Dexter uses his magic Onyx Pentacle to cast Ranged Shadow, Arcane and Fire bolts.

Credit: Shane Pierce

Introduction:

Changelog 18/05/23: It was ruled by the game designers that Dirty Fighting attacks must target an enemy that is at your location. This shuts down a big part of what is fun with this deck. The ruling was done to prevent abuse with Pendant of the Queen's evasions, for instance. I personally feel like this deck doesn't use this mechanic to break the game. Feel free to ignore the deck completely, use the deck with the new rule (it will probably still work well), or pretend you didn't see this message (Promise, I won't tell anyone). It's a cooperative game, after all, so as long as everyone at your table is fine with it, you are free to choose whatever you want ;)

When seeing Dirty Fighting for the first time, some obvious investigators came to mind, like Kymani, Finn or Rita. But I also wanted to explore other less conventional options. That's when I realised that it worked well with the completely overlooked Onyx Pentacle. In practice, it makes a fun and surprisingly efficient enemy management deck!

This series is a celebration of the 20k points on ArkhamDB to thank you all for all the support received.
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!

Let me know which investigators you would like to see next in the comment!

Table of Contents:

• Overview

• Main Strategy

• Evasion Tools

• Ripple Effects of the Evasion

• Increasing Your Skill Value

• Other Cards

• Upgrade Path

Overview:

Main Strategy:

• Use the Onyx Pentacle to evade from a connecting location, or Ineffable Truth to evade from your location with a damage.

• The evasion triggers Dirty Fighting, which allows you to fight that enemy, even from a distance using Shrivelling, Azure Flame or Brand of Cthugha.

• The activation of a spell triggers Sign Magick (3), which allows you to use another spell or Sin-Eater to clean the Onyx Pentacle.

Evasion tools:

When the enemy is at your location:

• Ineffable Truth fits well in this deck to evade an enemy because you will be trying to kill it, so the 1 damage becomes useful against odd-health enemies.

  • I am really happy with this deck for using Ineffable Truth for the first time. I love the artwork to bits, but it never felt right before.

• Our backup evasion tool is Sword Cane which is particularly great in Dexter Drake. You can play it with your ability or with "I'll take that!", which gives you a fast evasion using your .

  • We also appreciate the versatility of dealing 1 damage without using a charge on our spells.

Evading at a distance:

• Onyx Pentacle allows us to evade from a distance which can be extremely useful in multiple situations:

  • When engagement can be detrimental, like in many parts of The Innsmouth Conspiracy.

  • To deal with Hunters before they enter your location.

  • To evade an enemy engaged with another investigator at your location or a connecting location.

  • Simply to save move actions against enemies that spawn at a different location than yours.

• Sin-Eater takes over the doom from the evasion to mitigate the impacts.

Ripple Effects of the Evasion:

No matter how and where the enemy is evaded, it will trigger a reaction of events:

• Pickpocketing will reward you with cards and later resources.

• Dirty Fighting will trigger an attack on the evaded enemy, even if it is at a different location.

• If the attack is performed using one of your fighting spells (meaning not the Sword Cane), it triggers Sign Magick (3), which allows you to use another spell or ritual! Based on your situation, here are some of the things you can do:

  • If you are under doom pressure, you can transfer the doom to Sin-Eater and use Sign Magick's to trigger the cleaning .

  • If the enemy is still alive and at your location, you can trigger another attacking spell. Note that 2 different cards with the same name do not count for this effect.

  • If the enemy is already dead or you want to finish the last damage with the Sword Cane later, you can get a clue with Sixth Sense.

  • If there are no clues on your location and none of the above is relevant, you can still heal yourself with Earthly Serenity or use Sin-Eater to ready David Renfield for another resource and have Sign Magick (3) clean Sin-Eater.

As Dirty Fighting makes the fighting action fast, try to use it before using the action from Sign Magick (3) on a fight action.

Increasing Your Skill Value:

First phase: All your spells are lvl 0 and you are testing with 5 all the time, which is not ideal.

• Crystal Pendulum offers an additional as well as some occasional draw which is always good when it happens.

