Good work on this one! More love for the underdogs!

Maybe I'm missing something, but how is the Astral Mirror making the play a free trigger? Isn't it just an additional action?

@Dreadfish thanks, let’s give them some good stuff to work with! And thanks for the proof reading :)

@Snafu964 you are right, the additional action is not exactly the same as . I make this parallel because when you are not engaged with an enemy, that is how it feels, but the rulings of a normal action apply. I hope it clarifies.

I love this, I've been thinking about a deck for a while that could "abuse" the codex of the ages, but I wasn't able to nail it. This is just perfect. I just totally forgot that astral mirror give you an extra action to play the codex.

I like some enemy management in all my decks (for when it makes sense for the party to split up) and I was worried about the lack of options in this deck...

Then I realized that with 3 agility and all the token management / automatic success in this deck that it is probably pretty good at evading enemies.

I've been working on a Blessing of Isis deck for Mateo that I want to get some testing on but I think I may like this better.

I always try to lean into the blessed archetype to fish out the stars by getting double bless but this is interesting in that its jank doesn't touch any of that.

Hello,

I think Autel des Moires is more efficient than Versatile / récup to draw Codex des Âges no ?

@LeReverend31 Had to translate what Autel des Moires is. I think that's Shrine of the Moirai right? Unfortunately, signatures have no level so cannot be returned to hand with that card, thus scavenging.

That being said, this deck is purely theoretical. It asks for an obscurely fragile chain of sequencing that looks barely passable in theory, but falls apart completely in actual gameplay. Had valentin actually playtested his decks, then he'd realize this a bad deck.

Lemme explain how fragile this sequencing is. Components required are at least 1 copy of Scavenging, 1 copy of Astral Mirror, 1 copy of Codex, and optionally 1 copy of Antiquary.

Not a single one of these 4 cards is searchable in the deck. The deck uses Scroll of Secrets and Arcane Initiate to tutor the OTHER cards in hopes of thinning for you to find these cards. And then the deck boasts 2 copies of Scavenging and 2 copies of Antiquary so that you can fish for your Elder Sign twice a round.

You HAVE to investigate twice to get 2 Codex + Scavenging Loops per round. 2 out of your 3 natural actions are dedicated to the loop. Meaning, in order to do anything else, when you resolve your Elder Sign, you're probably just taking an extra action. They are SO many easier ways to get extra actions like Close the Circle instead.

Astral Mirror is once per turn. So it helps you replay Codex once per round. Meaning the 2nd time you do that Scavenging + Codex loop, you have to invest an action INTO playing it. Which mitigates the action gained from Mateo's Elder Sign.

Furthermore, why is this deck playing Clairvoyance when its finishing for Elder Signs? Does the deck just want to eat horror? I'm extremely confused why its included in the decklist. Plus the cost curve of this deck is insane.

• If you don't find Antiquary - Astral Mirror and Codex are very very expensive.
• If you don't find Scavenging - You can't loop Codex to begin with.
• If you don't find Codex - Then what was any of this for?
• If you don't find Astral Mirror - You are forced to take the extra action on Mateo's Elder Sign just to recuperate the time to replay Codex from hand.

I implore you to play your decks more than just once in your mind, maybe even once in game. Quality over quantity please.

@chirubime There's a way to deliver criticism and that ain't it. Your points may be valid but who wants to run with them when they're coupled with unnecessary personal attacks that you have no evidence beyond the list itself to justify?

I implore you to read your comment more than just once while you're writing it, maybe even after you've posted it. Constructive advice not toxic tear-downs please.

@Sabreblade That comment read harsh but it reads like you took the attack on your infallible leader's personally as well. @chirubime has got a point. I just looked at the deck author's page history. If they post 1 deck a week, how in the world are the upgrade paths even possible? Is the OP playtesting the deck through a whole campaign and showing us an upgrade path that comes from gameplay experience?

People are fed up with the OP crowding out meaningful space for other people. No sugarcoating around clout chasing and groupies

Third party perspective here--the decks definitely look polished, but as a casual player I do think that trends build on trends. After reading the flaws with this deck, I'm certainly much more scrutinizing of the top page decks that may look better than they are.

@josephmeleca I really shouldn't have included the second paragraph. It was intended to be tongue-in-cheek but tone doesn't come across well online!

