Wendy Fights w/ Card & Coin--Beat Core Solo, Hard Difficulty

After a lot of experimentation, I think this is currently the best way to make Wendy playable on Hard Solo.

The heart of the deck is Rabbit's Foot and Burglary. These two cards have a subtle synergy. With Rabbit's Foot, you have the freedom to take some risks because the first time you fail a skill test each round you get a free card, and cards let Wendy use her special ability.

Put another way, with Rabbit's foot you always want to be doing a couple skill tests a round because the downside for failure is less---especially because if you get a bad icon that has a negative special effect, you can just toss it back using Wendy's special ability. This is where Burglary comes in... when playing with Rabbit's Foot you are always trying to have one or two skill tests a round, and with Burglary you always have a productive thing you can do that uses a skill test. When I play this test, I use burglary almost every turn.

Now, using Burglaryevery turn slows you down a bit---except you will have Leo De Luca giving you a whole extra turn every round. And with Burglary you will have a ton of cash. That is why I call this the "Fight with coins and cards" deck because Wendy has crap basic attack, but you will have piles of resources to use to pump up your attack power, and you will have huge card draw with the rabbit's foot socan use your special ability to protect your bat from skulls and autofails (that break the bat).

And since you are doing a ton of Burglary, Scavenging can be useful as well, especially if it lets you get your Baseball Bat back. (To be honest, I've never had to use it for this, but it is still a reasonable include currently. Every item pulled from the discard pile is one more free draw later, using Wendy's special ability.)

When playing Wendy it is important that you time the playing of her Wendy's Amulet correctly. Try to have a Lucky! and an Emergency Cache in the discard pile---cards you can almost always use, so you get double use of these utility cards after you put the amulet down.

Mulligan hard for Rabbit's Foot, Burglary, Leo De Luca, and Baseball Bat, throw anything else (including Emergency Cache) away. On more advanced scenarios, you can keep Hard Knocks.

Your very first upgrade should be for two Will to Survive s, which work great with Leo De Luca because you have potential for 4 free skill tests instead of 3, and of course it is great if you can get double use of a Will to Survive by playing it and then putting down the Wendy's Amulet to play it again.

Next on the upgrade list are Flare, which let you get Leo De Luca out early (and for just 2 resources) and Close Call, which can replace Sneak Attack.

One last little trick. After you have wendy's amulet down and have put some high-value events at the bottom of your deck---Lucky and Will to Survive in particular---look for opportunities to shuffle your deck! In a multi-player game, this is relatively straightforward, as you can ask your partner to have a Old Book of Lore. But solo you have to look for scenario-specific opportunities. It may be worth an action to use one of the "search the top X cards of your deck for .... then shuffle your deck" location abilities, even if you do not actually have a card of the appropriate type. If you use Flare mid-to-late in the game to bring in an ally after your first one is called out, it will accomplish this goal.

I hate having the Fire Axe in the deck, but I think you need it both to avoid inconsistency issues (pretty embarrassing to get eaten early on simply because you have no weapon) and as a backup in case your bats break, but I've found it to be exceedingly rare that I ever actually have to play the Fire Axe and might consider switching it for something else.... I'd certainly drop it in the multi-player game.