Sister Mary, Here She Stands

When to Use this Deck

"Here She Stands" is a multiplayer-oriented deck for Sister Mary that excels in 3 or 4 player campaigns. This deck is not a one that promotes a "regular" Guardian playstyle. While our Sister Mary will eventually build up to be a pretty capable fighter, it's expected that at least one other player in the party will also be at least half-focused (if not entirely dedicated) on Fighting enemies.

Campaign-Specific Notes

This deck plays a lot better in campaigns that are more generous with its XP. The first two card upgrades are crucial to the function of this deck and the sooner you can get them, the better. In low-XP campaigns it would be highly worthwhile to take In the Thick of It so we can expedite our upgrades.

Intro and Key Concepts

The core objectives of the deck is to be a hyper-enabler for the rest of your team, helping keep threats off their back so they can do what they do best. The name of the game here is tempo; we want to keep our teammates on high-tempo while we worry about the annoying riff-raff. To achieve that outcome, we focus on 3 main goals.

Goal #1:

Cancelling or intercepting Encounter cards. Drawing a nasty Encounter card can throw a real dent into your teammates' plans, so one of our major goals is to make sure we prevent that from happening.

Goal #2:

Keeping the Chaos Bag full of Bless tokens. Once again, we're focused on keeping our teammates' tempo up. Failed skill-checks are wasted actions, and wasted actions kill tempo. Additionally, we also want to make sure we're not pulling those tokens out of the bag, so our deck tries to make use of very easy, or fully test-less actions.

Goal #3:

Kill what we can, soak what we can't. We want to keep Enemies off our gators so they can keep getting Clues and trash mobs off our bruisers so they're not wasting precious actions and ammo on Rats.

Our First 2 Upgrades

Before I get into the Deck explanation, I'd like to first talk about the first two upgrades we're going to get because they will immediately play a critical role in how the deck works.

Versatile (2)

Fundamentally, this deck is actually designed as a 35 card deck. In the Side Decklist, there are 5 level 0 cards listed which are the 5 cards we will immediately add to our deck when we purchase Versatile:

• Mr. "Rook"
• Trusted
• 2x Inspiring Presence
• Calling in Favors

Mr. Rook serves the same fundamental purpose of Arcane Initiate, to tutor out some useful cards, but he's significantly better because he can target cards that aren't just Spell cards. In descending priority:

• Nephthys (our next Upgrade; read more about it below)
• Guardian Angel
• Hallowed Mirror (3) (one of our future Upgrades)
• Boxing Gloves
• Ancestral Token

All the other cards besides Nephthys and GA are "nice-to-haves". Additionally, Mr. Rook's supposed "downside" of being forced to play any Weaknesses can actually be a positive for us. Because Crisis of Faith only affects tokens in the bag, if there are only a few tokens in the bag, then it's worthwhile to get the Weakness out of the way early on so it's no longer a concern in the long-run. This also allows us to repurpose cards like Purified to now add instead of removing .

Finally, I typically play with Tabooed cards, so I treat Mr. Rook's effect as an (which is still worth it); however, if you do not play with Taboos, then congratulations as Mr. Rook is now much more powerful with a effect.

Nephthys (4)

The next upgrade we must save up for is Nephthys. She is the capstone to this build and powers much of the engine. She seals the tokens you purposefully left for your teammates to pull, and once per turn converts it into 2 test-less damage as a . You can then spend your turn re-seeding the bag in a variety of ways with , creating a very consistent loop.

She is so important to us that basically all of our cards we add from Versatile is done so in support of getting her out ASAP and keeping her alive.

• Arcane Initiate gives us free card draws, which is always good, but more importantly thins out our deck to increase the odds of Mr. Rook and Calling in Favors to find her.
• Mr. "Rook" has 3 chances to find her through his ability.
  • He also serves as an alternative target to Calling in Favors; in case we use Calling in Favors on Arcane Initiate but don't find Nephthys, we might get lucky and find Mr. Rook.
  • Of course, we can also use him as a target for Calling in Favors to get Nephthys out for "free".
  • In the event you have truly terrible luck and can't find Nephthys through any of Mr. Rook's searches or Calling in Favors, you can replay Mr. Rook and get 3 additional changes to tutor her out.
  • If you still don't find her after 7 searches of 9 cards each, then you have truly angered some God or deity.
• Trusted is primarily meant to keep her alive. Some nasty Encounters/Agendas can hit Ally Assets, and we want to prevent a situation where she gets sniped as that ruins the rest of our engine.
• Inspiring Presence serves a double-purpose: it not only heals her, letting her take a little bit of damage/horror in an emergency, but also readies her, allowing us to use her power twice in a turn.

