Fail Engine Agnes

A variant of Agnes using as many Survivor cards and as much of a Fail to succeed engine as I think is feasible. It probably ends up being worse than a more standard Agnes, but it could be a fun gimmick regardless.

Drawing Thin would add a lot, but it's not in my collection. As is, it relies mostly on Take Heart for draw and resources.

Cards

The fewest mystic cards I think I've ever included in a mystic deck. Sword Cane is almost essential in Agnes, enabling you to actually kill things with it and Agnes' ability before you draw into your attack spells, or after to save charges. Shrivelling is the main attack spell. There should be enough horror healing in the deck to be able to deal with the downsides of the levelled version, but you can downgrade it for one less weakness in standalone. Ward is excellent, encounter protection that allows you to take horror in the mythos phase. Fearless is for horror healing. Simple. If draw power turns out to be lacking, Guts could be a good replacement, but that will mean coming a lot closer to death, having to rely on Grimm's and Peter alone.

When cutting down cards for the deck I actually removed Holy Rosary, since the allies give enough static stat boosts and horror soak on their own. That does open the option of playing Agnes' Signature, but since there are only 5 spells in the deck it's only worth doing very early, if you really need to pick up combo pieces. Otherwise, it's just 2 icons.

Cards

Whether the Survivor fail engine and the Mystic idea of substituting every test for your best stat can work well together remains to be seen, but the rest of Agnes' stats being so low at least benefits failing a lot.

The sweet spot for failing with Grimm's Fairy Tales, levelled "Look what I found!" and Dumb Luck is 2-3, which of course Granny Orne lets you hit fairly easily. Out of those cards, Dumb Luck is the most questionable inclusion, but it offers a way of dealing with annoying enemies if you haven't drawn into either of your attacking options, and it can still be used on Sword Cane tests, so I think it's worth trying. I'm also not sure about how effective Grimm's Fairy Tales is, but Agnes can certainly always use horror healing.

Lucky! and Live and Learn are also a part of this package, allowing you to make risky tests while holding them, without really caring about failure.

Granny and Peter are just an excellent pair of -boosting, horror soaking allies.

A Test of Will is excellent in Agnes, turning any dangerous treachery at your location into a will test that's easily passed.

Finally, Resourceful, though its icons are probably worst in Agnes, still allows you to pull back almost any card from your discard pile. Take Heart for more draw and resources, "Look what I found!" if you need more clue acceleration, an unfortunately killed ally. The only problem is when to commit it - but the best possible time is probably on an investigation after Live and Learn, having already got the benefit of the failed roll - likely a "Look what I found!" hoovering up clues on a higher-shroud, adjacent location. There's no benefit to repeating failed evades that had a Dumb Luck, after all, though Agnes' can be high enough to just succeed sometimes. Of course, it can also be committed to a friend's roll.

I decided Oops! was definitely not worth including since it's very bad with regular attacks and Sword Cane and while it allows a bad pull on Shrivelling to succeed, Agnes will generally be attacking with that at 7-9, meaning it only works on the , and the conditions of failure having to be 3 or less mean it would only work on an enemy with a fight of 3, or a 4 with Granny Orne (if she even works in that case, which I'm not sure about). Definitely not worth the cost just for insurance in that narrow a situation.

Neutral Cards

It's just Painkillers. Again, great in Agnes. The only physical damage soak I could find space for, but it also allows her to take horror damage in a phase where it would normally be impossible, since there's always a player window for its use the upkeep and mythos phases. On a particularly good turn you can take horror from an attack in the player phase, then in the enemy phase, painkillers in the upkeep phase and then either use the painkillers again in the mythos phase (the player window happens before the assets ready in the upkeep phase) or Ward a bad treachery for 4 whole damage. Then use a Fearless with a Shrivelling attack to heal half of the horror you took! If the stars align, that's probably a dead boss.

Levelling

A levelled-down version of this deck would probably look pretty similar, perhaps with a Holy Rosary taking the place of Peter Sylvestre until both it and Charisma are affordable. Dumb Luck is probably not worth taking unlevelled, so it can be replaced with a generically good card, maybe Guts or Clairvoyance for dealing with high shroud locations before "Look what I found!" can be upgraded.

The biggest question is whether it's worth taking Arcane Research just for Shrivelling (and Ward of Protection, too, I suppose). It probably isn't, but it makes the spells very expensive.

Any upgrades beyond this would probably just be upgrading Ward of Protection and Lucky!, which aren't really essential at all.

Partners

The deck is flexible enough that there isn't an obvious partner for it, but I don't know if it's reliable enough at gathering clues for solo play. It's good enough at enemy management - if not necessarily killing things until it draws into the big attack spells - that it probably could pair with a Seeker. It might be best as the third leg in a standard Guardian/Seeker team, Agnes' ability allowing you to chip away health from enemies that aren't engaged with you while you fail up as a secondary clue-gatherer to draw into Shrivelling in time for when either the biggest enemy or multiple big-ish enemies show up.