Heavy Cardtillery [EXPERT] - 30 XP version

Overview

This is my first attempt at publishing a deck here, though I've been using the site for years. I was inspired to post after reading https://arkhamdb.com/decklist/view/12038/minhfinity-stones-hard-mode-1.0 and the discussion beneath it. More specifically, in the "post-taboo" world I've been wondering how Ancient Stone escaped the ban-hammer, and I suspect a big part of the reason is that no character yet can take both it and Double or Nothing, which is the most obvious way to load it up with an obscene number of charges. But now with Drawing Thin (itself a strong candidate for "mutation," it seems), Minh is poised to reliably get many charges on the stones, and I suspect this will lead to the Arkhamverse wising up to the fact that, whatever the method, two loaded-up Ancient Stones in a Seeker deck built to maximize them utterly trivialize even the highest difficulties.

The deck published here demonstrates and somewhat reconstitutes the one that I, paired with "Skids" O'Toole (who could have been anyone with access to Double or Nothing), used to pretty much wreck TFA on Expert difficulty, basically entirely off the strength of Ancient Stone.

Caveat (A Pretty Major One)

Someone on your team should really have Double or Nothing and you should be on the same page with them about the overall strategy of committing it to your Ancient Stone investigation at the highest-shroud location during the second scenario of the campaign. This deck won't wow anyone if the Ancient Stone can't get at least 10. For the Expert TFA campaign I played, we planned on getting 20 charges but had to settle on 14, which wound up being plenty.

Piloting

Once you have the umpteen-charge Ancient Stone, just devote all experience to card draw. The Magnifying Glass factors pretty prominently because it knocks stones out of your hand for the reshuffle and then goes back up to repeat. There are a lot of interactions here, but I won't go into all of them. The point is that you can draw a nearly-infinite number of cards each turn and toss out a nearly-infinite amount of damage. You can do this with enemies on you because the allies will take the attacks of opportunity and circle back around. Most turns should be: 1) Walk a step. 2) Draw infinity cards and kill whoever's there (maybe without an action). 3) Investigate and gain all clues, recharge all assets, gain a bunch of resources, draw a bunch more cards. 4) (optional) If you didn't take step 1 this round, or step 2 didn't take an action, play an ally to replace one that might have been killed due to attacks of opportunity or horror from the deck going around.

Our Experience

1) We played through "The Untamed Wilds," taking our lumps but getting 2+ XP. (I actually got five and bought two stones and, in a "pre-taboo" world where I was rocking DMC, bought Higher Education to get the necessary Intellect value for the combo, but that isn't necessary. 2) We went into "The Doom of Etzli" hoping to get to spoiler high-shroud location and Delve Too Deep there in hopes of an Obscuring Fog. 3) With Premonition, our plan was to guarantee completion of the Ancient Stone with a Double or Nothing in that location, to get 20 charges per stone for remainder of campaign. 4) It didn't work. Due to time-crunch, we walked into the neighboring high-ish shroud spoiler location and used the combo to get 14 charges and all of the clues. 5) We left and spent the remainder of the campaign updating Daisy's deck with card-draw so it resembled something like what's shown here. 6) After "The Doom of Etzli," nothing really challenged us. It felt like the nuclear blast happened in the spoiler high-ish shroud location and everything after that was just fallout.

Miscellany

1) The level zero version of the deck is basically irrelevant. Just typical Daisy. 2) Your partner needs Double or Nothing. 3) There is probably an argument for Calling in Favors in this deck and maybe one or two more allies, but I don't want to post it that way because I didn't do that. 4) Just to reiterate, I found Expert TFA unfun and way too easy after running a deck like this, and soft-banned Ancient Stone afterward, so I'm not saying you "should" run this deck, but I am emphatically saying that it's incredibly strong.