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The deck has been refined over a few hard mode runs of sc`s from the first half of circle undone (up to greater good) paired with a few Diana, Minh and Joe decks that ive been playing about with. And a standard mode run paired with a friends Carolyn and Akachi. Plus ofc it is a new iteration of a heavily refined deck that ran on the same principal through Carcossa and parts of Dunwich.

Yorik has had a load of toys since last played him. And since an earlier version of this deck was one of the most fun experiences I've ever had in this game, I thought it about time to see how they all fitted in these days. The biggest change to how this plays is that new survivor economy cards enable moderate clueing options and a ton more Police Badge recursions that were once simply too expensive to run alongside the old combat suite.

The deck is shown here without Trial by Fire as it is as yet to be released and arkhamdb doesnt let you publish cards until after release. For the correct deck simply swap:

• 2x Lucky! 2x Trial by Fire

If you're not comfortable proxying, the deck can still get clues easily enough with Lucky!. Or you can just wait a couple of months for Trial by Fire's release. Scene of the Crime also works fine with On the Hunt to support it.

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SYNOPSIS (Overview)

A fast and flexible Police Badge recursion focused Yorik deck. Several weapons with +2 & +1 damage enable effective damage dealing by taking him to a base of 6, 2 damage per attack from very early game. This is boostable via skill pip commitments for tougher enemies or via Cornered/passive +1 from Beat Cops with xp. The addition of a generous economy suite from Drawing Thin & Take Heart allow this combat advantage to recur seemingly endless Horror and Health soaks and Police Badges and pay for a moderately strong clueing suite between fights.

These Police Badge then enable repeated power turns such as 5 attacks totaling 10 damage, and/or turn long boosts from the recurable Trial by Fire or Will to Survive.

Day to day cluing is facilitated through "Look what I found!" and Flashlight (automatic on 1 or 2 shroud), and Trial by Fire/Take the Initiative/Cornered (for temporary boosts). Any two of these can get clues from up to 4 shroud locations without too much difficulty. With xp Will to Survive and Cornered add to the options an permutations of clue tools available.

Finally Meat Cleaver & Second Wind let us heal off any damage or horror that made its way onto Yorik himself. Direct damage in particular can be an issue in TCU owing to the prevalence of certain Spoiler encounter cards (also a spoiler).

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ENCORE (Upgrades)

Core to the deck (in order of priority):

• 1x Enchanted Blade or Meat Cleaver Timeworn Brand (5) x1 - Consistent no faff 6 & +1 damage.
• 1x Act of Desperation Police Badge (2) x1 - AoD is not as useful after Timeworn Brand, but can still be used on Flashlight/Enchanted Blade.
• 1x Relic Hunter (3) x1 - Police Badge + Cherished Keepsake = "Officer Pewterson", our best friend and ally... but we also wont need to plan around Police Badge spamming vs horror risk.
• 1x Take the Initiative Cornered (2) x1 - Take the Initiative becomes less important after Cornered
• 1x Take the Initiative Police Badge (2) x1 - Yes i know the last one replaced a AoD earlier but we have Cornered now.

Later xp options:

• The other Act of Desperation Cornered (2) - Hey look! The whole AoD/Take the Initiative Cornered/Police Badge thing all balanced out in the end. What a relief!
• The other Enchanted Blade or a Meat Cleaver Timeworn Brand (5). improves odds on seeing it early, but that's a lot of xp for that and you can make do with surrogates while you dig for it with Take Heart/Drawing Thin
• Trial by Fire/Meat Cleaver Will to Survive (3) x2. - You can get away with 1 cleaver once you have draw. You can also get away with just one Will to Survive quite easily.
• Guard Dog Aquinnah (3) or Beat Cop (2). - Beat Cop (2) is quite important on hard for the + as we want to be 4 above skill tests in TCU. Though Aquinnah (3) is a lot of fun and not a lot of decks can get away with using her.
• Vicious Blow Vicious Blow (2) - more damage is more damage.
• Second Wind Alter Fate (3). - See encounter handling

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DETAILED PILOTING

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GRAND OPENING (Mulligan & Early Game)

The Mulligan, Keep:

• 1 weapon: Timeworn Brand > Enchanted Blade > Meat Cleaver
• 1 Police Badge
• Any Drawing Thin or Take Heart.

Muligan anything else in the hope of finding the above. If you got lucky and have a decent number of these already consider keeping clue tools.

