Norman Shrivels His Way Through Carcosa

This is a version of a deck I just ran through 4-player Carcosa. Norman's a ton of fun, and this build feels really strong, and lets you get away with some really cool plays.

Stats:

Norman’s stat line is amazing. 1 agility is great (see Edwards, Finn), since it lets him sit at 4 and 5 in stats that he actually cares about. If you need to fight, shrivel it. If you need to evade, play Mind over Matter. Or go for Mists of R'lyeh instead of Shrivelling. Mostly just don't take Norman into the jungle.

General deckbuilding:

The deck relies heavily on fast cards. The only thing better than spending an action to play a card off the top of your deck (getting effectively +1 card and +1 resource) is NOT spending an action to play a card off the top of your deck. Mystic has a lot of strong fast XP events that let you keep up the pace even after you upgrade.

This deck runs two copies of Arcane Research. When you start your campaign, you want to figure out how many times you’ll upgrade over the course of it, so you can maximize the payoff. The value is slow at first, since you’ve only got 3 Mystic(0) slots left over, so you have to buy into your second Shrivelling, St. Hubert's Key (if you choose to go that route) and Premonition with XP. But this bottleneck is significantly helped by Rite of Seeking, which lets you keep the low-XP slots clear, while still getting a full 14 points out of Arcane Research. (or more, if you're planning to take side scenarios)

Specific cards:

Split the Angle seems to suggest that Norman is an investigator all about Scrying and similar effects. I don't think that that kind of control is really there in the card pool yet, and most of it is level 0 Mystic, which makes it hard for Norman to actually use. Fortunately, you can just ignore that path entirely, and StA is still valuable as icons.

Dr. Milan Christopher is an obvious include, and needs no introduction.

Mr. Rook (represented here by Archaic Glyphs, a card that no REAL Norman deck wants to take) is an absolute beast. A bigger, splashier, clickless Old Book of Lore is quite good. He lets you be a little less aggressive in mulliganing for Milan, since you can search 9 cards 3 times. Once you buy a Charisma, you can keep them both on the field. The downside (drawing a weakness) is not that bad, since Norman needs to be prepared to chain into a weakness (or multiple weaknesses) without notice anyway. It's also a shuffle, which lets you change your top card as needed, and again, it’s extra free draws, which (combined with your ability, and all the fast cards) makes your deck run very smoothly.

Shrivelling is your main way of doing damage. As you upgrade them, you probably cut "I've got a plan!"s, but if for some reason you feel a real need to be your group's murderer, keep them in.

Thermos lets you heal the horror you get from Arcane Research and Shrivelling, as well as keeping your more mentally fragile friends up and running. You don't always want to play it, but when you do, it's clutch.

Upgrade priorities have to kind of be played by ear. The low-level Mystic botttleneck combined with trying to squeeze value out of Arcane Research means you need to really survey what the rest of your party is doing, and order your upgrades appropriately. It's almost certainly a good idea to go to Ward of Protection after your first scenario, but do you want to buy a second Shrivelling, or go for Premonition? Is it more important for you to smooth your setup time by taking Charisma, or should you get a Rite of Seeking ASAP, and start ripping multiple clues more reliably than Deduction allows?

Once you get over that hump, though, the real fun begins. Since Arcane Research means you don't need to spend points on upgrading spells, you can branch out into shenanigans fairly early. Recall the Future, Time Warp, and Counterspell are all very strong includes, and can be used to either help your teammates out of scrapes, power up your big turns, or even in a pinch, get away with making tests that your statline really shouldn't allow. As you upgrade, you can cut No Stone Unturned, since it's really not a good enough effect to play, even when discounted. Vantage Point also drops off in utility pretty quickly, and is almost entirely useless in some scenarios. (Dim Carcosa and Essex County Express, for instance). Tooth of Eztli should get replaced by St. Hubert's Key (More expensive, takes a Mystic 0 slot, but gives a more reliable bonus) or Hemispheric Map (2 more XP each, but frees up a slot for something else, and you can play around the unreliability of the bonus, if you're clever.) If you're really worried about economy, you could just run Holy Rosary, but that's basically the worst of all possible worlds. And you have Dr. Milan.

Skills:

Skills are as bad for Norman as fast cards are good. You can't play them off the top of the deck, so they end up just clogging things up, getting in the way of the fun. Deduction is in here mostly to serve as a stopgap until you buy Rite of Seeking for multi-clue compression, but I could see an argument for cutting them and just running with something generically good, like Preposterous Sketches. Once you're really rolling in XP, you could consider going with Seal of the Elder Sign, but even that is a maybe.