Tommy Muldoon vs Brethren of Ash (Hard, Ch2) - Deck Guide

My first foray into Chapter 2 features a classic Guardian/Seeker combo, pairing Tommy Muldoon with Joe Diamond. Guardian is my favourite class and I love blasting monsters away with overwhelming firepower, so with Tommy being the new gun guy I was drawn to him right away.

The current card pool is pretty small but there's still a lot of interesting choices to make. I tailor my decks for the campaign at hand and I iterate a lot to try to find the most effective bunch of cards that will consistently produce the best outcome in each scenario (in other words, as much XP as possible).

Tommy doesn't have great options on the economic side of things at the moment so his resource generation has a fair bit of variance from game to game, but his capacity for dealing damage is very solid, and frankly, that's all that matters.

This deck was designed for a two-handed solo run of Brethren of Ash, on Hard, alongside Joe Diamond.

The partner deck can be found here.

If you want to skip ahead to see the final version of this deck, it can be found here.

The Deck

I generally specialize my decks when playing two-handed, so in this case Tommy is focused on enemy management while Joe is, of course, focused on gathering clues.

Since we're playing on Hard we'll be aiming to get at least +4 on every test we initiate (or +5 later in the scenario when the token has scaled up). This means that, generally speaking, if you can't get +4 then you should probably use the action on something else like drawing cards so that you can hit that threshold.

Another general note is that it isn't worth trying to mitigate damage and horror from treacheries by including cards like Guts and Manual Dexterity. Tommy's and are too low for him to have any hope of passing those tests even when boosted.

Instead, the deck is designed with the expectation that he'll fail all of those tests. This is done in two main ways: directly, by including soak, and indirectly, by focusing on what Tommy is good at so as to bring the scenario to a close sooner.

The Cards

M1911: There isn't a lot of choice at the moment for level zero blue guns but, fortunately, this is a good one. It'll be our main mulligan target alongside Becky because it's critical for Tommy to be able to deal two damage with one action as soon as possible.

Becky: Speaking of, this new version of Becky is a nice upgrade over the original, mostly due to Tommy's ability to ensure it always enters play with four ammo. Its triggered ability is also very relevant in the second and third scenarios against the aloof enemies.

Protective Vest, Right Tool for the Job: Having only three weapons in the deck makes these cards our second highest mulligan priority. The vest being able to grab upgrades is handy too, and even though Tommy has 9HP its soak is useful because it lets you absorb more attacks of opportunity in case you need to do something more important than dealing with the enemy in front of you.

These two cards are effectively (though not technically) the only card draw in the current Guardian pool.

Logan Hastings: Expensive, but worth it. Passive stat boosts are the best way to deal with the Hard token bag, and his ability provides a trickle of resources in every game.

Resilience: Tommy has a lot of assets competing for his precious resources and this one has the lowest priority. Two copies was too many but one copy felt good for horror soak, which will hopefully only become necessary late in the game when you can afford to play it.

Bounty: This is a good resource card but, as with Logan Hastings, it only does something when you have an enemy to fight. As such, it's inconsistent.

Emergency Cache: There's no getting around this one, at least until Guardians get a few more viable resource generators.

Custom Grip: I didn't think this card would perform very well but it turned out to be a real linchpin. It gives you a lot of flexibility over the order in which you play your guns, manage your slots, and replenish your ammo.

Being able to play a gun as a fast trigger ability even saves you an action (and possibly an attack of opportunity). You can't use Tommy's ability when you do that, but then you won't always want to do that anyway.

Iron Sights: At the end of the first scenario we want to bring down the Servant of Flame and we may not have enough skill cards to reach +5 on every attack, so this card provides a valuable consistency boost. Spending an action is costly, but being able to land just two damage in one turn goes a long way towards felling this giant.

Physical Fitness: Despite Tommy's huge health pool and other soak assets, in the second and third scenarios he can still get overwhelmed by damage, so I found having one copy of this mitigated those occasional bad streaks. One thing in its favour is its icon, so it's never a completely dead draw.

Scene of the Crime: This is a pretty decent team efficiency booster in the first scenario but it will get replaced after that. In the final act you can deploy it to deal two testless damage against the Servant of Flame since there are a heap of clues at its location.

Adapt and Overcome, Armed to the Teeth, Overpower, Unexpected Courage: Any skill that provides at least 2 is worth taking to ensure our bullets hit their mark.

Overpower being the only card draw in the deck is a glaring weakness but there isn't much we can do about that at this point. We have a slightly larger skills package here than might be expected, but with Tommy being so resource poor any additional assets or events tended to just collect dust in the hand.

Vicious Blow: I was glad to see this card make a return in Chapter 2. It's as efficient as ever, often saving you an action depending upon the exact HP of your target.

