Up next on my Blessings of Asia decklist rundowns, we have a build for Minh Thi Phan, our campaign’s lone Seeker. For this deck, I wanted to bring back a concept that I had done before but had not played in a long time – Mariner’s Compass Minh with Dark Horse. I knew this deck already had Keep Faith in it, which meant that it was only missing a payoff for Bless tokens to be legal for the Blessings of Asia campaign challenge. It was easy enough to make that happen by tossing in two copies of Beloved, a skill card that Minh quite likes when there are lots of Blesses around, and bam, we got ourselves a legal deck! I am big fan of this build, so let’s quickly go over it now.

The Concept

Dark Compass Minh is a Dark Horse style deck which allows Minh to use Mariner’s Compass to great effect while also still being able to collect resources as normal. Yes, you heard that right — when we play this Dark Horse deck, we will generally always claim our upkeep resource. This is because we are including multiple cards which allow us to jettison all our resources quickly should we ever need to make use of the extra skill value from Dark Horse. Let’s break down what we got going on.

The main advantage of Mariner’s Compass is that it lets you discover an additional clue when your resource pool is empty. The card itself helps you empty out your resources during that action by letting you pump resources up to 3 times while investigating with for extra skill value – very helpful! That means your investigation attempt will be a 7 skill value – 8 with Dark Horse – which is quite strong. However, let’s say you had 1 or 2 resources only to spend. Madame Labranche can help you out by giving you another resource the moment your resource pool hits zero. Spend the resource granted from that right away on the Compass, and you are right back to being at zero.

Magnifying Glass and Keep Faith offer you other outs to get to zero, as they both can be played at Fast speed. While you aren’t necessarily going to be playing them during the Compass action, you can use them to get instant value out of resources you gain from upkeep and prevent yourself from accumulating more resources than you can dump out. (Working a Hunch is also great for this purpose, but it didn’t make it into this edition of the deck.)

Now, let’s say that you collected one resource during Upkeep and now it’s the Mythos phase and you draw a skill testing treachery. If only you had the bonus from Dark Horse to help! This is why Dig Deep is here. Most likely this treachery will be either Willpower or Agility. Spend the resource on either and you are testing at either 6 Willpower or 4 Agility before any other bonuses get added. That’s definitely much better!

Next let’s look at some of the events. I took Bizarre Diagnosis and Logical Reasoning because I am a huge fan of bringing extra survivability. The best part about these cards in Minh especially is that even if you ultimately find you don’t need them, they have doubles of their icons, which Minh can increase even further especially with Grisly Totem. Next, Deep Knowledge and Crack the Case are great economy cards which also cost 0, making them playable while keeping Dark Horse active. (I also wanted Deep Knowledge to help add more Curse tokens for Kōhaku.) Since this is high multiplayer, these cards and resources can be very helpfully distributed however they are needed across the team. In particular, Crack the Case on a high shroud value can allow Minh to take whatever specific number of resources she wants so she can play an important asset right away, such as Mariner’s Compass or Grisly Totem.

Finally, we can close with the skills. I think most Minh builds will go much harder on the skills than I did here, but these ones should be quite effective. I’m expecting this team to fill the bag with Blesses incredibly fast meaning that I expect Beloved to go off quite a few times throughout the campaign. Eureka! will help get some card draw, Unexpected Courage is there for some no-nonsense wild icons, and Deduction is of course another clue, which is always needed. Depending on how the campaign goes, I may try to invest more in skill cards with XP. For now, the assets are the main focus of the deck.

One thing for sure is that I do want to take Ancient Covenant with XP right away! That should be very handy if my projections about how many blesses get added to the bag are accurate. Beyond that and the upgraded Mariner’s Compass, which I feel is kind of mandatory to pick up given that the whole deck is built around that card, I’m not sure where all my XP will go. We’ll see how things shake out as the campaign goes on.

Summary

Overall, this Minh deck is going to be focusing on clues with an ample number of support cards added in. The Dark Horse package should allow her to have a buffed up statline without the downside of giving up on resources entirely. Rather, we just take them and spend them right away. Mariner’s Compass should allow for a reliable 2 clue investigation action each round, and outside of that, we should have a nice basic Intellect stat for investigating especially with Dark Horse and Magnifying Glass. This deck should be a lot of fun to pilot, and I’m looking forward to taking it through the campaign. Lily is the last deck to write up before starting the campaign, so keep your eyes out for that one when it comes out!