As I mentioned, absolutely @chirubime has valid criticisms of the list, but I personally find the delivery unhelpful and both of your views to be very cynical. If you're unhappy seeing so many lists posted of course it's your right to express that, but OP has an equal right to post them.

Personally, I've had great fun with decks based on both OP and chirubime's lists and many others. Mostly what I want from a list is inspiration so I love seeing cute ideas like this one. Judging by the deck ratings it seems like plenty of people are in the same boat.

Hey everyone, let's all take a deep breath and relax for a minute. We are all here to talk about a game, so why so serious?

@chirubime, thanks for the long explanations of all the weak spots of the deck.

You are right on most of your points, and I won't debate them one by one. Some of your critics are valid in theory but fade as you are in the game and for instance, spending your action to replay your codex is not such a big deal, since it is still an auto-succeed on any test.

All in all, I think you are misunderstanding the goal of the deck.

• Some people want some decks that are bulletproof, fully optimised and will kill the game from beginning to end, and for this, I am happy that the community has you.
• Some others are having fun with more "outside of the box" decks. Bryn from the PlayingBoardGames Youtube channel, for instance.

This guide mentions in the introduction that this is going to be janky and has 5 stars in difficulty to, hopefully, discourage anyone new to the game from just taking it and winging it. The fact that it uses the full collection also helps in that sense. To clarify, my series is here to give inspiration, ideas and proposals on how to take a deck through a campaign. I explain why I chose every single card individually so that anyone can understand and judge if they agree or not. I fully rely (and I know most players do) on the player's intelligence to take what they like and change what they don't :)

When it comes to playtesting, I do test every single deck I post. I am now also lucky to benefit from the amazing support of the community in playtesting. This one deck concept, for instance, was used by Blakink in a campaign, for which he then did a Youtube video for his channel (in French) because he actually found it really fun to play.

Regarding crowding out the meaningful space, I actually ran a temperature check no longer than 2 weeks ago on Reddit, and out of the 14.3k viewers, no one mentioned any annoyance (which is almost surprising coming from a Reddit community). Someone even mentioned here enjoying Mateo even though the combo didn't kick in yet.

So to summarise:

• Was this deck concept tested before posting? Yes, by multiple people in different situations.
• Is this deck 100% bulletproof? No, and it was never intended to. It's just a new take on an investigator that is supposed to be janky and fun.
• Is this the most fun I ever had with Mateo: Absolutely.
• Did I have good feedback before and after posting the deck from people playing it? So far, yes.

This being said, I am always happy and will gladly edit any of my guides if someone comes up with a constructive critique on how it could be improved.

Something about this doesn't add up. "I do test every single deck" followed by "This deck was used by Blakink" makes the point obvious that you don't playtest these decks, at least not to everyone's standards. I totally get why people are questioning the upgrade paths given the length of time between published decks.

The conversation between "bullet proof" and "outside the box" decks doesn't make sense to me either. Those aren't mutually exclusive, and I find @chirubime's decks way more innovative and outside the box. Labeling them as only bullet proof and optimized doesn't mean that they didn't break the mold and establish the standard in the first place.

I'm thinking the influx of criticism stems from a disparity between the amount of effort you put into selling the pitch for your fun, janky deck and how casual you want your decks to be. You ask for hearts/likes and engagement but you don't hold yourself to the standards of creating functioning decks.

The real difference? Some deck posters take a deck idea and refine it into a deck reality. Your newer series have not. If you really just wanted to get this "deck idea" out there, you could've left it on reddit or discord as a comment about "Versatile in Scavenging for Mateo to replay Codex."

I think your newer player guides and starter deck guides have been instrumental for the new wave of players since the revised core set. But I also agree with the many others who think that your more recent decks are more frill than anything else.

@Valentin1331 Hi there. I've liked your decks for quite a while. Can you explain exactly how you knew 14.3k viewers saw your post on reddit? AFAIK, reddit disabled view counts more than 4 years ago. Plus, what @Lola Hayes said about your own words regarding the playtesting for your decks confuses the hell out of me.

I think one of the sticking points here might be related to the use of ArkhamDB and how it's inherently kinda flawed as a platform. TBH, that's ok. It does a good job at 99% of what the community wants. I don't think there's enough here to warrant a change in how it works.

