So... what I want to know is if all this is valid in any way:

1. I initiate an investigation test.
2. I use Drawing Thin to get +2 difficulty and gaining 2 ressources
3. I commit Take Heart and failed (because of low investigation and high shroud and +2 difficulty, if you know any other mean to raise the difficulty, I'm interested)
4. I failed and draw 2 card and gain 2 ressources
5. I play (or not) Look what I found
6. I use Live and Learn
7. I do 3 to 6 again but this time, I have +2 to my skill test

Is that correct?

The difficult part is: when does this cards ends up in my discard? Take Heart and Look what I found should go at step 6, but Live and Learn would go after the next step 6.

Follow up question... if it is correct, and I only have all those cards in my deck/discard pile (with 2 copies of Take heart and Live and learn), can I loop until I actually succeed (which can never occured depending on the bag, shroud, and effect of elder sign) or die of the horror from reshuffling? (Or stop playing Live and Learn)

Seems valid to me. Would be a pretty rare occurrence though to repeat ad nauseum as removing cards from the game isn’t an easy feat.

I'm planning a Patrice deck with more than 30 assets. Seems quite easy to setup. The deck will dump the weakness somewhere with a hiding spot (you'll draw it with your ressource each turn, so you juste need to stray cat the weakness once, and we're done) and turn only with less than 9 event/skill.

Investigating with Sixth sense and Fearless to get horror back from the shuffling.

But the timing is somewhat not clear with me and Live and Learn. Do we resolve step 8 of the skill test timing before playing it? Seems to me it should be played at step7 and so, no cards are discarded yet.

That sequence is correct, with a few caveats.

The first being that you can only trigger Look What I Found if you failed by 2 or less, and Drawing Thin will potentially interfere with this. For example, the reliable way to trigger LWIF is to investigate a 1/2 shroud location - if you pass, great, you get the clue, if you fail, no matter what token, the test result cannot go below 0 so you'll always be failing by 2 or less even if your base skill was 2 and you drew the -8 - but if you use Drawing Thin to increase the test difficulty you no longer have the reliable trigger if the total test difficulty is 3 or more.

The second is that the second test courtesy of Live and Learn will still suffer the difficulty increase from Drawing Thin on the first test, so you are hardly guaranteed to succeed the second test even with the +2 from Live and Learn.

As for your questions: Take Heart will enter your discard pile in Step 8 of the first skill test. Look What I Found will enter your discard pile immediately after resolving, in step 6 of the first skill test. Live and Learn will enter your discard pile after the second skill test resolves in full (after the end of step 8 of the second skill test).

As for the "combo", let's find out: Starting out, you have Look What I Found (LWIF), the first copy of Take Heart (TH1) and the first copy of Live and Learn (LaL1) in hand. Your discard pile is empty and your deck consists of your second copy of Take Heart (TH2) and your second copy of Live and Learn (LaL2). You investigate, committing TH1 and triggering Drawing Thin. You fail by 2. Step 6, LWIF triggers and goes to discard. Step 7, TH1 triggers and you draw TH2 and LaL2. Step 8, TH1 enters your discard. After step 8, LaL1 triggers. You investigate, committing TH2. You fail. St.7, TH2 triggers, you take 1 horror and draw LWIF and TH1, emptying your deck. St.8, TH2 goes to discard. Then LaL1 goes to discard. Then you play LaL2, commit TH1, play LWIF, and draw LWIF and LaL1. St.8 TH1 discarded, after that LaL2 is discarded. Your hand now consists of LaL1 and LWIF, your deck consists of TH2 and your discard consists of TH1 and LaL2. At this point, the combo is broken - you can Live and Learn one more time, but without a copy of Take Heart, that's the last part of the combo (if you had instead drawn LWIF and TH2, you wouldn't have a copy of LaL to play at all, and if you still managed to draw TH2 and LaL1, you'd merely be postponing the issue for one more test - next time you will draw LWIF and only one element of your engine and the cycle ends).

So if you intend to play Look What I Found any time after the first test, your cycle breaks. You absolutely need to draw a copy of Take Heart and Live and Learn every test. However, if you don't use Look What I Found after the first test and simply keep it in hand, and you can guarantee failing every test even on elder sign, you can repeat the cycle of drawing and playing/committing Take Heart and Live and Learn. It's worth 2 resources and 1 horror per cycle - an interesting thought experiment but that's about it.

1 hour ago, vindoq said:

But the timing is somewhat not clear with me and Live and Learn. Do we resolve step 8 of the skill test timing before playing it? Seems to me it should be played at step7 and so, no cards are discarded yet.

