Agnes is drawing thin

After trying some crazily strong Preston deck I found on this site (here), I realized how strong the survivor eco cards can get, and that many characters with acces to lvl0 survivors seem to have some solid solo deck based on drawing thin. But I couldn't find such a deck for Agnes, so here is my try.

Idea of the deck:

• Agnes is all you need, if you can get your key spells out.
• Use survivor eco cards to draw those key cards, and later to get tons of cash.
• Use Arcane Studies / Dig Deep and this cash to pump even more.

Out of three runs on 'witching hour' hard mode, I could clear it fully twice and got badly destroy once from some ugly weakness&treachery combo.

Investigating

Sixth Sense seems a quite obvious card for Agnes, solving once and for all the issue of her painfully low The problem of course, is how to deal with games when you do not draw it early ? One possibility would be to pack the deck with auto clues or boost, but they typically take a lot of deck space, which was just not available. So how should you investigate before drawing Sixth Sense ? The answer of this deck is pretty simple: Don't. Just draw more.

(and yes, you probably do not want to take the train with this deck. But TCU seems quite forgiving to slow starts.)

Drawing more

Enters the set of survivors eco cards: with Drawing Thin, Rabbit's Foot and Take Heart, you should get some solid draw, and later some ressources once you get your key cards. If you can get both drawing thin and rabbit's foot out, it is usually worth it to take a failed action just to trigger it. Arcane Initiate can also help a lot to find your spells fast enough. Finally Heirloom of Hyperborea is usually just not better than its icons.

Ennemies management

The weapon of choice is of course Shrivelling and finding it should be your first priority. But of course you cannot just 'draw more' if you get some early ennemies, so some backup solutions are there. Those are Fire Axe, which can latter be used to make the extra damage saving one shrivelling charge, Dig Deep to simply evade, and of course Agnes's own ability which can be triggered by Forbidden Knowledge

Increasing

5 is a pretty good start, but just not enough to pass tests reliably in hard. The main tool here is Dig Deep, which uses the cash from your Drawing Thin to pass your tests. As it cannot be tutored by Arcane Initiate, I included Arcane Studies as a third copy. It can also save you in those scenarios with some mandatory tests.

David Renfield and St. Hubert's Key can also help, but their slots have too much competition to really rely on them.

Surviving and other details

Agnes tends to get a lot of sanity damages from her own cards (and I included Arcane Research x2, which I forgot to list here), so I entered Peter Sylvestre which is the ally you want in play once you are set up. Arcane Initiate is indeed totally expendable once you get your spells, David Renfield is a joker in case you extra need cash or soak. I still added some sanity healing, with Fearless and St. Hubert's Key, to get more uses out of Agnes ability.

Finally, Deny Existence and Ward of Protection feel just too good to pass, and provide additional target for Arcane Initiate

Upgrades

Entering the realm of full theorycraft, I still have to try it :)

• Peter Sylvestre seems an obvious choice to improve willpower
• With 5 allies, Charisma seems also an early pick
• With lots of draw, Cornered would nicely replace one copy of Dig Deep
• Arcane Research xp should be used first to upgrade Shrivelling
• Later all the upgraded spells ( Deny Existence, Ward of Protection, Sixth Sense ) seem to be pretty solid choices.