Deck Theory: Daniela Built a Strange Gun

Deck Theory: I like to build decks but don't get a lot of time to play them, so instead of leaving them to go stale in my private collection I'm publishing this with the caveat that this deck is untested and may not survive contact with a campaign!

The Idea

Thanks to Arkham Chronicle and their recent Costume Contest, I won a pair of Hyperphysical Shotcaster (it was for dressing up as Silas Marsh if you must know). I wanted to build a deck using them to celebrate.

To me it seemed like something Daniela might have tinkered with in her workshop - it's absolutely a stretch of the imagination but I ran with it! I figured she could use it to pick up some clues at range while taking much of the heat for the rest of the team.

The Plan

Since Daniela wants to be taking attacks, there are a mixture of assets to soak up the damage, with weapons, events and her ability to return it. Backpack and Tetsuo Mori ought to help find whichever items are needed. The deck is expected to burn through its assets, so Schoffner's Catalogue and Motivational Speech are there to help pay for them. The rest of the events are pretty cheap to run, with Safeguard to stick with another investigator to save.

The Hyperphysical Shotcasters are there for clues, although I'd be expecting this to be a backup to another clue-gatherer. They'll give you something to do if no one draws any enemies.

Since the deck ended up filled with items the Geared Up gamble seemed like it might pay off here. As usual mulligan for anything that is an item, or push further and go for backpacks and catalogues. At the very least, this didn't seem too bad when I ran a few draw tests.

The Extended Plan

I've not figured out whether In the Thick of It is worth the trauma, since it eats into Daniela's damage currency, but since the first order of business is to add Telescanner to the Shotcasters you might consider it worth it. If not you can probably swap these for some Machetes or something until you've earned the first 2xp.

Backpacks are the next priority for finding items and Salvage to get more use out of the Shotcasters. Adding Railshooter turns them into an extra weapon, leaving some space to add a Bangle of Jinxes. Aquinnah then provides enanced damage return or horror soak (I skipped Aquinnah (1) here as (3) seems much better but maybe the staged upgrade isn't so bad). After all that, further XP can be spent boosting the Shotcasters, or upgrading and exiling Leather Coat or Cherished Keepsake.

Upgrades

(View at arkham-starter.com)

Struggles

There wasn't a great deal of room for skills, although the events have a decent spread of icons to use if need be. Daniela's willpower ought to fend of some of the worst of the encoutner deck, but it may be that it eats away at her damage and horror stores a bit faster than desired.

Other Ideas

Bruiser sounded good for enhancing Hyperphysical Shotcaster and other weapon tests, but I struggled to figure out what could be cut for them. Potentially it could replace some of the events if they turned out to be too much.

The deck might run cheap, so Scrapper would be an easy option for excess resources without having to cut anything.

Finally, if your clue-gatherer is too efficient, one of the other Hyperphysical Shotcaster manifests could be fun to play with. Realitycollapser sounds like a fun alternative if you want further options for countering the Encounter deck.