"That's No Trumpet"

This all started after I saw how people were reacting to the .35 Winchester, and I thought everyone was missing something with a decent bit of utility. So I built a deck to use the darn thing.

The Gun Itself

Let's take a look at the .35 Winchester. 5 ammo, +2 , +2 damage, and it costs 4 resources, 0 XP, and 2 hand slots? That would be the most unbalanced weapon ever printed in the history of the Arkham Horror. So of course there's a downside: the +2 damage only happens when you pull the , +1, or 0 from the chaos bag, and it takes both of your hand slots. So the question then becomes, how do I make the hand slot issue not matter (or at least not matter as much) and have the chaos bag come up , +1, or 0 as often as possible? And for that, we need a Mystic.

A Gun for Mystics

Mystics use spells for most everything they do, which leave their hand slots remarkably empty. Furthermore, the .35 Winchester covers an actual problem Mystics have: the scarcity of Shrivelling charges. Until Wither came out, Shrivelling was the only weapon Mystics had, and using both at the same time eats up both of your spell slots. Using the .35 Winchester on odd health enemies lets us save our Shrivelling charges, instead of blowing them to deal that last 1 point of damage. Additionally, Mystics are the only class with a more than minuscule amount of chaos bag manipulation. Guardians have "Eat lead!"; Survivors have Against All Odds, and that's pretty much it. Mystics have a little more than that. So, since the .35 Winchester both serves a useful function for Mystics and doesn't completely hamstring the deck, we're using a mystic.

Securing the Bag

We now have to solve the perennial problem of Arkham Horror player: how to get the chaos bag to give us the tokens we want. Fortunately, we have a few options. Premonition lets us pull a token before we take the test so we can know ahead of time if using our rifle is a good idea, or if we should do something else. The Chthonian Stone removes a token that we don't want to draw from the bag, thereby increasing the chances of us drawing a , +1, or 0 (it also means we have one fewer , , or in the bag, which is always nice). However, Olive McBride is the undisputed queen of helping us draw the right tokens. As long as 1 of the 3 tokens she draws is a , +1, or 0, we get our +2 damage.

What about Jim Culver?

Jim Culver is one of three investigators who can use both the .35 Winchester and have access to the Mystic card pool (the other two being Diana Stanley and Carolyn Fern), and he offers us some serious utility. His passive ability treats all as 0, which sadly doesn't help with the .35 Winchester, but it does make Olive McBride less risky. His 5 flex slots are amazing, as they let us play Dr. Elli Horowitz, who basically gives us an extra hand slot to play Jim's Trumpet or The Chthonian Stone.

All That Other Stuff

Holy Rosary is there to buff Jim's cause it's a little low for a mystic. Alchemical Transmutation, Forbidden Knowledge, and Emergency Cache are there to help pay for everything. Calling in Favors is there in case Elli loses her relic or fails to find one in the first place, or Olive is in play but you don't have anything that cares about what tokens you pull. Quantum Flux is a strange bit of recursion. A lot of the items we want to recur, we want to put on Elli, which means they need to be in our deck, not in our hand. Quantum Flux gets them there. Drawing Thin, Read the Signs, and Ward of Protection are flex slots, I picked them for the utility, but you can put in something else if it seems like a better option for you.

Upgrading

The deck really wants to have both Olive and Elli in play at the same time, so Charisma is really useful. Beyond that, we have a bunch of options. Upgrading Shrivelling and [Rite of Seeking}(/card/02233) are obvious choices, but long time Jim favorite Song of the Dead is also on the menu. Also, all of the stuff that we use to try to break the .35 Winchester also works on Song of the Dead. Speaking of chaos bag manipulation, Grotesque Statue is great for that, and another reason to keep Dr. Elli around. If you think you can afford it, Protective Incantation helps remove unpleasant tokens from the chaos bag. Seal of the Seventh Sign takes out one very particular bad token.

This isn't the most serious deck in the world, but I wanted to find a home for the .35 Winchester, and this looked like it to me. Let me know what you think.