• David Renfield is a little less reliable as he'll be on and off, but when he is active, you'll benefit from another .

Second phase:

You get Dirty Fighting, which will give a bonus of +2 on your fighting spells as long as you evade the enemy before. Therefore, upgrading fighting assets is a low priority, and we focus on:

• Onyx Pentacle (4) for the +3 on the distant evasion.

• Ineffable Truth (3) for +2 .

• Sixth Sense (4) to find clues more efficiently.

• From this moment, the Crystal Pendulum becomes less relevant because all your tests should be done with 7 or more.

Third and last phase:

All your non-fight spells have been upgraded, and you are ready to increase your damage output by upgrading your fighting spells to the lvl 5.

• Make sure that you upgrade to Earthly Serenity (4) before you purchase Azure Flame (5) and Shrivelling (5) because pulling the wrong tokens can rapidly hinder your chances of success.

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Other Cards:

• Lucky Cigarette Case is the classic draw engine staple.

• David Renfield is here for another interesting bonus, as well as to help us pay for all our magic tricks.

I decided to ignore the David Renfield Taboo willingly and chose the 2021-06-28 taboo version instead of the latest one because I feel 3xp is an unfair change.
I can see the power of David in Charlie Kane decks, but even with Sin-Eater in the doom archetype, I don't think he deserves such a treatment.
If you want to discuss this, feel free to reach out in the #taboo-discussion channel of the Mythos Busters Discord.

• Lone Wolf is a good asset that gets you some cash, can be played for free with your ability and can be replaced at any moment if you think you have enough resources.

• "I'll take that!" is all Dexter Drake wants: action compression and economy. It brings some good "wow, that's nice" moments when you can make it work.

  • Use it to play Sword Cane fast which triggers the on the latter.

  • You can use it to play Lucky Cigarette Case and trigger it on the same test.

  • If you have in your hand a second copy of an item that is already in play, you can use the same fast window in which you play "I'll take that!" to first use your ability to replace that item with another asset and then play the asset from your hand with "I'll take that!". This way, you can see it almost as if, with Dexter, "I'll take that!" could play any non-item asset for you.

• Uncage the Soul is also perfect in Dexter Drake, offering you action compression and econ. The faster you can fill the table with assets, the easier you'll have your magic engine running.

Later upgrades:

• Uncage the Soul (3) is great for scavenging some spells if need be. It is arguably less interesting in Dexter Drake because you do not need the discard ability, but with Down the Rabbit Hole, it is still a really good purchase.

• Instead of In the Thick of It, we use Arcane Research for campaigns as it helps upgrade all your spells and will bring tons of experience compression.

• Down the Rabbit Hole is always a bit contentious. It makes a lot of sense here:

  • It costs additional experience on: Brand of Cthugha, Earthly Serenity and Dirty Fighting and Sin-Eater for a total of +6xp.

  • It saves experience on Sign Magick (3), Brand of Cthugha (4), Earthly Serenity (4), Pickpocketing (2), Ineffable Truth (3)&(5), Onyx Pentacle (4), Sixth Sense (4), Azure Flame (3)&(5), Shrivelling (3)&(5) and Uncage the Soul (3) for a total of -14xp.

  • If you are really confident with yourself and your team, feel free to add Charon's Obol for even more xp!

• In standalone scenario mode, because we cannot use the xp discount from Arcane Research and Down the Rabbit Hole, we add Relic Hunter to run both Lucky Cigarette Case and Crystal Pendulum and increase our .

  • Another option is to replace Relic Hunter and a copy of Crystal Pendulum with Geas as you do not have many icons in your cards anyways.

• If you have them, you could add Molly Maxwell and Yaztaroth to the deck. The tutored draw from Molly will be welcome, and the negative impact of Yaztaroth is rather limited.

Upgrade Path:

Note: I updated the experience cost of each card in this list based on the optimal usage of Arcane Research and Down the Rabbit Hole on 2 cards in between every scenario, for an 8 scenario campaign.
All of these are given in the priority order, but it is important to change the order as you gain experience to ensure you always use the most out of the upgrade bonuses.

Link to the 0xp deck

(View at arkham-starter.com)

Link to the full xp deck

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