Sister Mary in Innsmouth (Hard)

This deck was created for a two-handed game of The Innsmouth Conspiracy on Hard, with Minh Thi Phan (decklist here).

I decided to try building Mary as a fighter, or main enemy handler, which is definitely not what she was designed for, but I thought it might make for an interesting challenge. I also wanted to try out Bless token tech, and I wanted to use the Holy Spear because I'm very fond of big weapons and I typically play a Guardian in multiplayer games.

So, the complete set of parameters for this exercise was thus :

1) Play on Hard.
2) Use Mary as the fighter.
3) Use Bless effects.
4) Use the Holy Spear.
5) Get a successful Ironman finish.

Here are my rules for deckbuilding :

1) Don't choose cards that shore up your investigator's weaknesses. Instead, choose cards which enhance what they're already good at.
2) The majority of the deck should consist of two copies of any one card, for consistency, but leave up to four slots for 'flex' picks - single copies of cards which are situationally useful.
3) Unless you're playing solo, specialize! Focus on either fighting, investigating, or supporting, and don't try to mix all three.

As you can probably tell, we've violated rule #1 something fierce, and that's because Sister Mary has 3 and 5HP, which is fine if she was in a support role but as a fighter it's downright appalling. And the first scenario in this campaign features an awful lot of enemies, like, I don't think I can remember another starting scenario that has more, so a lot of the choices here were made specifically for The Pit of Despair. The other thing to note is that based upon the Hard token bag you don't want to take any test at less than +3 if you can possibly help it.

Before building this deck I hadn't played any Innsmouth at all, so I went through each scenario at least once to get a feel for the mechanics. I spent a lot of time replaying the first scenario because it proved to be the most challenging for Mary.

I'll go over the card choices in this deck and then provide a campaign report which will include the upgrades along with my impressions of each scenario and the strategies I came up with. This guide will contain spoilers!

Mulligan : Weapon (.35 Winchester > Enchanted Blade) > Prepared for the Worst (if no weapon) > Olive McBride > Rite of Sanctification/Stand Together.

• .35 Winchester x 2 : The Winchester is our main weapon and to be honest a Level 0 weapon that can do three damage is very strong, but it has serious consistency issues without Olive McBride and doesn't become truly good until you can spend some XP on Favor of the Sun. It feels bad to play the gun if you get it in your opening hand without Olive, but you should do it anyway because if enemies start spawning during the first mythos phase you are guaranteed to fall behind without it.

• Enchanted Blade x 2 : The Blade's primary purpose is to conserve ammo if you can play it before the Winchester, and then later when you run out of ammo it's your fallback. I tried a few different weapon combinations like Blessed Blade (atrocious) or the .45 Automatic, but the +2 Combat is crucial, and it has a tiny bit of flexibility such that you can swipe the Swarm of Rats at +3 without using a charge.

• Spectral Razor x 2 : Mary has a 4 in Willpower and this puts it to good use when you need to kill a tough enemy and/or can't afford to take a risk on the Winchester (even with Olive out). Really solid.

• Take the Initiative x 2, Overpower x 2, Daring x 2 : These are our main skill boosters for tests, though Take the Initiative pulls double-duty on treacheries. Mary's 3 allows her to test at +3 on a lot of the campaign's Agility treacheries (though the token bag gets nastier later, of course). Daring works with Willpower attacks, too, which was briefly relevant when I was experimenting with Shrivelling.

• Rite of Sanctification x 2 : An excellent economy card and one of the best things Mary has going for her since she adds two tokens to the bag at the start of the game so you can play it on the first turn. Minh can use it, too, so the tokens never stay sealed for long, but I only ever sealed two or three at a time. One token isn't worth the opportunity cost and more than three means it will probably restrict your other Bless stuff too much.

• Stand Together x 1 : Another economy card I ran two-of for most of my testing, but I dropped it back to one because I needed the flex slot and it's probably better as a one-of anyway. Depending upon how the campaign goes, we might upgrade this to Stand Together (3).

• Vicious Blow x 2 : A Guardian staple, but I actually had it out of the deck for a long time. Its value in saving on actions (and tests) can't be denied, though. It can be used for Spectral Razor and, later, Radiant Smite attacks, too.

