Doom Dancer

The voices came through the static, faint and riddled with distortion. But they were speaking to me. — Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

POV:

crackling static

"Amina... Amina... can you hear me?"

short burst of white noise

"The others turned away. They feared my voice."

intermittent hums and distant echoing tones

"But not you. You listened. You opened the channel and let me speak."

louder interference

"Let me in."

deep pulse, like a heartbeat under static

"I know you want my power."

high-pitched feedback spike

"Speak the rite. Break the seal. I will fly."

radio cuts to silence for a moment... then, one last whisper

"Let us dance together."

This deck was able to win The Scarlet Keys campaign in Standard difficulty with a total of 36 XP (including 6 from the finale).

| Difficulty:||★★★★★ - This is a very tricky deck. I love how demanding it is, but some people might prefer easier and less dangerous investigators. I also don’t recommend running this on a blind run.

| Enemy Management:||★★★★☆ - Very good for true solo.

| Clue-getting:||★★★☆☆ -Solid, but a bit slow (one clue at a time). Bonus actions help a lot and make it feel faster than it really is.

| Encounter protection:||★★★★☆ - Between all the skills, the mask, and Blood Pact, you're pretty safe.

| Survivability:||★★★☆☆ - The 3 health on Summoned Servitor is neat. Fearless and your naturally high sanity stat should handle the rest.

| Economy:||★★★★★ - Amina is the queen of Mystic economy: having a fast Emergency Cache every turn is really something else. I never used the Resource action during the entire campaign.

| Card Drawing:||★★☆☆☆ - The main weakness of the deck. If you have Lucky Cigarette Case, it becomes much better since you also get to filter your deck. Without it, you might struggle.

This Amina Zidane deck explores a risky playstyle where doom is not a threat, but a valuable resource—mainly for tempo and economy. Amina Zidane is actually a pretty strong investigator in solo: her statline is flexible, and her access to Charm cards offers unique advantages. However, she's difficult to pilot and requires a fair amount of XP to reach her full potential. Going in blind on a new campaign can be particularly dangerous, since you won’t know how the doom thresholds work or how much time you’ll have in each scenario. Familiarity with the campaign is a big advantage.

The deck features Summoned Servitor as a reliable tool for tanking, evading, and accelerating your movement across the map. With your permanent assets and the extra actions generated by Word of Weal, Dowsing Rod, and Amina’s ability, the deck sometimes feels like it plays more like a investigator—allowing for bursts of tempo while walking the razor’s edge of doom thresholds and pushing your luck to the limit.

How to play this deck (and avoid terrible agenda flips):

• Don't forget all the bonuses: Amina Zidane starts with a 3 in every stat, so most tests will require you to stack multiple small bonuses to reach a respectable skill value. Always keep an eye out for any boosts you can access—whether it’s from Elle Rubash, your asset's ability (Dowsing Rod) or Blood Pact if you choose to activate it. Once it’s in play, Cat Mask will also provide +2 / to a test at least once per turn.

• Don't forget to dance — and plan for it: You’ll generally have 4–5 actions per turn once Summoned Servitor is in play. Since it must perform two different actions each turn, it can't move or evade twice during its activation. This also means it won’t always be able to carry you along if you’re using Dowsing Rod once per turn—so optimizing its actions is key. Remember: you can only follow the Servitor when it moves from your location. This creates some wonderfully satisfying moments when everything aligns and you manage to get a free move action each turn and benefit from Dowsing Rod.

• Summoned Servitor is excellent at evading enemies from a distance, which can sometimes break how certain scenarios are designed—so don’t hesitate to use it to keep a troublesome enemy locked down far away. I chose the evade upgrade option, but you could absolutely prefer the investigate or fight version, depending on the rest of your build. Since this deck is already strong at both combat and clue-gathering, I felt a bit of remote evasion would round it out nicely.

I was genuinely impressed—there were several moments during the campaign where evading at range felt almost like cheating (and it helps you avoid Alert on failed tests, too!).

• Managing doom: Every time you take a test, you’ll need to evaluate whether boosting yourself with doom is worth it. That can be especially tricky on a blind run, since you won’t always know how much time you have left before the agenda advances. On turns when the agenda is going to advance no matter what, feel free to trigger everything—multiple times if needed—and become the true queen of mystics. But when you need to delay the agenda, you’ll sometimes have to carefully manage and remove doom from your cards.

• Always try to trigger Sin-Eater once/turn to collect the doom from Blood Pact and cards like Alyssa Graham which cannot lose doom via their own abilities (such as your hand-slot assets). Sometimes you’ll need to spend an action to remove all the doom from Sin-Eater manually; other times, you might not have the right timing and will need to rely onMoonlight Ritual since it’s fast. In general, you'll need to be good at predicting how much doom you can remove each turn, which can be a bit tricky. It’s a whole push-your-luck mini-game within the game. Occasionally, pulling your effect while there’s an enemy at your location is actually a blessing—since you can later get rid of that doom by defeating the enemy, or even better, one-shot it with String of Curses.

