The unassuming Assistant finds a Grim Memoir and through its Knowledge, gains infinite Power.

Credit: Andreia Ugrai

Many of us were baffled when playing high-draw decks for the first time, occasionally enjoying this guilty pleasure with Amanda. Yet, one thing that Amanda didn't necessarily have was infinites in:

• Clues
• Fight, including Aloof enemies, skipping engage actions
• Move
• Healing

So let's see how Minh takes over the title of the most bonkers investigator from Amanda.

Disclaimer: This deck has the capacity to tear apart the fabric of ~~ Silas's Shirt~~ - reality... This is better played true solo because its sheer power can make anyone at your table feel like they came to The Minh Show.
In multiplayer, you can limit yourself or, better, self-tabooing Knowledge is Power as a non-fast event. The latter will make it a very good deck, just a bit more... balanced. If doing so, you can add a Scavenging (2) to cycle the Grim Memoir and keep your Knowledge is Power for fighting and healing.

After the 20k Series and its success, this 30k Series will focus on the investigators that are much harder to solve. Expect some jank, some outside-of-the-box thinking and hopefully some love for the underdogs of this game.

Click here to see all the previous decks. I will keep releasing a new standalone-ready deck concept every week on Friday, so stay tuned and keep pressing the ♥ button if you want to see more!

• Overview

• Main Strategy

• Knowledge is the most powerful weapon against the Mythos

• The rest of the game

• Random Basic Weaknesses

• Other Cards

• Upgrade Path

• Postscriptum - Taboo Suggestion

• Use Knowledge is Power on Grim Memoir, Enchanted Bow and Earthly Serenity to get fast clues, damage and healing.

• Use the tests to commit Perception (2), Unrelenting, Eureka! and play Cryptic Research to cycle your deck and access more Knowledge, more Power, also find Shortcut to move around.

• Commit Analysis to be like Wendy and reroll any token that wouldn't lead you to success. This, along with the number of icons that can be committed and Minh 's ability, make this deck expert-proof.

Clues:

• Use Knowledge is Power on Grim Memoir, committing Unrelenting and Perception (2) to cycle your deck.

  • Use Analysis during the test to drop a clue and reroll any inconvenient token, such as the -8 or .

  • This means dropping a few clues occasionally, but that also means as long as you have clues to drop, you are sure to succeed, even in Expert.

  • As Analysis was my appointed card during the TSK Preview season organised by @Veronica, I am thrilled not only to find a home for it but actually have it as a cornerstone of such a powerhouse deck.

  • Commit Eureka! for a cantrip that searches your deck. This is especially good when you just played your Knowledge is Power, and your other copy is in your deck among 3 other cards. Eureka! will allow you to keep going, greatly mitigating the risks of breaking the loop because of the lack of draw.

  • Commit Deduction for acceleration (otherwise, it takes a loooong time to collect the clues one by one).

  • Practice Makes Perfect helps if you haven't found Perception (2) or Unrelenting to maintain the loop, or Analysis to make your test failproof.

  • Cryptic Writings pay for Practice Makes Perfect.

Fight:

• Use Knowledge is Power on Enchanted Bow to kill enemies at your location or a connecting location, also skipping any need to engage Aloof enemies. Retaliate is usually not an issue because Analysis has your back.

  • Using Mind over Matter, we can use our instead of , therefore committing Perception (2) to the fight actions, maintaining the cycle loop.

  • Note that upgrading to Mind over Matter (2) will prevent us from committing Perception (2) to non- tests, and so it's a detrimental upgrade in this case.

  • As mentioned, Analysis prevents bad tokens.

Absorb the horror:

• Knowledge is Power also works on Earthly Serenity to trigger a fast healing and gain back the horror from cycling your deck. With Unrelenting x2, Eureka! x2 and Analysis, you are testing at 9 , and you can reroll any token that would give you the maximum healing.

Move:

• Shortcut.

• If you need to move further than 2 locations away, you can investigate (even on an empty location) to trigger a deck cycle and find your Shortcuts again.

Scenario Tests and triggers:

These are the only ones that will spend your actions.

• Because of Perception (2) and Mind over Matter, anything that is not a test is easy to pass and will maintain the loop for the following test.

  • If doing a scenario action that involves a test, you can initiate the loop during this test, which would be your last chance to do one during your turn.

• For tests, Minh benefits from her great base stat, and we can use Analytical Mind, Eureka!, Unrelenting to go to high values and Analysis as our failproof tech.

Set up:

• In theory, having your deck fully ready to go wild doesn't take more than one cycle. In practice, because of the commits to pass early tests, you'll decrease the number of cards in your discard pile progressively over 2-3 cycles before you can really start.

• Because the faster you go through your deck at the beginning, the faster you'll start rolling, you should mulligan out any card that doesn't give you draw. That means priority to: Grim Memoir, Cryptic Research, Practice Makes Perfect and Perception (2).

  • We do not keep Unrelenting, at least in Expert, because the tokens in Expert do not meet the criteria to trigger the draw unless is added. So we depend on Keep Faith.

• Since Knowledge is Power targets assets from your hand, you don't need to play Enchanted Bow and Earthly Serenity, saving resources and play actions.

• You only need to play Grim Memoir, Dream-Enhancing Serum, Laboratory Assistant, and potentially Scroll of Secrets.

