The Girl Who Killed Umôrdhoth - Combo Wendy (The Gathering)

Warning: Massive spoilers for Night of the Zealot follows

The commentary assumes that the player is familiar with all story elements of the campaign. This series of decks uses 2 core sets, the Dunwich Legacy, and the Miskatonic Museum.

This deck is designed for playing Night of the Zealot campaign solo on Hard difficulty. Its goal is to reliably kill Umôrdhoth in one turn.

The Combo:

There are a few variants on how we can accomplish this, but Will to Survive is always involved.

If you have Leo De Luca in play, we can move into Umôrdhoth's location and take 3 actions. This allows us to play [Backstab/Flare + Double or Nothing + 5/] for 6 damage, then [Baseball Bat + 2] twice for the remaining 4. The easiest way to win with this line is to have [Will to Survive, Backstab, Double or Nothing, Overpower, Manual Dexterity, Lucky!, and 2 copies of Unexpected Courage] in hand on the turn we face Umôrdhoth.

If we are forced to use or discard some of those cards, we can draw into the icons we need with the Manual Dexterity + Double or Nothing in our Backstab which draws 2 cards. If we drop Backstab or Will to Survive, Wendy's Amulet can let us reuse them from the discard pile. For more redundancy, we will transition into Hard Knocks so we can use extra resources in lieu of cards to pump the attacks. Finally, if we don't have Leo De Luca, or if we must spend the first action on the critical turn to evade another enemy, a second copy of Double or Nothing with 5 more can deal our last 2 points of damage before Umôrdhoth can strike back.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. First, let's build a deck to pass The Gathering and talk about some card choices.

The Deck:

It's no secret that the biggest challenge for Wendy is her very low combat. To mitigate this, we will put in loads of combat aids:

Baseball Bat is an obvious include. Fighting at +2 and dealing +1 damage for 2 resources is incredible value. Wendy's own ability lets her redraw any that would break her bat, making this an obvious choice.

Knife is a one use Baseball Bat in most cases, but has the advantage of being cheaper and being usable alongside a Flashlight. Occasionally you will use the knife to deal 1 damage to Swarm of Rats or Acolyte.

Overpower is that draws a card, which makes it very powerful for our Wendy. So much that Oops! is played in this deck just for the alone.

Backstab is not only extremely powerful at 3 damage and using (effectively +3 for Wendy), but also lets us use cards such as Manual Dexterity to fight. This extends our resources for the most important checks by a large margin.

At 3, Wendy can handle most low shroud locations. For the higher shroud locations, we include "Look what I found!" to cheat out the clues. It helps that locations in Night of the Zealot have at most 2 clues. Flashlight is useful for shroud 1-2 locations to automatically succeeding investigations barring , and also for guaranteeing you fail within the margin for "Look what I found!" in 3-4 shroud locations.

Then we have generally good cards for Wendy:

Leo De Luca is great with or without Will to Survive - 4 actions a turn wins games.

Unexpected Courage helps in our combo or in checks in general, and the same goes for Lucky! which is just an amazing card in any situation.

Emergency Cache funds our high cost cards such as Leo De Luca, Backstab, and Will to Survive.

Double or Nothing saves an action in most cases and even in the first scenario helps us take down the Ghoul Priest with one Backstab, in addition to being a vital part of our combo.

Finally lets get to the more questionable choices. Opportunist is here for the icon alone. In an older iteration of this deck, it was replaced with Rabbit's Foot. However, Rabbit's Foot requires 3 triggers to break even for the cost of playing it, and Opportunist's slight upside won out. Guts is scenario specific, as an inopportune Crypt Chill can take out Leo De Luca or a Baseball Bat and seriously set us back.

The Gathering:

Piloting this deck through The Gathering is relatively straight forward, but we do have to manage our enemies and investigations well.

There are 9 enemies in the encounter deck:

3x Swarm of Rats are the least concerning. With a Knife or a Baseball Bat in hand, even little Wendy can reliably deal with them unassisted.

3x Ghoul Minion are the concerning ones. At 2, they are easy enough to evade if they are in an out of the way location. However, if they are not, you will be discarding your Knife or using Baseball Bat with pump cards to kill them.

1x Ravenous Ghoul is the Backstab target. Committing resources to succeed 2 checks against it even with a baseball bat is difficult. If you do not have Backstab in hand and must kill the Ravenous Ghoul, it is often worth evading it until you can draw Backstab.

Flesh-Eater and Icy Ghoul will usually be evaded. This deck should rush through the scenario fast enough to avoid drawing them most of the time as well.

The 2 clues in Study have shroud 2, and are prime targets for Flashlight. The 2 in Attic should be easy enough to pick up unaided. Finally the 2 in Cellar are where we should be pointing "Look what I found!".

With those in mind, for our mulligan, we will be looking very hard for:

Leo De Luca - getting him out turn 1 gives a massive advantage.

Knife/Baseball Bat - since without them, drawing into a Ghoul Minion is hard to deal with. Backstab in the opening hand is good too, since it gives us some way of dealing damage.

Flashlight or "Look what I found!" - either one will clear up the Study very quickly.

In the first act, investigate the Study for all of its clues using either investigation aids in the deck. However, you should not rush to advance the first act without having a "Look what I found!" in hand and either Baseball Bat or Knife on the board. The Study is the safest place to be - drawing Icy Ghoul/Flesh-Eater result in them being discarded, and if you fail a check with , you can search the encounter deck for one of these and draw them as well. Also, the reverse side of the first act discards all enemies in the Study before moving the investigator, which means any enemies engaged with you when you decide to advance will be removed. This can be used to discard an enemy or two for free.

The second act is straight forward. If you have not discarded Icy Ghoul in act 1, clearing the Cellar with "Look what I found!" is faster and reduces your chances of running into Icy Ghoul, which is difficult to evade. Flesh-Eater is easy enough to evade as you clear out the Attic unaided.

Finally, facing the Ghoul Priest will take some resources. Backstab + Double or Nothing and plenty of pumps will kill Ghoul Priest in one hit. That said Backstab + one hit from Baseball Bat is probably the most practical - spreading the skills committed over and . This is where Wendy's redraw ability really shines.

The Future:

If all goes well, you should be walking out of your house with 2 xp for the scenario, 2 xp from the Ghoul Priest, and 1 from each of Cellar and Attic. We will also defy Lita Chantler and not burn down our house for the extra xp, since we will never play Lita Chantler over Leo De Luca. Also, that 1 xp is really useful for our game plan for The Midnight Masks.

--Part 2--