Kōhaku Narukami | The Blursed Folklorist 2.0

"This might be both the best and worst thing I've ever read." - Kōhaku, Probably

Kōhaku Narukami is a new investigator being added in The Feast of Hemlock Vale expansion. He boasts a solid 4/4 /3/1 statline, which means we can basically do whatever we want to unless that test involves . This man is a folklorist, not a runner. His high stat will also let us pretty easily investigate for clues, especially once we get Flashlight in play.

Kōhaku's ability allows you to add either a blessed or cursed token to the chaos bag (whichever has less in the bag) at the start of each of your turns or to remove 2 blessed and cursed tokens to gain an extra action. This ability is powerful enough that it's worth building around (who can say no to the potential of 33% more actions in a game?). As such, this deck looks to push this into overdrive to give us as many turns with an additional action as possible, while still having enough tools to deal with enemies and gather clues as needed. This is very much a flex setup and is designed for use in parties that either have other flexes or already have a designated fighter and cluever.

Mulligan Tips:

Ideally, you're looking for the following cards (in priority order) in your starting hand:

• Tempt Fate | Tempt Fate allows us to take the second turn and dump a ton of blessed and cursed tokens into the chaos bag during one of our teammates turns. This allows for a quick boost in our usefulness and can give us a first round additional action if the need arises.
• Faustian Bargain | More curse tokens and resource generation. This card will help us combo into the next card we're looking for or can provide teammates with additional resources to rolling if you get unlucky in your initial draw.
• Eye of Chaos | This is our investigating bread and butter. Combo this with Faustian Bargain on turn one to get it into play early.

The next cards are ones that can be nice to have early on, but aren't cards you're hard mulliganing for.

• Priest of Two Faiths | Soak and Blessed/Cursed Tokens. My encounter deck luck has been awful in testing so having this early on has saved my life a few times.
• Living Ink | Early Bonus stats is never a bad thing. Since we're relying more on Eye of Chaos to investigate than normal tests, we're taking +1 over +1 as our first icon. This will get remedied as we get more experience.

Core Upgrades:

• Alchemical Transmutation -> Earthly Serenity (1) |1 Exp Total| Healing is going to be really important as a 1 of in case we get some bad draws. Through my testing, we had more than enough resources with Faustian Bargain and Voice of Ra, so this card was kind of overkill. Earthly Serenity can also have its charges restored via killing enemies with Wicked Athame.
• 1x Holy Rosary -> Priest of Two Faiths (1) |2 Exp Total| Priest of Two Faiths provides us with incredibly cheap soak as well as blessed and cursed token generation. Adding a second copy makes drawing him more consistent.
• Living Ink +> Macabre Depiction (3) |5 Exp Total| This upgrade for Living Ink allows us to get charges back when we reveal a chaos token with a symbol on it. We'll be revealing a lot of those so this gives Living Ink nearly 100% uptime.

These upgrades should get you running reasonably well in the flex role. More detailed upgrade paths are listed below.

Other Cards:

Some optional cards to include in the deck, depending on which scenario you're playing:

• Cat Mask | This card has a lot of good uses for Kōhaku and should be included instead of Alchemical Transmutation in scenarios that include the Dark Cult encounter set, have a lot of doom being placed on cards, or you are playing with Amina Zidane.
• Scrimshaw Charm | Some alternative resource generation that can be swapped in for Voice of Ra if you find it to be too inconsistent. This takes up the accessory slot, which is already pretty hotly contested in this deck, so it won't be as reasonable of a pickup until you've already grabbed Occult Reliquary.

Upgrade Path:

(View at arkham-starter.com)

This deck is still a work in progress, but this version will be what I'll be going into the Hemlock Vale release with. If I find cards that fit better (either in the unannounced cards from the set or if the new campaign requires certain cards to effectively deal with encounters), I'll make sure to update the guide and provide a changelog in the new version.

Change Log:

• 2.1 | Updated the upgrade path section to add in 2 copies of Fey. After some discussion with Valentin1331, this card makes loads of sense in the deck and can easily be slotted in in place of Voice of Ra since we already have plenty of resource generation with Blood-Rite and Faustian Bargain.