• Scene of the Crime x 2 : We can spare two slots for testless clue-grabbing but I went back and forth on this a lot, initially assuming that Mary would be so inefficient at killing that I wouldn't be able to afford wasting an action on it. But since it turns out you only get one good shot with the Winchester per turn anyway you can generally afford to play this in the first scenario, and in the second there are even a few opportunities to set it up by tanking one of the weak enemies like the Initiate of Dagon for a turn. It performed pretty well over the course of the campaign, as it usually does. Sometimes it sat in hand for a long time, but the times when it was useful it made a big impact.

• Olive McBride x 2 : I tried to make the deck without this card but it just doesn't work. I was skeptical of the odds when I first tried it and after some initial bad pulls I took it out for a long time, but there's just no getting around it. I'm not sure how Bless tokens affect her overall success rate but I believe generally speaking she makes tests on Hard more difficult to pass so I never used her for the regular ones. However, for meeting requirements that look for specific tokens she greatly increases the odds, and my feeling was that if you had around 5/10 Bless tokens in the bag then you had around a 70% chance to trigger the gun (and about the same to pass the test if you started at +3).

• Ward of Protection x 2 : This is here purely for two treacheries : Deep One Assault and Fractured Consciousness. A monster that never spawns is one less you have to get down on your knees and pray to the god of gunpowder to save you from, and preventing an almost guaranteed two damage hit on Mary is an extremely good way to extend her life.

• Deny Existence x 2 : If there's a card with a 100% pick rate on ArkhamDB Sister Mary decks then this would be it, and for good reason. Crisis of Faith is one hell of a nasty weakness if you can't mitigate it right away.

• Prepared for the Worst x 1 : I ran two for a long time but drawing the second one was always... the worst. With five weapons in the deck you already have a good chance of opening with one, and if not then it will almost always hit something. Yes, it is crucial that you find the Winchester in particular, but you don't need it immediately at the start of the game so two copies felt like overkill. Later we'll put it on Stick to the Plan so it'll always effectively be in our opening hand.

• Glory x 2 : This is some Pit of Despair tech so it'll get replaced for the next scenario, but basically when you have to frequently commit to pass tests you need to restock your hand as efficiently as possible, and this is a good way of doing that because there's no shortage of targets to meet its condition. I found it amusing every time I used it after killing Swarm of Rats . Such glory.

• Sword Cane x 1 : A late addition, and it's there because being able to evade at 4 is occasionally useful when The Amalgam appears. Also, due to the high variance in location layout for the first scenario you can end up in a long game where you've played both Blades before your guns, so having a final backup weapon is also occasionally useful. Dreams of R'lyeh can be a problem because we don't waste resources trying to remove it, so there could be a better option here.

• Robes of Endless Night x 1 : Another late addition, swapped in for Hallowed Mirror (more on that later) because I really needed just a bit more soak and of all the possible candidates this seemed like the best option as it could also provide a bit of economy. There were so many times when the scenario ran long that 1-2 more points of soak would've made all the difference, so I feel like this slot is correct even if this particular card may not be.

Many other cards were tried. Here are a few of the more notable ones :

• Shrivelling x 2 : I thought this could replace Enchanted Blade while providing the same kind of ammo conservation for the Winchester, because unlike the Blade, I could equip this at the same time as the gun. When I was testing this I also put Guts and Steadfast into the deck because of its lack of built-in stat boosting, but that really sent the deck in the wrong direction. But hey, it was great for killing those Rats.

• Guard Dog x 2 : Testless damage! Health soak! What's not to like? Well, for one thing, it's not really testless damage if you use it for soak, and while the efficiency in killing things through Attacks of Opportunity was pretty beneficial in the first part of the scenario, once The Amalgam appears you really need to be able to shoot it because you just don't know how many times it's going to come back. And you can't shoot it effectively without Olive McBride.

• Hand of Fate x 1 : I had this in the deck initially while I was still evaluating Bless token generators. Cancelling an attack is kind of like soak, but it's expensive and feels bad to use when you will only get two tokens from it, which is the case for every enemy in the first scenario. This card could have a place in a Support Mary, but probably only as a one-of.

