All Mystic, All the Time

Combat:

• Shrivelling: Basic two-damage spell; primary combat weapon.
• Blinding Light: Included as a means of evading tougher monsters; also does a free damage to let a guardian clean up easily on 3 health monsters.
• Knife: Chosen due to Akachi's 3 strength and lack of other color choices.

Between shrivelling and knives, the odds of getting at least one weapon in your starting hand is 81%, assuming that you mulligan your starting hand if necessary.

Failing any of these, unexpected courage can be used to raise agility and attempt to evade.

Clue gathering:

• Rite of Seeking lets you skirt around Akachi's 2 intellect and contribute in clue-heavy scenarios.
• Drawn to the Flame trades two free clues against an extra encounter card. Given how many encounter cards involve willpower tests, this is usually a good trade.

Encounter Deck:

• Scrying is useful in a multiplayer game for tweaking who gets which events; take all the willpower tests for yourself and let the Guardian handle the monsters.
• Ward of Protection is a good panic button for if something like Ancient Evils pops up; mixes well with Scrying.
• Delve Too Deep: For when your game isn't hard enough, or you want to risk everything to get a little more XP.

Horror Management:

• Commit Fearless on relatively safe tests to heal off the inevitable backlash from your own spells.
• Holy Rosary serves both as a boost to willpower tests and as an emergency source of sanity soak
• Arcane Initiates make great meatshields. In fact, you may want to deliberately put them in harm's way.

Resource Management + Other:

• Uncage the Soul: Essentially an spells only Emergency Cache that saves an action (plus a nice commit bonus).
• Alchemical Transmutation: Kind of iffy on this one, due to action cost, but it does appease Angered Spirits cheaply.
• Arcane Initiate is perfect for hunting down the Rite of Seeking and Shrivelling, both of which are key assets to the deck.
• Archaic Glyphs is mostly here for whatever upgrade it'll get. At least you'll get five resources for deciphering it.
• Spirit Speaker is a huge boon, if you can get it out; alchemical transmutation and scrying both turn into emergency caches, and shrivelling / rite of seeking can be refreshed easily.

Recommended Substitutions:

• Ritual Candles are a decent contender for the hand slot; the special tokens tend to have the worst effects on failure.
• Flashlight is another option, turning 1-2 shroud locations into an success on anything but tentacles.

Upgrades:

• Spirit Athame makes a great replacement for the knives; they're both a reliable backup weapon, a good way to conserve Shrivelling charges if dealing with 3-health enemies, and can be exhausted to provide a +2 to spells.
• Grotesque Statue is another good upgrade, which is even better on Akachi due to having charges.