Alessandra rides the Toxic Gossip Train

“Hey. It’s been a while…”

Do you want to ride a toxic gossip train where you manipulate and command Bianca “Die Katz” around to do your dirty work and while she desperately tries to stab you in a situation that is going to end up posted on r/relationshipadvice with a comment section filled with red flag emojis? Then look no further.

Alright so I saw this theory concept from Reddit user u/Simple-Animator-6672 and I absolutely loved the idea of it - this is me trying to build a deck based entirely around that game plan.

What’s the game plan? Obviously have Fine Clothes played but you’re Alessandra so that’s a given. Play Bianca, immediately steal from her, anger her (scandalous!), beguile her, do a test on her contributing Grizzled (with the nemesis upgrade), pass it, attach Power Word to her. What do we get? A walking parley machine that has -3 difficulties to all tests done using her! How was Power Word (rightfully) chained? By giving it a Will (3) test. Wait a minute…

And it gets even more fun - with thrice-spoken upgrade on Power Word we can command other enemies assuming we pass the test first on our lovely assistant/mortal-enemy Bianca which, assuming you don’t draw an auto-fail, you will always do. Bianca has now become something of an operator for us - all while still trying to shank us. Then add in tonguetwister to command up to three enemies to discover clue/evade/exhaust/move/damage/etc. all for a single action that only fails to auto-fail - how efficient!

Now, this is obviously a pretty strong concept - what are the downsides? Well most obvious is the fact that this is a card combo that requires quite a few cards, one of which is a forced one-of in our deck - plus setting this up involves paying quite a bit of resources! To try and solve this I’ve put in as much convenient card draw as possible - Lucky Cigarette Case should be pretty reliable with your parley tests having a -3 difficulty to them and neutral skill cards will draw you a card if you succeed with them. Resource wise we have Bianca ourselves who will give us 5 off the bat as we steal to provoke her and Bank Job which will give us 8. I’ve deliberately avoided any XP cards that aren’t part of the main combo to give you flexibility to custom the deck to your liking, but there’s plenty of upgrade cards you can take to fix some of the deck weaknesses (I’ve included some of my favourites in the Side Deck) - Bewitching especially has good promise.

This hasn’t had the chance to be properly tested yet as my group doesn’t get to meet up and play often - so I would love if others could try this deck/any variations of it out and see how it plays!

“…at least you’re having fun…”