• Dynamite Blast x 1 : I put this into almost all of my Guardian decks, for flavour as much as value. I think it's great but it is very expensive and it was a poor fit for this deck's curve. Later on we will definitely grab one of the XP versions.

• Hallowed Mirror x 1 : Out of all the cards in the game that heal this is one of the very few playable ones. I ran it for a long time, only taking it out for my last 5-6 iterations, and I feel like it was the right choice. The problem with it is that it costs actions. Yes, it cycles, but drawing a Soothing Melody when you really needed X, and then spending another action to get that X proved too costly in the long run. It really wasn't obvious to me what was going wrong in all the games that ran late, but swapping this card out along with another key decision I made for Minh's deck (stay tuned) felt like the final piece of a puzzle slotting into place. It really hammers home the point that in this game which is built upon compounding difficulty each turn, actions spent on bringing the game to a premature end are so much more valuable than actions which simply draw it out longer. In other words, damage not taken is better than damage healed, especially if you had to use an action to do the healing. I still think the Mirror is a good card, just not in this deck.

Scenario One : The Pit of Despair

Appropriate title. I'll skip right to the strategy : pray.

Ah, just kidding... mostly. I don't think I've come across a starting scenario with such high all-round variance since my adventures with Nathaniel and Trish in Return to The Untamed Wilds. And much like that scenario, this one features a bunch of locations with a completely random layout and one big dude you don't want to draw before the obligatory shuffle-the-discard-pile-into-the-encounter-deck step.

There's a lot of chip damage here, from the encounter deck, the token bag, and from the Deep One enemies that hit you when you engage them. It's really a race against time, which, yeah, it always is, but it ties in pretty well to the theme with the whole rising waters thing. At the same time, there's a strong incentive to stay as long as possible and use all of the keys, because their effects will benefit you for the rest of the game.

The actual strategy I settled on consisted of a few key points :

1) Get the red key at all costs, because it means Mary can get Thomas Dawson in the second scenario, greatly aiding our efforts there.
2) Don't waste any actions on superfluous investigates, which means don't try to clear the Underground River for the VP. It's a trap!
3) Not really scenario-specific, but my other main objective was to complete the task for Dream Diary so that we can upgrade it immediately. I didn't list it as an important mulligan in the deck section because I found Minh would almost always cycle her deck during this scenario and it was fairly trivial to unlock it. Also, it's not a great idea to waste actions drawing your Essence of the Dream after that first time, but I did do it on occasion.

After the red key, the purple was next most important because it eliminates one of the tokens which can spawn The Amalgam. And speaking of that, I learned pretty quickly to always take Minh's turn before Mary's if she was tanking him because killing him and then having him suddenly reappear on top of her felt super bad (Mary was the Lead Investigator). Towards the end I tried to get a bit creative with this, choosing to evade him every now and then instead of just killing him, but that really came down to what felt like it would work in the moment.

In most of my test runs I got four XP from finishing this scenario, but in the proper run I actually came out with five because two of my starting locations were Underground River (so I broke my #2 rule) and I got a pretty favourable location layout when the act advanced.

Resolution 1.

1VP.

Three keys used.

Memories recovered :

A decision to stick together.
A meeting with Thomas Dawson.
A battle with a horrifying devil.
An encounter with a secret cult.

5XP.

Upgrades

Mary : 4XP spent, 1XP left.

Ward of Protection x 2 -> Radiant Smite x 2
Glory x 2 -> Favor of the Sun x 2

Minh : 5XP spent, 0XP left.

Dream Diary (3)
Shortcut x 2 -> Sharp Vision x 2

Radiant Smite x 2 : This is a very powerful attack and even with only two copies it dramatically increases Mary's offensive potential. Excellent card.

Favor of the Sun x 2 : An auto-include which makes the .35 Winchester a reliable weapon, at least for one shot per turn.

Dream Diary (3) x 1 : Minh is now a powerhouse, as long as we can find this early in the game.

