Clues under the sea

Silas is an Investigator that lets you (once per round) return skills played back to your hand before resolving the skill test. In other words, whenever you make a test, you can play multiple skills and recover 1 if it wasn't necessary, or you can just play 1 skill, and recover if you were gonna fail anyway. This gives Silas a very simple and interesting playstyle, and as far as you have skills in hand, you may be acting like a (4,4,6,6) survivor, more than a (2,2,4,4).

Since the main focus of Silas are skill cards, this also means that Silas won't need many resources. His main objective will be to have card draw, but luckily, and thanks to the possibility of adding Innate cards to his deck, there are plenty skills that let you draw/recover cards: Take Heart, Resourceful, Eureka!, Daring, and the classics Manual Dextery and Overpower. Impressive to note those are only Skill cards. We also use the asset Drawing Thin as our last way of getting cards.

All this skills make Silas very flexible. Although he wont excell at Investigating or Will tests, he might be able to pass them. And even if he cant, he won't loose cards because of it. Playing with the charm Grisly Totem will give you even greater chances to pass all your tests.

The main weakness of Silas is definitely his low horror threshold. To fix this, it is very important to have great allies like Peter Sylvestre. This asset is a perfect fit for Silas, giving him the survivavility (and extra dextery!) that he needs.

His playstile changes a bit when you have your main weapon, the Sea Change Harpoon (or the Sila's Net if you prefer to evade). This is because the weapon lets you return all you skills committed to a "Fight test" back to hand (this time after resolving the test!), along with the Harpoon. This means that If you wanted to use this every turn, you would need to spend 1 action and 3 resources in the setup, then another in the fight. On the other hand, this means that you can use very powerful effects again and again.

Some great effects of his skills are:

1. Getting extra actions with Quick Thinking.
2. Obtaining cards with Resourceful and Eureka!.
3. Have great versatility with Inquiring Mind.

Overall, this sailor is an impressive investigator. He obviously excells at fighting and evading, making him a great guardian. However, the best part is that its a very flexible character, being able to deal with any type of tests. In this deck we even add the Old Keyring and "Look what I found!", making him a real detective able to get a great ammount of clues.

UPGRADES

Some good Upgrades overall are:

1. Peter Sylvestre (2), to gain survivavility.
2. Brute Force, as a great way of dealing damage.
3. True Survivor, since it has a great sinnergy with Silas kit.

Depending on the campaign, you can replace the cards you feel you are going to use less, or the ones that are usually too expensive. Since your Harpoon and the Net can be used (and re-payed) infinitly, you can always find uses for all your resources.

Then, there are 2 possible styles to play Silas: one is to focus on the ability of retrieving Skills from the graveyard. The other is to take advantage of the strong Events survivors have access to.

So for example, if you wanna focus on Skills, things like Unexpected Courage are very usefull.

On the other hand, a very strong event is Eucatastrophe. And it takes advantage of the fact that the arcane symbol of Silas is actually very strong!

In any case, be careful with the Costs in your deck. Although is a deck with low ammount of Assets, there are few ways of gaining resources, so it won't be so easy to play them. Even more if you plan to re-play the Sea Change Harpoon and the Sila's Net.