Joe Diamond puts things together and locates the famed Dial of Aberration using his inspiration and a curious camera !

• I've never found a Joe Diamond deck that worked for me. Most options I've seen around here are either fast cycle decks that I'm not fond of, or decks that stack multiple costly assets that don't fit my play-style either. Overall, it always felt like I was either better off playing Roland Banks if trying to leverage his , or a different if I wasn't.

• Enter Dial of Ancients. Finally, a weapon that his brethren can't get a hold of. An infinite, 2 damage weapon with token manipulation built in ! And what's better than 1 relic wielding detective ? Two Relic wielding detectives !

• With the new dial as the deck's centrepiece, I wanted to experiment with the rest of the "Token Manipulation" package from the Drowned City : Oculus Mortuum for fast clues, Correlate All Its Contents as a new hunch to reload the Dial, and Artistic Inspiration to change the test results rather than the token itself.

• Alternate Title : D-Al Joe

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• Overview

• It Belongs in A Museum

• Shoggoths ! Why Did it Have to be Shoggoths !

• I've Got a Bad Feeling About This

• Other Options / Omissions

• Upgrade Path

• Conclusion

• The Deck's centrepiece is the new Dial of Aberration, which offers an unlimited amount of 2 damage attacks (or 1 damage evades...).

  • It leaves Joe's hands free for the deck's Tool assets (just like his signature Detective's Colt 1911s).

  • It is a Relic, which allows it do deal with several campaign-specific enemies where other weapons would fail to do anything: (Spoilers).

• Of course, this card has "Limit 1 per deck", so we need to have some way to find it early. Given how important this one card is, there are no half-measures like Dr. Elli Horowitz or Backpack(2) : Consistency has a price, and 10 experience is price for 2 copies of No Stone Unturned(5), which are not placed in the hunch deck to maximise the odds to find it as early as possible.

  • 1 copy of Astounding Revelation is in the deck to offset their resource cost and thin out the deck.

The next thing to do is to ensure Joe Diamond's is high enough to successfully fight.

• The first thing is obviously the Dial of Ancients's ability to redraw tokens and significantly improve the odds of success.

  • Note that this ability is used reactively (after you pull the token), that i can cancel the , and that you may use it multiple times per skill test.
  • Thanks to Correlate All Its Contents lurking in the Hunch Deck, you can hope for anywhere between 5-8 charges over the course of the game.

• Artistic Inspiration is a new favorite of mine. Turning any card into a half Lucky! is huge value to ensure successful skill tests. The fact that it applies to any skill means this also helps with basic Investigate Actions, treacheries, or even evades (more on that in a bit). Finally, this helps to get full value out of Correlate All Its Contents.

• Reliable is an excellent card to empower Dial of Ancients, which will last for the entire game.

  • The boost when fighting is obviously what the card is for, but don't overlook the fact that it will also increase your while using the Dial's Evade Action. With 2 Reliable and Artistic Inspiration, you're testing at around 4-5 (remember that you can still re-roll your tokens), which may allow you to turn off Retaliate, or deal a final point of damage to an enemy whose fight is higher than its evade.

• Ice Pick is a card I have always used as a stepping stone to Ice Pick(3) and Scavenging shenanigans, and I'm glad I finally found a deck where I was very happy to have this in my deck the entire way. The 1/ turn boost (alongside cheap cost) is the main draw, but increasing for investigate actions during downtime is valuable as well.

• Finally, we have a fairly standard Practice Makes Perfect package : Overpower and Plan of Action for card draw, Vicious Blow for additional damage, Take the Initiative for encounter protection and Analysis for another opportunity to re-roll an important skill test.

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• Oculus Mortuum is a fascinating card to try and build around : At its best, it generates one testless, actionless clue every two turns !

  • To store evidence, we have the Dial of Ancients's ability, two Correlate All Its Contents (which also adds more charges to the dial for more evidence later), one Uncanny Specimen and one Analysis (or 2 if drawn with Practice Makes Perfect).
  • To trigger the second reaction, Toe to Toe provides a testless attack, while Dodge allows us to negate the drawback altogether. With more experience, Guard Dog can trigger the attack and throw in extra damage as a bonus.

• For encounter survival, I find that the best option for Joe Diamond is to take things on the chin rather than try to beat the encounter deck. This is why we have Dr. William T. Maleson for cost efficient soak and "I've had worse…" to get additional survivability and resources in one sweet package.

• Well Prepared, Dream Diary : Other sources of skill boost that can be used for a variety of purposes. I went for Ice Pick for the sake of trying something new, and for its extremely cheap cost, something common across many of my decks.

• Lab Coat : Boosts (sort of) skill tests made using the dial. It was a toss up between this card and Ice Pick, and I went with the latter for the ability to use it to investigate, even though the coat is probably better if the goal is solely to successfully attack using Dial of Ancients, with the additional soak being helpful to tank an extra hit and get an extra clue from Oculus Mortuum it the final stages in the scenario.

• Michael Leigh : One of my Favorite cards, right at home with this investigator and in this deck. I decided it just costs too much experience alongside the rest of the deck to realistically put together in a campaign, and went with Dr. William T. Maleson in the early campaign and Guard Dog for its synergy with Oculus Mortuum with more experience.

Link to the level 0 deck

• To nobody's surprise, the deck built around a 4 experience card is very different at level 0. This deck is not that great, with Oculus Mortuum being basically useless and relegated to Artistic Inspiration fodder until important upgrades.

• The Dial of Ancients requires successful evasions to decipher it, something Joe Diamond is really bad at. This deck really wants a strong evader to pair with in order to help identify it as early as possible.

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(View at arkham-starter.com)

• This deck was a lot of fun to build and to play (through FOHV, on standard 3P), and i'm glad i finally cracked the case of Joe Diamond and found a build for him that I've really enjoyed.

• Dial of Ancients is such a cool card that is unfortunately difficult to make work with the stats that most seekers have. has gotten better at evading, but the additional points of damage isn't really that useful if you plan on evading unless you are doing very specific (Pairing it with Gray's Anatomy does sound cool though).

• Oculus Mortuum seemed right at home in Joe Diamond given some of its most iconic cards (Working a Hunch and Scene of the Crime) gather testless clues for him already. The token manipulation thing was a bit tricky to make work, but I managed to get 3-4 clues out of it on a few occasions.