Eighth Level Bureaucrat

Roland Banks has to contend with a mountain of maddening paperwork, but he's ready to axe the hard questions and cut through this red tape. This is a deck that is already very strong at 8 exp. By 14 exp, the core upgrades will be finished, and then it's all up to your personal preference for luxury upgrades.

Much like the base version of Roland, this deck for his parallel counterpart is walking the line between monster killer and clue gatherer. He has to jump through substantially more hoops to get there, but the payoff is well worth the effort. In four-person multiplayer, if you are looking to be the dedicated monster killer of the group, you may want to consider changing up this deck to be more fight-heavy to accomodate. Roland's no slouch with this build, but if you have to consistently deal with 2+ enemies a round, you will struggle without help.

Roland has to choose three of his five directives to aid and also hinder him. Let's go over them:

Directive, Due Diligence, is the second best of the directives. It does limit Roland to only fighting twice a turn, but we rarely plan to fight more than that anyways. The quick action means that you'll always be able to count of an effective agility of at least 4 for the first evade test you make each turn if you need to make it. This gets even better when engaged with multiple enemies (swarming, anyone?) because it gives you a +2 bonus for every enemy engaged with you. Most of the time, you'll want to capitalize on this by investigating with Burning the Midnight Oil or Winging It to get the bonus on an investigate action. We can do this without provking opportunity attacks because of:

Directive, Red Tape. This is the focal point of the deck. Once a turn, this allows Roland to play certain events as though they were fast. Since they're fast, they don't provoke opportunity attacks, so you can do fun tricks like investigating (see above) or moving (Task Force) while engaged with enemies. It also basically gives Roland a conditional extra action each turn as long as we can keep events in hand and have resources go pay for them. The downside to this directive is real, though: we can only play two cards a turn. This is the directive I've found myself wanting to break the most (especially on turns with no enemies), but the cost is well worth the reward. Because we're limited to two cards only, Fast cards become notably worse (since a portion of their power budget goes to the idea that they don't cost an action to play).

Directive, Consult Experts, gives you a free Charisma, but prevents you from assigning damage or horror to ally assets. This is a perfectly reasonable directive, and there are surely good and fun decks that exist for it. However, it is not included here because we'd rather keep a critical mass of events in the deck, and because allies are expensive to play in a deck that doesn't have the greatest resource generation.

Directive, Seek the Truth allows us to draw a card whenever we gain a clue if an enemy is at our location. This is a phenominal payoff that synergizes with both Due Diligance and Red Tape, since we can play an Investigation event to grab a clue, gain a bonus, and then draw a card go replace the event we spent afterwords. This is a fantastic combo, and I would not fault anyone for choosing this directive over my last choice. If you do opt to run this Directive, consider the benefit of some Handcuffs for your deck so you can drag a cultist around with you for permanent card draw (and Due Diligence bonuses). However, I cannot handle the truth, because the downside of this directive prevents us from committing cards at locations with clues until we've managed to collect a clue. During deckbuilding, I was not confident in my ability to consistantly grab clues in time to deploy my Overpower, Daring, and Vicious Blow skills, which are vital to the primary role of killing monsters. My playtesting (in true solo and 4-player) has thus far confirmed my suspicions. If you opt to run this directive, let me know how it works for you!

Directive, Leave no Doubt, is the final choice for this decklist. +3 sanity is a boring, but effective bonus. It turns our base 5 sanity from a mythos deck liability into an 8 sanity powerhouse. A 9/8 statline makes even Stella Clark jealous and allows us to comfortably run In the Thick of It with minimal soak or healing. The downside of only being able to move twice a turn is rarely felt, since most turns you'll want to attack or investigate at least once. Just make sure that you're keeping up with the group in multiplayer so they're not waiting for you to advance the agenda at a location. Remember: if you have to, you can always flip this directive facedown with Roland's once per game abilitycin an emergency; just make sure you've taken 4 or less horror so you don't immediately go insane.

A few notes about our core cards:

-Runic Axe is just the best weapon Roland can wield with a 3xp cutoff in Guardian. Mulligan hard for this weapon, keeping only card draw and pitching everything else. This allows for a 5-strength, three damage attack every turn, and you can spend additional charges if needed. Overpower and Daring do good work here at preserving charges for damage inscriptions while replacing themselves, and Vicious Blow can allow for 5 damage attacks in a single hit.

-At a Crossroads draws three cards in exchange for an action and zero resources and only one experience. That's the kind of value even Seekers can only dream about (Preposterous Sketches). Moreover, since Dilemmas trigger on revelation, At a Crossroads does not count against our two-cards-per-turn limit.

-Stick to the Plan is the first recommended upgrade because it thins our deck by 3 cards, allowing us to more easily mulligan into a Runic Axe. It also allows us to start with Prepared for the Worst if we manage to miss any weapons in our opener. The extra two events (Kicking the Hornet's Nest for economy and Task Force for value are my current favorites) are just icing on the cake.

-Enchant Weapon makes our Runic Axe more accurate and allows for higher damage caps. (with STTP and Prepared, you can afford to cut a Sledgehammer for this).

-Stargazing is not a critical upgrade, but it can be played as a fast action with Red Tape and it costs 0 resources to do so. In addition, it will net a "real" action later, along with a resource to help our ailing economy and a card draw to replace itself. This is well worth the add.

-Ancestral Token can be swapped out at your discretion. It can be hard to afford early on, but it provides some emergency soak and generates strong if unreliable value over the coarse of the game.

-Alice Luxley giving +1 while investigating really boosts the odds of us grabbing clues. The difference between 3 and 4 is massive for most chaos bags, especially in the early-mid game before the skulls will tend to ramp up. Grabbing clues every turn is already the plan, so getting an extra damage from her each turn is also strong. You can even play Kicking the Hornet's Nest, find something with 1 health (like a cultist), and then immediately kill it by picking up the clue. I have yet to find myself missing the extra fight icon of a Beat Cop or similar, although I could see a late-campaign argument for something like Grete Wagner.