Loose Cannon: This weakness adds to Tommy's resource woes. Note that as long as you have more than one resource you can choose the "lose 5 resources" option, which is often the better pick.

This means you generally want to hold onto Emergency Cache until you need to use it to play something, because floating more than a few resources means they'll be wasted if your weakness shows up unexpectedly. And remember that during upkeep you draw a card before gaining a resource, so if this weakness sends you broke you'll still have at least one resource at the end of the round.

Wounded: This is the basic weakness I pulled for my final run through the campaign. Tommy has HP to spare but its chip damage can really build up if you ignore it for too long.

And here's a few cards that didn't make the cut:

Endurance: On paper this looks like a good way to boost your attacks when you run out of skills, but in multiple games it never hit the table because there was always something more important to play.

Its two resource play cost is a real hurdle, and you won't have spare resources to activate it until the late game in most cases. And while that might seem like the best time to use it (since you're probably low on commits) its slot is better spent on something that can impact the game sooner.

"Make 'em sing": The most interesting thing about this card is that you can use it on Elite enemies. It serves a similar purpose to Sweeping Kick from Chapter 1 in that it can let you "tank" an enemy that takes more than one turn to kill.

Sometimes simply evading an enemy is as good as defeating it, though not really in this campaign where most of the enemies have hunter and the ones that don't tend to build up doom if you just leave them parked somewhere. I tried this card for a while and barely ever found a use for it, but I think it could find a home in a different deck.

Service Revolver: Getting a free attack for taking a hit isn't a bad effect but since you can't activate it on demand you still need to equip a regular weapon alongside it, and that makes it unaffordable.

The Campaign

Brethren of Ash is pretty short since it's intended to be the introductory campaign. I'll make some notes about various things and then go over the upgrades.

Scenario One: Spreading Flames

• After advancing the first act you'll need to run through the Dormitories on your way to the Miskatonic Quad. Make sure both investigators have enough actions to do this in one turn because you'll have to take an attack of opportunity from the Servant of Flame (then he disappears when the act advances again).

  Joe is usually better at taking this hit with a Laboratory Assistant since you'll probably want to preserve Tommy's sanity, but if you have Resilience in hand (or in play) then Tommy should be able to handle it.

• Chances are you'll want to head straight to the Orne Library to use its card draw effect since you might not have all the kit you need for the upcoming boss fight.

• Before advancing to the final act you will hopefully have Becky in play with at least two ammo along with a few skill cards to ensure your hits land.

  It should only take two turns to kill the boss. Joe should have both copies of Insidious Truths in hand, and you can shoot and/or use clues to deal the remaining damage.

Spreading Flames: 8XP gained.

Upgrades

Since this is a three-scenario campaign you only get two chances to add upgrades to your deck before the finale, and that worked out to be 16XP pretty consistently across all my playthroughs once the decks were refined.

This limitation feels bad because adding upgrades is one of the most fun things you can do in this game, but to my surprise it also felt good because it makes you think really hard about exactly what cards your deck needs to perform to its fullest potential.

Removed:

1 x Iron Sights: We'll drop one of these because the second scenario has more breathing room for us to find it, and it will still be very useful for our new gun.

2 x Scene of the Crime: Multiple runs through the next scenario convinced me that Tommy needs to specialize more on fighting. He can get away with this because Joe is absurdly good at grabbing clues and won't need any help.

Added:

1 x Winchester Model 12: The perfect tool for gunning down creatures from beyond and the good citizens of Arkham both. I chose the Thompson Submachine Gun at first, but then when I saw what awaited me at the end of the third scenario I switched to the shotgun because it's a true boss killer (no shade on the Tommy gun, it's excellent too, it's just fit for a different purpose).

2 x Extended Barrel: A passive 1 boost on every attack is a good effect, and our chosen XP weapon scales directly with our test result so it's even better.

7XP spent, 1XP left.

Scenario Two: Smoke and Mirrors

• A typical first turn here involved playing a gun (either from the mulligan or from tutoring one) and then ending at Southside via the Merchant District. On the next turn you can start digging for cards with the location ability.

• Ideally, you can get either a M1911 or Becky into play first, saving the Winchester Model 12 for later. Becky is a particularly good solution for the Whippoorwill problem, and try to get on them quickly so you don't have multiple birds sitting around.

• The reason for that is because this scenario has many ways to slow you down, from Arcane Lock to Mark of Elokoss to your action taxing basic weaknesses (if you have them). Getting stuck in one spot for too long with a flock of annoying birds compounds all sorts of nasty issues for you, and it's one of the reasons I dropped Scene of the Crime (making Tommy more efficient at killing).

