Building a Gloria deck with only Revised Core Set and The Drowned City looks a bit iffy on both fighting and clue finding. But the "support" package is surprisingly complete. This starter deck is designed to be in 3~4 players team where you already have dedicated fighters and clue finders. Gloria's task is to make everyone near invincible to variability of the scenario. She can deal burst damage or get critical clues once in a while.

Accolades : Won The Drowned City Standard 4P blind run being the "support"!

2026 Environment Starter Deck : A series of beginner friendly decks using only cards inside the Current Environment used in year 2026. Currently the exact details has not been released yet, this is based on my prediction that Revised Core Set and The Drowned City Investigator Expansion are very likely to be in that environment.

(View at arkham-starter.com)

How to Play

Setup

• Arcane Initiate helps finding stuff as usual. Beware that this deck has no other soaks as it intend to rely on Spectral Shield attached on yourself, so getting Arcane Initiate to find the shield and the 9 charge spell in the first place is critical.
• Combination of Relic Hunter + 1x Eye of Ghatanothoa + 1x Holy Rosary let you have 7 . Use the higher willpower to save amount of tokens you decided to pull on Breath of the Sleeper or Eyes of the Dreamer. Blood of K'n-yan can be used without finding either due to its built in high boost.

Support

I had tons of fun doing this. I say this because people often said Gloria takes out all the fangs and fun out of mythos deck. If you played Carson before and loved it, you might also have good time doing this kind of thing.

• Spectral Shield : The ultimate support card, just stick it to your hard carries and enjoy.
• Eye of Ghatanothoa •• : Gloria's pseudo-signature card, since in Mythos Phase you can see the next card revealed on top of encounter deck before assigning it to someone with her ability each time one by one, now everyone could get the stuff they are good at doing. If they have Spectral Shield they can even get stuff they are bad at doing! Beware that Gloria's Prophecy of the End counters this as you don't know what's behind the Surge at the point of deciding someone to take it.
• Scrying / Scrying ••• : The only thing other than that let you use Gloria's ability to bury and prepare for Psychic Sensitivity pair-up. I found this enough, I don't really need more look-ats with so many more things to do and there's a limit of 3 cards beneath her anyway.
• Hunter's Mark • : Obvious support card for the fighters! You can attempt to use Breath of the Sleeper to finish off 2 HP enemies with the exploding effect but you won't get benefit from +1.
• Deliverance ••• : Your heroic moment. If you have Spectral Shield, some charges, and one of Holy Rosary / Eye of Ghatanothoa setup, you might come out of everything surprisingly unscathed even if you can't cancel anything! And here's a cool bonus, if the first card drawn is Prophecy of the End, the "gain Surge" effect is free since it already has one! Therefore you can make a very cool play together with arrangements from Scrying / Scrying (3).
• Dreams of the Clay • : You should stick to others to increase the chance of committing this and succeed, especially if you have Eye of Ghatanothoa and can arrange a good one for the right person. During Deliverance is of course a lot of opportunities to commit. (But you cannot use to cancel.)
• Enraptured •• : Sometimes you might run into Scrying / Scrying (3) on setup and being reluctant to lose their valuable charges from Spectral Shield. Refilling the charges especially on the Lv. 3 version is very valuable. Even better if others had charges/secrets to refill. You can perform basic investigate on 2 shroud or something to commit this, but it also can be committed to Eyes of the Dreamer due to having 1 .

Clue Finding

• Flashlight : Removed soon for Blood of K'n-yan snake hands but they worked well with her 4 .
• Drawn to the Flame : This is extremely potent when you can see what you're getting with Eye of Ghatanothoa, Ward of Protection/Dreams of the Clay to cancel, or Spectral Shield to tank things.
• Eyes of the Dreamer : It might get 1 clue but pulling just 2 tokens so you don't have to get sometimes equals to auto success if you have Holy Rosary / Eye of Ghatanothoa boosts.

Damage

• Breath of the Sleeper : By pulling more than 1 token, even though the damage is likely 1 you can use it for finishers after others had softened the enemies up. You can potentially deal 2 damage with Hunter's Mark .
• Blood of K'n-yan ••• : This deck has been designed to not use any hand slot after the upgrade tossed away all the Flashlight. With Arcane Initiate's deck thinning, it is likely that you are holding one or two of this bad boy ready for 3 HP enemies.
• Dynamite Blast : Sometimes this is the only solution to things. There might be a really cool play involving Spectral Shield, like trying to bomb yourself and able to take all those AoO since they are hit by hit and you can shield each time. The bomb itself could be shielded from 3 to 2 too. Eye of Ghatanothoa has 3 health soak by the way.

What are those extra cards?

I didn't expect to get here, but The Drowned City campaign unexpectedly giving away XPs like candies so...

• Eldritch Brand ••••• : Is added to brand the 1x Breath of the Sleeper remaining in the deck. 10 XP is expensive and might look stupid to brand a Lv. 0 card like this, but it makes any Spectral Shield found instantly ready to go with 9 charges, moreover you can hard mulligan for either Eye of Ghatanothoa or Holy Rosary which will use up your 2 remaining resources exactly. Also I like that I can still keep 2x Eyes of the Dreamer in the deck for refills, as the brand will force that spell to only have 1 copy.
• Emergency Cache •• : The draw will smooth out any rough edges of not getting Arcane Initiate. Drawing into Dynamite Blast complete with the resources to use it is pretty good too.
• Transfiguration •• : I add this because it can be committed like Guts and looks funny. Basically inside this card pool, I'd transform into Wendy Adams and use the redraw token to became even more invincible on treacheries. Or you can become Parallel Agnes Baker to recycle those juicy Blood of K'n-yan. (Beware of the lowered Sanity!)