Infinite Dreams of Sled Dogs - a HungryColquhoun deck

Even without the full combo, this deck concept looks pretty cool. Using the dogs as fodder for DES and the occasional emergency soak is a fun idea. As per a potential taboo, I think mutating DES would be the way to do it. All of the Seeker/Splash infinite decks I've seen rely on DES as a way to thin the deck. If it had a hard +2 max hand size (or at least not what it currently has), it would still fit in Big Hand decks without enabling infinites (or at least, not as easily).

Honestly Working a hunch is a key part of a lot of infinites in being able to get clues. Anything thats fast and gains clues should just be limit once per round.

@gByakko Thanks! Ursula is well known for her ability to rip through scenarios, so I guess this takes it to the nth degree. On DES, yeah I think this would be the most easy one to target for a taboo - probably +5 hand size would be fairer as keeping cards in your hand unused is a bit of penalty as it stands. Either that or you could taboo how it interacts with myriad cards, e.g. it makes one additional copy in your hand not count towards deck size - or something like that. I think a big nerf would be quite harsh, as it's a key tool for big hand decks generally.

@Rolandironfist Thanks for the comment. Personally I think it's a slippery slope to limit uses of Working a Hunch per round, as decks which are going infinite but will reshuffle their decks should have the option to play it more than once if they draw it to make the effort worthwhile. There's also other legit ways you can recur this (e.g. Shrine of the Moirai played by Darrell Simmons or just by another investigator as anyone can activate it) that would get punished if you put a limit on it directly. I would taboo elsewhere because of this, likely the easiest way to correct infinite would be to limit the amount of actions in a turn (fast or otherwise) that you can have - however this would be tedious to keep track of so it would be inelegant. It's definitely hard to get right!

@Rolandironfist I meant "aren't going infinite", fast typing in the morning before work...

On the taboo discussion: Why not add a rule that states going through your deck twice in one round will make you insane? Seems fitting enough..

@Weges Thanks for the comment. I think the main reason to keep tabooing infinite play is if it can bring conflict to gaming groups (where one character is playing infinite, and the other 3 are playing normal, and they don't know each other well enough to be upfront about it).

Otherwise, it's easy enough to self-moderate, and it still doesn't guarantee an automatic win; in playtesting this in Dream-Eaters campaign A, the randomly generated boss at the end was 18 health dealing two damage and horror per hit (I think it was the worst possible combination, and difficult as balls for two-player). So, while it makes things easier, depending on the campaign it doesn't mean guaranteed victory as you'd think it might do.

I think I'll still play infinite from time to time, but I have the self-control to not play infinite as well. As it is a playstyle that people are interested in, what I was looking for here was a deck that does that play-style decently while keeping XP costs of critical upgrades low - which I think this accomplishes very well.

Looks like a fun deck to try. When you had Chronophobia, how did you avoid drawing that every turn and blowing two actions per turn? Did you leave it on the board and soak it somehow? It seems like drawing your weakness every turn makes this potentially a tricky deck, depending on what random weakness you end up with.

@jgslc Yeah it was decent, this was my first time trying infinite as mentioned so I was surprised how well it worked!

And Chronophobia is direct horror so there is no way to soak it unfortunately! I would keep it in play for as long as was feasible (i.e. not activate the discard) as Scientific Theory can soak other non-direct sources of horror, but it does eat away at you and it was a very bad weakness to randomly draw (but I wanted to stick with it to appropriately stress-test the deck). I would say its only blessing is that it can stay in play, as when you're going infinite you'll rely on Cryptic Research for draw and so weaknesses that become one of the cards in a 3 card deck are no good (the majority of weaknesses do stay in play through).

If you're really in a bind with weaknesses like that you can choose to un-infinite yourself - commit a lot of cards from your hand to get a fat discard pile (and so bigger deck in the next cycle), and just don't use your card draw. Ursula is quite good with her free investigate anyway, and Eon Chart plus Cryptographic Cipher also can give you a lot to do in a turn.

I guess with similar bad weaknesses my advice would be to push your luck as much as you're able with going infinite, but better still keep your fingers crossed when drawing a weakness and hope to get Nihilism instead!

It seems to me this deck is dramatically stronger if you random into a basic weakness that goes into play. Like a Chronophobia would be delightful, while an Overzealous would be brutal.

Which I like the rule playingboardgames has suggested that you random your basic weakness before deckbuilding, not after.

