This article contains no spoilers for The Drowned City aside from some light discussion on Task options.

R’lyeh Beckons to Daisy

I recently had the distinct pleasure of being able to play a full campaign of The Drowned City this week, and after a glorious victory, there was one deck in particular that I really wanted to highlight and share with the community. When people think of Daisy, they often don’t immediately think of her as a healer. However, when designed and piloted with healing in mind, Daisy is a fantastic support who can help your high multiplayer team safely explore (and win) The Drowned City – even with just a limited Current card pool!

A special note here – while this deck is primarily aimed at The Drowned City, the concept of this deck can easily be applied to any campaign. You might want to change your deck up somewhat to accommodate the intricacies of a different campaign, but there is no reason your healer support Daisy wouldn’t also work elsewhere.

Now let’s get on to discussing the deck!

Do No Harm – A Great Task For Daisy In Current

A special part of The Drowned City is the introduction of Tasks. Each of these tasks gives your investigator a special personal side-quest which you will want to complete as many times as possible over the course of the campaign. Without getting too much into the details in this article, being able to complete your Task as frequently as possible is critical to your success in The Drowned City. Therefore, when building a deck for TDC, a question you must ask yourself is “What task will I pick and how can I ensure I complete it reliably?” At a certain point, if you completed your task a certain number of times over the course of the campaign (no specific spoilers on that in this article!), you get the reward of flipping your task over to use its powerful Completed side, potentially powering your investigator up by quite a lot!

A quick point worth mentioning – Do No Harm is certainly not the only task worth Daisy’s time. If you wanted to play a Cluever heavy Daisy, you can take Plumb The Depths, a task which has you repeatedly discover the last clue off of locations. This is just to say that Daisy has good Task options, but Do No Harm is a great option for a Support-focused build that is also easily constructed within the Current environment.

So what is Do No Harm you ask? Do No Harm is a task (a permanent earned asset unique to The Drowned City) that asks you to heal an investigator or ally 5 times. Note that it’s not 5 points of healing but 5 instances of healing. This means if you were theoretically to heal 5 damage off of someone in one go, that would still only count one progress towards this task.

Don’t be scared off by the fact that Do No Harm won’t suggest itself as recommended for Daisy in the campaign log. We don’t need to listen to that because Rite Of Seeking is here to tell you that it is actually amazing for her. Now why is Daisy particularly well-suited to this task, especially in the Current environment? While we still don’t know all the cards that will ultimately end up in Current, as the final list has not been announced yet, we can safely presume that at least Core and The Drowned City will be included. And what Seeker card is in that card pool? That’s right: Medical Texts! All Daisy needs to do to complete Do No Harm is play Medical Texts, follow other injured investigators around, and use her special additional Tome action on Medical Texts. Pull this off 5 times per scenario and you will easily secure progress while helping keep your team alive! Easy! That means this is a great deck archetype that even a new player will be able to play successfully without a huge card pool. In fact, as I describe this, you’ll see I can use mostly Core cards to play this deck. (New players, if I mention a card in this article, you can generally assume it’s a good idea to take 2 copies of it unless otherwise stated.)

Beyond Medical Texts, you also have a couple other cards which can help you heal. Fearless is a skill card that can heal a horror off yourself, and Short Rest from TDC can heal as well. Short Rest is Myriad, so be sure to take all 3 copies here. While neither of these cards are large heals nor can they be repeated frequently like the action on Medical Texts, they still can contribute one point of progress to Do No Harm, and ultimately, that’s really what we want to ensure is happening. The 3 copies of Short Rest alone can provide 60% completion of Do No Harm!

Outside of healing, Daisy has other ways to support the team. Old Book of Lore is another Tome Daisy can use to help herself or her team find cards. This can even help you get the best possible value out of Short Rest by letting you find and add the extra copies to your hand. And of course, let’s not forget that Daisy can also bring good skill cards along with her to help her teammates (or herself) pass tests. I always like Perception and Manual Dexterity in Daisy, but feel free to tweak this to be Guts, Unexpected Courage, or whatever else you like more.

One more note – I would say Medical Texts is so important to this build that you may want to bring one or two Research Librarians to help make sure you can draw Medical Texts, especially if you are playing in Current only. One is probably fine considering the Myriad Short Rest has 3 copies of itself. If you get Medical Texts early, you can always switch your target so the Research Librarian picks up Old Book of Lore instead, so your librarian should usually have something to do if you play it no matter what. If you don’t need him, you can always just commit him.

A Backup Cluever

Alright, so we’ve established that Daisy can heal and support her team, but what else is she doing all scenario long? Surely, healing alone isn’t enough to win the game! Well, thankfully, Daisy is a Seeker with 5 Intellect, so even if everything were to go wrong on the healing front, she will still be able to collect clues for your team.