• The King in Yellow stays in play once you are set up. You can target the Grim Memoir/Scroll of Secrets from your hand so the hand slots become useless, and with Perception, Unrelenting, Analysis, Eureka!, you can commit 3 Skills to every test anyways.

  • Since are optional, you may choose to leave The King in Yellow in play, even if you meet the requirements to discard it, which prevents it from turning into a dead draw with every cycle.

• Try to keep your early Knowledge is Power to target Enchanted Bow on early enemies. If you can't, you can use Mind over Matter to evade or Existential Riddle to Aloof an enemy.

  • Existential Riddle is mostly here if you get an enemy as your Random Basic Weakness. Making it aloof prevents it from cycling with your deck every time you kill it.

  • If you use Existential Riddle on an early enemy that you couldn't kill yet, you can still deal with it afterwards with the Enchanted Bow without needing to engage and gain the riddle back during your next cycle to slap it on another enemy (including a weakness).

• Analytical Mind is useless since The King in Yellow will force us to commit 3 cards. We, therefore, store it in our hand and use it when we need the .

As a rule of thumb, the fewer cards you use during your first cycle, the faster you'll be ready to loop. The encounter cards you will draw will determine how many cards you will need to commit.
Overall, it's worth being a bit slower, taking damage/horror early, and even if it means power drawing during your first 2 turns, it is all worth it since you'll then be unstoppable later.

The heavy-drawing mechanic can be heavily affected based on the weaknesses that you pull. Here are some leads on how likely it is to happen if using this deck and how to mitigate most of the unfortunate weaknesses:

RBWs that threaten the loop and ways to mitigate them:

Standalone Mode: Breaking the loop: 2/37 - Impacting the gameplay: 6/37

• Narcolepsy: Complete blocker. You lose all your remaining actions every time you cycle. It's unlikely that you will keep this one, though, as you probably won't play this deck in full intensity in multiplayer.

  • A fun interaction would be that if you draw Narcolepsy while drawing multiple cards at the same time, and this causes your deck to shuffle, the horror from the shuffling will kick out Narcolepsy.

• Through the Gates: Complete blocker. You lose more and more key cards with every deck cycle.

• Amnesia - You could try to keep Cryptic Research in your hand. You will lose the infinite loop but still win the game because of how fast you draw.

• Dread Curse: Add Fey and commit 2 to each test to mitigate the weakness significantly.

• Overzealous: It can be challenging. Pack 2 Forewarned, and since you heal with Earthly Serenity, you should be fine.

• Enemies: Existential Riddle disables them, so you can leave them on the table and forget about them.

Campaign Mode only: Breaking the loop: 3/43 - Impacting the gameplay: 8/43

• Doomed: if you draw this one, just die on the first scenario and enjoy another investigator.

• Offer You Cannot Refuse: Pack 2 Crack the Case and upgrade Cryptic Writings (2) asap to increase your income and afford the 5 resources.

Conclusion:

• Campaign mode: 16% chance of having a detrimental weakness and 13% chance of having one of the 3 weaknesses that will kill the deck's mechanic.

  • If you get Doomed, better cycle fast and kill Minh Thi Phan, starting again with another Investigator scenario 2. If you get Through the Gates or Narcolepsy, you can shift the upgrade path to decrease the draw and prioritise action compression, with Deduction (2), Sharp Vision, etc...

• Standalone Mode: 25% chance of having a detrimental weakness and 10% chance of having one of the 2 weaknesses that will kill the deck's mechanic, 5% if you are going true solo.

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• Scroll of Secrets is a good set-up card that basically reads: 1-cost, 1-action, draw 3 and discard any weakness that is drawn. It will be pushed away by The King in Yellow

  • Once the combo is fully running, it is nice to have the Scroll of Secrets on the table as our second hand slot, alongside The King in Yellow, so in case we are short on our loop, we can use the trigger to get a chance to fuel the engine again. We can keep the Grim Memoirs in hand as Knowledge is Power targets it there.

  • This becomes much more powerful if we upgrade it to the Scroll of Secrets (3) to increase set-up, prevent disruption in the loop, and cancel early weaknesses that would be revealed.

• Dream-Enhancing Serum is your main big-hand enabler. It also gives an interesting card draw during the set-up.

• Laboratory Assistant is your second big and enabler. What we are trying the most to avoid with these 2 is to have to discard cards when your turn ends, which will clog our discard pile and slow down our cycle loop.

• We use Keep Faith to bring tokens in the deck to enable the seal mechanism of Unrelenting. If you are playing in Multiplayer, I am sure that your team is also going to love 10 constant in the bag.

  • We could have used Tempt Fate, which is cheaper and a cantrip, but adding to the bag can break our loop by making it impossible to succeed in certain tests, even when committing Analysis. So we instead choose Keep Faith.

Disclaimer: This decklist is published in the version that I tested. The upgrade path is just one possible way to upgrade while maintaining the best experience and value of the deck. As these decks are made to be universally good, feel free to adapt them to your campaign and change the upgrade order around based on your experience.

Link to the 0xp deck

(View at arkham-starter.com)

Link to the full xp deck

• As a suggestion to "turn off" such an infinite loop, I would recommend unchaining Knowledge is Power but removing the fast aspect.

• And now we're here, making Unrelenting's trait Innate instead of Practiced would solve most of Amanda's case, while being thematic with Silas.

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