Winifred Talks a Big Game

Play tested this for about 2 weeks, doing first two scenarios of various campaigns solo on standard/hard. Won pretty much every standard session barring excessive auto-fail, and on hard it was a real struggle when dealt too many willpower tests but did better than I expected.

The goal is to buy two copies of Vamp with your first batch of EXP.

Vamp lets you essentially cycle your entire deck and even if you fail one of the tests you get your bulldog in for free. You play it, do all 4 tests, committing 2 card to each test if able, trigger her ability to draw, then also draw for the resolved effects of cards like Perception Pickpocketing and Lucky Cigarette Case.

Fine Clothes and Well-Dressed make a ton of early scenarios easier just based on the game mechanics but also make parleying Bianca "Die Katz" incredibly easy, which can sometimes be annoying if you're trying to fail on purpose to get an enemy out to Vamp and bypass location keywords.

for playing this deck, you mulligan literally everything that isn't Lucky Cigarette Case or Pickpocketing. All that matters is card draw. Once you have Vamp obviously you keep those, but only your reusable card draw assets matter at level 0.

The second purchase you make is Underworld Market. This lets you pull out all of your illicit cards you already have in the deck and add some more key cards like Fake Credentials and Disguise.

The unupgraded Vamp is kind of awful and not worth running in the level 0 deck. But It doesn't take long to get the deck rolling, it really only needs 10 exp to kick into high gear. The Underworld Market purchase also lets you add in some more cards that aren't illicit since you have 6 in the level 0 deck already, so this is when you add Honed Instinct and maybe Refine if you can't help yourself (I know I can't).

If you have an extra EXP to spend this is also when you would buy three copies of Easy Mark or Three Aces if you're not using taboo rules.

After that first 11 EXP it's really your choice of how to upgrade the deck. upgrading your Lucky Cigarette Case helps you manipulate your deck and push down Easy Mark if you don't have any copies yet or fish them out and can also help you pull out the most ideal skill card to add to your next test of Vamp when you need it. Upgrading Tennessee Sour Mash can make those tests much easier to pass if you have Guts or Anything You Can Do, Better in your hand. And of course getting the permanent Streetwise is always hand as you can easily find yourself swimming in money and mostly just have to test and since fine clothes makes the and part of Vamp 0 and you won't have much reason to test unless you run into some Swarm of Rats.

The big ticket purchases you're going to eventually want are obviously Ace in the Hole since you will cycle your deck so quickly and Double, Double to milk your upgraded Honed Instinct as much as possible and have hour long turns.