• Try to keep at least 1 doom on one of your hand-slot assets while they are attached to Elle Rubash since you can benefit from playing Word of Weal on it or remove the doom with Ghastly Possession / it's second ability, or even trade the asset with another on with too much doom on it under Elle Rubash. Keep in mind Elle Rubash can only attach cards with doom on them.

• Final note: playing Summoned Servitor also allow you to remove doom from the board since you have to sacrifice an asset. You can stack doom on David Renfield or Alyssa Graham and enjoy your new friend when it's becoming a bit tight on the doom clock.

Clue Acquisition

In the early scenarios, Alyssa Graham, St. Hubert's Key and Dowsing Rod are pretty good at taking care of most clues around while using your . Later on, with the upgraded version of your Dowsing Rod and Blood Pact you might sometimes use instead for better boosts. Sin-Eater will let you ready and thus use the powerfull ability twice/turn. For very difficulty locations, String of Curses is also a very good card.

Enemy Management

• Ceremonial Sickle isn't the best weapon by any mean, but it's totally serviceable in true solo and will be able to 2 damage/action reliably once you have Sin-Eater on the board.
• Explosive Ward provide direct damage (2/action) when needed, very good to keep in your hand until the boss showes up.
• Summoned Servitor can evade (or do some damage, depending on your chosen forms.)
• String of Curses can also defeat enemies for free when they have doom on them.

Economy and Draw

• David Renfield powers your economy if needed during the first few turns, when you got 3-4 dooms on him and it's starting to be dangerous, replace him with Summoned Servitor.

• Lucky Cigarette Case offers card draw from successful tests, with a good amount of filtration.

The deck’s main challenges are:

• Tempo loss if doom gets out of control — manage carefully, always have a plan to remove or hide doom tokens beneath Elle Rubash. Don't forget that permanents assets can't be attached to other cards that way.
• Card draw: don't hesitate to draw a bit or to include skills that draw you like Guts.

Mulligan and Early game

• Always hard mulligan for Elle Rubash (especially when you have only 1 copy), Lucky Cigarette Case and at least one hand-slot item. An ally like Alyssa Graham or David Renfield is valuable but don't keep both. Summoned Servitor is not mandatory.

Focus on setting you up the first few turns by cheating assets into play and drawing some cards if necessary. Start investigating on the low shroud locations and try to avoid enemies by using Alyssa Graham's ability every turn if you also have Summoned Servitor waiting in your hand and ready to commit some sacrifice.

Start of campaign XP

Take 2 mental trauma and use the 3XP granted by In the Thick of It to grab a copy of Elle Rubash and a copy of Ghastly Possession. Elle Rubash is kinda mandatory with Amina Zidane for doom managment.

Down the Rabbit of doom

• Between each scenario, try to optimize Down the Rabbit Hole by upgrading at least two cards - Summoned Servitor is the default target here. As you can see, this deck managed to bypass a total of 10 XP in total (12 thanks to 6 points of upgrade across 7 scenarios played minus 2 due to Sin-Eater and Elle Rubash). In longer campaigns, Down the Rabbit Hole will obvisouly get even better.
• Keep in mind that each new card you will buy (like Sin-Eater) will cost you 1 additional XP.

Here are listed the main cards you might want to take, with the highest priority at the top.

• A second copy of Elle Rubash is very good to take early once your have 3XP to – huge for both clues and doom management.

• Lucky Cigarette Case – excellent for consistent draw.

• Sin-Eater essential for long-term doom cycling but recquires a good boost of XP. Sometimes it's worth to save some XP for it.

• Blood Pact is a risky but very strong card, especially with Sin-Eater around.

• Fearless is a good 1XP sink that boosts Willpower on crucial tests and soaks horror.

• Moonlight Ritual is also very good 1XP sink that can save runs.

Optional upgrades:

Be careful with those upgrades—each new card purchased costs additional XP due to Down the Rabbit Hole!

• Guts: Mainly included for the card draw. Some players might prefer starting with the 0 XP version during deckbuilding, possibly by replacing David Renfield, for example. That would totally make sense.

• Charisma for extra ally slots. Didn't feel it was really necessary during my run though.

• Blood of Thoth because action economy is go... WAIT NO! That card if not even good enough to replace something like Lucky Cigarette Case.

Please design team, let Blood of Thoth not exhaust on the next Taboo! ^^

Final Thoughts

This deck embraces what makes Amina unique: manipulating forbidden forces with elegance and cheating with money at your own risk. It’s a dance with fate, where every doom token becomes a question: Will you fall... or rise?

I found this deck incredibly funny, tense, and rewarding to play. You feel sometimes pretty weak, sometimes insanely strong and cappable of 7 actions per turn. With a base of 4-5 actions / turn where 2-3 can be done at 6-7 base value if not 9-10 with Blood Pact, Amina can pass most tests and beat the game cool ways.

Get ready to redefine tempo and cheat cards like a Rogue would do it!