Marion Studies the Art of War, One Punch at a Time

Credit: Aleksander Karcz

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This year, I will propose a series of 6 investigator decks (all but Gloria), released one week apart, to help people who have little time to deckbuild, or are still getting familiar with the new cards. May these serve as a base for you to build your own decks and adapt to any other campaign or group size.

Disclaimer These decks have never been run through The Drowned City Campaign since they are published before its release. They are built and tested with a 2 context. The goal of these deck guides is to break down the new investigators, display some interactions, and give players a first reference point when starting to play the new team!

Enjoy the reading, and I hope you'll have fun with these in The Drowned City!

• Overview

• Main Strategy

• Study the Book of War

• Breach the Door, and Wing It:

• Other Cards

• Upgrade Path

• Make Your Own Deck!

• Use the Book of War to cycle One-Two Punch (5), one-shotting all but the beefiest enemies.

• Use Stick to the Plan to prepare your One-Two Punch (5) and store your Act of Desperation to discard your empty Book of War.

• Use your natural Sleuth Talent to pay for the Book of War and all your Tactic events.

As the venerable Sun Tzu once said, the war against the unfathomable beings hidden within the fabric of the universe is solved One Punch at a time.

• Mulligan can be a little complex. Here are the things to consider:

  • The Book of War itself
  • Tetsuo Mori as killing him quickly can help find your Book of War
  • Sleuth as it is another really important part of your deck.
  • Any card that draws one or more cards will help you dig deeper into your deck.
  • Finally, Improvised Weapon can be a good one to keep in hand, in case you don't find the Book of War fast enough and you need to deal with an early enemy.

• Once you have your Book of War, you can simply use it to get back the One-Two Punch (5) and play it multiple times. Being able to kill any enemy under 5hp in one action will make enemy management significantly easier.

  • One-Two Punch (5) can be attached to Stick to the Plan, so that's one less card to draw for your main combo.

  • Since One-Two Punch (5) is attached to Stick to the Plan, it is safe from early inconveniences like Amnesia. After you play it once, try to always keep 3 other events in hand so you can deal with your weakness rapidly without taking the risk of losing your most precious card to it. Bonus points if you use Winging It/Improvised Weapon/A Glimmer of Hope for this.

• Once the Book of War is empty, you cannot replace it with another copy of itself since it is (Unique). Therefore, Stick to the Plan stores an Act of Desperation to get a little extra damage and, most importantly, our resources back to play another copy as soon as possible.

• As finding the Book of War is the priority, we have Tetsuo Mori to help find it or return it from the discard pile if you haven't found the second copy yet.

  • If you still have trouble finding the book, you can get Backpack (2) earlier in the campaign. It also finds your Emergency Cache, so even if you use your experience here instead of Sleuth, it should be fine.

• Though tempting, I chose to not add Short Supply to the deck. While it would be of great help to find the Book of War, and would add some of the Improvised events to the discard pile, it would also take the risk of discarding Sleuth. There is no way for the deck to retrieve it, and it would result in significant resource strain on the deck. This alone justifies not going with Short Supply.

• Finally, we are packing 2 Improvised Weapon and another One-Two Punch for when you are facing smaller enemies and you want to save one secret of the Book of War, or if you are fighting an Elite enemy with more than 5 health and you need more gas in the tank than one copy of One-Two Punch (5).

While there are a few ways to help find Book of War, the deck is highly dependent on it, and thankfully, Marion Tavares is great at drawing cards, making her pretty reliable overall. However, I would not recommend this deck as the only fighter in a 4-person group. I see her more as a 80% fighter, 20% cluever investigator.

For the rest, you can live a few turns without Sleuth, and all the other important cards stick to the plan for immediate access.

Now that you can deal with all enemies in one action, even allowing you to play another event in that same action, you need other ways to spend your time.

• Use your other actions to get clues.

  • Apparently, it is a Sleuth method to Breach the Door. As it is a test on an event, you can commit both Determined, making it a good way to bring down a high-shroud location for yourself or the rest of your team.

  • Even if you only bring the shroud down to 1, Winging It will get you clues 2 by 2 if it's in your discard, as long as you don't pull an . Since you shuffle it back in your deck, you can play it a decent number of times in each scenario, significantly helping with the pace of your team.

• Speaking of the discard, Bound to the Horizon turns A Glimmer of Hope, Improvised Weapon and Winging It into movement for even more tempo.

  • I advise you to use your ability on A Glimmer of Hope (2) aggressively, even if there are only 2 in your discard. They will help tremendously with "I'll do it myself", with fast movement, and most importantly help you deal with Treachery tests.

• Since Winging It and Improvised Weapon are both Tactics, they benefit from the resources and skill pump of Sleuth!

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• Hallowed Mirror is great in this deck. Not only does it allow you to be a bit more reckless during the scenario, but it is also a great way to use your ability on Soothing Melody, to draw a total of 2 cards without using an action, thanks to your .