It would be clunky, but a general rule that any particular card can only be played at most 2 times per round per player would likely deal with all infinite combos, even if they didn't involve cycling the deck, but would still allow these decks to be pretty powerful since they could run a couple of full cycles each round (like with this deck, you'd still be able to play 4 cryptic researches / round, which seems good).

Just saw you had Chronophobia, confused why this was tricky. Isn't the point of going infinite that you can get loads done each turn, so don't have to deal with hardly any end of turns / encounter draws?

@camipco I assume it gets tricky because it is direct horror. You can't leave it in play too many times before that becomes a problem. I haven't played this yet, but I assume that even on infinite you can't afford to lose two actions per turn very often. Then again, maybe I'm wrong, which is why it is called infinite...

@camipco For your first comment, yes all infinite decks are quite weakness dependent (and Overzealous would be deadly!). Deck building after weakness draw works, but takes a lot of time - I like to have decks and upgrade routes planned before I attempt a campaign to reduce downtime (even if you deviate from an upgrade path, it's still easier than going completely on the fly). If you're keen to house rule against infinite play then 2 plays per round per player per copy in your deck sounds like a reasonable fix - it may be hard to keep track of as a further rules overhead though.

On being confused why this is tricky for your second comment, you're forgetting that scenarios themselves will put in road blocks that stop you causally blitzing through - e.g. only advancing Acts while all investigators are on the same location in multiplayer or at the end of the round (or in the last scenario of Dream Eaters A, doing obscure tests on locations to progress - only one of which was intellect - and needing specific circumstances to allow you to do the tests in the first place). Plus there's limits on what this deck can do in terms of enemy control if swamped, which this was at various points playing 2 player. Infinite does still take a few turns to set up as well, while this does it faster there's no deck which is going to go infinite turn 1.

While it's easy to theorise why a weakness wouldn't be a problem, it's much different putting it into practice. Generally I would say while going infinite is an easier button, there's no easy button in Arkham LCG!

@HungryColquhoun

Appreciate the thorough reply.

I hear you about wanting to plan your decks and avoid downtime. Changing just a card or two after drawing a weakness would be nice, although of course that can always be done after the first scenario without house rules. In the case of Chronophobia, I wonder if Idol of Xanatos would do the job (with Relic Hunter), and has the added bonus of the style points for being a non-seeker Relic. Or, less cute, just a copy of Logical Reasoning.

True about the road blocks, although it is a rare scenario that has more than a handful of these. I do get that this deck doesn't just neutralize Chronophobia. However, dealing with Chronophobia with this list still seems preferable to either this list with any non-trivial weakness that doesn't go into play, or to Chronophobia in a regular Ursula deck that can't hunch and shortcut around multiple locations and clue stacks in a turn.

@camipco I like to be thorough - always good to have in-depth discussions about the game and deck building!

Yeah both Idol of Xanatos and Logical Reasoning would be good solutions. As you say I suppose the rules do already have an avenue for dealing with this in that you could just spend XP to swap in level 0 cards to deal with your weakness, but I don't think most players want to do that! I think whatever works best for people and allows them to enjoy the game is the right approach, as always.

And yeah definitely Chronophobia is much better than things like Overzealous, but arguably quite a bit worse than other persistent weaknesses like Nihilism, Atychiphobia, Haunted or Hypochondria. Equally Drawing the Sign likely ruins this deck as a persistent weakness (I'd have to math out the drop in max hand size vs. the limits of card draw per turn to be sure!), so there are persistent ones that are worse than Chronophobia too.

I would say even with a bad weakness like Overzealous, infinite decks are designed to do a lot with few actions so this deck still has plenty without going infinite - the tempo is still very strong. I guess that's probably what makes them an easier archetype once people get the hang of it, because the action economy is always resilient regardless of what gets thrown at you.

I’m about halfway through TSK with this and having somewhat mixed results. It is awesome towards the end of each scenario when I’m close to infinite, but it is often too little too late because early in the scenario you’re always caught in a catch 22 of failing tests or having to toss cards for pips which then fattens the discard. The high shroud values in TSK make this tricky. Upgrading Scientific Theory might help.

@jgslc I haven't played this one more than a few scenarios, but in general with decks like this it's often a good strategy to invest more of your early actions in setting up than you normally would. Of course, there's only so much you can avoid if the encounter deck is throwing stuff at you. Your events other than Cryptic Research especially are often better thrown at encounter tests than they are played until you start cycling.