Hikaru Nakamura

Care has been taken to ensure this deck is playable with only core, carcosa, and hemlock vale.

If proxying is available, try Armageddon instead of Shrivelling.

If not, fear not as it's not really that good without the upgrade anyways.

Leaning more curse than bless, but with a good mix of both to still get extra actions sometimes.

The only bless cards are 1 of Guided by Faith and technically the Book of Living Myths and The Key of Solomon with your passive. In my experience this gives a reasonable stream of blesses for extra actions, with the Guided by Faith being almost completely unnecessary but included due to lack of cards.

Overall, the number of curse/bless in the deck will be pretty low outside of your turn, but nonzero. Curses are great to enable Rod of Carnamagos, Armageddon, Control Variable, and most importantly, Spectral Razor and Read the Signs. These cards have heavy offsets for the stacking debuff of curse tokens, so you want to use them with a guaranteed curse if possible.

Combat is usually simple: Spectral Razor is near guaranteed 3 damage, generally testing 8 or 10 vs < 4, and synergizes with Book of Living Myths and Rod of Carnamagos for practically unlimited use.

Clue gathering: same as combat, but a lower priority if playing in a campaign with a seeker or primary cluever.

Other cards are unfortunately mostly fills, as the rest of the card pool is good, but not particularly relevant to the cause; general mystic utility that can be found in almost any build.

One thing worth noting is that Uncage the Soul is less efficient in this deck due to the 2 cost of Spectral Razor and Read the Signs. Emergency Cache is better, but we're already action starved in addition to resource starvation, so really these are only crutches and we want to get David Renfield or The Key of Solomon online ASAP.

Mulligan:

1. Book of Living Myths / Key of Solomon

2. Fight spells and investigation support

3. Everything else

My own upgrade order:

2x Storm of Spirits -> 2x Spectral Razor (2)

1x Diabolical Luck -> 1x Key of Solomon (4)

1x Diabolical Luck -> 1x Key of Solomon (4)

1x Occult Reliquary (3)

1x Rod of Carnamagos -> 1x Rod of Carnamagos (2)

1x Guided by Faith -> 1x Rod of Carnamagos (2)

If we have enough chaos generation:

2x Accursed -> 2x Dawn Star (1)

If we have enough resources:

2x David Renfield -> 2x Gabriel Carillo (1)

2x Uncage the Soul -> 2x Read the Signs (2)

If we need more clue gathering:

2x Drawn to the Flame -> 2x Read the Signs (2)

2x David Renfield -> 2x Gabriel Carillo (1)

2x Cat Mask -> 2x Prismatic Spectacles (2)

If we need more evading:

2x Drain Essence -> 2x Ethereal Form (2)

Other swaps are of course possible; in general the cards being swapped out are all constantly on the chopping block for whatever upgrades are best to solve the problems of the deck at any given point.