Joe Diamond's Venturing Fingerprint Kit

Beat Cop is Alice Luxley for now, but the site isn’t updated.

Joe Diamond is my new favourite investigator. Versatile, and with astonishing efficiency, he is really capable of handling just about anything. This is my version of him that I am taking through the Circle Undone with a Diana Stanley build, and I am finding it incredibly good fun. This deck can be run multiplayer or solo, and I think is equally strong on both.

At heart, the deck is just a good stuff Joe, with plenty of solid cards for his insight deck, good skill cards, and a set of weapons and allies to match. There is a slight combo here, which revolves around getting out Joe’s pistol, a fingerprint kit, and a Venturer. Use Venturer to refill whichever you feel needs more supplies, and then call in favours to bring him back to hand, and either put out another one, or get Alice Luxley on the table to help with investigating. The deck can get surprisingly well off, and you shouldn’t have too many difficulties paying for all of these bits.

It can struggle a bit at fighting on occasion, it’s quite difficult to get to six fight consistently, but it is doable, and that is probably the deck’s one really major weakness. You don’t have many fight icons, so you really need to horde them until you need them.

Hunch Deck – Scene of the Crime, Crack the Case, Preposterous Sketches, No Stone Unturned, Working a Hunch. You want to keep Logical Reasoning in hand to use it when it is most needed.

Upgrades- Your first ones should be Charisma and Higher Education. Being able to have multiple venturers out, or a Venturer and Alice is just funny, and you need higher education to be able to deal with willpower tests. Curiosity, Inquiring Mind, and Steadfast are also all in to help with that. After that, you mainly want to upgrade your Hunch Deck, with the upgraded No Stone Unturned as an absolute priority. You should then look at upgrading Preposterous sketches to Cryptic Research, and then probably look at upgrading the two vicious blows. Upgraded magnifying glasses will probably help as well.

Notable Omissions – Milan. I desperately wanted to do a deck that didn’t rely on the seekers number 1 crutch card, and I feel that crack the case allows me to do just that. Milan has an insane upfront cost, for limited benefit, it’s six actions before you see any real benefit credit wise from him, and I have enjoyed an Ursula Deck that relied on the Jewel of Aurelous for economy instead, and worked surprisingly well. I don’t feel like I miss him (Luxley’s 1 investigate boost makes up for that), as fingerprint kit provides increasing investigating efficiency, which means you may well never really make your money back using him, especially if you run this solo or with another good investigator.

Changes - I am still not sure on Alice Luxley. It feels like Beat Cop is just going to be better, but she does proc off of Scene of the Crime and Working a Hunch for enemies that you just want to plink in multiplayer, rather than actively put down, and that plus 1 research is really helpful… but I remain uncertain. The .45, machete and prepared for the worst are all relatively interchangable as well. .45 procs off of Venturer, but is more expensive, whereas machete is cheaper, and end of the day you will want to put your detective colts over it instead. I think 1 prepared for the worst is the maximum for this deck, but you could swap it for a second machete.

Thoughts very much appreciated!