The only reason we don't have her has our first Upgrade is because Mr. Rook is inherently useful to help us search for Boxing Gloves and Ancestral Token — two cards which we also really want — and Versatile is just 2XP cheaper.

Deck Explanation

Let's take a look at our starting deck and highlight the main synergies we're trying to establish.

Guardian Angel (GA) + Spectral Shield (SS)

↪ Breath of the Sleeper | Eyes of the Dreamer

↪ Arcane Initiate

Our signature GA is an amazing tool. Not only does it compensate for our low starting Health of 5, but it also adds to the bag. In particular, there are two elements of GA that we need to take advantage of:

1. GA adds when damage is assigned, not when damage is taken!
2. GA can absorb damage from connecting locations, which means its "sphere of influence" can be huge depending on the map layout.

This is where Spectral Shield comes into play. By attaching SS to GA, we can assign a damage to GA, add a token to the bag, and then Cancel the damage before it gets applied to GA, effectively soaking a damage while also generating a . All it costs us is a single Charge off another one of our Assets.

Fortunately, we have access to two cards — Breath of the Sleeper and Eyes of the Dreamer — each with 9 Charges. Ironically, despite the fact that we can use those cards to Fight and Investigate, we never actually want to do that, opting instead to keeping those Charges as payment for SS.

We also notice that SS, Breath, and/or Eyes are all Spell cards, which means that we run one copy of Arcane Initiate, which gives us a card draw each round, to help us tutor those cards. 14 out of our 30 starting cards are Spell cards, so the likelihood of getting a card each round with Arcane Initiate is pretty high.

Crisis of Faith

↪ Purified + Toe to Toe

↪ Inspiring Presence | Vicious Blow

Our signature Weakness, Crisis of Faith annoyingly converts tokens in the Chaos Bag into tokens. Luckily, we have a solution for that in the form of Purified, a card we can attach to any test that can help us remove 's, or add 's in case we discarded Crisis of Faith already.

Ideally, we can attach Purified to an easy test performed by another Investigator so we can maximize the points succeeded; however, in the event that isn't an option, we also bring along a copy of #Toe to Toe. Toe to Toe has the distinction of being an automatically successful Fight action, which means that it's technically a skill-check we can attach Purified to for a guaranteed success by a minimum 3 points (Sister Mary's base ). This also applies to Vicious Blow giving us a one-time, test-less 3 damage hit in a pinch.

If we have Inspiring Presence, we can also attach that to the same auto-success skill-check to heal Nephthys and re-ready her.

Drain Essence | Toe to Toe | Nephthys

↪ Ancestral Token + Boxing Gloves

↪ Reveal Cards | Spirit Cards

Once we have Nephthys, along with a few of our other cards, where we can consistently defeat enemies, we then have the full engine running whereby our defeating of the enemies then allows us to put more into the bag (via Ancestral Amulet), tutor out Spirit cards (via Boxing Gloves), which then gives us the tools we need to reliably and efficiently use our other cards.

Deck Upgrades (the 4Cs)

Crucial

See "First 2 Upgrades" section above for details on our Crucial upgrades.

Core

⊱ Rite of Sanctification → Prophetic (3)

While our Sister Mary doesn't play like any of the other Guardians, it doesn't mean she doesn't have the same issues regarding a strained supply of Resources. Rite of Sanctification is nice, but seals a bunch of , takes up a precious Arcane slot, and is wasted on 1-cost cards. Prophetic provides the same number of Resources (2/turn), but has the added benefit of locking up no , takes up no slots, and gives us the flexibility to spend the Resources on 1 cost cards. Our deck is also chock full of Spirit and Spell cards, so we never have to go fishing for applicable cards.