That being said, the problem to me is that this site has a like and favoriting system, which rewards users with imaginary internet points and favors those people by keeping their decks on the front page. In turn, people are incentivized to make quality content, with cool formatting and images and to your credit @Valentin1331, you make that formatting available to folks who want to post their own guides. But when it becomes about the points, the likes, the engagment, etc then this site starts to look like a social media platform and I have to say I don't like that.

As someone who has tried to post decks that I've heavily refined for people to see and gotten very modest engagement comparatively, seeing this situation can be very frustrating. A deck that is relatively untested, posted by someone who already has dozens of other decks, including on the front page right now. Obviously I recognize your content or @chirubime's is favorable to mine for the most part, but when it's happening consistently and sometimes more because of the presentation than anything else, it's frustrating. Either because the deck is untested or because it's highly similar to existing lists on the platform (not the case for this one, tbf).

All in all, this is a public platform, you can present content however you want, but I figured I'd share what I think can be frustrating about this experience. I get that the Reddit post didn't have any criticism or mention of annoyance, but I think you should also realize that the post itself is going to be biased towards people who like your stuff (which there are a ton of, it's good stuff!). I highly suspect anyone that commented something negative would probably be insanely downvoted and ultimately dismissed

Sorry for this discussion. My only point was to propose that Shrine of the Moirai would replace all the combo with scavering because Shrine of the Moirai would play several Codex of the age directly.

Because i love the idea to play several Codex but the initial combo was complicated in number of cards

@Lola Hayes & @gowonnie, sorry if my previous comment was not clear enough. Let me explain my full process.

1. The first part is obviously the idea. They usually happen while taking part in discussions on the Mythos Busters Discord server, where I spend time daily sharing ideas and helping people with their own decks. I have, up to this day, 749 decks on ArkhamDB, a lot of bad ones, and a few interesting ideas here and there.
2. The concept part: I select an investigator that can run my idea and try to build the core of the concept, checking if the combo and synergy that I have in mind actually even work. Then I fill up the rest of the deck, trying to give enough draw to at least go through the deck once, enough resources to play anything they want and what it takes to survive. If there is space left, I add side effects to the combo, cards that synergise well but are not essential. I fix myself the limit of 19xp Standalone mode (unless impossible to do like for my Trish deck) for 2 reasons. First, this is what I use myself, and I know that it is useful to players to have decks that they can use directly for standalones, without having to make any fixes if they don't have time/desire to, and secondly, this is usually the experience at mid-campaign, and I think that if I'd want a combo, it should hopefully be available by then. I also check on ArkhamDB existing decks to check the most popular decks for obvious cards that I would have missed and see if the concept already exists, in which case, if it's an older deck, I bring it a new lift in the light of newer cards, or if it's recent enough, decide not to proceed any further.
3. I run my combo idea through the #rules-discussion part of the Mythos Busters Discord if I am slightly unsure to make sure that I don't publish anything for which an official answer at some point when I wasn't aware makes it unviable. I also often post the concept on #deck-tech on the Mythos Busters Discord server to ask for feedback or any obvious blind spot before I use the deck.
4. If I am happy with the results of the theorycraft and the concept seems viable, I pair the deck with a counterpart (if it's a flex deck, I'll pick another flex in my list of concepts, if it's a cluever, I pair it with a fighter, and vice versa), and take it to a standalone scenario. I usually pick The Depths of Yoth for its scoring mechanism, start at Agenda 2A, and see how deep I can go with the decks, usually |Spoiler ON|killing Yig in the process|Spoiler OFF|. To go further into details, I pick 2 weaknesses randomly (as per the standalone rules), but I reshuffle weaknesses that will alter my testing too much, such as Dendromorphosis if I am a main fighter, or Paranoia to assess the resource generation curve, or the healing ones if my deck didn't plan for healing upfront. For Mulligan, I will re-shuffle cards that are key to the deck to assess if it would still run ok if I don't find the right cards until mid-scenario, for instance. I also play using a hard-mode token bag and Easy/Standard scenario card. If, for some reason, The Depths of Yoth doesn't synergise well with my deck, for instance, Monterey Jack and Sixth Sense (4) come to mind as particularly handicapped by the scenario's specifics, I will pick Midnight Masks and assess how many cultists I can get. In parallel, I share regularly my concepts with some members of the community, from which they pick the ones they like and choose what they want to do with the decks. Most of them, such as Blakink mentioned earlier, but also others, whose names I won't give because I did not ask for their permission, take the decks through campaigns and give me feedback about their highlights and struggles. I then change my deck accordingly and proceed to another test myself. One particular challenge with deck guides is that they have to be "universal" enough to work at least in 2,3 or 4 and more or less any campaign. Will you run the same deck through TFA or TCU? Probably not, so I try to find a middle ground, and I think that Depths of Yoth's encounter deck is good at it.
5. 2 options: I am unhappy with the deck's results, and I go back to the drawing board, either ditch the deck completely or try to mitigate the weak spots and go back to step 4. This can happen multiple times. For instance, I have made this loop at least 4 times with my Skids deck, and I am still in this process with other investigators, such as Jim and Wendy. On the other hand, if I am happy with the deck, either because it was meeting my expectations (Depth 6 or 7 usually), or because the flaws were not altering the experience, I prepare a 0xp deck, trying as much as possible to downgrade cards with similar options: Scavenging (2) turns into Scavenging (0), econ for econ, draw for draw, etc... And a full xp deck trying to think of everything available that the deck would benefit from. I usually test the 0xp deck in the opening scenario of the Path to Carcosa (but to be 100% transparent, I do not always do, if I am confident that the 0xp deck is solid).
6. I put the deck in another list called "ready", for me to write the deck guide for it. Weekly, I pick one deck from that list and use the template that I made available to everyone to write the guide. In this guide, I try to explain the deck's concept, how I advise to run the deck, give some details about any unintuitive ruling, unobvious combo and propose an upgrade path. I use 5argon's amazing upgrade path tool to create an upgrade path from the 0xp deck to the deck I used, trying to assess which card needs to come earlier in the deck to provide the best experience. I ask every week for help proofreading the guide because I am not a native English speaker, but not so many people are interested (understandably, of course), so I bought a premium Grammarly license mostly for this purpose. On Friday, I publish the deck and post roughly the same post every week in Facebook and Reddit to inform of the release.

