The Fatal Thespian | Ch2 Starters Revisited

Card draw simulator

Odds: 0% – 0% – 0% more
Derived from
None. Self-made deck here.
Inspiration for
The Fatal Thespian | Ch2 Starters Revisited 0 0 0 1.0
The Fatal Thespian | Ch2 Starters Revisited 0 0 0 1.0

HungryColquhoun · 22120

The Fatal Thespian

HLz9shgWkAAmCNx.png

In this mini-series I'm focusing on powerful decks built from the Chapter 2 starters. Here André can deal up to 9 damage in a turn by bashing enemies' legs in, pushing them off roofs (twice) and shooting them. Who knew show business was so cutthroat?!

If you want to support my work, give it a like ❤︎ and a favorite ★ on here!

Series Decks

  Seeker      Survivor     Guardian      Rogue      Mystic  
Carolyn Miguel Tommy André Marie

At a Glance

Stats
Clue-finding:  ★★★★☆
Consistency:  ★★★★☆
Enemy Management:  ★★★★★
Encounter Defense:  ★★★☆☆
Survivability:  ★★☆☆☆
Simplicity:  ★★★★★
60354.avif 60352.avif 60353.avif

Overview

  • Taking slapstick literally: With his Polished Cane, André slaps people with a stick at an 8 with Olivier. This will often trigger an oversuccess, giving you both an extra action and automatically evading the enemy. Both Hammerless and A Sudden Fall then deal extra damage to exhausted foes. The Grapevine allows you to get straight to bad guys (even Aloof ones) and engage them while providing card draw. Of course you can also evade enemies with your great stat too.

  • Cash for clues: When you're not blugeoning enemies with walking implements, you're getting cash and finding clues. Out the Door and "Watch this!" throw resources at you, while Thieves' Kit provides money from investigating. Prestidigitation allows you to flip between clue-finding and enemy management with ease. When you're not investigating with a Kit (e.g. you have your weapons out), resources convert to clues with Right Under Their Noses, Pay Your Dues and Silver Tongue. André's extra action coupled to Olivier's free move gives great versatility, often enabling up to 4 clues in a turn.

  • There's no people like show people: As André has a slightly padded deck with 3 signature skills, card draw is important. Lucky Cigarette Case gives cards for oversuccess, while upgraded Grapevine pairs card draw with efficient enemy management. Manual Dexterity and a Perception round this off, replacing themselves while boosting tests. In terms of the encounter deck, André sports a respectable number of and icons here in addition to Know the Line. While the Film Star only has Olivier Bishop as soak, his basic health and sanity are good.

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):

HLheX5ZWUAArm_e.png

A recommended order of purchases/upgrades is:

Post-19 XP suggestions are:

Playtesting notes

I made a couple of small tweaks on play testing. Firstly I swapped the order of Another Day, Another Dollar and upgraded Right Under Their Noses (so the former is bought inside your first 19 XP). This plays a little better with upgraded Silver Tongue, which itself works very well with Thieves' Kit. Surprisingly, André felt like my main clue-finder while playing - in addition to his great enemy management. The other small change was removing one copy of Perception rather than Unexpected Courage from the final deck. Given you do tests with Polished Cane, the icons are handy over the slightly more situational icons.

Playing on Hard two-player through Children of Blood, I thought the deck worked great. I used the 5 bonus XP from Hard difficulty for upgraded Silver Tongue and a copy of upgraded The Grapevine. While the latter didn't shine too much in the campaign, drawing a card for something you were going to do anyway is a nice effect. I found Polished Cane in particular to be excellent - very easily triggering your extra action by testing at an 8 with Olivier. As mentioned in my review of Polished Cane, it also allows you to pin Elusive enemies to a location if you get the over-success on your first action. Prestidigitation was extremely useful in shuffling hand assets around on the fly. Overall this build felt like the quintessential Rogue, which is exactly what I was going for!

Final thoughts

This deck allows you to have your cake and eat it. Enemy management (both fighting and evading) leverage André's high and his easy money feeds into clue-finding. People often enjoy Trish because her Seeker splash gives clues, however André's additional action does this and more. The Grapevine is an added bonus, giving you card draw with absurd mobility, and convenient means to engage Aloof enemies like Whippoorwills, Zealots and most Civilians. Hope you enjoy!

12 comments

Aug 29, 2026 Flame_ustc · 22

The 0xp deck link is broken.

Aug 29, 2026 HungryColquhoun · 22120

@Flame_ustc Thanks for the heads-up, fixed. I didn't realise but a number of the 0 XP decks were saved locally and then when I cleared my cache a couple of weeks ago they got wiped. I'm sure the Marie deck link is broken too so I'll refresh that in a moment...

