Smoking Dogs

The Alpha Dog and his pack.

Another deck where dogs do the heavy lifting. Duke and Sled Dog activations for fighting and investigating. Once you get Ice Picks you now have a reliable boost to both these actions, and you can choose to discard them to gain extra clues after knowing whether you can recur them with Scavenging or not. Tapping 4 Sled Dogs to attack with 2 Ice Picks is a 8 attack dealing up to 6 damage, obviously it takes some time to set it up, but there's a lot of card draw to get there. The synergy between Guard Dog, Scavenging and Bandages is incredible and is how we're intending to soak damage. Because we're already intending to succeed by 2 for scavenging, Lucky Cigarette Case is a no-brainer. Use the boy's ability to give out treats as needed. Schoffner's Catalogue is not great for this deck, but it can help a guardian friend get his weapons out and we're replacing them as soon as we have the essentials anyway.

Playing the deck with and without a Lucky Cigarette Case in your starting hand is miles apart and is something I'd actively mulligan for unless you have a very good hand without it. Guard Dog + Bandages takes care of any non-horror enemy while you run around investigating, gathering, and assembling the pieces of Exodia. Use Guts, Overpower and Perception as card draw and to help secure important tests for anyone at the table. And try to make sure A Glimmer of Hope isn't in your discard pile when you have to shuffle.

As far as upgrades go, there's a few paths I can see, I prefer Granny Orne for the extra for scavenging. But I can also see Peter Sylvestre and Dig Deep being better in the campaigns where you need to do a lot of tests. After changing out Magnifying Glass for Ice Picks, you could maybe also put in a green economy card like Faustian Bargain, but I couldn't really find anything to cut for it. Upgrades grouped by theme, order in parenthesis.

Increasing the size of the pack:
(1) 1x Charisma.
(7) 1x Relic Hunter and 1x Rod of Animalism instead of any combination of Stunning Blow, Overpower and Perception.

Making the boy useful to his master:
(2) 2x Ice Pick Instead of 1x Magnifying Glass and 1x "Look what I found!".
(8) 2x Scavenging upgraded to Scavenging.

Finding Friends Faster:
(3) 2x Schoffner's Catalogue to Nothing Left to Lose.
(5) 2x Lucid Dreaming instead of any combination of Stunning Blow, Overpower and Perception.
(9) Upgrade Emergency Cache to Emergency Cache.
(9) Upgrade Lucky! to Lucky!.

Iron Will:
(4) Either 1x Charisma and 2x Granny Orne instead of 2x Guts.
(4) Or 2x Dig Deep Instead of 2x Guts.

Horror Soak:
(6) Either 1x Relic Hunter and 2x Elder Sign Amulet instead of any combination of Stunning Blow, Overpower and Perception.
(6) Or 1x Charisma and 2x Peter Sylvestre instead of any combination of Stunning Blow, Overpower and Perception.