Dr. Milan Christopher is highly recommended as this gives Daisy resources on successful investigates but also allows her to be up by 4 on the Medical Texts skill test. On Standard, this means that the majority of the time you will not fail unless you draw an Autofail. This will eventually stop being true as things get harder, but still you will want your Medical Texts test to be as safe as possible. You don’t want to hurt your friends! (Unless they have Toe The Line, a task that wants the bearer to take instances of damage equal to their health. And that’s another great reason to bring a Do No Harm Daisy into multiplayer — her synergy with Toe The Line is phenomenal as she can both heal and sometimes cause the damage for that Task’s bearer!)

Beyond that, we will definitely want to take Deduction to get bonus clues and Working a Hunch to pick up a clue at Fast speed. Magnifying Glass can be taken as well in Current since it’s cheap and Fast. If you get Daisy’s Tote Bag out, you can hold two Magnifying Glasses in addition to your Medical Texts and Old Book of Lores. This would net you great bonuses to investigating without disrupting your support setup. However, if that doesn’t happen, these Tools are small enough assets that you won’t feel horrible about overwriting for a more important Tome.

Finally, I rounded out the deck in Current with Mind Over Matter, Holy Rosary, Ward of Protection, and Emergency Cache. Emergency Cache helps ensure you can pay for your deck, while Ward and Rosary help protect you from the encounter deck, which is always a good thing to be thinking about. And let’s not forget that Mind Over Matter can be used as an emergency button to evade or fight off enemies with your Intellect in a desperate situation. These cards give your deck a more well-rounded quality, helping guard against edge-case scenarios that can ruin your whole game.

Altogether, you got two roles Daisy can competently do in supporting and discovering clues. She already sounds like an amazing investigator you’d want to have on your team, wouldn’t you say? And that’s still only considering a very limited level 0 Current card pool! Here is a link to the decklist described above!

Next, we’ll see some ideas for what to do with your experience points while staying in Current.

Continuing to Upgrade in Current

So your Daisy performed so incredibly on your team that now you have lots of experience points to spend. Frankly, an expected outcome, if I do say so myself! But what do we spend those points on? Again, I’m going to be limiting my review here to just Core and The Drowned City, but even here we have plenty of options. I’m going to highlight a few cards that I think are really good to consider.

First, upgrade your Old Book of Lores. This helps your supportive power a lot, but it also has a special interaction with Medical Texts. If you search your own deck with Old Book of Lore level 3 and find Medical Texts, you can immediately play that copy of Medical Texts for no resources by spending a secret from Old Book of Lore! This is really, really helpful, and it’s a combo that I make use of even in Legacy.

Second, you can upgrade your Magnifying Glasses or you can add Encyclopedia level 2. The choice here is yours. Magnifying Glass level 1 is nice for Daisy because it can potentially bounce back to your hand to make space for a Tome instead of being overwritten. Once in your hand, it can be committed for an Intellect icon. Meanwhile, Encyclopedia gives you an alternative way to support your team, and support is the main thing you showed up to do. Also, you could always use the Encyclopedia on yourself to give yourself an Intellect bonus and then collect a bunch of clues!

Third, Antikythera from TDC has a surprisingly good use case in this deck. Remember how you are trying to do that Intellect test on Medical Texts as often as possible, a test where you are often up by 3 or 4? With fortunate pulls, you will often succeed on that test by more than 1, and that’s where Antikythera can start profiting for you. Say I have only Medical Texts & Antikythera in play. Daisy tests and draws a -2. Not only does she pass the test to heal someone, she also discovers a clue from exhausting Antikythera! And she can do things like this over and over across the course of the game because neither of these cards have uses that they can run out of! If you want more control over this, which you almost certainly do because it’s 5 XP to get one copy, you could even add the TDC skill card Inquisitive with XP.

Finally, I would like to highlight Cryptic Research from Core as a phenomenal card. This card can truly help you support your team so much by allowing you to pick anyone at your location and letting them draw 4 cards at Fast speed. And if you use this on yourself, you have another tool to help you find your healing cards!

Of course, there are many other cards that are perfectly good options as well, including Working a Hunch level 2 or Emergency Cache level 2. Even a Bulletproof Vest is a great idea, as despite all your healing, you still only have 5 Health and sometimes you just want that extra safety. (I even had a Bulletproof Vest on Daisy in my winning Legacy deck and I’m glad I did!) The above list is not exhaustive by any means, but merely just a few options I wanted to highlight.

