Endgame Lola Hayes The Boxer (Nathaniel Cho)

The penultimate result of a 3 player standard Drowned City run with a stop at the Film Fatale side story on our way back to Arkham.

This deck fights things and is a hopeless cluer. Please build the team accordingly. Or, change some stuff so Lola clues better. It will be tough to clue on the turns with a 0 book stat. I recommend Survivor tricks. Watch Lola's build requirements, though. I use Guardian, Mystic, and Survivor here.

The gimmick of this deck is to turn into Nathaniel Cho using Transfiguration as quickly as possible. Then, each damaging event does extra damage (once per phase) like Sneak Attack or Spectral Razor or the MVP, Improvised Weapon.

Playing Lola is always pretty cool, what with her unmatched deck building potential, and we have Living Ink and Boxing Gloves to boost her fight stat in the result of a Transfiguration whiff. The events do substantial damage, and Improvised Weapon is a fantastic edition to this deck, eventually helping us draw everything and leaving our deck simply copies of Improvised Weapon and Soothing Melody. Combat queen even without the gimmick.

This deck is acceptably lethal, so I'm going to focus on what most people will worry about: Drawing Transfiguration and getting resources.

2 x Studious and Stick to the Plan means Lola has a 37 card deck and can see 14 of them at the start of the game. That makes the odds of starting with Transfiguration sit at around 37% on the first 7 cards and a further 42% on the full 7 card mulligan. The odds of both of those events failing is around 37%, which means we'll start with Transfiguration about 63% of the time. As mentioned before, though, Lola can hold her own with just a Living Ink, and this did happen to me a couple times in the campaign. She did fine.

As far as money goes, this deck struggles. Some of that was due to my pulling Indebted as a basic weakness, so the Another Day, Another Dollar washes out the debt. I just added Unscrupulous Loan for our last scenario with no intention of paying them back. They can thank me when I Jackie Chan a Chthonic horror in the face.

Other things to note: Ward of Protection is a spirit card, and Boxing Gloves can find those. So can Nathaniel Cho's Elder Sign. You can also get back Lucky! or Drawn to the Flame. It's just so much fun to pull back these cards.

Living Ink is always active during the mythos phase. If you have both copies in play, Lolaniel Cho's stats become: 1/0/9/0 during the Mythos phase and on combat turns. We had an encounter card reduce Lolaniel's book to -1 which was a new situation for us.

Using Improvisation to play Leo De Luca or Boxing Gloves is a great deal, but try to only do this before Transfiguration because Lolaniel remembers her last role and pulling a Crisis of Identity and being forced to discard Leo De Luca would be a shame. Ideally, we improv Leo, then Lola switch to Mystic and Transfigure. This way we are stuck protecting our Inks for most of the game, but losing those is less critical at that point.

Lola decks are always my favorite! I hope you enjoy.

Level 0: https://arkhamdb.com/deck/view/4598508

Upgrade order: In the Thick of It gets the first Transfiguration and starts the Living Ink.

Get the second Transfiguration and finish the Living Ink ASAP

Get the fancy Hallowed Mirror if the situation requires. Especially a sanity taxing campaign like Carcosa

Slowly add Studious, Stick to the Plan and upgrade various events.

Drowned City hands out a monumental amount of exp. Remember when Dunwich gave us, like, 20? If the campaign were to keep going, I'd upgrade the last Vicious Blow and the Boxing Gloves.