⊱ Absolution → Hallowed Mirror (3)

Despite Goal #3 being explicitly about soaking damage, up to this point Absolution is our only source of healing, with Spectral Shield mostly doing the heavy lifting on cancelling damage. Well, no longer! Hallowed Mirror gives us 3 bonded copies of Soothing Melody, an incredibly flexible healing card that doesn't "cost" a card since it lets the player draw another one.

"But we only have 1 Accessory slot!" I hear you say. That's totally fine! The reason we take the 3XP version of this card and not the 0XP one is because the 3XP version doesn't remove the bonded Soothing Melody cards when it leaves play. That means we can play Hallowed Mirror, shuffle in the Soothing Melodies, and in the future replace it with our Ancestral Token and keep all the healing cards in the deck.

⊱ Alchemical Transmutation → Bulwark (2)

With Prophetic helping alleviate our Resource burdens, we can free up our Arcane slot for the much handier Bulwark. Bulwark's ability provides many interesting combos. Due to us stuffing the Chaos Bag with $bless, we can reliably seal the +1 Token without hurting our teammates. In exchange for that, we get two very interesting rewards.

First, cancelling an attack is pretty self-explanatory. You can use it save your own skin, or another local gator. However, you can also proc this ability yourself! Toe to Toe triggers an enemy attack, so you can use it to cancel that damage, effectively doing a test-less 2 damage attack. But a better use is to tank an Attack of Opportunity (AoO), giving you an extra Action which may be desperately useful.

This leads into the second reward: readying an Asset. We really want to proc Nephthys's ability any time we can, so Bulwark gives us a good way to do it twice in a round. Alternatively, we can use it to do a double search using Mr. Rook's ability, letting us get our important cards faster.

⊱ Occult Reliquary (3)

Ironically, with Occult Reliquary, we can now actually wear both the Ancestral Token and the Hallowed Mirror. However, our intended target for the Reliquary isn't Hallowed Mirror, but instead....

⊱ "Let me handle this!" → Martyr's Vambrace (3)

A once-per-round "Let me handle this!". Now we can reliably intercept one Encounter a round. Additionally, this allows your teammates to play powerful cards like Drawn to the Flame with some semblance of safety. The only real downside compared to "Let me handle this!" is that it's only a local effect instead of a global one. Martyr's Vambrace is also the real target of Occult Reliquary, letting us hold both it and Ancestral Token at the same time. Poor Hallowed Mirror is still as disposable as always.

⊱ Trusted → The Star • XVII (3)

Straight upgrade on Nephthys, GA, and our new Martyr's Vambrace.

⊱ Safeguard (0 → 2)

More Actions is the name of the game. Now, instead of one free move with another gator, you get to piggy-back the whole journey. Additionally, the move is a "may", so you can hop off at any time along the way and it's activated on another gator's turn, so they can even give you a ride if they're passing by!

One more unique combo this card gives you is with Storm of Spirits. Because your "moves" aren't actually moves in the game sense, you don't take AoO. This means you can drag all the enemies you're engaged with into another place with a crowd of enemies and blast them all with Storm of Spirits. If you happened to take Taunt (3) as well, you can play it on another player's turn as they move, making it a very effective way to pull an entire mob of enemies off of a teammate.

Consistency

Most of these upgrades are pretty self-explanatory, and can be taken in any order you wish depending on the needs of the team and campaign. The only two upgrades worth highlighting here are:

⊱ Absolution → Call the Beyond (2)

Let's us recharge Breath of the Sleeper or Eyes of the Dreamer. Plus, we get a bonus Investigate or Fight action.

⊱ "Let me handle this!" → Radiant Smite (1)

We mostly rely on our teammates to handle enemies with a lot of Health, but in the rare cases we absolutely need to wallop an enemy, then this is it.

Cushy

These are very strong upgrades you can take if you're in a position where you're doing very well even without the Consistency upgrades. In that case, you can consider investing into one of these high XP cards that will really give you some oomph.

• One-Two Punch is an upgraded Toe to Toe, giving you the same automatic success but now also allowing a follow-up base 6 attack that does 3 damage.
• Fang of Tyr'thrha is a uniquely useful card. You can use it as a teleport to get someplace far away with an enemy, or you can use it to remotely attack an enemy with a 4 damage attack. Most importantly, this can target Elite enemies, which is incredibly useful in certain scenarios.