However, I did want to quickly drop a note about Library Pass both level 1 and level 5. I don’t think this is the right deck build for a Library Pass. The major problem with Library Pass is it wants to remove the Tome attached to it from play. This is terrible for Medical Texts on Do No Harm Daisy because you want to be able to use it as frequently as you can. I’m sure it’s great in many Daisy decks, but not this one.

Here is a sample upgraded Current decklist for Do No Harm Daisy with 30 XP spent.

Legacy Considerations

While this deck archetype is fully functional in Current, it naturally gets way better when you consider Legacy. I will quickly toss out some important card choices in Legacy that make this deck way better. Note that since we don’t have an official Current environment list, some of these cards listed under Legacy could in fact fall within Current in the future.

At level 0, you can decide if you want to go a little bit more clue focused or more supportive. If you want more healing, Logical Reasoning and Bizarre Diagnosis are two events that can help you heal more with your actions. While bigger heals don’t advance Do No Harm faster, they do still help your team out that much more. While we want to complete Do No Harm as much as possible, we don’t want to get too bogged down in the mechanics of advancing it. If you can get further value, then definitely go for it. And if you want more ways to play supportively, Shortcut can be a lifesaver in a clutch situation and the level 0 Encyclopedia is another Tome option you can take early on to help out your team. On the other hand, if you want more clue power, Grim Memoir is excellent on Daisy as it lets her investigate with her additional Tome action.

Overall my recommendation would be replacing the Magnifying Glasses in the Current build with either Encyclopedias or Grim Memoirs for a strong level 0 Tome suite, depending on if you want more support or investigation. Grim Memoir is likely the stronger choice due to clues always being critical, but your mileage and tastes may vary.

With your Arcane slots, you can try adding healing spells like Healing Words or Clarity of Mind. Personally though, I’m not a huge fan of these choices, as I instead skip those entirely and run Explosive Ward. Explosive Ward gives Daisy a testless combat option that can save her from an unfortunate enemy spawn. It’s a tech that I run often in my Daisy decks when I am not using Arcane assets, and I swear by it so much I put it in my beginner decks when I am teaching new players the game.

It’s entirely possible if you are not the main cluever in your multiplayer team that someone else might want to bring Dr. Milan. In this case, you have other options for a static +1 Intellect boost. Jeremiah Kirby, Alyssa Graham and even St. Hubert’s Key are all possibilities. While this is expensive to set up, I personally ran both Dr. Milan and St. Hubert’s Key. Remember, the key is we want to be testing Medical Texts with 6 Intellect if we can, just to protect ourselves from an unfortunate -4 draw.

Now onto XP choices. Truthfully, this deck is very flexible as again, you can lean into further support or further cluevering, depending on your needs. (Also, once again I have to say, this is by no means an exhaustive list, and if you look for other cards that would conceivably work well in this deck archetype, you will easily find more.) However, there is at least one non-negotiable Legacy upgrade and that’s Medical Texts level 2. This version is so, so much better. Not only does it give you the possibility of healing for 2 damage if you oversucceed, which can happen quite easily, it also gives you an option to not damage your target if you fail the test. Once you have this, you can start healing damage all over without worrying about smacking your friends on an Autofail draw.

I also would recommend Surgical Kit. While this lets you heal for greater bursts, it could also let you heal yourself 1 horror and draw a card. In my opinion, both modes of this are good and can be used, but the healing yourself 1 horror and drawing a card is actually very strong. Not only does this choice help Do No Harm even more, because now you’ve healed across two different instances, but Daisy can often have horror on herself from things like clearing her own signature weakness or playing a Ward of Protection. Medical Texts doesn’t heal horror, so that can potentially be a weak spot, and Surgical Kit can help with that a little bit. Also, potentially adding a card draw on 4 triggers of Medical Texts can’t be argued with!

Gray’s Anatomy is another good choice. This card can amplify healing or damage dealt by anyone, and both of these modes can be very useful for a support. Similarly to Antikythera, if you go for Gray’s Anatomy, you will likely want to go further into the succeed by X Seeker archetype. This is because you will want to ensure you are maximizing the value of your expensive 5 XP purchase. For this reason, I didn’t end up going with Gray’s in my campaign, and I went with only Grim Memoir, Medical Texts, and Old Book of Lore as my final Tome suite. However, a Gray’s Anatomy Do No Harm build is definitely possible.

The next card I’d like to highlight is Logical Reasoning 4. This card is absolutely the kind of thing Do No Harm Daisy wants, and for certain teams, such as ones with a horror-spamming Agnes or investigators who have very low sanity, it becomes even more valuable. This card can potentially remove 3 obligations from Do No Harm just by itself. While 4 XP is significant and you need to have 3 clues collected to get that outcome, the possible best case scenario of this card is really good. Also, the possibility of being able to remove Terror treacheries is also a fantastic bonus.