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PERFECTING YOUR PITCH ( ability use vs play from hand)

You don't need to play all your assets via the ability. In fact you should expect to play a fair few from hand simply because you want them asap and the opportunities don't come every turn. They come maybe one turn in 2 or 3. This means you will want to save them for Police Badge or recurring soaks as often as possible. This has a few implications:

• Get your first weapon down asap.. Just play it from hand. You need the + damage to get the opportunities in the first place.

• Similarly you want the cash from Drawing Thin to pay for them Unless you have a plan to play it very soon, this is just too good to wait for and well worth the action to play. You will see that value several times over.

• Police Badge has pips. Which means you can commit it to any test to get it into the bin asap. It is a little better at checks, which is worth baring in mind for any encounter cards that stay in play and test to clear at the end of turn like Spolier or Spoiler which can be a massive pain to almost any deck.

• Anything else is board state dependent. Aside from the soaks (Keepsake/Guard Dog) which you usually want late game so they get spent for icons early game, the rest depend very much on whether you think you can use the next for a Police Badge or not. So basically if you are swimming in cash. Notice that if you have the cash to play a Police Badge then it will give you 2 actions one of which can be the action to put a different asset in play. If you pitch everything and anything with a view to recuring them later you will find a lot of them stay in the bin for good.

• Anything discarded by Cornered is available to your ability. Unlike cards committed for the skill pips which sort of sit in limbo outside of your discard pile until the window to use your has passed.

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GOLD DIGGER (Cash & Draw)

Survivor just got rich! Drawing Thin & Take Heart will be paying for almost all of our toys so we`d like to use them as often as possible:

• Drawing Thin triggers before the test not after it: This means you can commit any card you drew to the test. It also means you dont care if you pass the test or not. Crucially since we expect to simply take the damage/horror from various encounter checks (see encounters section), we can just allow these to fail as long as the penalties dont scale with how much you fail by. On cards like TCU Encounter Spoiler just jack the test up high, take it on the chin and get a load of cash. Similarly if the haunted implications are negligible or damage/horror related, just use Drawing Thin and/or Take Heart on an investigate test and accept that you will fail it (keep an eye on the effects too).

• You can use both copies of Drawing Thin in the same test So you only need to fail 1 test a turn to generate 4 resrouces, or 6 resrouces and 2 cards if you threw Take Heart in too.

• Track Shoes let you initiate a test anytime you move, and dont carry the risks that haunted locations do. This is why they are in the deck, and why there is only 1 copy. They are nice to have and compliment the cash engine but not essential. But if you are playing them via a ability, then you arnt wasting that much on the install. In a pinch you can actually use them as bonus moves via Take the Initiative or Cornered ofc and the similarly offers a little encounter protection (see below)

• Cornered cancels out the downside of Drawing Thin. It gives you +2 which exactly negates the +2 test strength allowing your to drop an asset from hand into bin for later in order to to get cash, or cycle your deck looking for something. Note the timing of Cornered allows you to play any assets you pitch this way via your ability (unlike cards committed for their natural pips (see section above).

• You can recur Take Heart Via Resourceful or if needed Ok thats a bit obvious but its worth baring in mind.

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BREAKING A LEG (Combat)

Most here things do what they say on the tin:

• All weapons have been selected to give +2 and +1 damage in order to get to a base of 6 or 3 above test strength for a str 3 enemy. In TCU the chaos bag actually wants us to be 4 above strength hence the recommendation to take Beat Cop (2) in the upgrades section if playing on hard. However we also have a large number of pips available to us and Cornered later on if the cop doesnt show early.

• Early campaign, Act of Desperation can recur Enchanted Blades or Flashlights. The card is discarded before you attack, so if the attack kills the enemy you can recur the thrown item with your effectively reloading it. It even gives you back exactly enough resources to pay for it. Alternatively if you have one Enchanted Blade in the bin and one in hand, you can just pay to put the one in the bin into play over the one in hand once it runs out of charges. Act of Desperation can also be recurred by Resourceful if another weapons hasnt shown yet.

• Dont miss the pips on Act of Desperation. If you have a longer term combat option in play like The Brand or Cleaver, this can be used to land blows. Alternatively just throwing the Brand can be equivalent to +3 higher than using its attack, and can be used while Encumbered by spoiler.

• Burst/Bonus Damage within a given attack is available from Guard Dog/Vicious Blow/Beat Cop and Timeworn Brand's once a game ability.

