Patrice Hathaway, True Carcosa

This deck is for a The Path to Carcosa campaign. as a support character to Carolyn Fern, True Carcosa and Joe Diamond, True Carcosa who will take point on clue and enemy handling [1]. This is built against a single core deck, so some card options are constrained or split across the three investigators.

Deck Walkthrough

Because we'll cycle our entire deck due to Patrice discarding her hand every round. we'll be able to get out The Chthonian Stone and seal a chaos token, plus the stone is not competing for hand space. Fingers crossed, that will be useful for our Carcosa campaign where the bag chaos tokens change between campaigns with 1 of // and a few skull tokens.

Mists of R'lyeh and Sixth Sense lets us replace her weak evade (2) and book (2) tests with willpower, for a more respectable value of 4. For her accessories, Grisly Totem is interesting, since it adds a pip to any of her skill check cards, and an idiomatic way to build a deck for her is to carry plenty of skill cards with icons. Holy Rosary and St. Hubert's Key are shared with our Carolyn Fern, True Carcosa colleague, because we are using just one core. If you have the option you could just carry two of either for consistency. My own bias in that case would be Holy Rosary, but since Carolyn specialises in healing horror, 2x St. Hubert's Key would be ok as well plus also bumping our book at the cost of -2 sanity. In any case, either of these will get our willpower up to a very respectable 5 (no need to carry Fine Clothes). With Mists of R'lyeh and Sixth Sense in the two arcane slots, we now have an option to have agility and intellect tests at 5 as well when we need them.

Heavy Furs, Bandages, and Madame Labranche give us some (up to 9) damage soak. Instead of The Edge of the Earth's Fur, Leather Coat would work, is in the core set, and is 0 cost to play. Fur's advantage is being able to repel a chaos token draw but at a cost of 2 to play. Possibly, since Patrice is not a primary damage dealer and will likely prefer to evade, the coats are not strictly needed, but we have just 7 health, and coats always seem on theme for our 1920s investigators.

For economy, we're relying on Patrice's Violin and Madame Labranche to get us one or two extra resources per round. Neither are charged based, so getting them played early won't hurt; Patrice is carrying quite a few assets. Because of these we're not bringing Emergency Cache along; the caches can go to our Joe and Carolyn colleagues. Not carrying caches means we can add more cards with skill icons instead (cache has none). Madame Labranche gets regularly paired with Patrice. Our ally gives the option to cycle our deck faster as well as gather resources and for 2/2 soak is excellent value at a cost of 2 to play.

The event and skill cards are optimising for cards (we have 26 icons in this deck), cards that can be played out the discard pile (Improvised Weapon, Impromptu Barrier), and 'fail forward' cards (Live and Learn, "Look what I found!"). Speaking of fail forward, we're not bringing Take Heart because it has no skill icons. Trial by Fire gets any stat up to 5 and has a so it's ideal for Patrice, but we're carrying plenty of cards with pips and have play area options to get to 5 already except for combat.

Rise to the Occasion works with our weak stat line and even better still works when those stats are buffed by other cards in play (its text is "at least 2 higher than your base skill value" and not your working value). Live and Learn costs more cards compared to Lucky!, but it has has a wildcard icon, and we're throwing the hand away every round anyway, so not the end of the world, plus it will bump Last Chance if you hold that card back. Last Chance is going to be situational and require some hand management in the round, but every now and then it's going to make a bag pull a sure thing, short of drawing the tentacle. It can also synergise with Premonition, which in turn lets us see the next bag pull. We'll often want to play Premonition's free action at the beginning of the investigation phase to increase another investigator's chances. Deny Existence offers some protection from encounters and comes with that all important wildcard icon. Winging It seemed less necessary because we're not going to be a main clue-getter (and has no wildcards), but is a good card for Patrice in general again because she discards her deck every round. Resourceful, while not a wildcard, has 1 each of book, punch and and evade, our weak stats, and lets us pull a card back into our hand to give us 6 cards instead of 5 so we'll want to try to play it on our first or second action.

Prophesy looks viable for Patrice even though it's considered inferior to Unexpected Courage (which we're bringing anyway). There are plenty of times we'll have 3 doom out to get it up to 2 wildcards. In any case, Prophesy has some of the best art in the game, which we're going to see it in every game because of the way Patrice discards her deck so it's just plain fun to carry over the course of the campaign and subtly thematic with Patrice's backstory. If we're weren't bringing this, Trial by Fire mentioned already would be a reasonable alternative.