Finally, what I actually ended up playing was Ancestral Knowledge with powerful skill cards, including cards such as Survey the Area, Perception level 2, Fearless level 2 (another healing card!), and Eye of Truth. I really liked this direction as skill cards can be very flexible, going towards supporting others or enabling your own strategy. Setting up my Ancestral Knowledge & Eye of Truths (or is the plural Eyes of Truth?) was extremely XP intensive and took a long time, but in the end I was happy for even the possibility of randomly getting an Eye of Truth attached to Ancestral Knowledge on set up. This set up definitely saved me several times.

Of course, if at any point you decide your healing is enough as it is, you can always transition into just taking whatever Seeker cards help you get clues faster or handle pesky enemies. With 0-5 Seeker and 0-2 Mystic as your options, there is certainly an ocean of things you can potentially do with Daisy to achieve whatever goal you want!

Here is the actual final decklist I won The Drowned City with, so you can see an example of upgraded Legacy Do No Harm Daisy. (Scenario cards which were added to my deck during the campaign are not included in this list.) Unfortunately, I don’t have the level 0 version recorded for the deck I started with, but if you scale this deck back down from its high XP state, it should be fairly easy to construct a strong Legacy one for yourself.

Teammate & Task Synergies

I would recommend Do No Harm Daisy in a 3 or 4 player multiplayer team. While you can take her in a 2 player team, I think you will want to really drill down on her cluever power in that case, whereas this build is designed to emphasize her support potential. Also in a 3 or 4 player team, there are more investigators with health and sanity available to be healed in the first place. The 5 obligations on Do No Harm do not scale with player count, so in my opinion, the more the merrier when it comes to running this task.

Do No Harm synergizes very well with the other tasks Toe the Line and Dreams of Destruction. Both of these have investigators taking hits frequently, Toe the Line being for damage and Dreams of Destruction being for horror. However, because Do No Harm Daisy wants to heal with Medical Texts, she is better equipped at supporting a Toe The Line player than a Dreams of Destruction player. Depending on what your final decklist is though, she can potentially support both.

Next, let’s quickly highlight a handful of teammates Daisy could do really well with.

Considering Current only, I would highlight Agnes as a stand out. Agnes gets so much value out of taking horror, and if Daisy has the ability to heal her, then Agnes can get even more value. Again, it’s a bit harder for Daisy to heal Agnes’ horror in Current but certainly not impossible. And, since Agnes has low Health, Daisy can always keep her from dying to damage if that becomes an issue. Also from Current, Gloria is a good one for Daisy to follow. This is because just like Daisy, Gloria has only 5 Health, so she can be in danger of dying with just a few hits on her. While Gloria’s encounter card manipulation should hopefully prevent this outcome, Gloria’s terrible Agility also makes her vulnerable to Agility treacheries, and these often deal damage.

Considering Legacy, stand outs include Daniela and Mark. Both of these investigators love to take damage, Daniela for her investigator reaction and Mark for his card draw ability and Sophie triggers. Just like with Agnes, Daisy can help them get even more value out of their health pools by healing them up. Another good candidate is Calvin. While Calvin does want some damage and horror on him, if there is ever any fear that it’s getting out of control, Daisy’s healing can help ease those concerns.

Taking This Archetype Outside of TDC

As I said earlier, you can definitely play this deck archetype outside of The Drowned City. However, you might want to change some choices up! Our goal with this deck is to have a high healing frequency, enough to reliably heal 5 times each scenario. Outside of The Drowned City, we don’t really get as rewarded for doing that in the same way. Therefore, cards like Short Rest, which are primarily there to quickly remove three obligation from Do No Harm, can be replaced with other utility cards. You could also replace Fearless with Guts. Having Medical Texts out as soon as possible is also less critical, so you also could replace Research Librarian entirely.

Even though I’m offering these ideas, keep in mind that Medical Texts support Daisy still offers great value to a team, so there’s no need to completely abandon this idea just because Do No Harm is no longer in your play area. If you see value in keeping your healing tools outside of TDC, then keep them on board! You can still take exactly this archetype wherever and find lots of success.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Do No Harm Daisy is a great archetype that you can definitely run through The Drowned City with just a limited Current card pool – and it only gets better if you expand it to Legacy! If you’re a new player looking to try a support style investigator during a multiplayer campaign in The Drowned City, I’d recommend giving this archetype a try. And if you’re an experienced Legacy player, I think you can have loads of fun with this Daisy build anywhere. I know not everybody has The Drowned City yet, so it’s good to know you can use these ideas outside of it. Or you can even start planning your decklist for a future first time run! That being said, thanks for reading and I hope you all enjoy your future expeditions to R’lyeh!