Smuggling clues (Cluever Finn - taboo list viable)

About this deck:
This deck is meant to fill the role of a dedicated clue gatherer in a multiplayer campaign. Since I only play on standard difficulty, I haven't tested this deck on hard or expert, and can't tell how viable it is. On standard though, it's able to gather most of the clues your group needs, even in 3- and 4-player games. This deck was made with the recently released list of taboos in mind. It doesn't really bother Finn too much - the only cards in this deck that are affected by the list are Streetwise (which will cost 8 XP instead of 3 - but this deck doesn't need a lot of XP, so it's okay), Quick Thinking (max 1 committed per test - minor nerf) and Elusive (2 XP instead of 0 - we can't start with this in the deck)

Strengths:
• With Lockpicks, you investigate at a base skill of 8, making even the highest shroud locations trivial to investigate. Add Lola, and you're at 10. That works really well with your economy cards like Double or Nothing, Lucky Cigarette Case or Drawing Thin.
• Your naturally high , combined with your free evade action every turn, allow you to move away from the rest of your party. Unlike most Seekers, you don't need a babysitter. Again, this helps your economy with Lone Wolf.
• Your stat distribution allows you to handle most non- treacheries at least to some extent...

Weaknesses:
• ...but treacheries are a big problem for you. Yeah, you're not going to past a lot of willpower tests.
• Limited card pool. You're only allowed to take Rogue cards up to level 3, which prevents you from buying some of the most broken Rogue cards out there.
• Really limited card pool. You only have access to a maximum of five non-Rogue (non-neutral) cards. In theory, you have access to all Illicit cards, but at the time of writing, all of those are Rogue cards anyway. The only card that this allows you to take that you couldn't take normally, is the Chicago Typewriter, which takes both of your precious hand slots.

When should you play this deck?
• When you want to play a cluever, but you don't want to play the same Milan Seeker for the seventeenth time.
• When you want to get clues, but don't like babysitters.
• When you're playing a campaign where you want to evade some enemies, rather than just killing everyone.
• When you're playing with teammates who can cancel treacheries, handle your treacheries, or even get rid of your Frozen in Fear.

When should you avoid playing this deck?
• When you want to play a real Seeker with the Seeker card pool.
• When you're playing a campaign with lots of treacheries.
• When someone else on the team needs Leo De Luca or Lola Santiago

Piloting:

Mulligan:
The most important thing is, you'll want something to put in at least one of your hands. I would still always keep Leo, because it's so good if you can play him on turn 1. A really early Lone Wolf is great too.

Piloting:
Your Lockpicks (and also Fingerprint Kit) exhaust when you use them, so you want to use them at least once per turn, to make use of the massive advantage they provide. Other than that, you're pretty free to do whatever needs to be done - which will be investigating most of the time, to be honest. But you can also play more of your assets, get some resources, or even help your teammates. Some other Seeker is engaged with an enemy, while your Guardian is busy? Just engage and evade. Your Mystic didn't draw their combat/evasion spells yet? Just engage and evade. It doesn't cost you a lot, but could mean 3 extra actions for your Norman, Agnes or Daisy.

Your -ability
It's a good ability, but don't count on it doing something every time you draw it. In my experience, most of the time, when you draw it there's no clue on your location anyway. Maybe I was just unlucky though. That being said, just pretend it's another "0" token, and if you draw it and you get your free clue, it's really good.

Card Choices:

Signature Cards:
• Smuggled Goods: This is just your third copy of Lockpicks. I usually don't use this for anything else, and just commit it to tests. If you have an upcoming boss fight, you can also look for your gun. You can also get your Lockpicks back from your discard pile if you lost them to a Crypt Chill.
• Finn's Trusty .38: While in theory this is a great weapon, especially with an investigator that can evade so easily, I usually don't play this gun at all, for two reasons: 1) you need both hand slots for investigating, and 2) you don't need the gun to handle enemies. It's good to have for emergencies, but don't be afraid to toss this into an important skill test.
• Caught Red-Handed: In my opinion, it's a pretty mild signature weakness. Half of the time it doesn't do anything at all, and just gets shuffled back into your deck, and the other half it moves a couple enemies to your location. If this happens in the upkeep phase it's not a big deal, since they don't immediately attack. Just remember to not draw a card as your last action. Drawing this card can even be helpful. This happened to me recently: I wanted to move to a connecting location where my buddy Norman was engaged with an enemy, to engage and evade and allow Norman to do his stuff. With this card, it saved me the action of actually going there and engaging; the enemy disengaged Norman and moved to me, where I could use my free evade action.

