Quick Learner Yorick | Fight, Clue, Repeat (29 xp)

“The secret to good detective work is punching a few monsters first. Fight, Clue, Repeat.” — William Yorick

We already know that William Yorick is an excellent user of Police Badge, as his recursion ability allows him to take five-action turns whenever there is an enemy to defeat, usually enabling action-heavy weapons such as Sledgehammer(4).

This deck, however, takes Police Badge in a different direction. Those five-action turns are also an excellent enabler for Quick Learner, effectively giving you three actions at -2 difficulty on skill tests and turning Yorick into a remarkably competent cluever.

Because the whole process still relies on defeating an enemy to immediately recur Police Badge, the deck’s ideal turn is gloriously silly: you spend the first half of the round burying enemies, only to somehow become a better investigator because of it.

Fight

As is often the case in a flex deck, the weapons are mid-tier but more than capable of getting the job done. .18 Derringer(2) and Brand of Cthugha(1) are your primary combat tools, with Enchanted Blade serving as a backup that can also discard an empty Brand of Cthugha.

During combat turns, the main puzzle is how to navigate that first action at +2 difficulty from Quick Learner. Your options are:

• Use Cornered, ideally discarding improvised events, to offset the increased difficulty
• Take an unboosted attack with .18 Derringer(2) or Brand of Cthugha(1), accepting the higher chance of failure since missed attacks do not cost ammo or charges
• Take a basic fight or evade action (avoiding Alert or Retaliate effects) to intentionally fail, ideally while committing Take Heart

In a five-action turn, it is perfectly acceptable to lose that first action, considering the value gained from the final three actions at reduced difficulty.

Clue

Depending on how the fighting portion of the turn unfolds, you can transition into up to three investigate actions at -2 difficulty. This allows Old Keyring(3) to reliably pick up two clues at a time from locations with up to 4 shroud.

If there is no enemy to deal with at the start of the round, the turn reverts to a normal three-action turn, meaning that only the third action is well suited for investigating higher-shroud locations.

Repeat

To consistently repeat the five-action turn sequence whenever an enemy appears, there are a few things to keep in mind.

First, we want Police Badge to be the most frequent target for Yorick's recursion ability, which means minimizing the need to recur combat and investigation assets. This is achieved by:

• Using assets that only spend uses on successful tests: .18 Derringer(2), Brand of Cthugha(1) and Old Keyring(3)
• Relying on improvised events (Improvised Weapon, Winging It), which are conveniently discarded with Cornered and work very well alongside Quick Learner from the third action onward (-3 difficulty)
• Making use of basic fight and investigate actions from the third action onward (-2 difficulty), which are often sufficient for enemies with 1 remaining health and locations with 2 shroud or lower

Second, we need an economy engine that can support replaying the 3-resource Police Badge over and over. This is achieved through:

• Setup/burst economy: Geared Up, Schoffner's Catalogue, Emergency Cache and Take Heart. Geared Up, in particular, will pay off more often than not with 12 Item assets in the deck, including Backpack(2).
• Sustained economy: Madame Labranche works very well alongside Schoffner's Catalogue. There are very few non-Item assets in the deck, and the ones that are present are inexpensive (Brand of Cthugha(1), Madame Labranche and Cornered, all costing 2 resources). This means you can intentionally empty your resource pool while preserving secrets on Schoffner's Catalogue, allowing Madame Labranche to reliably generate one resource each turn.

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Weaknesses / Things to Watch For

Outside of Take Heart, this deck has fairly limited card draw. That said, Short Supply and Backpack(2) do a good job of thinning the deck, and Madame Labranche can occasionally provide additional draw, especially if you lean heavily on Cornered. Improvised Weapon(2) would be an excellent upgrade here, allowing you to recycle improvised events faster in a thinned deck, but I kept the list at 29 XP for standalone mode.

Soak is also somewhat limited. Madame Labranche does a lot of work here as a cheap, recurrable 2/2 soak, but you still need to be mindful of sustained damage and horror pressure.

Final thoughts

In the end, this deck is Yorick at his most delightfully absurd: every enemy becomes the setup for the next turn, every discarded card an opportunity, and every awkward action sequence somehow turns into momentum. What looks like chaos on paper quickly settles into a satisfying fight, clue, repeat rhythm, proving that the best detective work really does start with a punch!