Hello, and welcome to me posting an article again! If you had not heard, the Mythos Busters hosted BusterCon 2023 in Roseville, Minnesota earlier this month from June 1-4. This event was 4 days of Arkham action, which included as the big draw the Innsmouth Ironman event. During this event, players would play the entirety of the Innsmouth Conspiracy in one sitting. If that sounds like a wild mix of being both very fun and very exhausting, that’s because it is! While I was not able to make it to Minnesota for the event, I was able to virtually run my own Innsmouth Ironman with two friends at home in Canada. While we did not collect every flashback or win every scenario, we did WIN the campaign! And more importantly, we had a boatload of fun (Get it? Boatload because it’s Innsmouth?) Anyway, I thought it would be fun to do a retrospective of the deck I used and what choices I made in construction and piloting. So without further ado let’s get into the deck I used: Weapons Dexter!

Pre-planning

Before we even get to the deck design, we have to go into how we landed on our investigators for the event. My friend, who we will call N, and I knew we wanted to do some kind of themed team. Our first idea was to do some kind of all-the-same-stat-value team. Think choosing from investigators like Calvin, Preston, Jenny, Lola and so on. However, we then added my friend’s brother, who we will call J, to the team. Now the thing about J is that he is a huge Sister Mary fan, and as soon as he was added, he immediately wanted to be Sister Mary. N and I thought sure, why not, and we decided to make our new theme be “Innsmouth Conspiracy investigators” only. The final team ended up being J on Mary, N on Trish and myself on Dexter.

Now the thing about Dexter is that he can be built to do anything, so I waited a little bit to see J and N’s decklist before constructing my own. J’s Mary deck was a lot of your typical Bless tech but with a plan to go into Hyperphysical Shotcaster. N’s Trish deck was a mix of investigating and evading, with Damning Testimony, Lockpicks, and Disguise being key assets. He also had his eye on The Red Clock with XP. Reviewing their decklists, I felt my best opportunity to fill in gaps was to go heavy into combat. I ultimately took no clue tech whatsoever, in part to balance out Trish’s general lack of damage. Mary and her Shotcaster had the best opportunity to be the generalist in between myself and Trish. In the end, we had some basic roles sorted. Trish was on clues, Dexter was on damage, and Mary would be a generalist and support with Bless cards.

The Starting Deck

The question then became how do I want to do damge? I thought about doing a Spell heavy build with cards like Shrivelling, Azure Flame, or Armageddon. However, I decided against it in large part because I literally played a very similar Mystic deck not that long ago. My attention then turned to two things: Occult Scraps and Dexter’s 3 combat stat. If I leaned in hard to Dexter’s Combat stat, that would mean Occult Scraps was much less punishing while I was fighting. Since fighting was my main role, that strategy sounded like one that would give me a lot more consistency. Ultimately, I settled on the following list:

Weapons Dexter Level 0

Assets

2x Colt Vest Pocket

2x Sword Cane

2x .45 Thompson

2x Azure Flame

2x Dark Ritual

2x Holy Rosary

2x Leather Jacket

2x Lonnie Ritter

Events

2x Faustian Bargain

2x Sleight of Hand

2x Spectral Razor

2x Ward of Protection

Skills

2x Guts

2x Overpower

2x Quick Thinking

RBW: Mob Enforcer

I will now quickly talk about each of the 15 pairs of cards listed here and why I chose them. Let’s talk about the 6 Skills first, because that’s the easiest. I took Guts and Overpower because those were the main stats I expected to be testing most often. These skill cards would help me draw my deck faster, and that was good enough for me. I felt Overpower in particular would also help me get higher skill values on some key Combat tests, given my 3 stat is just average to start. Quick Thinking made sense because with the Bless tokens from Mary, it was even more likely the bonus action could be triggered. Promise of Power, Manual Dexterity, and Calculated Risk were all considered but ultimately got cut because I wanted to include more assets and events. In hindsight, I think Promise of Power especially may have been worthwile.

