Stage Sorcery: Cursed Knowledge

Opening Thoughts

So, I wanted to do something different - I rarely if ever play casters, and when I looked through the various options I found that ol' Dexter Drake offers a significantly different toolkit to everyone else specifically due to his Investigative Ability of discarding controlled assets to help fund new ones of a different name. As such, the deck is built to take full advantage of this by running multiple options of various natures, taking away some consistency in card-draw to exchange it for more options to take advantage of the skill.

The Build

Specifically, this is more of a battle-caster as opposed to a searching one - my personal opinion on Mystics is that they ought to be used as combat characters of a certain type, and the Sword Cane actively helps in this manner by acting as a replacement for cards such as Mists of R'lyeh or Shrivelling. As it takes up a Hand Slot as opposed to an Arcane Slot, the Sword Cane is a very helpful tool.

Obviously running a single copy of the various good combat spells is incredibly useful, so Shrivelling still makes an appearance alongside Wither and the newer Azure Flame, as well as Obfuscation which is a spell variant on the Dodge card. We round off the spell selection with a single copy of Clairvoyance, which is a far better option than its counterpart Rite of Seeking as taking a single point of horror is vastly superior to losing all your actions, even ignoring the factor that it is more likely for you to draw a problematic symbol from the average chaos bag comparative to a positive symbol. My reasoning for this is that, as a battle-caster, you are rarely going to be investigating as hopefully you'll be paired with a potent cluever, and since you have a small amount of horror soak as well you can better afford the horror damage over the lost actions.

All events in the deck are spell-oriented: either based in stopping problematic treachery cards or helping to further commit to the decks strength in Willpower and Willpower alone. Helping with all this are a single copy of the Robes of Endless Night, which are helpful for reducing the costs of Spell Cards, the number of which covers a solid third of the deck, thereby making them rather useful. Again though, a single copy of the Robes are all that is necessary, and could easily be swapped out for another card if deemed necessary.

David Renfield is probably the most broken card in the deck, as you can abuse the life out of his ability before sacrificing him without starting a new agenda to reduce the cost of another asset you want to play. David can easily net you a good 4-8 resources in merely a few turns, which then perfectly sets you up for deploying all your costly assets early, especially allowing you to land your Leo De Luca for a big push in the mid-late part of scenarios where you really want to have multiple actions to do big damage and move to key locations quickly. Meanwhile, combining the Arcane Initiate with the Scroll of Prophecies will allow early-game milling and deck-thinning to get cards you deem to be more useful, such as your various spells (again, a third of the deck) or simply pulling cards and dumping options not particularly worthwhile at the time to you.

Finally, there are the rest of the cards - the various skill cards help to buff either the non- stats on the rare occasion those tests will be attempted, while Guts will obviously help when it is deemed most useful; the two different accessories offer up some more deck thinning in the form of the Crystal Pendulum or simply some nice horror soak and extra in the form of the Holy Rosary, and finally Liquid Courage allows for horror-healing which is honestly the deck's biggest "weakness" for effectively free, with mostly-safe gambling for 2 healed horror every supply used.

Upgrade Options

First off, the two Arcane Research give you a solid base to springboard spell upgrades on the exceptionally cheap; obviously, Shrivelling, Clairvoyance and Azure Flame are all amazingly good first options for spell upgrades, though Ward of Protection is also an interesting and useful pick when you either run low on the EXP chain or once the other cards have been upgraded to a necessary point. Personally, I'd advise upgrading each card seperately to its mid-stage point before considering the "full power" versions, as Lvl 3 Shrivelling and Lvl 3 Azure Flame is better than a Lvl 5 Shrivelling on its own.

Leo De Luca is a very good upgrade for one significant reason - his cheaper cost means that with Dexter's ability he can be played with just 4 resources, which is an absolute steal to add a permanent 4th action slot. Arcane Initiate can be a later pick as it offers an alternative to doom addition, though with the ability to swap him out it is debatable an upgrade. Not to mention adding Charisma which can again add more utility - you don't have to use the second Ally slot after all, but having it available as an option means that you can use David to pull Leo out one turn, and then the next gain more resources with David before ditching him for another card entirely.

Dexter's decent growth options can be enhanced further with Charon's Obol to significantly increase your growth at the expense of making the deck purely Ironman in that you lose, you die.

Do not underestimate a free 2 EXP for spells and then an additional free 2 EXP for any card/s - the type of growth available to Dexter is among the highest potential in the game and it allows you to dip into options that you otherwise wouldn't bother with. However, Charon's should only be taken after the first scenario or not at all - the gains available are too powerful to be left out until later, while without the bonus for as much as the campaign as possible the negative outways the positive as it has a 1-scenario startup to payoff.

If you do take Charon's then adding in various permanents or otherwise more frivolous options does open up - Relic Hunter, Versatile and Adaptable all offer some significantly intriguing options, especially combining the latter two as for 3 EXP you can add various off-colour options to the deck to suit the scenarios in mind. It's again one of those either immediate or not-at-all options with the Versatile-Adaptable combo as it will best pay off earlier rather than later.

Closing Thoughts

Honestly, I just think that Dexter has a more interesting pool of cards comparative to the rest of the Mystics, and he can truly take advantage of his class' great card depth without needing to dip into Sealing to make it all work out. Combine this with his ability to run a fairly decent amount of Rogue cards which combine surprisingly well with Mystic and the newer options available now, and hopefully the Stage Magician shall dazzle and amaze.