Space Mead Brewers' Convention

Proudly presenting: the first-place winner of the Greater Milky Way Space Mead Brewers' Convention, Jenny Barnes! With a fizzy, fruity aftertaste, and a near-perfected carbon dioxide cycling mechanism, her mead is the highest quality this judging panel has ever seen, and we'd take it on a space walk any day of the week!

The Controversy

All right, let's address the elephant in the room: Double or Nothing. The only card on the Forbidden List, a card so powerful MJ determined it was too unhealthy for the card pool to be considered to exist when balancing future cards. Seeing it here in the decklist is probably enough to turn away any player dedicated to using the Taboo list. It is absurdly powerful and capable of trivializing many scenarios.

To that, I ask: but what if we only committed it to the most random, useless test in the game?

The concept behind this deck is simple. I usually play with Taboo. I would like to use Double or Nothing. In order to balance out its considerable power, I propose a mutation: Double or Nothing may only be committed to the test on Liquid Courage. The result? We've neutered some of the worst of what Double or Nothing can do to the game, while also brewing the most powerful alcohol on the planet! Win-win!

In all seriousness, this is a goofy deck that I made because Liquid Courage is a repeatable, low-difficulty test that doesn't actually advance the game, at least not in theory. I was very excited to challenge myself to find a way to make the Donut/LC test into the central combo of a deck, and when the Space Mead thematics fell into place, it just felt too perfect. Since I went non-Taboo for this deck, I let myself lean into the other Tabooed Rogue skills, as an homage to the olden days. But if you're a fellow Taboo player, and you want to explore the joy of Space Mead while keeping as much of the List active as possible, feel free to leave All In and Quick Thinking Tabooed or even cut from the deck entirely. You'll still have a tremendously powerful economy engine–and you'll be downing supernatural alcohol like it's fruit punch at a frat party. What's not to love?

What is Space Mead?

Now that we've got that out of the way, let me share with you the joys of Space Mead! This is a Mythos concept (created by Derleth) that hasn't actually made its way into Arkham LCG yet, so some of you may not be familiar with this hilarious and bizarre magical consumable.

Space Mead is a liquid, created through a mixture of magical and alchemical means, that allows the drinker to survive the vacuum of space and the inhospitable places between dimensions.

Awesome, right? Now, it's not fully explained how it does so, but I've taken the liberty of extrapolating a few of the necessary effects. Space Mead would have to make you self-regulating temperature and pressure-wise, in order to survive unprotected in space. Thus you retain freedom of movement under vast crushing pressures or total vacuums. It would also have to shield your mind, or perhaps increase your ability to process the cosmos, in order to protect you from madness induced by seeing beyond reality. Last of all, since the places you're going may not have oxygen or even atmosphere to speak of, Space Mead would have to trigger some bodily process that converts carbon dioxide back into oxygen within your bloodstream, in order to counteract the need for fresh air. All these effects and more you will get to witness in...

The Deck

Finally, we arrive at the meat of the deck–or the mead, I suppose. Allow me to introduce Jenny Barnes, the best dang supernatural moonshiner this side of the Andromeda Galaxy! With her buddy and still technician Rat at her side, she has perfected her own secret recipe for Space Mead and boy, is it a doozy!

The way this deck works is primarily by getting Liquid Courage into play–this is your flask of Space Mead. Jenny can then drink from it by committing Double or Nothing and any of an array of skills, causing the action spent downing the Mead to produce as much as 1 horror healing, 14-16 cards, 12-24 resources, and 2-4 extra actions! You can then use those extra actions (the freedom of movement and alacrity granted by the Mead) to move around, attacking those poor saps still restricted by gravity, or using the enhanced processing power of your mind to comprehend the Mythos mysteries around you.

The Mead also shields you from physical harm, thanks to Moxie–which conveniently counteracts the horror you'll be taking from cycling your deck, if it were ever to get too much even for the Mead itself to heal. Between that and the mental clarity (represented by Keen Eye, Jenny can spend her considerable resources to pass a test in any of her stats. And when your flask is empty, Rat can toss it away and hand you another, for resource-neutral cost and fast speed. Or you can refill one with Emergency Cache!

Now, there is a bit of an honor code going on with the deck. There's nothing technically stopping you from committing Double or Nothing to a test other than the one on Liquid Courage, and there's nothing technically stopping you from taking a shot of Liquid Courage without committing Double or Nothing to it. How strictly you want to hold yourself to that rule is up to you–but whatever you choose, you can be certain this deck will be surprisingly and bizarrely powerful, while still being totally absurd and hilarious.

The Runners-Up

Now, I said this was a Space Mead convention, and what kind of an emcee would I be if I only introduced you to first place? Here are some of the most intriguing other finalists!

• Sefina Rousseau realized early on in her career that the cognitive side effects of Space Mead included superior control over magical energies and a greater resistance to their negative effects. She promptly focused her efforts on a specialized recipe for the Mead that maximized these effects, producing a brew that boosts her already-considerable sorcerous talents!
  • Her deck is very similar to Jenny's, but instead of using Working a Hunch as a payoff she has a suite of spells like Ethereal Form (which keeps her safe over the course of long Quick-Thinking-based turns) and defensive tech like Ward of Protection and Deny Existence that she can keep almost constantly in her hand. Her Mead even offers precognitive effects like Premonition as it casts her mind far from our placid island of ignorance. She also gets upgraded Guts for even more Mead card draw.
• Nobody quite knows what goes into "Skids" O'Toole's secret recipe. They know it's good, they know it's effective, they just aren't quite comfortable with the way reality seems to warp around those who have consumed it, or the shifty look Skids gets when you ask about ingredients.
  • Parallel Skids is able to run a very cool combination of Justify the Means and Harmony Restored, allowing him to pass a lot of tests, including the (for him) difficult Space Mead test in exchange for later having to spend actions to clean the bag of Curses. He can dig deeper for his sketchy methods using Practice Makes Perfect and Daredevil, while channeling the dark cosmic powers the Mead gives him with Eye of the Djinn and "Lucky" Penny.
• Fortunately for Wendy Adams, there's no minimum drinking age in the depths of deep space, so no being disqualified based on her youth. As a non-Rogue, Wendy has an extremely unique take on brewing the Mead, and unlike most of her competitors she's willing to change her recipe on the fly in order to suit the situation and drinker. She may be young, but she's a Mead-brewing prodigy, and nobody should underestimate her!
  • Quick Learner allows Wendy to guarantee success on her late-turn Space Mead tests without even needing to boost her stats, saving time and resources for the rest of the combo. However, due to her age and weight she can't hold the powerful alcohol content, as the more she cycles the more Abandoned and Alone will rip through her deck. So instead, she has to use a more complex event loop of True Survivor/Resourceful and Scrounge for Supplies to keep her Double or Nothings in rotation, and make up for the extra action cost with Swift Reflexes. Nonalcoholic Space Mead? Don't knock it until you've tried it!

Since the only cards you need to brew Space Mead are Double or Nothing and Liquid Courage, that means any investigator with Rogue 0-1 (or even just Rogue 0) is eligible! Bob could run a stand out front of the convention, selling his Space Mead as refreshments to other players. Preston could own a high-class Space Mead empire, growing so rich that he could use big money payoffs to facilitate his own drinking and investigating. And there are tons more options, so feel free to come up with your own cool recipes and be sure to share them below!

In Conclusion

Get drunk. Go to space. Save the universe. That is all.