We have some slight fight ability to tune up enemies thanks to tests and Improvised Weapon, but our other campaign investigators will be punching out monsters for the most part. We're bringing Wither over Shrivelling, as it weakens enemies for other investigators and we'd like to avoid how Shrivelling recoils horror when it fails. Patrice's signature weakness, Watcher from Another Dimension can be brutal, given it can do 3 damage against our 7 health, and its 5/5 combat and agility mean it can chew up actions trying to get it our of our hand. We might be relying on our Joe Diamond, True Carcosa and Carolyn Fern, True Carcosa colleagues to help us finish it off, along with the amount of wildcards we can use for attacks to land at least 1 damage or evade. Ideally we have Mists of R'lyeh in play to bump our evade ability to get the Watcher out of our hand and into our threat area. It will be interesting to see if this approach works out.

Upgrades

• Relic Hunter is going to allow us to have Grisly Totem plus either Holy Rosary or St. Hubert's Key in play. Easy to forget: Relic Hunter is not unique, so at the cost of 3 more XP we can get out all 3 accessories, which would get us to 6 willpower. Combine that with our arcane cards and we have a polyfill to get to a 6/6/2/6 stat line, plus skill cards on top.

• Four of Cups has to replace something (maybe one of our Guts) but adds 1 more will boost to an uncontested tarot slot. Now we're at a 7/7/2/7 polyfill, which certainly should balance out her hand limitation. This might be the best first upgrade to pick up given our reliance on willpower.

• Upgrading Rise to the Occasion(3) gives a good boost on hard tests. This is worth considering as an earlier upgrade and is a lot more useful than its lower level version, which is useless for tests at 3.

• Cornered seems ideal to convert no icon cards into 2x cards and looks tailor made for Patrice.

• Miss Doyle looks interesting, especially due to Zeal giving us 5 combat, which is the one stat we can't bump with our assets. We could also pull Doyle's cats back into our hand using A Chance Encounter(3).

• True Survivor lets us, commit skill cards to tests in action 1, draw them back in action 2, and commit them again in action 3. It costs one action, but increases our chances in a round and won't clog our hand since we'll discard everything at the end of the round.

• Survival Instinct (2) can be a bit situational, but is more useful than its 0 XP version because it exhausts enemies. Being able to evade everything engaged with you and move provides multiple free actions and exhaustion provides much needed breathing room against hunters.

• While we have encounter deck mitigation with Deny Existence, Ward of Protection (2) lets us manage the encounter deck for all investigators (also, although this is highly specific, our Carolyn and Joe colleagues can't bring it).

• Alter Fate is a great survivor card for managing treacheries and there are some nasty treacheries in Carcosa that might make this worth it.

• Later in the Carcosa campaign Aquinnah (3) can become interesting. There are plenty of hard hitting enemies and Aquinnah's testless damage that can be directed to anything provides a form of action compression.

• Defiance gives more bag protection against non-numeric chaos tokens, something that's useful over the entire Carcosa campaign.

Final Thoughts

Patrice Hathaway is a fascinating investigator to build. She seems polymorphic and one of a few investigators that are viable for true solo. Putting a build together as a supporting character who can fill gaps (a damage here, a clue there), can manipulate bag draws and encounters, and can get isolated for multiple rounds who won't always need to be in the same location as a guardian, was interesting. A survivor / mystic build is pretty interesting space to explore. One thing to consider is to aggressively replace allies, to the extent your economy allows. Also mulligan out expensive assets/allies at the beginning so your starting hand isn't carrying more than 5 resource cost to set up (remember you're going to discard your hand anyway at the end of the round).

This build is going to rely on an investigator to help with horror, like our Carolyn Fern, True Carcosa. It's definitely meant to be used to commit skill cards and shouldn't need an opening round to play assets to be useful. That said, getting out Madame Labranche and/or Patrice's Violin to kickstart an economy is going to help pay for those assets. The Chthonian Stone seems too good not to bring given we're not looking to add any other hand cards to start with: because we're going to get through our entire deck, we should be ok to bring just one. It will always get into play unless we have no money to pay for it.

Patrice as a musician, feels very on theme for The Path to Carcosa , but it will be interesting to see how that campaign's ability to clog up your hand wrecks her hand limit of 5. If she has a campaign card and the Watcher from Another Dimension in her hand, that means only 3 effective cards per round, which is not much given three actions. The hand size limit of Patrice is an interesting design choice: even a 6 hand size seems like it could per her into over powered S tier territory.

[1] The prelude for this Carcosa campaign starts at the Excelsior Hotel, where Joe Diamond and Carolyn Fern will meet our protagonist and murder suspect, Patrice Hathaway.