Sharp Vision x 2 : Exactly the kind of card Minh likes. We now have six ways to grab two clues with one action.

Scenario Two : The Vanishing of Elina Harper

This is one of the most memorable scenarios in the game and a great take on the 'search around town' mission that seems to pop up in every campaign. The pressure is really off Mary here as most of the early enemies aren't very threatening, so she can afford to stock up on Spectral Razors and Radiant Smites for the later part. This is the most interesting scenario in the campaign when it comes to strategy, so I'll get right to it.

I have ten runs recorded in my notes. Small sample size and all, but in all of them I took Minh to the Innsmouth Harbour right away and took 2-3 peeks at the top card of the leads deck before doing my first draw. However, I tried two different strategies :

1) Draw three each time, which meant I would do about three actual draws per game. 2) Draw one, then one, then three for as many times as possible afterwards (or two if it was the final draw).

In seven attempts with the #1 strategy I advanced to the final act every time. In three attempts with the #2 strategy I advanced to the final act zero times. In every case, I never found both the suspect and the hideout so the Angry Mob always spawned, and I only narrowed down the list of suspects or hideouts to one twice (I was mostly working with a 50% chance on one or both of them). Make of this what you will!

Other general strategy bits : I tried to keep the Innsmouth Troublemaker locked down until the discard shuffle if one spawned early, and I always spawned locations instead of suspects when possible to get the VP and because it was a lot easier for Minh to scoop up clues than it was to do any of the parley actions.

Resolution 3.

Othera Gilman at the New Church Green.

4VP (three locations plus the Winged One.

Upgrades

Mary : 5XP spent, 0XP left.

Sword Cane x 1 -> Dynamite Blast (3)
Robes of Endless Night x 1 -> Physical Training (2)

Minh : 4XP spent, 0XP left.

Unexpected Courage x 2 -> Unrelenting x 2
Deduction (2) x 1

Dynamite Blast (3) : Testless damage is great, and fast testless damage is even better!

Physical Training (2) : I became a believer in this card after my Nathaniel run in RtTFA. It costs zero, it has good icons, but its actual function is to let you pass those critical tests on Hard. As resource hungry as Guardians often are there are times, often late in a game, when you will have excess resources but not enough cards in hand to commit to pass a test, so I think this makes for a good one-of. It's situationally very good.

Unrelenting : This will be Minh's only real Bless token payoff, and it's a good one. It's great for keeping the tokens in the bag on tests where you won't need them (basically every investigate action) and the card draw feeds more skills into her hands.

Deduction (2) x 1 : We'll be upgrading our Deductions this campaign, but not our Perceptions. There are enough 4+ clue locations in 2-player to justify it, and at worst it still gives you two clues for passing the test.

Scenario Three : In Too Deep

I really liked this one. Taking a more-or-less linear path that gets progressively harder as you go, the feeling of being, well, in too deep, it's a different enough experience from the regular kind of scenario to feel fresh and it makes me glad for the future of the game that haven't even come close to running out of new ideas when it comes to encounter design. I played it through twice before my Ironman run, and both times I was able to get five keys and a bunch of VP. This time, though, Minh had a really bad opening hand and took a while to get up to speed...

Strategy-wise, I took it fairly slowly, making sure to visit every VP and key location as by this point I was confident in Minh's ability to scoop the clues. Mary was kind of just along for the ride until the half-way point when things became interesting. Having bagged the Innsmouth Shoggoth on both my previous attempts there was no way I was going to let him live this time, but getting it done required a LOT of thinking; you know those times when you're playing through the scenario at a steady pace and most of your actions don't require much thought, but then suddenly a huge decision tree takes root and grows before your very eyes, spreading its leaves in all directions like in some time-lapse video? That happened, but I got through it thanks to my trusty Dynamite Blast (3) and my decision to abandon the keys and just stick it out for the VP.

Mary rode the bus back and forth dealing with threats while Minh plodded along clearing out the last couple of locations. I actually forgot to go back and use the black key to get the Jailbreak memory; by the time I realized it was too late a conga line of deep sea monsters was bringing up the rear, making it a no-go. For one brief but terrifying moment Minh was in danger of being Pulled Back, but we managed to avoid drawing the one token that would have sealed her fate.

