Marie Poppin' Cultists | Ch2 Starters Revisited

Marie Poppin' Cultists

In this mini-series I'm focusing on powerful decks built from the Chapter 2 starters. Here Marie be poppin' cultists with Cosmic Flame and Consume Life, which she can easily find with Jim Culver, Arcane Initiate and her ability.

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Series Decks

At a Glance

Stats
Clue-finding:	★★★★☆
Consistency:	★★★★★
Enemy Management:	★★★★★
Encounter Defense:	★★★★★
Survivability:	★★★★★+
Simplicity:	★★★★☆

Overview

• Practically perfect in every way: Marie is the queen of card advantage. If you use her ability each phase and Arcane Initiate then you can theoretically churn through up to 11 cards per round (or 33% of your deck), drawing 5 of these. You of course won't need to gobble through your deck at this rate (plus you're limited by the damage going directly onto Marie), but still it demonstrates just powerful her ability can be. In addition to enemy attacks or treachery damage, you can use Blood Curse, Offering Bowl and Grand-Mère's Charm to activate your card draw. Card advantage makes finding Offering Bowl and Emergency Cache easier - handy given the deck is expensive (but manageably so).

• A spoonful of sugar: This deck has both damage healing (Cosmic Guidance, Consume Life, Infuse Life) and horror healing (Fearless). Having both to hand means you can use Blood Curse, Soul Link or Ward of Protection readily. Aside from healing, you have a shedload of soak as well (Jim Culver, Bloodstone, Grand-Mère's Charm and the disposable Arcane Initiate) which make Marie tough to kill. Both the soak and healing makes putting damage on Marie for her ability much more palatable.

• Everything is possible, even the impossible: This deck has Second Sight for clue-finding, Cosmic Flame for frying enemies and then 25 icons to commit to tests, with Jim Culver and Bloodstone boosting Willpower. As there's a few disposable assets here, Will of the Cosmos provides easy additional clues. Is there anything Marie can't do?!

_{Thank you: 5argon and their thumbnail tool; Valentin1331 for his support over the years; the community creators of Arkham.Build (Felix), Arkham Cards (zzorba) and ArkhamDB (kamalisk) - linking their Patreons!}

Starting deck and planned progression

0 XP starting deck is below (and link here):

A recommended order of purchases/upgrades is:

• 1 x Cosmic Flame → 1 x Cosmic Flame •••••

• 1 x Guts → 1 x Fearless

• 1 x Cosmic Flame → 1 x Cosmic Flame •••••

• 1 x Jim Culver → 1 x Jim Culver ••••

• 1 x Unexpected Courage → 1 x Fearless

Post-18 XP suggestions are:

• 1 x Unexpected Courage → 1 x Retribution

• 1 x Infuse Life → 1 x Blood Ward

• Blood Curse → Blood Curse •••

Playtesting Notes

The deck is good! I made no changes on playtesting. I played on Hard two-player through Children of Blood, taking the 5 bonus XP it suggests you can take (getting an upgraded Cosmic Flame). After the penultimate scenario we'd amassed 24 XP, so I forwent one of the Fearless from the upgrade track and instead purchased both upgraded Blood Curses and a Retribution. With the final boss of CoB, after A Sudden Fall from André then Marie swooped in and fried them with two Cosmic Flame attacks - one with a +1 damage Blood Curse committed - for the win (with another 8 Doom left to go on the Agenda, no less). We also had Retribution to hand as well, should one of those attacks fail - making the win guaranteed.

I will say Grand-Mère's Charm was very useful throughout the campaign, particularly in scenario 1 where it allowed a win (by killing the boss) through refueling upgraded Cosmic Flame. If there's an area where this deck is weaker it's be clue-finding; Will of the Cosmos can be very useful - but it is situational, and sometimes you have to ditch it for something else when using Marie's ability. Also, by only having one copy of Jim Culver, there can be a delay with him coming online while you have Second Sight out - still there is enough power here to warrant a 4 ★ clue-finding rating. Health and Sanity-wise, Marie was extremely robust - probably one of the studier decks I've ever made. Even with Called to Guinée, often she had enough health left that it didn't need to be dealt with during a scenario.

Final thoughts

Marie's innate card advantage really sets her apart, meaning you can find both powerful Mystic assets and a huge number of icons. While you can't put damage on Marie indefinitely, you can do it enough that card draw is very strong - allowing you to run a single copy of Jim Culver and free-up XP to take Fearless (and so lean into Ward of Protection and Soul Link). Honestly this feels like the greatest hits of the evergreen Mystic card pool rolled into one... Hope you enjoy!