Introduction

Sun Warrior Yorick is a combo-driven, damage-dealing Bless deck for William Yorick that revolves around two specific cards released in The Innsmouth Conspiracy: Ancient Covenant, from In Too Deep, and (the still unreleased at the time of writing) Favor of the Sun, from The Lair of Dagon.

This card was already strong, but it’s about to enable a whole new world of ridiculousness.

Sun Warrior Weapons

Yorick has access to a few weird weapons that are very strong, but also quite unreliable. Baseball Bat can discard itself on a Skull or Autofail draw. Old Hunting Rifle jams on those same draws. If you are playing with Taboo, the .35 Winchester can hit for 3 damage on any non-negative token draw, but it does only one measly damage otherwise. In short, these weapons would all be fantastic if you had some way to bypass their unreliability entirely.

Skull draws on a Baseball Bat? We don’t know what those are anymore.

Enter the Ancient Sun Warrior combo!

The best picture of Favor the Sun I can get right now because it’s still an unreleased card.

Favor of the Sun is powerful because it lets Yorick draw Bless on demand. Combine this with Ancient Covenant, and you will not need to draw an additional token. Basically, drawing a Bless token means you didn’t draw a Skull or an Autofail for Baseball Bat and Old Hunting Rifle, and you did not draw a negative token for .35 Winchester. Therefore, this entirely bypasses the unreliability of all the aforementioned weapons. Not only that, each of those weapons gives you a very high native combat boost, ranging from +2 to +3 Combat. Add in the +2 skill value from your Bless draw, and suddenly you are turning in scores of 8 to 9 Combat for 2 to 3 damage on hit.

Not only does this succeed against basically every enemy in the game, it succeeds on demand and by a lot. What this means is we can now start adding other elements to this combo. Toss in Vicious Blow 2 to deal an additional +2 damage, or Overpower 2 to draw 2 cards. Commit Resourceful and pull back a Survivor card you need. Have a Rogue commit their All In, Momentum, or Quick Thinking. There are so many options! The Vicious Blow combo in particular nets you guaranteed 5 damage shots.

Commit one of these bad boys to your .35 Winchester and watch 5 health enemies melt before you.

At this point, you might be thinking, but doesn’t Favor of the Sun discard itself after the 3 tokens sealed on it have been used? Why would we build an entire deck around this if it discards itself? Oh, my precious imaginary doubter, this is exactly why we are playing Yorick! Check out these timing windows. First, we know that we are using the Sun tokens pretty much exclusively on fighting (although, in a pinch, you can use it on something else). Favor of the Sun is discarded as soon as the third token is unsealed from it, meaning that it hits the discard before the test is finished resolving. If this test kills an enemy, then as soon as its over, if there are 3 Bless tokens in the bag at the time, you can just completely refresh your Favor of the Sun the very same test that you discarded it! This in particular is a big part of what makes Sun Warrior Yorick so freaking powerful.

But if you aren’t sold yet for some reason, here are 3 more upsides!

Upside 1: Very Cheap XP-wise

The central components for this build – 1x Ancient Covenant, 2x Favor of the Sun – are 4 XP in total. That’s insanely cheap. Not to mention you are building this in Yorick, whose signature card gives bonus XP. Barring something really unfortunate happening, you should always have your Sun Warrior running by Scenario 2.

Upside 2: Permanent Combo Piece

That means you don’t ever have to worry about drawing one of your key combo pieces, because it’s always there. This improves your reliability a lot.

Upside 3: When Out Of Combat, Ancient Covenant Helps Allies

Ancient Covenant can be triggered by any investigator at your location, and since this deck encourages Bless tokens to be flying around the bag constantly, this will almost certainly happen at least a few times.

Now, the strengths of the combo should be clear by now. However, there are some very obvious downsides to this. Let’s review those next.

Downside 1: Key Assets Exhaust

The number of times you can do this per round is limited. Both Ancient Covenant and Favor of the Sun exhaust, so at most you can only do this once per round. However, there is no need to worry too much about the once per round limit, because we are designing the rest of our deck with this exact situation in mind.