Assets:
• Fingerprint Kit: Three Deductions compressed into one item. It does have an upfront cost of one action and four resources, but in the end it's worth it. Especially if there are some locations, where you don't want to investigate multiple times, like Circuitous Trail, Burned Ruins, Mess Hall or Orne Library. Remember that you can only use it once each turn. You can combo it with Double or Nothing on low to medium shroud locations.
• Flashlight: "Free" clues from 1-2 shroud locations isn't really something Finn needs, but until you get your Lockpicks, Flashlight can help you a lot. Unlike Fingerprint Kit, the Flashlight does not exhaust and you can spend as many charges as you like in a single turn. At least one of those will be replaced by other cards though, as soon as you get your Lockpicks (ie. after the first scenario). You can choose to keep one Flashlight in the deck, to increase your chances of a hand-slot item after your mulligan.
• Lucky Cigarette Case: This will draw you a lot of cards. Aside from the fact that you draw a 0, +1 or Elder Sign every now and then (which probably means that you succeeded by 2+), this will basically trigger every time you use your Lockpicks.
• Leo De Luca: This is one of the advantages of Finn's card pool. Most seekers don't have access to the Louisiana Lion. While certainly expensive at a whopping 6 resources, you have the ability to afford him, with Lone Wolf, Drawing Thin, Crack the Case, Emergency Cache and later Hot Streak at your disposal. The earlier you play him, the more actions he generates.
• Drawing Thin: This is a great economy card for several reasons: 1) with Lockpicks or sometimes even Fingerprint Kit you won't care about the increased difficulty of the test. 2) with 1 , there are some tests that you will fail anyway, so it's kinda "free" to further increase the difficulty. 3) its bonus is flexible - sometimes you need the card draw, but once you have your important assets, you just take the resources every time, to pay for your Streetwise and Lola Santiago.
• Lone Wolf: One of the best economy cards - it will generate lots of resources over the course of a game, especially if you play it early. As mentioned earlier, unlike low-, low- seekers such as Daisy Walker or Norman Withers, who rely on certain cards to handle enemies on their own, you can freely move around alone. You don't need to be protected by your guardians. Play Lone Wolf, run off on your own, and get rich.
• Pickpocketing: You won't evade an enemy every turn in most scenarios, so this is not as good as Drawing Thin or Lucky Cigarette Case. That means it's also not a priority to play. However, if you have some time in a turn (ie. you still have actions left, but all your Lockpicks and Fingerprint Kits are exhausted) play it, and you'll draw a couple of cards with it. Depending on the campaign and how it's going, you can either replace this with its upgraded version, or with other cards altogether.

Events:
• "I'm outta here!": This card has several uses: 1) if you have Charon's Obol, this can save your ass. 2) it has two icons, so it's a slightly worse version of Manual Dexterity (no card draw attached). 3) there are victory locations with a resign action in this game - resigning the "normal" way will drop all your clues on that location and you won't get any VP. If you resign from another location with "I'm outta here!", you're able to get that VP that you normally couldn't.
• "You handle this one!": Save this for nasty willpower treacheries. Don't waste them on enemies. Your best friend against Frozen in Fear is giving it to your buddy.
• Emergency Cache: Leo De Luca, Fingerprint Kit, Lockpicks and Lola Santiago are expensive. This helps to pay for them.
• Crack the Case: Unlike Emergency Cache, this has a bit of variance in it. You can't play it whenever you like, but in return you might get more than three resources out of it, and it doesn't cost an action. You can even give resources to your teammates if they need it more than you. Unfortunately we only have space for one copy.

