An Attempt At Core Agnes

Here's my attempt at making a reasonable two core Agnes deck.

So here is my attempt at a reasonable two core Agnes deck. I'm not going to lie. Agnes is the hardest investigator to build and pilot. Way harder than Daisy. This mainly stems from the fact that Agnes' strength is Willpower. Everything else in her stat line is mediocre to poor. Willpower is great for avoiding treacheries and casting spells, but those uses have precursors. She is the poorest investigator in the game and that's an extremely important skill considering gather clues is how you advance the act deck. Her card ability while very powerful is also tricky to use sometimes. Ultimately to make her work the way she wants to be played requires quite a few pieces in hand. That said once those pieces are assembled she can be a true terror, but until then it can be a struggle.

So how do we make this work. Well we just do our best with what the core gives us and hope for the best.

We start with her bad intelligence. I've gone heavy on Intelligence icon support to try and balance her out. In addition I've included both Look What I Found! and Drawn To The Flames to help investigate in challenging situations. Also I've given her a Flashlight to give her the best possible help in this area. Arcane Studies was included for the intelligence boosting primarily so that's a valid end game option.

Taking Flashlight means no Baseball Bat. Baseball Bat would make her a decent fighter, but if we get her combo pieces in place she wants to be a spell caster anyway so the weapons would be redundant. Also a 2 handed weapon will be a problem when we buy Book Of Shadows with her experience and that should be our priority. Since we can't use Baseball Bat I've chosen to include Knife to hold Agnes over until she can protect herself with her awesome Willpower.

So the rest of her deck is in service of her spell casting ability. Agnes needs to see Scrying or Shrivelling as soon as possible. That will help her navigate the encounter deck more easily. I chose obviously Arcane Initiate as the ally to help make that more consistent, but still you are going to have a stalling start sometimes. Once more offensive spells are introduced this will be less of a problem because we can up the spell density in her deck the same way we do with weapons in a guardian deck. Forbidden Knowledge at first glance seems like a horrible card, but in Agnes it is amazing. You can basically just spend your Sanity to ping down enemies with Agnes, which is great when you are in trouble. All this spell casting can be taxing to your sanity so Fearless was added, which is Agnes' only way to recover her Sanity.

Agnes is bad at Evading enemies as well so we really would like to see Scrying early to preview and reorder the encounter deck. When that isn't possible Blinding Light is our get out of jail free card. Ward Of Protections and Lucky! were added to try and help get Agnes out of jams until she gets up and going.

Mulligan priority is obviously Shrivelling, Scrying or Arcane Initiate. If you don't see one of those cards it's probably not worth keeping the hand.

Experience priority is Book Of Shadows. Seriously you need to be able to use Shrivelling as much as possible since it's the only offensive spell. Also keeping Scrying around is pretty powerful. The extra spell slot might be great in the future sometimes, but right now that's kind of a wasted bonus. Next best priority is probably Grotesque Statue and upgrading Blinding Light. At the same time if you find that you are draining you Sanity too quickly an Elder Sign is probably not a bad acquisition.