First, consider that depending on your game state, if the fighting must continue, you may be comfortable using your weapons even while Ancient Covenant and Favor of the Sun are exhausted. It’s definitely riskier, but it’s not as though the weapons involved are completely unplayable outside of this combo. This combo simply takes their reliability up a notch. In multiplayer, other effects in the game can also improve their reliability. Consider Jacqueline’s ability, Premonition, or Counterspell as other ways your team can help to control the hit going off. You might also consider adding in a level 3 Will to Survive. This card is just really good in general, but is particularly good when paired with an Old Hunting Rifle or Baseball Bat as it does the same job as Ancient Sun combo by ensuring you don’t draw the Skull or Autofail (note: this doesn’t synergize with Winchester, as you revealed no token at all).

This card adds some more oomph and reliability to the Ancient Sun concept, but you may find it a little expensive and redundant. A luxury upgrade.

Now, if you really don’t want to touch your weapons without the reliability secured, Sun Warrior Yorick takes along other ways to do damage. Brute Force is a great way to toss a big punch out without requiring a weapon, and should be an early pick up. Fighting events like One Two Punch and damage dealing allies like Guard Dog can help as well. This will help tide you over while you wait for your assets to refresh.

Downside 2: Requires Bless Tokens Or Else It Doesn’t Work At All

Particularly, you will want regular Bless generation constantly throughout. Why? You will definitely want to be playing Favor of the Sun more than once per game, which means you want 3+ Bless token in the bag constantly. This is why I think Yorick should be taking Keep Faith with Resourceful to pull back Keep Faith, and you probably also want Sister Mary or someone else on the team somewhere to be a pocket blesser.

Four tokens is one more than the three we want to see to play Favor of the Sun; therefore, we love seeing this card.

Downside 3: Not Designed For Solo.

This deck is best when you are fighting a lot. We don’t have much of a plan for clues or evasion. It also depends on other people to help mitigate some of its weaknesses, such as constantly needing bless tokens in the bag.

Downside 4: Locked Hand Slots

Most of the time this won’t matter, but it does mean you miss out on being able to take some other items you might enjoy having. A Bandolier can solve this problem, but you may have not the time or resources to spare for it.

Potentially a neat upgrade, as you will have more hand slot flexibility and you will certainly get the +1 Will bonus.

Downside 5: Needs Economy.

You are going to want a healthy income to play this deck, as it relies on consistently replaying a 2r asset, or on recycling your guns from your discard once they run out of ammo. Rite of Sanctification and Madame Labranche are good options here. Be advised though that if you don’t have the money to play out of your discard, you may be in a spot of trouble.

“Wait, what about Blessed Blade?”

Blessed Blade is also fine, and allows for Bless generation and unlocks your hand slots. My problem with Blessed Blade is you need to draw Bless or Elder Signs specifically for it to do bonus damage. Even taboo .35 Winchester has more tokens it can hit to trigger than Blessed Blade. This means if you don’t have Sun available for any reason, this weapon will be swinging for 1 damage only at a rate that is worse than .35 Winchester, which is not great. It also gives a lower combat bonus and less bonus damage than .35 Winchester. As far as Bless generation, we are actively relying on our teammates to provide Bless tokens anyway, so we do not require it on our weapon. For these reasons, I would even prefer an Enchanted Blade or a .45 Automatic over Blessed Blade in this build, just because the damage output is most important. However, if you want to use Blessed Blade with this, you certainly could try it out. If you take Sister Mary along with you, Blessed Blade would fit well on her as your partner rather than on Sun Warrior Yorick himself.

Conclusion

Do you like guaranteed damage? Do you like the security of a blessed chaos bag? And most importantly, do you like jank that is secretly busted? Ancient Sun Warrior Yorick is the deck for you. It’ll be a few months still before we can really test this deck out, but I for one am very excited about this concept and I anticipate it will be very strong. Also, feel free to share your variants of the Sun Warrior archetype – perhaps Sun Warrior Tommy or even Sun Warrior Lola could join Yorick? And of course, there is Favor of the Moon still floating around… Moon Warrior Dexter with Armaggedon???

Moon Warrior Dexter awaits his time to rise…