Now let’s go back to the assets. I have 16 asset cards in the deck, 8 of which exist to deal damage. Six of those cards are Weapons, that being the pairs of Colt Vest Pocket, Sword Cane, and .45 Thompson. The remainder is the pair of Azure Flames. In short, I packed a lot of redundancy in this deck to guarantee that I would have a fighting asset out somewhere early on. Sword Cane is great for flexibility. It is my only way to reliably evade and you can’t forget that it can be used to dispatch a 2 health enemy the turn that it enters play. Other than that though, Sword Cane sadly isn’t dispatching big enemies. Next, I had an idea that at some point I could use Dexter’s ability to swap in Colt Vest Pocket and blast out a few shots, although in practice this never happened.

This brings us to .45 Thompson. This was my big priority weapon. I chose it for several reasons. First was that my ultimate goal was to run Cyclopean Hammer in this slot, and if my deck could use .45 Thompson that it could for sure also use Cyclopean Hammer. The cards are similar in cost, slot usage, and purpose, so it seemed like building around one helped prepare for the other. This assumption proved to be correct, although I will say one of my combo pieces I used to support .45 Thompson stopped being as useful for the Cyclopean Hammer. I will talk about that when I get to events.

Finally, Azure Flame was chosen as an Arcane slot asset that would deal damage but not compete with my hand slots. I chose this one over Armageddon due to cost and Shriveling due to the composition of the Innsmouth chaos bag. Azure Flame proved to be very useful to the deck’s consistency, so I am happy with this choice.

Next, I took two copies of Dark Ritual as an Innsmouth specific choice. I thought that with the Faustian Bargains or the Lair of Dagon scenario, it may be worthwile to seal the Curse tokens. My Arcane slots were also free so it seemed safe enough. In practice, I literally only played this card 1 time and it was so that I could immediately switch it with Occult Scraps. Perhaps in some circumstance, this card can get value, but it was a dud in my campaign. Any money I had was earmarked for more important things, and it didn’t take long for Covenants to get added to the deck which interacted with the Curse tokens faster than Dark Ritual. Ultimately, Seal of the Seventh Sign would replace it with XP.

Rounding out the assets, we have Holy Rosary, Leather Jacket, and Lonnie Ritter. This package gives tankiness and passive stat bonuses to our most used stats. As a fast asset, Leather Jacket also gives us the potential to cheat out an asset at that same speed using Dexter’s ability if we can afford it. On an Elder Sign draw, you also get the opportunity to return one of your soak assets to your hand, allowing you to play it again as a fresh copy later. This whole package remained steadily useful through the whole campaign, and my only wish is I had more economy to afford playing them every time.

This takes us to the end of the deck, which is our 4 pairs of events. Ward of Protection is a Mystic staple, and my previously mentioned added tankiness made it an even safer play. Spectral Razor helps us knock out enemies with 8 skill value, serving as a mini Cyclopean Hammer in event form. Faustian Bargain was there because with cards like Lonnie Ritter and .45 Thompson, our deck is very expensive. Looking further ahead, 5 resources is also the exact amount to pay for Cyclopean Hammer. Finally, we had Sleight of Hand. This card was for .45 Thompson especially. Using Sleight of Hand, we can play .45 Thompson for just 1 resource, blast out a bunch of ammo, and then return it to the hand to play it fresh in the future. This combo did actually see play, and it was a real joy to watch when it went off! I will say though that with the switch from .45 Thompson to Cyclopean Hammer, Sleight of Hand is less useful as there are no uses to preserve. (Not to mention that you can’t even use it on Cyclopean Hammer in Taboo rules, but we weren’t playing Taboo anyway.) Sleight of Hand never saw play again after I removed both .45 Thompsons and was only committed for icons.

The Campaign

I won’t go into extensive detail about the campaign, but I will bring up some highlights. Trish managed to win The Pit of Despair by herself, after Dexter and Mary both got defeated. The campaign was not looking promising with a result like that in scenario 1, but we turned it around in The Vanishing of Elina Harper. Faced with 2 fifty-fifty guesses, we managed to correctly guess the Suspect – Zadok Allen – which allowed us to continue even though we did not correctly guess The House On Water Street as the Hideout. Dexter managed to tank and evade the Mob well enough to slow it down, allowing the team to complete the finale of this mission.

