Empowering Miss Daisy

This is my rough and ready first draft of what a Daisy deck built around Empower Self might look like. I have no doubt that some of our better deck-building geniuses can craft a much better deck than this one, but I do think that Daisy is probably the best investigator to make use of this new toy in our arsenal so I thought I'd be the first to have a crack at putting something out there. All feedback will of course be gratefully received.

The Problem With Empowerment

ES seems to have sparked off one of the most vigorous debates we've seen on the reviews section in quite some time. There are some who think it's borderline worthless and others who are super-excited about its potential for certain investigators. For the most part I probably fall into the former camp. The problem with including this card in a mystic deck is that it competes for the arcane slot with a whole raft of other spells which are simply better. Yes, you can use three of them for only one slot, but for most mystics they'd be better served by leaning into their willpower using the existing suite of spells than they are by having a range of situational +2 boosters for the lesser stats, and if you want them all in play it's costing you 9 resources and 3 actions to play them. Probably not worth it in most cases.

Daisy strikes me as far and away the standout candidate to make use of this new spell. Although she does have mystic access up to lvl 2, she lacks the willpower to really leverage it to any great extent. As such she has less use for her arcane slots than pure mystics do and can easily afford to give one up for some self-empowerment. She also has access to the full suite of seeker card draw and deck searching tools to let her find them quickly. Oh, and she can make use of all of them.

The idea behind this deck is to leverage all three cards of the Empower suite in such a way as they obviate the need to include a lot of other cards into the deck, creating a lean, efficient engine for clue gathering that has a lot of action compression and doesn't require a constant chaperone from the team's guardian. In particular I wanted to free up all of her hand slots for tomes, so no Magnifying Glass, no Fingerprint Kit or any of the other staples that make investigating easier.

Enemy Management

Daisy is not exactly known for being a badass, but there are cards that you can sometimes include that help her to deal with enemies, be it fighting options like "I've got a plan!" and Strange Solution or evasion tricks such as Mists of R'lyeh. The plan for this deck is to eschew all of that and lean heavily into Empower. The Stamina version allows her to punch rats and cultists in extremis and it's worth having, but the Alacrity version should see more work. With these cards she can either fight or evade at base 4. We'll also be looking supplement these boosts by liberal usage of Essence of the Dream. The new upgraded version returns to your hand at the start of every turn, which means you have a constantly replenishing +2 booster, which will often be a +4. For this deck I've chosen the Explorer variant which triggers at shroud 4 locations. I think that will be most useful, but we'll have to see. With Dream Diary in hand and Empower Self in play Daisy can evade at 6, which should be good enough for most situations, or 8 if she's at a high shroud location. If there are no enemies in her threat area, which most of the time there won't be, then Essence of the Dream will instead be used to boost her bread and butter investigation checks. Later in a scenario of course we should have managed to assemble Pendant of the Queen, which gives further enemy management opportunities.

Clue Compression

Since we're wanting to keep our hands free for carrying books, that means we can't use Fingerprint Kit. Enter Rite of Seeking. This is a spell which has hitherto been utterly useless for Daisy since it uses will and she has a much higher intellect. However, once you manage to get the Acuity version of Empower into play then you have the ability to ignore that requirement, allowing you to investigate with RoS using your intellect, which can also be boosted up to 7 in the process. This turns it into a pseudo Fingerprint Kit, and you'd also be able to pitch Deduction into the mix for a potential haul of 3 clues in one action. Later on we can also grab actionless clues via the Pendant. It should be possible to average 3 or 4 clues per turn while still having actions left over to play down assets.

Why have you included Book of Shadows, doesn't that suck ?

No !

I mean, yes, most of the time it sucks. Not in this deck though. Daisy can use it as a free action, so she can use it to continually replenish her RoS charges. It's a shame it can't also replenish the Pendant but I guess that would just be rude.

In truth it probably still kinda sucks and there may be better options, but that card never gets any love so I thought I'd give it a try.

Economy

Must admit I'm not 100% convinced that this deck won't run out of money. There isn't anything hellaciously expensive but there are a lot of 3 cost assets and you'll want most of them in play. I've gone with Crack the Case for some fast resource grabbing and Uncage the Soul as a way of getting the spells in play for free. Things could still be a bit dicey for funds though. I'm half inclined to sub out Mr Rook for Dr Milan, but that's boring and may slow down the rate of finding all the pieces we need.