• On the same topic, the dreaded Downpour is such a threat it breaks my general "no commits" rule, and it's why Unexpected Courage is still in the deck. Taking damage and horror in the mythos phase is one thing, but losing actions is a whole different ballgame, and the token bag here isn't bad enough to prevent +1 on that test from making a noticeable difference over the course of multiple playthroughs. So yeah, save Unexpected Courage for that if at all possible.

• Try to save Extended Barrel and Iron Sights for the shotgun and use Custom Grip to juggle your regular guns as necessary. You shouldn't need the shotgun until you start knocking on doors, and mostly for the Servant of Flame in any case.

• You don't need to be at the same location as Joe to spend clues but make sure you don't knock on a door with your last action. Joe can deal with 4/6 of them more efficiently than you (I'm including Naomi O'Bannion there because he can actually afford to pay her) but you'll most likely have to blast Sgt. Earl Monroe and Cornelia Akely away. In fact, Cornelia is the only one that neither investigator has any chance of handling nonviolently.

• The Servant of Flame is Elusive in this scenario so you can pace yourself if you don't have a shotgun ready for it.

• With the final versions of each deck I was able to get four targets handled pretty consistently, but never five. We'll need more and/or better cards for that to be possible with these two investigators.

Smoke and Mirrors: 8XP gained.

Upgrades

Removed:

2 x Unexpected Courage: We need to make room for a couple of new cards and this is the best place to do it.

Added:

2 x Vicious Blow: Damage is the number one game in town.

2 x Counterattack: In order to save actions moving in and out of the boss's location (so we don't get smashed) we can use this to simply cancel its attack.

1 x Physical Fitness: The finale has quite a lot more sources of damage than horror and sometimes it can build up really fast. The one resource cost discount also makes a tangible difference for Tommy.

8XP spent, 0XP left.

Scenario Three: Queen of Ash

• The goal here is to get set up as quickly as possible with a kitted-out Winchester Model 12, but you'll probably still want a regular gun out first to deal with trash. Once again, Becky is invaluable for handling aloof enemies like the Zealot.

  A surprising number of enemies in this campaign have retaliate as well. Becky is just a really good weapon.

• Let Joe enter each location first. If you enter the Infested Pipes first you won't be able to grab the clues, so he'll have to enter anyway and trigger a second enemy (which is a big tempo hit). His deck is designed to handle any enemy that can appear there, so stay away!

• If you find the Smuggler's Cache early it can be a great place to sit while you get your kit together (probably from taking as many draw actions as you can afford to).

• Take the damage and horror from Cosmic Evils during the first agenda to delay the Servant of Flame from spawning, but afterwards the clock should be long enough to take the doom instead.

• Once Joe has six clues and the Servant of Flame is dead (if it wasn't already) you can enter the Underground Cistern and spawn the boss. You can either move from the Sewer Culvert and end your turn at the boss, or start from the Flooded Crypt or Toxic Waste Pit (whichever one you can afford to end your previous turn at) which will let you perform two actions before the boss attacks instead of one.

  Hopefully you have a Winchester Model 12 with a few rounds, at least one Counterattack, and a few skill cards.

• It takes three max damage shots to down the boss, or fewer with Vicious Blow. Joe might also be able to contribute some damage, but don't count on it. Unfortunately, there's no way around the token's auto-fail effect here, but that's why you have multiple shells, right?

Final Thoughts

This campaign felt like a good introduction to the game for new players and I particularly liked how the final boss wasn't impossible to kill like in the original core set.

It might've been a bit prosaic on the whole for a veteran like me but I appreciate what it was trying to do and it had a good thematic through line across all the scenarios. I liked how Dr Armitage lampshaded the fact that flame worshippers had set up shop in the sewers, and I think the new modular sets are great and have a lot of potential for varied gameplay and stories in future.

The current developers have clearly benefited from ten years of Arkham Horror design to draw on, with my overall impression being that everything here is very clean. The new player cards have been very carefully considered in terms of design space and power level, and it bodes really well for the future of the game.

As for Tommy, he's great. His ability is interesting and powerful, and it took me a while to rethink my old habit of simply putting the extra ammo card into every Guardian deck that uses guns.

Stock Ammo Reload is a good card but it's not really needed thanks to Tommy's ability. You can still get value out of it of course, but moreso than with any other blue investigator you can also make do without it and put that XP towards something else.

To be honest, the path with a higher chance of overall success was probably the one where Tommy takes the Thompson Submachine Gun and Joe brings the boss down with his smarts, but the shotgun path was more fun.

Joe's article has more commentary about the campaign from his side of things. Tommy and Joe make a good team.

Tommy Muldoon vs Brethren of Ash (Hard, Ch2) - 15XP