• But the real damage boosts come from Police Badge. 5 attacks at 2 damage each = 10 damage in a turn if you can land them all (or more often 8 damage if you use an action to Drawing Thin to set up the cash for a replacement Badge ready for next turn). Alternatively you can use the badge to compensate for high enemies by simply attacking over and over until an attack lands. If you miss and they have retaliate, you can even use the Dogs. Just be careful of things that have forced on attack abilities like Spoiler.

• Meat Cleaver is our back up weapon and late game horror healing tool. Whether your heal or self harm with the cleaver depends on the HP of the enemy:

  • 1hp enemies - gain san.
  • 2hp enemies - you break even
  • 3hp Enemies - you break even
  • 4hp Enemies - you lose 1 san

  • Notice that if you use Vicious Blow or another source of 1 damage prior to the final kill, then the effects of this table move down 1 slot (ie you can heal on a 2hp enemy, or break even on a 4).

  • Similarly if you take the horror on an asset (Cherished Keepsake or Beat Cop), then you can use Meat Cleaver to heal horror taken directly on yorik and just recur them later via his if they die. Alternatively this is quite nice for Aquinnah abuse since you care less about the any horror you take using her.

  • Finally you can also just do the first attack with a different weapon and deal the last 1 damage with the cleaver to heal, or you can actually just attack say a 2 hp enemy twice with the cleaver to heal horror on the kill from the second attack, which if you are confident of a hit would be on a par with attacking once for 2 damage the taking 1 action to heal.

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TAKING ON A NEW ROLE (Clues)

Yorik can finally clue reliably from the very start of the campaign! Hes no seeker, but he really can pull his weight when the enemies are all done and buried. How we do it depends on the shroud:

• 2 shroud locations: "Automatic" clues are available via "Look what I found!", Will to Survive or Flashlight. Good odds of success are possible from from Trial by Fire, Take the Initiative or Cornered.

• 3-4 shroud locations: Use 2 different cards from "Look what I found!"/Flashlight/Take the Initiative/Trial by Fire/Cornered. Trial by Fire and Take the Initiative take you to 5, then a further +2 or equivalent from "Look what I found!", Flashlight, or Cornered takes you 4 above a 3 shroud location. Notice that a charge from Flashlight reduces the shroud to 2 making "Look what I found!" a guarantee on anything up to 4 shroud since your skill value is treated as zero if it goes negative. Similarly Will to Survive + any of the tools should be able to guarantee these.

• 5+ shroud locations: These are a little more tricky as they will likely require combining 3 clue tools in the same way a 4 shroud wanted 2 cards, but they are possible. They can only be automatically cleared via Will to Survive & a boost from one of the other set.

There are a few other tricks here:

• Drawing Thin boosts the shroud up 2 places Therefore if you have Flashlight or Cornered in addition to the required tool set for above, you can use Drawing Thin and keep your pass odds static.

• Will to Survive usually pays for itself if you have both copies of Drawing Thin down as you can simply exactly match the test strength. You can also use Resourceful in a Will to Survive turn to get Will to Survive back ready to use again later on.

The other interesting thing to note is that this clue suite works almost irrespective of your current , which means it is viable in other characters like Rita Young, Calvin Wright, Wendy Adams, Silas Bishop, "Ashcan" Pete, or Lola Hayes. Or if you are willing to forgo the Will to Survive, it would also work in Agnes Baker and Preston Fairmont, though arguably preston might want to find a +1 from somewhere (im looking at you Lola Santiago).

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TOUGH CROWD (Encounter Deck Handling)

• Use On the Hunt liberally. Obvious uses include setting up a ability when no enemies are around, setting up Bury Them Deep, or making sure you get that VP enemy out of the deck. Less obvious uses include getting around aloof keyword on enemies, manipulating the order enemies (like Spoiler) come out of the encounter deck, or frankly the fact that this can guarantee you don't draw a particularly bad encounter card at a bad time.

• You have lots of Soak - Just take the hits Guard Dog & Cherished Keepsake can be recurred as needed. If the impact of an encounter card test doesn't scale with the amount failed by, then just take the hit and take the cash via Drawing Thin/Take Heart as described above. Importantly Spoiler doesn't do all that much to your Dogs.

• Dealing with Direct Horror Heal this off with Meat Cleaver if needed. (See combat section).

