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Thursday 5 April 2018

Building Agnes Baker - An Arkham Horror: The Card Game Story


So I wanted to give Agnes a go for my groups latest campaign (Path to Carcosa) and I came at the deck from a different angle than I usually do. Rather than thinking of how the deck plays straight off the bat, I focused on how it would play once we had accumulated some experience points. With the upgraded spell cards taking up a bulk of experience I wanted to focus on getting upgrades which would decrease the change of the level 0 spells missing their mark. I’ll go into each point of the deck and then look at upgrades after.


Arcane

So, Shrivelling and Rite of Seeking are the two basic spells in the deck, obviously one for combat and one for investigating. Unless we get an abundance of experience points, these will more than likely stay at level 0, simply because there are so many cards which up your willpower value and provide other little abilities too, however these cost experience, so best to spend it on expanding your action base in my opinion.


Accessories

Only one here and that’s the Holy Rosary, I quite like Agnes’s signature asset, however with not going to spell heavy overall in the deck, it’s not going to get the use it deserves. So, the Holy Rosary will get the slot, its extra willpower bonus and sanity buff is going to fit perfectly into the build. I was tempted by the Key, however the minus 2 sanity really put me, maybe see how these play and we can always amend where needed.


Body

Leather Coat was the only real option here, Agnes has a low enough health value to make this a priority and as it’s o cost card, I don’t have to worry about resources to get this into play. If we have enough left-over resources this could possibly become a Body Armour, but will have to see. 


Ally

Peter Sylvestre was the sure choice here, not because of his level 0 version, but his level 2 version. The extra sanity buff he provides and his willpower bonus makes him the perfect addition to this deck which is trying to increase its willpower. I also threw in a couple of Arcane Initiates too, as the deck doesn’t have a huge number of spells it made sense to play cards which could go looking for them. It’s great having so many willpower buffs but if we can’t get the spell cards out, they are useless.


Other

Ok, so Forbidden Knowledge and Painkillers take these positions. As noted earlier her lower health means Painkillers was a great include, healing health is always nice, also because it can be combined with Agnes’s ability or even the ability of Peter Sylvestre to mitigate the horror you take from using them. Forbidden knowledge can be used in the exact same way to not only trigger your ability but to simply use Peter Sylvestre to negate the horror being taken to gain a resource.


Skills

So not my usual payload of skills here, I only went with Guts and Fearless. Guts is another great way of pumping your willpower stat and then drawing a card if your test is successful. Fearless at level 0 is ok, the higher-level version is better as its gives you two willpower icons, but the ability to heal horror is great. In most of my builds I go skill heavy but I felt this deck could manage without it.


Events

Some pretty standard choices here, Ward of Protection and Lucky, were my first choices. Evading encounter cards is great when you don’t necessarily have the ability to beat them and being able to add 2 to a skill check when you would lose it is nothing to snub either. So these cards were certainly staples for this deck. I threw in an Emergency Cache too so we could make sure Agnes always had some moolah to hand. I added Drawn to the Flame to give her some clue gathering power should Rite of Seeking not make it to the board within a reasonable time, I can imagine this being one of the first cards to be cut when upgrading. Delve Too Deep also got a sneaky include, I noted that we should be trying to get as much XP as possible to use between scenarios, and two copies of this in the deck could net us 2 XP a game which again, is nothing to be snubbed. As William Yorick is on the Team he can potentially add 1 XP each game too, so the potential for gaining XP is greater with all these includes. 


Ok, so that’s the build as it stands at 0 experience and there is certainly some wriggle room for upgrades of cards already in the deck and some new additions which can be added into the deck. Cards like Ward of Protection have a couple of upgrade options now, Peter Sylvestre as previously discussed, Fearless and Lucky all have upgrade options which give their own little boost to the build.


Spirit Athame provide nice little additions when upgrading, increasing your skill value by 2 when testing a spell card is a phenomenal include and again is a cheaper alternative to upgrading the spells in the deck.  Book of Shadows is also a welcome addition later on, to restock the charges on your spell cards or a Grotesque Statue if you would rather increase your chances of pulling the right token when you do utilise your spell cards.


From the Neutral card pool, I like the idea of the Key of Ys and even the Relic Hunter card, some real potential there especially considering the deck could have a few different accessory cards.


On the Survivor class front, there is nothing really jumping out at me on the upgrade front outside of Peter Sylvestre and Lucky. A Test of Wills is one card that does intrigue me when combined with Ward of Protection you get a good range of cards that allow you to evade the encounter deck. Sadly I feel a lot of the experience points will be spent on Mystic cards.


With our new campaign starting on 11th April 2018, I cant wait to see where this deck goes as the campaign progresses. I didn’t manage to get much noted down from our Dunwich Legacy campaign, so I am hoping to get some more noted and reported this time around. 

Im Big Boss, I’m out.... peace.