no clues on the map at all so you can't commit it to anything, including the act ability to deal with Dreamer tokens.

Working a Hunch: On paper I thought this card would be good to get Kate's Flux Stabilizer working quickly, and to grab clues quickly in act one and from high shroud locations in the desert in Act Two. It turned out though that she didn't need this kind of enabler for her signature card, and while grabbing a testless clue is good, it just wasn't doing enough for its slot.

Chemistry Set: This one didn't last long. I wanted to like it because it's a new card and it seems cool, but it's not there yet. I think even with enablers like Steady-Handed it's still pretty mediocre, but I can see it being good in future with more cards to support it.

That's it for now. Let me know if you have any questions about anything here.

Final decklist is here.