Alright, it is finally time to write up some deck lists! As a reminder these are deck lists I am designing for my Blessings of Asia campaign, which you can read about here.

Up first, we have Kōhaku Narukami! Full disclosure: This deck is going to be the hardest one for me to build, as I have not played this character before doing this challenge nor have I really studied decklists for him. I have heard some talk about what strong strategies for him look like, but I have not gone super in-depth into how those are achieved. So please understand that context before I go into this decklist and that I’m not thinking this is some busted strategy or whatever. This is just something I made up after thinking it over for a little bit. That out of the way, I decided to approach this investigator with my own approach, and taking note of his two 4’s in Will and Intellect, I decided to go with a Statball deck! Here’s my deck breakdown.

The Concept

The concept of any Statball to deck is to push at least 2 stats as high as possible with the goal being that any time you need to test one of those two stats, you almost certainly win outright. It involves doing the upfront work of stacking up a lot of passive bonuses from assets, but once it turns on, you can enjoy increased reliability on the stats you are presumably testing the most. The goal here is to make Kōhaku test his Intellect the most as one of our main clue collectors, alongside Minh Thi Phan. You might be thinking, “Oh, but you don’t have to do that! He is a Mystic! You can have him test his Willpower instead of Intellect.” If you want to do that, then yes, you certainly could do that. Personally, I am a big believer in Mystics using their other stats, especially if they are a 4 to begin with. Putting all your hopes and dreams in your Mystic’s Willpower being able to do every single task can be akin to putting all your eggs in one basket – it can often work, but if you are missing one critical asset, you are just stuck with a pile of Willpower that doesn’t do anything. Opting in to using your other stats gives you a wider array of options your investigator can go when it comes to piloting and deckbuilding, so when it’s easily possible to do so, I’d recommend it.

Towards that end we are choosing assets which enhance our Intellect mainly and our Willpower secondly. For simplicity, we are taking 2 copies of all cards named here. So we are taking Alyssa Graham as our ally (with XP, we want to switch this to Gabriel Carillo for the curse generation & card draw), St. Hubert’s Key as our asset, Dowsing Rod in our hand slot, and Living Ink with the Intellect skill selected in our body slot. If we get all 4 of these assets active, we will be investigating with an Intellect value of 8. Now, of course, this is going to be really hard to do because we have to draw 4 cards, play them all out, and spend 12 resources to do so. So next, we’re going to discuss how we deal with that issue with other cards in the deck.

First of all, we have two cards which allow us to do a lot to handle the cost of those assets. They are Rite of Sanctification and Faustian Bargain. Not only do these cards help Kōhaku, they can also help our team members. (It’s worth noting now that other investigators will similarly be bringing team economy cards, something I considered when opting into a wildly expensive gameplan.) While this Kōhaku deck doesn’t have a lot of inherent Bless generation, mostly relying on Book of Psalms or Guided by Faith, others in the party will be helping to generate enough Blesses to make Rite of Sanctification work well. Second, we have Guts and Perception to offer a small amount of card draw to help us hopefully draw into the assets we want to be stacking up as quickly as possible.

These aren’t huge amounts of economy, but they certainly will help out. The big thing to remember is we don’t need every single asset online to be reliably picking up clues. Even if we only get Dowsing Rod and St. Hubert’s Key out, we are already at 6 Intellect, which puts up by 3 against 3 shroud locations and up by 2 on 4 shroud ones. We also brought Read the Signs and Control Variable to help us get some clues a little bit burstier. (Guided by Faith can potentially also get us 2 clues in one action, but the main purpose of it here is truthfully to add the blesses on the investigate action.) Considering that Kōhaku can get bonus actions, being able to Investigate four times with a Intellect of 6 or higher sounds pretty great to me!

Let’s talk about what else we have going on. I have Enraptured to let my Living Ink last longer, which I think is going to be pretty cool. I plan to put a good amount of XP into this card so that it stays out longer and also buffs my Willpower. Ideally, Kōhaku’s Living Ink and St. Hubert’s Key combo will allow him to have a statline of 6/6/3/1 off of 2 assets! There are other XP cards we can consider to grow this even further, but of course, that will be explored as the campaign progresses. Finally, we also have Sword Cane to give us a small amount of enemy management, and Book of Psalms and Drain Essence give us a small amount of survivability. Essentially, this deck has some other cards to help it close up some gaps in its Intellect stacking plan.

What about Weeping Yurei?

This deck has nothing to deal with Weeping Yurei outside of Sword Cane, which itself is a very slow way of responding to it, and Drain Essence, which requires a bit of specific circumstances to work. Normally, I’d recommend tossing in something like a Spectral Razor or a Storm of Spirits to handle this. However, in this case, I know already that Lily and Nathaniel are going to be handling enemies & that Nathaniel has “Get over here!”, which blows up this card easily. For that reason, I’m not overly stressed about Kōhaku lacking a strong response to his own signature weakness in this deck. That being said, outside of a situation where decks are being coordinated for multiplayer play, I would not recommend doing this.

Conclusion

This is my first stab at a Kōhaku deck and I’m optimistic that it will work well! I think under different circumstances I’d want a bit more economy as well as bless & curse generation, but I know that I have team members who are helping to plug those gaps and that XP cards will help address issues that arise. Overall, we are hoping to build up a very reliable Intellect-based Mystic who can do a couple additional neat things to help out the team, and I think so far I’m on the right track. Stay tuned for the other decks for Lily, Nathaniel, and Minh, which will be coming soon!