Curse All of This Awesome Free Stuff!

This deck intends to dabble with tokens, largely to power free clues from Prismatic Spectacles. Here Harvey finds lots of clues and supports fellow investigators with lots of card draw.

To a lesser extent it contributes some healing and handles a few enemies. It’s versatile, and with the massive draw capacity and searching via Old Book of Lore it can expect to dig for cards as the situation demands.

Given the curses, 2-player with a dedicated fighter would likely be the best context. An ideal partner would be able to run Ritual Candles to mitigate the chaos bag. Agnes, Jacqueline, or maybe parallel Jim all could fit the bill.

Curse tokens are usually a pretty bad thing to meddle with, but not so bad if you run the (permanent) Blasphemous Covenant. Each turn the covenant makes the modifier of the first token drawn go from -2 to +1. That’s a huge swing.

The other way to mitigate tokens is Favor of the Moon, which pulls 3 from the bag and puts them “in your pocket” to draw on demand. That’s a great way to power the Prismatic Spectacles.

Setup and Mulligan

You’re looking for Old Book of Lore (which lets you conduct a small search every turn), or the Research Librarian who will fetch it. Probably keep any other assets, though you should dump Favor of the Moon since it's not beneficial early.

Finding Clues

The main gimmick here is Prismatic Spectacles to scoop up free clues. The bag is seeded with tokens from Gabriel and the spectacles themselves. And at low XP Harvey will also have Deep Knowledge, but that card is cut pretty early once you have some experience.

If the bag has 4+ clues you run the risk of drawing more tokens than you want... and failing a test. If you judge this is becoming too much of a risk consider playing Favor of the Moon! It pulls 3 curses out of the chaos bag, and makes them available "on tap" for your investigations. That way you will always have one for investigations but the odds of drawing two on the same test go down precipitously.

Apart from the Spectacles, there's more free clues from Deduction and True Understanding.

Draw Lots and Lots of Cards

Many Harvey decks are themed for "big hand", where he draws many cards for himself in order to power a few highly specialized events. That strategy also makes his signature weakness a huge liability. This is not a big hand deck, so figure out which investigator needs cards and help them. Sometimes that's Harvey, sometimes not.

Note that Gabriel grants free draw only to Harvey, but that's only one avenue for free card draw. Harvey is happy to share his card-drawing powers with his fellow investigators, especially before suffering his signature weakness. Vault of Knowledge grants a card to any investigator at Harvey's location after a successful investigation. Old Book of Lore grants a search for a card. And Harvey's innate ability stacks nicely to grant yet another free card. These all can really help a fellow investigator get established if they're having a bad start.

More Support

Helping your fellow investigators with free cards is just one way this deck can act in a support role. Bizarre Diagnosis is efficient health healing. Logical Reasoning heals horror. And Crack the Case can pad the pockets of your fellow investigators with resources. Be a team player!

Deal With Enemies

Harvey's abysmal and stats are obvious, but he's no pushover!

When necessary those stats can be greatly improved with Mind over Matter in order to punch or evade. Persuasion will easily send a thug back to the encounter deck. And Transmogrify will stop an enemy with the hunter trait from bothering your investigators, and grab a clue in the bargain.

The card for actually defeating enemies is Occult Lexicon, which converts extra cards from your hand into testless damage.

0 XP Deck

For a campaign starter deck just remove all cards with XP and use the 7 cards that have 0 XP listed in the Side Deck section.

Later Upgrades

This list shows the the progression at 15 experience, which is about 3 or 4 scenarios into a typical campaign. Some ideas for later experience are:

• Occult Lexicon (3) can do even more testless damage, and the Blood-Rite spells will remain in your deck even if the tome leaves play
• Old Book of Lore (3) for better economy. It grants 2 free play actions and some bonus resources
• Studious (3) helps your opening draw

Please let me know your thoughts!