• Lucky! is crucial in Marion because your Signature Determined only comes back to hand when you succeed. When you have Lucky! in hand, you can commit Determined to tests more freely, knowing that you have a safety net.

• Glory and Ready for Anything are here to slim your deck, important to access your Book of War and Sleuth faster.

  • We only take one copy of Ready for Anything because it can easily take up to 4-5 turns until you draw an enemy making it a dead draw during all that time. Often, you will end up playing it on a normal turn anyway because you are tired of waiting, making it a very ineffective card.

• Scrounge for Supplies is just good in Marion Tavares since she negates its biggest downside: the action cost. You can use it to target anything you need at that moment: resources with Emergency Cache, draw with Glory or Ready for Anything, another Act of Desperation so you can have a 3rd Book of War cycle thanks to Tetsuo Mori... There are many possibilities.

• Ever Vigilant is always a winner when using Stick to the Plan, even if you only end up playing 2 assets with it. It shines especially in Marion Tavares since it basically turns a play action into an event that can trigger her .

  • If you want to know what Dopamine feels like, try this as an opening turn: playing Ever Vigilant from Stick to the Plan to play Sleuth, and immediately use the resources on Sleuth to pay for the Book of War, and finally trigger Marion's to throw an Emergency Cache. You still have your 5 resources, have 3 cards in hand, and you are set for the rest of the game.

Early deck

• We take In the Thick of It and choose 2 physical trauma because the Hallowed Mirror can compensate for it. However, we do not use the experience yet. Instead, we store the experience points to purchase Stick to the Plan as soon as possible.

• Take the Initiative is the best defensive card available to and it helps a lot before you upgrade to A Glimmer of Hope (2).

• Wolf Mask is helpful before you get One-Two Punch (5) because the tests on the lvl 0 are sometimes challenging to pass, and the Mask really helps, especially as you are still waiting to find the 2 copies of Determined. The part also helps with treachery cards which is always appreciated.

  • It is replaced by Sleuth as it also offers 2 resources per turn to bump your skill value on all your Tactic events, adding the option to pay the resources too.

Later Upgrades

• Stand Together (3) is insane value in Marion Tavares, 2+1 cards and 2 resources that can be chained to another event... However, it is "just" value, and therefore it comes a little later in the build, only once the main combo pieces are obtained.

• Backpack (2) is probably the best tutor in the game, and since your main combo piece is an item, it has to be mentioned.

• Oops! (2) is actually a fun addition to the deck. The first attack of One-Two Punch (5) automatically succeeds, but the second can pull an , resulting in a mean punch in the face of poor George Barnaby. Save actions engaging enemies by being able to say "No." to the dreaded autofail.

• True Awakening is a possible upgrade to Glory. It uses one less resource and offers a testless clue. The trade-off is not being fast, but as you are Marion, you probably want to use your to play it anyways.

• Ever Vigilant (4) is a fantastic support card and I would recommend getting it much earlier if you are playing in 3 or 4 players. You can use it to play the Book of War, then spend a secret from the Book of War immediately to get it back to hand and play it next turn again. This should be enough for your whole party to be ahead of the game from the beginning.

• Emergency Cache (2) and Lucky! (2) are just slightly better versions of the same card, so feel free to add them if you have the experience.

• Keen Eye is interesting later in a campaign, since you can end up with more resources than you need, and especially the pump can be helpful, however Sleuth already helps a lot with it.

• Hallowed Mirror (3) is really low priority, since playing 3 copies of Soothing Melody is most likely enough already, but later in the scenario, if you have a lot of trauma, it may be worth it.

Link to the 0xp deck

(View at arkham-starter.com)

Link to the full xp deck

After the Reddit survey that I did, Marion Tavares is the most hyped-up investigator, and I can completely see why! She is a super fun investigator to play, yet her deckbuilding has been much more of a puzzle than I anticipated when she was first revealed. I've been playing multiple builds during Preview Season and somehow struggled to make her work.

Book of War is the card I needed to unlock her. Event based investigators need a way to keep their hand filled with events that move the game forward (as opposed to resource/draw), otherwise they quickly run out of fuel. Sefina Rousseau can draw the events under her, Nathaniel Cho is bound to his Boxing Gloves to replace Spirit fight events, but Marion's built-in draw wasn't sufficient to build and maintain momentum. With the Book however, as long as she can afford the resource cost, she can loop Tactics events while triggering her .

The last challenge with Marion after Book of War was released was to find Tactic events that are worth the effort of slotting, finding, paying and playing this expensive asset, especially in the only hand slot available to Marion. While it's a rather common trait that has been around for ages, there actually aren't that many contenders, and One-Two Punch (5) is really by far the best one. As long as you can keep playing the book and you don't lose your precious event to your weakness, you should be able to deal with enemies for a full scenario.

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