Arkham Chronicles Season 3 Preview: Drafted!

Welcome to another season of Arkham Chronicles! This time, I'm taking you to Dunwich, but it will not be your regular ride. I've referenced him a few times already on the blog; I absolutely like Justin's work at PlayingBoardGames. A little over a week ago, he had a video going over a fan-run friendly Arkham competition called Hunters of the Mythos, and I immediately jumped in.

There are several categories; you can find all the details in the video, from your regular game to a Kukri challenge where the only way to damage enemies is with Kukris. 🫨 It's a bit much for me, if I'm honest. However, I still want to try something new; I registered in the Drafted Multiplayer category. I have never done a draft. This will be fun, I'm sure. 😉 Available for all categories are optional objectives, or, as I like to call them, side quests, as a way to score points. It is a competition after all! I'll be going over these as we march through the campaign. In this preview, I would like to present my very unfortunate decks.

What is a draft deck, you might ask? Rather than choosing cards from your entire collection, you draw a set number of cards available to your investigator, five in this case, pick one of them, and repeat the process until you have accumulated a full deck. I used Arkham Draft for this process; you can freely try it out too.

Note that I had limited choices for my investigators. The organizer randomly picked two pairs of investigators, and I had to choose one in each. That's how I ended up with Zoey and Jim.

Link to the full deck

A Zoey deck should be straightforward, right? That was my reasoning for starting with her. She's a good fighter, has high willpower to resist the Mythos, and her signature ability and necklace usually help with her economy a ton.

Lesson #1 of the draft: The tool really likes to shove these offset cards in your face.

Zoey can have 5 cards from any color; that's a large pool, and usually the last thing I would think about while building her deck. I learned after the draft I could have tweaked the Arkham Draft tool to show me these cards in stages. I didn't check either if it would have been a legal way to build the deck in this contest. All that to say, that's how you end up with Stall for Time, Armageddon and Map the Area in your deck; sometimes you pick the less horrible option, especially when presented with five non-Guardian cards. They are not entirely useless since Zoey has 4 willpower, but I don't feel they will ever be a priority to play.

Lesson #2: There's a chance the combo card you pick early never sees its combo counterpart.

In one of the first rounds, I picked Tinker as the other options were not appealing to me. Not until the 17th round did I see a tool! Phew! I'm not high on Crowbar, exhausting weapons can be limiting, but I have four other one-hand weapons, so it's probably not an issue. Later on, if I upgrade to two-handed weapons, Tinker could be useful to keep getting the odd clue, because, oh geez, Jim is going to need help. More on that later. Overall, six weapons is about what I usually aim for.

The deck might be a little light on assets, but at least Guard Dog, Tetsuo and Wolf Mask are strong cards. Even the Heavy Furs are not too bad.

While all these assets are expansive, I tried to stick to cheap events, especially since it felt like it was all I was being offered. In theory, Heroic Rescue, "Where's the party?" and "Get behind me" should synergize with Zoey's signature ability. The question is more about my playstyle. Each time I've had these cards in my deck, I dumped them mid-campaign as I was simply not using them. Maybe this should be my personal challenge for the campaign: to play more of these utility or defensive events. I usually have no issue with the offensive events like Counterpunch or Monster Slayer. If you wonder why Oops! is in there, it's for the two fist symbols. You can never have enough of those!

Rounding up the deck are a couple of skill cards; there's nothing unusual about them. Where are my Vicious Blow, though? 😢

Overall, I'm confident about this deck. I think it has enough weapons to be effective. If I lean more than usual in my events, it should help. The card synergy is low; there's no super-duper combo, but that's to be expected when drafting.

Link to the full deck

So many assets. To be honest, I don't care about half of them; the joy of drafted decks. I also have no idea how I'm going to pay for them. There are limits as to what Decorated Skull and Robes of Endless Nights can do. I guess assets are the new skills. 😆 Especially true since I only have three skills that are average at best.

This was supposed to be a cluever deck, but I was presented with about everything but tools to get clues for many rounds.

Lesson #3: When you can do everything with your card pool, there's a chance you won't be able to do anything efficiently.

At some point, I thought this would not work. I considered calling a mulligan, but I'll try to make this work with single copies of Rite of Seeking, Eye of Chaos and Read the Signs. Maybe some chaos token manipulations with Olive, Katarina and the Chthnonian Stone will help. It's also the idea behind Living Ink; I'll get all the help I can get in the form of +1 willpower. Customizable cards are subpar when you have to randomize the available upgrades, but I'm willing to risk it.

To mitigate all the singles, I picked Quantum Flux and Scrounge for Supplies. I see them as possible ways of getting back the key cards.

Funnily enough, I don't remember the last time I played a Mystic with Arcane Research and/or Down the Rabbit Hole. While some people swear by them and by In the Thick of It, I prefer not to rely on these very popular cards. Classic decks sound boring to me; I like variety and trying different combos.

I have serious doubts about this deck. It looks like a bunch of random cards with no direction. Collecting all these clues will be hard.

Stay tuned for the campaign. The challenge asks us to play two scenarios per month, so the next two episodes of Arkham Chronicles should be coming up.