By this time, we had a fair amount of important XP cards coming into play. Mary’s Shotcaster had XP, Trish had Red Clock, and Dexter had Cyclopean Hammer. We safely made it through In Too Deep, choosing to forego some greedy opportunities in favor of notching a scenario win. We did however get Teachings of the Order. This then led us to Devil Reef, where we had our absolute peak performance. Trish was unstoppable with her clues, while Dexter had Cyclopean Hammer and Thomas Dawson in order to fight at 10+ values. As expected, Mary’s Shotcaster was getting clues and doing damage as well. Our team secured every relic and defeated the Terror of the Reef for what was an essentially perfect scenario result.

We then ruined our campaign’s win streak by dooming out in Horror in High Gear after drawing about four Ancient Evils and cancelling more or less none of them. I was pessimisstic heading into A Light in the Fog, assuming we didn’t have good chances after both a botched scenario opening and our previous loss. However, some clever plays and extreme luck allowed us all to escape with diving suits and 1 key. Not only did Dexter manage to use the Pump Room by drawing a 0, I also managed to avoid being captured by Oceiros by top decking a Ward of Protection in upkeep and using it immediately the following Mythos phase. Dexter’s ability, Sword Cane and Quick Thinking shenanigans then allowed me to evade Oceiros, zip three locations across the map and still have an action left to resign for the win.

Whatever good fortune got us through A Light in the Fog was then stomped on by The Lair of Dagon. Unfortunately, our Mary had 2 physical trauma and was eliminated fairly early on. Depsite Trish and Dexter valiantly making it to the third act, we doomed out here too.

This brought us to the finale, Into the Maelstrom. Our mix of successes and failures gave us 24 XP to work with, not tons but it was certainly something. By this time we had been playing for maybe 10 or so hours but we were determined for a strong finish. Using our wits and Dexter’s enormous Hammer, we managed to manuever the enemies around so that Trish and Mary could safely pick up clues. With Trish having every key, the finale turned into escorting Trish around the map so she could lock down every Sanctum. After accomplishing this, Mary, now armed with a super blessed Holy Spear, and Dexter, miraculously armed with his second copy of Cyclopean Hammer after being forced to discard the first one, managed to smash out tons of damage on the weakened Dagon and close out the campaign with a big win after approximately 12 hours! (Mary was sadly killed in the process as the resolution dealt 2 more physical trauma to her, taking her to 5 physical trauma. In lieu of flowers, please send more aether for her Hyperphysical Shotcaster )

Final Version of Weapons Dexter

Assets

1x False Covenant

2x Sword Cane

2x Cyclopean Hammer

1x Liquid Courage (level 1)

1x Azure Flame (still level 0)

1x Seal of the Seventh Sign

1x Earthly Serenity (level 1)

1x Antiquary

2x Holy Rosary

2x Leather Jacket

2x Lonnie Ritter

Events

2x Faustian Bargain

2x Sleight of Hand

2x Spectral Razor

2x Ward of Protection (still level 0)

Skills

1x Manual Dexterity (level 2)

2x Guts (still level 0)

2x Overpower

2x Quick Thinking

RBW: Mob Enforcer

Final Thoughts

While my deck was successful, there were some things I would have done differently. First, I would have either added even more economy or made the deck cheaper. I thought Trish’s Faustian Bargain and Mary’s Rite of Sanctification would help me out. While they did sometimes, oftentimes the bonuses didn’t get distributed to me, which I should have anticipated more thoughtfully. As well, some of my own Faustian Bargain resources didn’t get sent to me either. A couple card adjustments would have made this deck play better.

Second, I would have taken Adaptable and switch out the level 0 cards that outlived their usefulness such as Dark Ritual, Sleight of Hand or Colt Vest Pocket.

Third, I would have taken more healing for my team. There were a few times where I had left over actions, and if I had a better way to preserve Mary’s health we could have turned around a couple situations throughout the campaign. I took Earthly Serenity at the very end (and then never drew it!), but honestly I think even Healing Words would have been a nice fit for this situation.

Overall, I had a great time playing this deck even if there were some changes I’d make to it if I did it again. It was fun to play a Mystic that was a little bit off the beaten path. Also, the Ironman experience is definitely one of the most special events the Arkham communty has to offer, so I highly recommend giving it a shot if you are interested. All that being said, thank you for reading and thank you to the Mythos Busters for being awesome folks!