The second deck to be featured in my Blessings of Asia series is a Bless centered Nathaniel deck. Nathaniel is my most played investigator in Arkham Horror: The Card Game, and I had been wanting to experiment more with Bless cards in him for a long time. I think Nathaniel does have some good directions to go with Bless cards, so here’s what I got!

The Concept

Nathaniel’s job in this campaign is to be a fighter and to supply additional Bless tokens. This deck is mostly just your standard Boxing Gloves Nathaniel package, which is Boxing Gloves plus a suite of fighting events. I’ll briefly cover my choices here in case you haven’t had much experience playing Boxing Gloves Nathaniel (which is a very fun archetype that I’d recommend highly – I have another Boxing Gloves Nathaniel deck that I wrote about previously here!)

The fighting events which I chose are “Get over here!”, Clean Them Out, Monster Slayer, One-Two Punch, and Toe to Toe. This gives us 10 fighting events to start with. With XP, we definitely want to pick up more or switch some of these out for stronger versions. In particular, we really want to get Radiant Smite for a potential 5 damage swing when our team’s Bless token generation is active.

“Get over here!” is good action compression, especially against Aloof or Elusive enemies or doom stackers that want to get away from the investigators. Kōhaku’s Weeping Yurei and Acolytes at connecting locations are great targets for this card. Clean Them Out has low damage value, but it does help a lot with Nathaniel’s economy. Over half of the cards in this deck are 2 resources to play or less, so Clean Them Out can easily make the difference between Nathaniel playing a card or not. Monster Slayer can be a cheap 3 damage swing, while One-Two Punch is a more expensive 4 damage attack. Both of these cards help Nathaniel dispatch medium sized enemies in one action, with One-Two Punch especially being part of Nathaniel’s boss killing gameplan. It’s worth noting that One-Two Punch also helps you defeat your signature weakness faster – although hopefully, you don’t have to spend this card on doing that. Finally, Toe to Toe is great for a guaranteed 3 damage. In particular, the automatic success on Toe to Toe makes it a great vehicle for committing your skill cards, as they are guaranteed to trigger their bonuses. Vicious Blow especially makes this card a guaranteed 4 damage — 5 damage if you have Vicious Blow upgraded.

That all being explained, let’s look at what we got for Bless cards. As stated in the Blessings of Asia rules, every deck must include a card that generates Bless tokens and a card that uses Bless tokens. At level 0, Nathaniel has this covered with Tempt Fate, Ancestral Token, and Ofuda.

Tempt Fate is fantastic for Nathaniel because Nathaniel desperately wants cards in his hand all the time. Being able to draw a card at fast speed is fantastic for him. Effectively, this gives Nathaniel a pseudo 28 card deck, helping him get to his critical cards much more easily. Also, because Nathaniel frequently tests at such high skill values anyway when fighting, drawing some of the curse tokens from this card likely will not matter much.

Ancestral Token provides additional horror soak, but also it can allow Nathaniel to put large bursts of Bless tokens in the chaos bag. This is because Nathaniel can quite easily deal large amounts of damage in one action, so you can plan to add a hefty amount of Blesses with Ancestral Token quite easily provided there are enemies with high printed health in play. In high multiplayer, which is what this campaign is, that will be even more likely to happen. I’ve played Ancestral Token in Nathaniel before, and while it can be challenging to get out because it’s one of the decks most expensive cards, an early Ancestral Token can easily add a lot of Bless tokens throughout the scenario.

Finally, we have Ofuda as a payoff for Nathaniel’s Blesses. I haven’t used this card yet, but I expect it will work out just fine. The keyword I want to remove the most is Aloof, as that can save actions from engaging. Retaliate will also be a good keyword removal at times to help stay safe. My initial thought is this card is more of a luxury, but I wanted to try it out because of the nature of this campaign centering around bless tokens. It’s a two-of in this deck list mostly for flavour purposes, not because I think it really merits two slots in the deck. With XP, we may see one or both copies get cut.

Before closing, I wanted to review the last few cards which had not been mentioned yet. Tetsuo Mori is one of my favourite Nathaniel cards because of the supportive team soak and because he can help you find your Boxing Gloves. That being said, even if your Boxing Gloves are already out, this deck still has other items Tetsuo can pull up, such as Wolf Mask, Ancestral Token, and Ofuda. And if Nathaniel himself doesn’t need the Item search, another investigator will be happy to use it. Next, On The Hunt is a good card in general but it’s an especially good tech card for The Scarlet Keys. This is because it can bypass the Concealed trigger on enemies by making enemies spawn engaged with you instead of in the shadows. That can help Nathaniel save the team a lot of time by preventing decoys from spawning. Finally, I have one each of Safeguard and Wolf Mask. Both of these cards are here because they are generically very, very good, especially in high multiplayer where their conditions are more likely to be triggered. One copy of each felt like enough to get the value I wanted.

Summary

Overall, what I have constructed here is a very standard Boxing Gloves Nathaniel deck. However, changing out just a few cards to ones that interact with Blesses suddenly make our Nathaniel able to generate plenty of Bless tokens. That will help him play well with the rest of the team while keeping everyone safe. I fully expect this deck to be plenty strong at dispatching enemies, especially with XP when our 5 damage Radiant Smites start coming out (7 damage if our level 2 Vicious Blows work out!). Lily and Minh’s decklist articles will be coming up next, and don’t forget to check out Kōhaku’s article if you have not already!