Card-Counting Urchin

This deck is designed as a standalone deck but can be easily modified as a 'mid-tier' goal for campaign play.

With 4 and 4 Wendy is a sturdy investigator who can weather most treacheries and avoid most enemies from turn 1. Her ability further reinforces this by allowing her to mulligan out of perilous situations at the cost of cards in hand. In trade, Wendy's is a passable 3 and her a dismal 1 which makes it difficult for her to contribute to a scenario right away.

This deck leverages Wendy's strengths to power several interlocked engines that will allow her to boost generic tests while shifting resources around in a self-sustaining loop. It is, natural to the amount of green you see before you, a succeed-by-two archetype.

This is the simplest engine and your bread and butter. It is bootstrapped by Hot Streak, fueled by Lone Wolf, and perpetuated by High Roller. "Watch this!" with potential Double or Nothing can be used to escalate to perilous heights of excess but make sure to always have a few cards in hand so that you may to any particularly terrible token draws. No gambler worth their salt bets everything unless they have an ace up their sleeve, after all. Money can then be used to pump Scrapper for tests (or god forbid ) or to buy you out of failures with Lucky Dice (though this is expensive, don't run yourself below High Roller threshold because you're greedy)

Slot Lucky Cigarette Case into your accessory slot and look for as many reasons to take low tests as possible. This will get you additional draw, which means more pieces of your engine, more skill cards, or more fodder for your . In turn merely having a full hand allows you to protect your investments in High Roller and Lucky Dice, perpetuating your money engine.

Cards are generally speaking more valuable to you than money (if less flexible). They regenerate slower and buy you more re-draws from the token pool. Nonetheless you need to be cautious, cards can run out in a way that resources do not (especially in a fast engine deck like this one). In particular Abandoned and Alone can be a nasty weakness and one you should always have in mind. This brings us to our final section:

This is by and large a supplement to the Card engine. Scavenging is effectively an additional copy of Lucky Cigarette Case, albeit one that draws from a highly constrained pool from your discard.

The rules here are a lot more complicated and contextual, however. Leather Coat and Cherished Keepsake in particular are important extensions of your health pool. Many dangerous tests like Grasping Hands can be willingly forfeited if you know you'll just have the coat back momentarily. Wendy's Amulet is also a good target for recursion as it has nice icons, though for various reasons it's probably still better to just use it as an additional card for Wendy's .

Most importantly though it buys you some protection from Abandoned and Alone. This is one of those cards that usually isn't terribly threatening, but can blindside you if it is deep in your deck. This archetype hemorrhages cards into the discard and if you lose 20 cards sniped by AaA right before you reshuffle this can mean deadly direct-horror every couple of turns. Playing this deck means always being aware of where this weakness is, and playing your discard appropriately. Keep items out of your discard until it shows up, that you may bury AaA if it does this.

Quick Thinking works well with the win by 2 archetype, Leo De Luca is just a good card. Leverage these actions to either do useful things or replenish depleted cards and resources.

Say you're not doing standalone, you may want to know what cards can be sacrificed going forwards. In this case I think your top four candidates are the following:

1x Leather Coat

1x Cherished Keepsake

2x Unexpected Courage

just because you probably don't need as much health/sanity/items as 2x each of the survivor cards and UE does nothing but boost by two, which Wendy's ability is more efficient at for higher difficulties (rendering this card effectively blank). Your first priority after these upgrades is unconditionally 1x copy of Relic Hunter so you can get Wendy's amulet or just smoke two cigarette cases at once. Otherwise, good targets for upgrade would probably be Pay Day as it can rival Hot Streak for money, or Will to Survive though make sure to use that opportunity to guarantee you get cards and money out of any tests taken. Otherwise I'm not sure you even would want to upgrade from here. There aren't too many more level 2+ rogue cards that help this archetype out, and the Survivor upgrade pool is well... unhealthy to say the least.

away from them.

away from them but be about it.

you should have more than enough actions to stay one step ahead of enemies. Biggest real concern is killing cultists, and for that you have Scrapper, but you can insert a more aggressive option if you want to. Just keep in mind that those won't scale as well against higher health monsters, so you should tailor this decision to the scenario you're going against (or Adaptable it if in campaign).

Edit: final oversight. Some of you probably noticed that I didn't account for Cherished keepsake's amulet slot. This increases the priority of Relic Hunter even further, which means you may have to ditch a copy of Hot Streak and upgraded LdL to make that cut.