Resolution 1.

Memories recovered :

A deal with Joe Sargent.

6VP + 2XP.

8XP banked due to scenario requirement.

Scenario Four : Devil Reef

Ah, a fishing expedition. Another thematic win and our first introduction to the Vehicle rules for this campaign. This is the first scenario where I only played it through once beforehand, and I think it must've been a pretty charmed run because I managed to get all three relics, thanks in large part to very favourable Underwater Cavern placements which allowed me to avoid the sea monster.

This time, I wasn't so lucky because the first two islands I visited had all of the dud locations, and then Minh had an absolutely catastrophic auto-fail draw on a huge commit for The King in Yellow. To give you an idea of how badly it was going, by the time the agenda advanced and the sea monster appeared Minh had only discovered a single clue. So, we were pretty far behind, which meant we had to start taking some risks. Which meant Sister Mary was going to have to slay the The Terror of Devil Reef

I kind of knew I would have to do it so I was already taking stock of my options, and the turn before the agenda advanced I drew a Radiant Smite, so now I was feeling confident. But then immediately after it appeared, Mary drew Psychic Pull and it nailed the Smite from a hand of six cards. So we were back to risky-but-doable territory. Mary was standing on the island ready for it and laid into it, tanking its damage for a turn with a spare Deny Existence. Minh was down in the tunnels, and on the following turn there would be just enough actions (if no tests were failed) for her to come up with enough clues to hit it with a 4-point "I've got a plan!" if it was required. So I had a backup plan, but in the event it wasn't needed and Mary finished it off herself.

After that, there were only enough actions left to claim either the Awakened Mantle or the Headdress of Y'ha-nthlei and I chose the Mantle because I figured it would be a nice bit of soak for Mary's deck. We spent too much time at sea, so the tide grew stronger. But hey, the Terror of Devil Reef was dead. That's not nothing, right?

Resolution 1.

Memories recovered :

Discovery of an unholy mantle.

4VP + 2XP + 8XP (banked) -> 14XP

Upgrades

Mary : 14XP spent, 0XP left.

Stick to the Plan x 1 Olive McBride x 2 -> Nephthys x 2

Minh : 10XP spent, 4XP left.

No Stone Unturned (5) x 2

Stick to the Plan x 1 : Is there any Guardian that doesn't want SttP? Maybe Carolyn? I always purchase it, and I always stick the same three things under it : Prepared for the Worst, Ever Vigilant, and Dynamite Blast.

Nephthys x 2 : If all of our previous Bless effects were build-up, then this is the payoff! Outstanding card, and it even works with Favor of the Sun because its tokens are resolved as if they were revealed from the chaos bag. From now on, every Bless token drawn by either Mary or Minh will end up sealed on Nephthys.

No Stone Unturned (5) x 2 : Not going to lie, it's an expensive upgrade in a class that has no shortage of big, flashy upgrades to spend XP on, but I think for this deck it's absolutely the right choice. This will go a long way towards ensuring consistency for Minh's most important cards. We're banking the rest of the XP for a new card I've had my eye on...

Scenario Five : Horror in High Gear

We're in a car! We're hurtling along a treacherous cliffside road at breakneck speed! There are guys in bigger cars chasing us! This is top-down design at its finest - something AH does extremely well in general - and when I first read the text on Cliffside Road I immediately thought of Devil's Luck because who could survive such a fall except... a Survivor?

Based on my previous run and how Minh's deck had been performing so far, I thought I had a good chance of making it through without having to stop the car, so that was going to be my strategy. In the event, I had to stop twice, and the first stop came right after the first Mythos phase because we drew a Pursuing Motorcar and a Hit Van. That's nine HP worth of enemies. Oh, and we were at the aforementioned Cliffside Road.

