"Ashcan" Pete - Solo

The general idea of the deck is to leverage Duke in solo play to sniff out clues and bite the heads of enemies. Duke's biggest limitation is his stats - 4 is fine, but needs to be consistently higher to be reliable (especially given that using him a second time in a turn costs a card - we want to maximise on his activation every turn). The set of cards I've added for that are:

Pocket Multi Tool - this isn't great, and will be replaced by Ice Pick after scenario 1. ITTOI could be used to skip straight to it. I'm choosing not to because I over-use the card! Fieldwork - Primarily useful for picking up clues with Duke, particularly as Duke's investigate gives a free move action as well. In a pinch, and with planning, this could be used for other skill checks. However, there's a lot of luck in the setup for that, so could be difficult to make work Mouse Mask - Another 2 point boost for Duke's investigate! In solo, keeping this topped up will be trivial, so using 'spares' for defensive checks isn't a bad idea at all! Dark Horse - Boosting both of Duke's actions, and Pete's defensive stats is fantastic. Naturally, this leads to...

Madame Labranche and Fire Axe - the classic Survivor trio sets up a lot of resilience. Duke can cover all the clue getting for one investigator, but we can fall over to a 3 health enemy. We don't want to discard a card every time we need to clear that least point of health, or investigate AND fight on a turn. Axe gives us plenty of enemy management resilience and gives us a way to spend our resources. The Madame gives us resources to re-buy ice picks later on, pays for heavy swings with fire axe, and draws cards if you're stuck fighting enemies with Duke. Notably, you can draw a card with her, discard it to ready her, then draw another card with her if you're seriously digging for something.

Scavenging gives us a reason to over-succeed with Duke. It fuels Pete's ability by getting cards back, and later in the campaign it enables Ice Pick recursion for double cluing or triple damaging. We can pay for the recursion with Schoffner's Catalogue without holding resources in hand

Cherished Keepsake and Leather Coat keep us safe, and they can be recurred with Scavenging. Fine Clothes is cheap soak with a potential upside. Switch it for another coat or teddy as needed if you know you're not parleying

No Lucky at level 0 as we want to stay out of cash for Dark Horse. Instead, we have Live and Learn, which fulfils a similar role.

Faustian Bargain - This is a hedge against a situation where we just need a pile of cash, or find ourselves needing to re-build our setup mid game. This could easily be emergency cash if you don't want the hassle of bringing your curse tokens to the table!

The upgrade path is all about Ice Pick and Ice Pick - with those sorted, the better Scavenging is nice for the play action on coat and teddy. We can even use it to play Fire Axe, if discarded to ready an asset during an investigate. But, it's not that high a priority!

Other upgrades are all luxuries, based on the campaign. Backpack is nice, helping us dig for our items. Lucky level 3 is free, so typically better than Live and Learn. There are loads of better skills, etc as well. But the core of the deck is there with 6xp for Ice Pick

Plucky and Scrapper could replace Dark Horse, as the static +1 isn't quite enough late in the campaign