• Dealing with Direct Damage [CARE TCU ENCOUNTER CARD SPOILERS] Direct damage is a particular issue in TCU due to Spoiler and spoiler. We are using spoiler to fire Drawing Thin and Take Heart off action. Since Guard Dog is also a low priority some damage on yorik himself is inevitable. This becomes quite a big issue if we get hit by a bad token on spoiler or end up with Spolier on you. And of course over a campaign, this will happen a few times just by chance and it is at least better on you than others due to your soak recursion. Second Wind is there to recover this. You rarely need it more than once a game, but dont be afraid to use it anytime you have 2+ damage on you (it draws a card so the action isnt lost). Also remember to recur it via your ability if you get caught short. There are a few alternative options for the same slot:

  • Painkillers - Can be played via to save ability. Then put the horror on Keepsake and/or heal it off with Meat Cleaver. Can be a little slow in practice as those abilities could be better spent on Police Badges. Note that Painkillers don't discard from play automatically when empty, so they are hard to recur. This is the reason i swapped to a 2hp event.

  • Emergency Aid - Can be used in the same way as Second Wind. They're slightly more expensive and lose the card draw in favour of flexibility on timing and option to heal Guard Dog or Beat Cop(2) for a little more damage. This is untested, but don't sound as good on paper.

  • Alter Fate (3) - Upgrade any of the above to this and you can simply take the doom on spoiler and clear it later on. You can even use this on other players. Note this can ofc be used for a lot of other cards too and it can be recurred via Resourceful/ draws.

• Alternatively, If you do need to pass tests, Take the Initiative which has in the mythos phase can put you to 6 or 6 in those early games. or Cornered + Police Badge/Track Shoes can do the same once you have the upgrades by discarding any 1 card.

SHOWTIME! (Power Combos)

Fight or Flight & The Red-Gloved Man are gone in favour of Trial by Fire, but cash and draw are now available making the Police Badge combos highly recurable. Once ive managed to get one of the badges into the bin, i tend to get to fire a Police Badge one turn in two or three. This has numerous advantages listed above, but one that is less obvious is that if you are taking more tests you will likely see more s, giving you a little more recursion. There are a few other notes about the the combo pieces:

• It is possible to have a 7 or 9 action turn via Police Badge if you start with at least one badge in play. This combos with Will to Survive and/or Trial by Fire if you time it well.

• Will to Survive + Trial by Fire also work fine together. How would you like to take 3 clues off a 4/5 shroud location as the parties brawler without needing to draw any tokens?

• 9 Action Turn Achievements! Start your turn with 2 Police Badges in play. Fire both off for a 7 action turn, then kill something to put one of them back in play to be fired off again for a whopping 9 Action turn. Bonus points for using Will to Survive and/or Trial by Fire on the same turn.

IMPROVISATION (Variants):

More combat, less clues:

• drop: "Look what I found!" &/or Flashlight to make space for some options:
  • Rabbit's Foot (3) - if you want more draw
  • "Let me handle this!" - more team support. This can also go over On the Hunt easilly.
  • Dynamite Blast - more burst damage.
  • Old Hunting Rifle (keep at least 1 Act of Desperations). Possibly pick up a Live and Learn if you can make space.
  • .45 Thompson can replace Enchanted Blade or 1x Meat Cleaver if you have dropped the Flashlights since you wont need the hand slot as much.

More Theme:

• swap 1x "Look what I found!"/Flashlight/[Trial by Fire] (/card/05281) Gravedigger's Shovel. because you are Yorik and you should have a shovel. This also enables:

• Shovel throw achievements! Act of Desperation can be used on Gravedigger's Shovel to deal 2 damage and refund the price. This isnt especially effective, but it does allow you to shout "Spadearang!" as your comrades roll their eyes at you. Bonus points if you kill Spoiler by doing so, more bonus points if you Bury Him Deep afterwards, and double those points if you scream "There can be only one!!" across the table as you do so...

The Big Man:

• I dont bring Peter Sylvestre because hes an unnecessary cost. Thats one less Police Badge you can afford. Hes also prone to dying to Spoiler, and since were simply tanking these hits with heals and soaks, you will end up paying for him a few times. That said, he offers to save a few uses relative to the Cherished Keepsake. The question really is just how much horror are you going to take? in my experience not so much as to warnt him over the Officer Pewterson. Certainly its not worth taking him if anyone else has more use for him like if you're paired with Wendy, Rita, Agnes, Carolyn, or Silas.... but if you really must, you can upgrade Cherished Keepsake into Peter Sylvestre (2), then grab an extra Charisma at the expense of 3 to 7 xp you could have spent on some fun toys. Just know that I’m judging you when you do so.

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Anyhow - Thanks for reading!