An on-demand Dynamite Blast (3) was half the solution to that problem, and the other half was for Mary to stop the car and get out so that I could have the Motorcar hit only her. A quick Deny Existence on the four damage, a boosted regular attack and one Spectral Razor later and we were back on the road the following turn. The next stop came when the agenda advanced. I was curious as to what would happen since the Terror of Devil Reef was dead (fantastic bit of narrative flair when it's alive, by the way) and it turned out to be not so bad; the car stopped automatically, which was actually extremely fortunate because we had a Malfunction a couple of turns ago, we had two more enemies on our tail and we had just arrived at the 6-clue Cliffside Road, which, given the situation, I wasn't confident in being able to clear before we would've been forced to move again.

The final stretch was pretty hairy when Minh was defeated by horror from the encounter deck. With more enemies close behind that I had no way to deal with and three cards left in the road deck I took a gamble and used the car's ability to draw an encounter card and move ahead, and I flipped over... Falcon Point Approach! We made it!

Along the way we cleared every VP location we passed through, and also every intersection so I was never at risk of having to take the Long Way Around. Minh's a pretty good navigator!

Resolution 1.

7VP (six locations plus the Winged One).

Minh defeated by horror. +1 MT.

Upgrades

Mary : 6XP spent, 1XP left.

Enchanted Blade x 1 -> Holy Spear x 1
Stand Together x 1 -> Ever Vigilant x 1

Minh : 14XP spent, 0XP left.

Ancestral Knowledge x 1 (adding Unexpected Courage x 2, Shortcut x 2, Logical Reasoning x 1)
Grisly Totem (3) x 1
Deduction (2) x 1

Holy Spear x 1 : Finally, a weapon you can believe in. I wasn't sure what to expect from it but when I put it into play for the first time early in the next scenario it was immediately obvious that it entirely obsoleted every other weapon in the deck. I didn't play another .35 Winchester or Enchanted Blade for the remainder of the campaign, and it also effectively obsoleted Favor of the Sun.

Ever Vigilant x 1 : A staple in my decks, and as mentioned before it goes under SttP.

Ancestral Knowledge x 1 : A new card and one which has Minh's name written all over it. I possibly should have purchased it sooner but I felt the NSU upgrades were more important. The hard part was figuring out which five cards to add to the deck. I went with Unexpected Courage x 2 because it was a good skill, Shortcut x 2 because it had proven useful earlier, and Logical Reasoning x 1 because I now had mental trauma to consider and I knew our old friend Frozen in Fear was about to make an appearance. I'm open to suggestions here about what might have been better, because although I had been planning to take this card for a while I hadn't actually given much thought to what the deck needed for the rest of the campaign.

Grisly Totem (3) x 1 : A solid upgrade. More draw effects means more consistency.

Scenario Six : A Light in the Fog

This is one of those scenarios where it really helps to have played it before because trying to deal with Oceiros Marsh on the fly made for a pretty awkward test run. In the proper run we didn't get captured at all, and we were pretty far ahead this time so we were able to complete the objectives fairly comfortably. As far as strategy goes, I think you're probably just relying on being able to scoop enough clues to use the location peek abilities to save actions. I didn't waste resources trying to kill Oceiros the first time, and when he returned we were ready for him with Dynamite and Minh's 4-point "I've got a plan!"

I remember The Moon Room was on the bottom floor and the Pump Room on the one above, and Minh sat there for a turn operating the pump while Mary got into position for a clean exit. I briefly thought about having Mary resign immediately, but it would take Minh two turns to reach the exit so in the end I had her stay, but not at the exit itself because I knew, I just knew, if she sat there for a turn waiting I was guaranteed to draw a Rising Tides and it would screw everything up.

Resolution 1.

6VP.

6XP banked due to scenario requirement.

Memories recovered :

A conversation with Mr Moore.
Lifecycle of a Deep One.

Scenario Seven : The Lair of Dagon

Now this is an interesting one, strategy-wise, and out of all of the later scenarios it probably would've benefited the most from a few more replays, but as it was I failed pretty badly on my test run so I didn't see what happened in the later part of it. I did get a better feel for it in the proper run but I swear I must've missed something because when you get to the tunnels they're only connected to the entrance and not each other, and it felt like that was really a lot of actions to have to spend exploring the place on top of everything else that had already happened.