Altogether, based on my stats on TTS, which I bought for this series (I would only test using the physical game before), I spent 183 hours on TTS for 18 decks published, and it doesn't account for all the time spent working on the concepts, involved in discussions, or writing the detailed guide, which probably leads to around 15/20 hours per week for more than 4 months. All of this is, of course, purely voluntary work (I never asked for financial contributions such as Patreon), and besides some likes that are giving visibility to the work, the main reason why I am doing this is my excitement to share concepts that I think are fun, the hype from the discussions around the decks with people from the community and the (often positive) feedback from people using the decks.

I hope this clarifies a little bit the situation. In this regard, I have been transparent whenever asked on Discord.

This being said, I like always to try to come up with solutions. I thought that the introduction of my deck was clear enough, stating from day one of the series that "I will release a new standalone-ready deck concept every week on Friday for the following months". To be more transparent, I could add a disclaimer before every upgrade path to explain that this is a suggestion and the deck was only tested by me in Standalone.

@davilimap Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experience in a constructive manner. For what it's worth, I have given back as many likes as I could to anyone investing time in a write-up with their deck because, in my opinion, the beauty of these collaborative platforms is the variety of choices people can have access to and I am happy when for instance right now someone is in the popular list with a great Rita deck. Also, I want to give back to the people that probably gave me likes before.

For your own decks, I actually had an interesting discussion with @Mattastrophic, who also published a very well-polished Lola deck recently and had surprisingly little engagement for it.. That is another thing from this type of platform that we cannot really control: what the target audience of the website is eventually interested in.

Was I a bit disappointed that the deck that cost me the most hours was also the least successful of this series (sorry, Skids, you'll shine another day...)? Sure, and the same happened when I published my Amanda deck, which is the one that took me the most work overall and at the time got quite a lukewarm welcome (probably for some reason). I am spending most of my time working on Jim and Lola currently, and I already know that both of them will have very limited engagement because that's not what the ArkhamDB community is here for, but that's what I am motivated by: publishing ideas that are fun and which I believe people will be inspired by, sometimes learn a few things from, and most importantly help to have fun with the game even if you don't really like or have time for deckbuilding.

One small thing, though: the total points do not change anything. Every deck will be treated the exact same way. The only difference will probably be people clicking more on a deck when they see it's posted by a "big" account, though the vast majority of users probably don't really understand (and/or care) what these points are.

@gowonnie I am not sure what you're talking about, I'm fairly new to Reddit (I created my account for the r/arkhamhorrorlcg), and I always had access to what they call insights on my posts. Here's a screenshot of what I see..