Skills:
• Double or Nothing: Lockpicks, Flashlight, and/or Streetwise enable you to use Double or Nothing. While it doesn't double the benefits for things like Lucky Cigarette Case, Drawing Thin or Crack the Case (all of which are not effects on successfully passing the skill test), but it will work with Quick Thinking, Perception, Guts. It will also work if one of your teammates commits a Deduction, Eureka! or any other skill that has an effect if the test is successful.
• Guts: As I mentioned in the introduction, you won't pass many tests as Finn. But sometimes, there are important tests that you need to pass, or you can't afford to fail by a large amount of points. You shouldn't value the card draw on this very highly - if you draw a Rotting Remains and you're already high on horror, just commit your Guts. Even if you don't succeed, it might save you 2 horror. The card draw isn't important in that case, you have other means to draw cards.
• Perception: This is in the 0 XP version of the deck, before you have Lockpicks and Lola. I usually replace them at some point, because your should be high enough in most cases.
• Quick Thinking: Like with Double or Nothing, you have several cards that enable you to safely pass tests by 2 or more. Coincidentally, this also combos very well with Double or Nothing (giving you 2 extra actions).
• Unexpected Courage: Not much to say here. It's just a solid card for any situation, either to use defensively on a treachery, or combo it with Quick Thinking and Double or Nothing. Since I've played this game, I never thought "shit, I drew Unexpected Courage, I have no use for that".

Alternatives:
These are some cards I considered, but decided against including them in the deck. Here's why. Let's talk about the splash cards first.
• Dr. Milan Christopher: I didn't forget about the good doctor. I don't include him for various reasons; first of all, you don't need the resources that badly, with Drawing Thin, Hot Streak, Emergency Cache, Crack the Case and Lone Wolf, you're set for money. Secondly, with Leo and Lola you already have two great allies, and you don't really want to buy 2 copies of Charisma. But most importantly, you can only include 5 Survivor/Seeker cards, and Drawing Thin and Fingerprint Kit are just too important. You could play one Milan instead of Crack the Case, but then you'd have to pass on either Leo or Lola (or just buy a second Charisma for that one Milan), but I like Crack the Case because it doesn't cost an action, and doesn't require an upfront cost of 4 resources.
• Other / passive stat boosters (Hawk-Eye Folding Camera, Magnifying Glass, Peter Sylvestre, Track Shoes: They're all good in theory, but they either use up important asset slots, or just aren't impactful enough to justify one or two of the five off-color slots.
• / Economy cards (Rabbit's Foot, Scavenging, Eureka!, Take Heart, Deduction): Additional clues, card draw and resources are always useful, but you're not so desperate that you cut one of our other cards for it.
• Backpack: I had one copy of Backpack in earlier versions of this deck - there are lots of important targets for it to find. However in my experience, it's not really needed. You'll typically find something for your hand slots soon enough, and most of the time I wasn't willing to pay an action and two resources to dig for some cards. It's perfectly fine to play one of these instead of something like a Perception or Pickpocketing though.
• Fine Clothes: Always a viable option, especially in early Carcosa.
• Well Connected, Money Talks: While you generate lots of resources, you like to spend most of them on Streetwise and Lola Santiago.
• Backstab, Cheap Shot, Sneak Attack, all weapons: This deck is designed to be the primary clue getter in multiplayer. You have Finn's Trusty .38 for emergencies, other than that you just evade and get clues. If you want to fill more of a hybrid role instead, feel free to include any of these in the deck.
• Contraband: It can double the assets on your Fingerprint Kit, Flashlight or gun. It's too expensive for what it does. However, if you have a Guardian in your group that will go for big guns, Venturer and Extra Ammunition shenanigans, it's okay to include a Contraband or two.
• Sleight of Hand: Unfortunately, both Lockpicks and Fingerprint Kit exhaust when you use them, so you can't really combo either of those with Sleight of Hand. That leaves Flashlight and Finn's Trusty .38, which means Sleight of Hand just isn't good enough.
• Elusive: With the recently announced list of taboos, this costs 2 XP to include in the deck. If you're not using the (optional!) list, feel free to play 2 copies of Elusive. It's one of the best action compression cards in the game, sometimes giving you the equivalent of 5+ actions on a fast card that costs only 2 resources.