In hindsight I think it's supposed to be that way because it seems like everything in this scenario is designed to slow you down. The bag filling up with Curse tokens, the dreaded Stone Barrier, and all of the weak cultist enemies which spawn some distance way so they need to be chased. Speaking of which, it made me wish I had "Get over here!" in my deck, and then later I realized this place would've been perfect for Righteous Hunt, a card I'd been thinking of trying but just couldn't justify before now.

Mary was able to pick off all the cultists before they ever caused the agenda to advance prematurely, but Minh had another critical failure on a huge The King in Yellow commit and the Stone Barriers really slowed me down (I should have used the red key on one of them instead of on the Y'ha-nthlei Statue). I was just starting to explore the tunnels when the final agenda was about to advance so on that last turn we made our way back to the entrance and resigned. Shame about Dagon waking up.

Resolution 3.

4VP.

Upgrades

Mary : 11XP spent, 0XP left.

Enchanted Blade x 1 -> Holy Spear x 1
.35 Winchester x 1 -> Hallow x 1 .35 Winchester x 1 -> Enchant Weapon x 1

Minh : 10XP spent, 0XP left.

Shortcut x 2 -> Cryptic Research x 2
"I've got a plan!" x 1 -> Fortune or Fate x 1

Hallow x 1 : Final scenario upgrades are always interesting to consider. I wasn't too sure of what to expect so I went with something that should be universally useful : doom removal.

Enchant Weapon x 1 : Mary was already used to only doing one big attack per turn, so why not continue in that vein with an upgrade that works particularly well on a weapon that never runs out of ammo? This is a pretty solid card as a one-of in this deck and I can see it being great in a support focused deck.

Cryptic Research x 2 : There are so many powerful and expensive Seeker upgrades that I wasn't sure what to pick, so I went with the basics. More draw adds consistency to both decks, and I did actually use this on Mary to find her a Holy Spear on the first turn of the final scenario after her Prepared for the Worst whiffed.

Fortune or Fate x 1 : Did somebody say final scenario? Time to break out the exile cards! I am actually a big believer in early exile cards for Survivors, but Seeker/Survivors don't have the same luxury of XP to spare. I wanted to try Stroke of Luck x 2 but I then I would've had to pass on Cryptic Research, so this was the next best option in my mind.

Scenario Eight : Into the Maelstrom

As final scenarios go, this one was pretty cool. I remember TDL, TFA, and TCU's final scenarios all tried to evoke otherworldly settings unbound by time and space, and while technically Y'ha-nthlei was exactly that kind of place too, it felt a lot more like these locations inhabited some real, physical space. Maybe it was because of all the water references and the flooding mechanics. Whatever the reason, I liked the theme, and I also enjoyed being chased around by a giant un-killable Ancient One as soon as we entered its domain, though it was a bit alarming before I got to grips with the mechanics.

We began with three of the four keys needed to advance the act and we found the fourth at the second location we uncovered so I decided not to linger and got straight into the final part. The regular enemies weren't too hard to deal with, but I do like how every final scenario in this game always focuses on the doom mechanic, often ramping it up to a seemingly overwhelming degree. The encounter deck had a really nasty surprise in the form of Treacherous Depths, which ArkhamDB doesn't seem to have up yet. Suffice to say, it nailed Mary's Diving Suit and Guardian Angel on the second turn after arriving in the city. And Psychic Pull never failed to disappoint by again nailing the best cards every time it appeared.

The strategy here was pretty straightforward : Minh held onto all the keys (I did give one to Mary after she hit a convenient Scene of the Crime) and she also ran around scooping up all the clues needed to lower the flood levels. Mary kept Dagon busy the whole time and we flushed him and his missus down the drain one turn before the agenda would have advanced and woken her up! The investigators win the campaign!

It seemed pretty manageable, to be honest. In fact, maybe it was easy. A little... too easy?

After reading through the epilogue I glanced at Flashback 14 and confirmed my suspicions : yes, there was something to look forward to in a future replay, and it didn't look easy at all. But for now I'm satisfied that I completed all the goals I set out to with this run, and this was a great campaign.

For reference, here's the final deck :

Sister Mary in Innsmouth (Hard) (40XP)