@LeReverend31 Thanks for the suggestion. It's really appreciated when people think along! @chirubime correctly explained that, unfortunately, it doesn't work. And do not worry about the rest of the discussion. It happened independently of your comment :)

That turned out to be a longer post than expected, especially as I swore to be away from my computer (and from Arkham) for my holidays, hence no deck for the first time since the Christmas period, but I care for the community, and I feel like the feelings expressed here have been simmering for a while. The comment section of this deck is probably a little bit too "niche" for everyone thinking the same to read my answers, but I hope that at least it will clarify things, and if these questions come up again, I will refer to this post.
If after this you are still not satisfied with my work, then the best I can do is apologise for it and promise that I will do my best to deliver the best work I can do for the coming weeks as I still have quite some concepts in my backlog (when possible because finding something fun to do with Mateo was a lot of work).

It's not my goal to discredit the amount of work you put into publishing and marketing your decks. Anyone can recognize the dedication you put into this game. My frustrations for this deck stem from what appeared to me as obfuscated methodology and/or the unreplicability of your conclusions about the deck.

To newer players or even anyone who hasn't played this deck, when you put out deck guides where you haven't specified the conditions in which they are tested, in this case tested as a standalone by you, it can lead the reader to the wrong conclusion about the deck. Standalone and campaign progression are very different in my opinion. Even when a deck is tested at 0 xp and its posted xp, the upgrade path can be extremely challenging to juggle given the added cards can bring in more synergies while potentially breaking existing combos.

In this deck's case, the core requires 2 exp for Versatile, 2 exp for Astral Mirror, and 3 exp for Antiqurary. In cases where you don't get 7 exp in a given scenario, you don't explain to the reader, what takes priority and how to play the deck in these middle transitional states. I frankly shouldn't have called it a bad deck because what I really wanted to say was that I felt like aspects of the deck and it's testing methodology were misrepresented/omitted. I apologize for that.

You've laid out your entire process, and you've discussed being more open about the game style it was tested in with the player. You've qualmed my concerns.

so how does Scavenging work with his codex? Since his Elder sign is a auto succeed, you don't succeed by 2 and thus you don't get it back via the combo correct?

@Fockfear auto success sets the difficulty of the test to 0. So long as your skill value is above 2 you should trigger Scavenging.

@chirubime this is a bit of a necro but as a new player (who has purchase 7 cycles and all 5 starters of investigator cards plus 5 campaigns) I felt the need to point out that this thread and your comments leaves a bit of a bad taste for me about the Arkham community and reduces my motivation to continue playing. I have enjoyed seeing a number of creative decks, like those previously posted by @Valentin1331, and others with decent effort put into the write ups (in particular, setting out complex and unintuitive rules and card Interactions), however, from viewing the more recent deck lists this year, almost none of the lists are as popular as those previously posted by @Valentin1331, who doesn’t seem to be posting as frequently, and many of the other authors put minimal effort into their guide write ups making it difficult to ascertain the quality or reasoning behind the deck and whether it is for fun or optimisation.

In your comment apologising to the OP there is the appearance of “contrition”, however, it feels forced and disingenuous at best. In particular, you go on to further attack the OP in your comment when you say that the core cards required for the combo need at least 7 exp whilst you seemingly intentionally omit what you ought to be fully aware of, being that Mateo starts with 5 bonus XP. Getting at least 2 exp in the first scenario of most campaign seems relatively common or you could just start with “In The Thick of It”. It is apparent you show disdain for @Valentin1331 success in making a mix of optimised decks but also more janky, creative but less optimised decks compared to yours.

Likely your comment was motivated more by jealousy rather than any legitimate or objective criticism to what the introduction makes clear, this deck is janky and made for fun and not built to break the game with raw optimisation.

What might help in future is having “janky” and “optimised” deck categories, like there is with solo and multiplayer, so that players can search by category depending on what they seek to achieve from a given deck. I would also suggest that any deck allowed to be categorised as “optimised” would have a higher threshold to be posted in the first place (with at least a minimum word count but preferably some review and approval by moderators) with a report function to allow the community to flag those decks that do not meet the requisite quality level.

Anyway, I hope this website can improve to provide a more functional way for the community to search for deck ideas they are seeking and to also motivate those that are good at deck building to continue posting their best ideas.