Sep 13, 2026 DazzaG · 1

@HungryColquhoun thank you so much for the decklist and commentary! As a relatively new player I've been learning a lot from both reading and playing with this (and your other) decklist(s), so it's massively appreciated.

For the post-19xp suggestions, what are your thoughts about instead aiming for The Red Clock? The problem I'm having with Right Under Their Noses is that it doesn't have huge synergy with Polished Cane, so really a lot of the time the manual evade is just against an elite... also I'm a sucker for Unexpected Courage, so hate to see it go.

I do appreciate the xp difference, but the way the trade-off is 9 xp for 10 (and maybe a bit more if you want to throw in a Relic Hunter) and the way it plays nice with the over-succeed mechanic on André, it just sorta... feels better, I guess?

I'd welcome your thoughts- given I'm still learning, even if I get corrected I've still improved my knowledge so big W :) !

Sep 15, 2026 HungryColquhoun · 22120

@DazzaG You're very welcome and glad the guides have been useful!

Re. The Red Clock, it's also a good idea (but with it's 10 XP price tag I find it tricky to include in decks most of the time). You can always ditch one Another Day, Another Dollar to get it earlier (especially if you want to buy Relic Hunter too) - I do have a Trish deck planned for a future series where I recommend doing exactly this. Equally I don't think Right Under Their Noses is too anti-synergistic as this deck doesn't need to kill things all the time. Honestly what surprised me the most with this deck is it still feels strong on clue-finding, so having anything which can net you extra clues is nice.

Sep 23, 2026 thegarbageman25 · 118

Rules question: can you spend resources on your agility with silver tongue to increase your polished cane's skill test? I know you can't commit agility icons, but does silver tongue work any differently?

Great deck!

Sep 24, 2026 HungryColquhoun · 22120

@thegarbageman25 Glad you like the deck!

Good question, and one I didn't know the answer to myself - like you I'd assumed as you can't commit to the test for a boost, then this wouldn't work.

However, Silver Tongue is just boosting your stat in a similar way to Olivier Bishop - which does stack. In searching around for precedents for this, I found this deck:

arkhamdb.com

In this case Blood Pact is used to boost Read the Signs in similar fashion. chirubime commented on the deck and didn't flag any issues, and he did have a very good grasp of the rules. I've had a scan of the Grimoire and can't see anything which would contradict this either.

TL:DR it seems to be allowed! I will say most of the time your test value is high enough that you want need a boost, but it's good to have the option.

Sep 24, 2026 thegarbageman25 · 118

@HungryColquhoun Thanks so much! Appreciate you taking the time to clarify the rules.

Sep 24, 2026 HungryColquhoun · 22120

@thegarbageman25 No worries at all, I think a lot of 'new' players (brand new Ch2 players, Ch1 players who haven't played in a while) are coming across these decks - so it's good to be helpful!

Sep 30, 2026 Javi1967 · 1

Muchas gracias por el mazo. Me ha servido de mucha ayuda. Continúa haciendo este trabajo. A los nuevos jugadores nos sirve muchísimo.

Sep 30, 2026 HungryColquhoun · 22120

@Javi1967 De nada! (That's about as far as my Spanish goes I'm afraid...)

Oct 24, 2026 Highrise · 1

Thanks for sharing this deck @HungryColquhoun! I'm currently running a variant through Brethren of Ash with 2× Polished Cane, 1× Hammerless, 2× Thieves' Kit and 1× Lockpicks. Running more of them gives me a better chance of having a hand item that lets me succeed by a lot.

I'm struggling to find a use for Prestidigitation, though. Can you explain when it's useful? I usually have both hand slots filled, so playing Prestidigitation makes me discard one of them to make room. Then at the end of my turn I have to return an Item to my hand. You mention it's useful for "shuffling hand assets around on the fly", but I end the round with one hand asset fewer in play. Maybe I'm reading it wrong?

Oct 25, 2026 HungryColquhoun · 22120

@Highrise Glad you're enjoying the deck! Prestidigitation is there more for the M1903 Hammerless to reload it (and/or to 'reload' a Thieves' Kit too). Also you can bring a Hammerless in fast if you're already engaged with an enemy. So if you've reduced down to one Hammerless and are using Lockpicks a fair amount over Thieves' Kit it probably will have less use.

Re. shuffling hand assets around on the fly, you can also do things like use it to play Lucky Cigarette Case and then return a hand asset for the reloading effect. Or if you need to do boss killing, then often you're not so bothered about bumping out Thieves' Kit at that stage (and even if you then have to return a Hammerless at the end of the round, it's not so big a deal - especially as you can use Polished Cane to often exhaust a boss on your next turn and so play a Hammerless without an AoO).

Hope that gives a bit more perspective on how to pilot the deck. As mentioned it does become less useful if you move away from assets with uses that need to be refueled.