Card Upgrades:

High Priority:
• (optional) 1x Charon's Obol (2 XP): If you're not afraid of dying and continuing with a 0-XP investigator mid-campaign, get the Obol. There are certainly investigators who can pull their weight even with 0 XP, but it's not everyone's cup of tea. You also don't strictly need it, since you're not that XP hungry.
• 2x Lockpicks (1 XP each): Buy two of these after the first scenario, under any circumstances. This is the best item for Finn, and Finn gets the biggest benefit of all investigators for these. You normally only lose charges if you draw an auto-fail, so the 3 charges they come with typically last for the entire game. Like Fingerprint Kit, they exhaust, so you can only use them once per turn (or twice per turn if you're dual-wielding them).
• (optional) 1-2x Adaptable (1 XP each): If you know each scenario of the campaign you're playing, being Adaptable is the key to maximizing VP while minimizing risk. I'm not going to point out which cards should be swapped for each scenario in this guide, so you should only get Adaptable if you already know what you're doing.
• 2x Lola Santiago (3 XP each): This is Finn's greatest ally. She buffs the two stats he really wants, and has a great way to spend resources. She gives essentialy +2 on investigation attempts with Lockpicks, and +1 on most other skill tests you do. If you draw a second copy, you can commit it for 2 . What's not to love about Lola?
• 1x Charisma (3 XP): Get Charisma after Lola. You can get it after the first or second copy, it's not a big difference. But the goal is to have both Leo De Luca and Lola Santiago out at the same time, so there's no way around Charisma.

Medium Priority:
• 1x Streetwise (3 XP; 8 XP if you use the taboo list): Move this to high priority if you don't use the list of taboos. Even at 8 XP, it's still a great card. Especially since the other upgrades aren't that important, if you have everything from the High Priority upgrades above. If you're broke and you have Drawing Thin, you can use Drawing Thin for 2 resources, then use those resources to buff your skill by 3 with Streetwise, giving you essentially a free +1 once per round.
• 2x Emergency Cache (3 XP each): One more resource if you have to play this in the early game, but more importantly, this will refill your Fingerprint Kit (or even Lockpicks if you're very unlucky).
• 1-2x Hot Streak (2 XP each): Unfortunately, Finn is only allowed to have the 2 XP version in his deck. It's still great, because you can never have too many resources, if you have Streetwise and Lola Santiago.
• 1-2x Pay Day (1 XP each): With your free evade action, Leo De Luca, Quick Thinking (maybe even in combination with Double or Nothing) and maybe things like Expedition Journal, you can get 5 or more actions in a turn. Even more, if you already have Ace in the Hole. The only downside is, it doesn't have any icons, so you can't commit it and it might just be an unupgraded Emergency Cache.
• 1-2x Elusive (2 XP each): This only applies if you play with the list of taboos. If you don't, you can start with 2 copies of this in your deck. It's one of the best action compression cards in the game, sometimes giving you the equivalent of 5+ actions on a fast card that costs only 2 resources.

Low Priority:
• 1x Ace in the Hole (6 XP): Luxury upgrade, that will allow for a power turn, probably only once per game.
• 1-2x Sure Gamble (2 XP each): Essentially a Lucky!, that doesn't use up one of your five splash slots. You don't have to reveal a number token for this to work, it can also be a /// with a negative modifier on the scenario card.
• 1-2x Leo De Luca (1 XP each): It saves 1 resource for 1 XP - not the best use of XP, but it's ok if you have nothing else to upgrade.
• 1-2x High Roller (2 XP each): Another way to use resources. It'll boost one skill test per round, but has an upfront cost of 2 resources and an action.
• 1-2x Moxie (1 XP each): This is a card for "that" willpower test you need to pass. Since it is fast, you can keep it in your hand until you need it. You can play this during the skill test you need to pass, then spend all your cash on it. Don't just play it immediately if you draw it, because it might not stick around until it's really needed.
Edit: Like matt88 mentioned in the comments, unfortunately it doesn't work that way. You can play fast assets only during your turn, so you can't play it during skill tests in the mythos phase or during someone else's turn.
• 1-2x Pickpocketing (2 XP each): Optional upgrade for more card draw/resources.
Edit: Update after The Greater Good was released:
• 1-2x Tennessee Sour Mash (3 XP each): I haven't tried it, but this seems like a good upgrade for Finn. The 3 XP upgrade solves all issues I had with the 0 XP version of that card: It no longer costs an action to play (unfortunately, like Moxie you still can only play it during your own turn), gives a solid +3 instead of 2, and its fight action does 2 damage now, meaning it's not completely useless. It's also Illicit so Smuggled Goods can find it. I'm sure I'll try this the next time I play Finn!