Live and Learn is played after the test fully resolves, so you're fine there.

1 hour ago, vindoq said:

I'm planning a Patrice deck with more than 30 assets. Seems quite easy to setup.

That's ten full turns of doing nothing but playing assets. Assets which cannot be discarded, so you can't soak with them or have extra copies of uniques. That doesn't strike me as "easy to setup" at all.

23 minutes ago, rsdockery said:

That's ten full turns of doing nothing but playing assets. Assets which cannot be discarded, so you can't soak with them or have extra copies of uniques. That doesn't strike me as "easy to setup" at all.

I agree. Even once you get Cornered into play so you can throw away assets you don't need, it's just not going to help.

I can't even think of 30 assets I'd want to have in a Patrice deck. My Patrice deck, which worked very smoothly, ended up with maybe 18 assets in it, and next time I'd definitely cut it down by a couple.

How even are you getting 30+ assets in Patrice, by the way? First you have to fill out your slots, which at the absolute cheapest costs you:

• 1 resource for an Ally (Stray Cat or Arcane Initiate, assuming you don't mind keeping those in play)
• 2 resources for both Hands (plenty of combos, like 1x Fire Axe plus 1x Ritual Candles)
• 2 resources for both Arcanes (some combination of Alch. Transmutation and/or Scrying)
• nothing for the Body (Leather Coat)
• nothing for the Accessory (Cherished Keepsake)
• 3 for the Footwear pseudo-slot

That accounts for eight cards (the Composure pseudo-slot isn't included, since you can't keep those cards in play). Beyond that, you need slotless assets:

• Arcane Studies (cost 2)
• Dark Horse (cost 3; one copy only)
• Dig Deep (cost 2)
• Drawing Thin (cost 0)
• Forbidden Knowledge (cost 0)
• Painkillers (cost 1)
• Scavenging (cost 1)
• Smoking Pipe (cost 1)
• Tennessee Sour Mash (cost 3)
• Thermos (cost 4)

That gets you another 19 cards, for a total of 27 asset cards altogether, still short of your quota. And plenty of these cards are laughably useless: A Leather Coat that you don't want to use for soak, Scavenging in a deck that fails investigations, Dark Horse in a deck that needs over 30 resources to put its "combo" together, and of course two copies each of Dig Deep and Arcane Studies in play simultaneously.

So... apart from extra drawing with Grisly totem or Drawing thin, you cannot play Look what I found! without breaking the loop.

Seems pretty close to a breaking point. I don't remember all the ability that could trigger on failling a test, and there could be a lot of other triggers that could be added in this mess.

29 minutes ago, rsdockery said:

That's ten full turns of doing nothing but playing assets. Assets which cannot be discarded, so you can't soak with them or have extra copies of uniques. That doesn't strike me as "easy to setup" at all.

6 minutes ago, Allonym said:

I can't even think of 30 assets I'd want to have in a Patrice deck. My Patrice deck, which worked very smoothly, ended up with maybe 18 assets in it, and next time I'd definitely cut it down by a couple.

Yeah... lots of non-fast cards make a lot of action to build this setup... But nonetheless, this is essentially academic, you're quite useless before this. Most of them are useless.

Here's the list:

Quote

Patrice Hathaway Groundhog Day

Patrice Hathaway
Packs: From Core Set (2) to The Depths of Yoth

Assets
2x Forbidden Knowledge (Core Set)
1x Shrivelling (Core Set)
2x Arcane Studies (Core Set)
2x Scavenging (Core Set)
1x Stray Cat (Core Set)
2x Dig Deep (Core Set)
2x Smoking Pipe (The Miskatonic Museum)
2x Painkillers (The Miskatonic Museum)
1x Dark Horse (Undimensioned and Unseen)
1x Lantern (The Path to Carcosa)
1x Cherished Keepsake (Echoes of the Past)
1x Mists of R'lyeh (The Forgotten Age)
1x Backpack (The Forgotten Age)
2x Thermos (The Depths of Yoth)
1x Track Shoes (The Circle Undone)
1x Sign Magick (The Secret Name)
2x Tennessee Sour Mash (The Secret Name)
1x Sixth Sense (The Wages of Sin)
2x Drawing Thin (The Wages of Sin)
1x Patrice's Violin:My Muse (The Dream-Eaters)

Events
2x Ward of Protection (Core Set)
2x Delve Too Deep (The Miskatonic Museum)
1x Hiding Spot (The Path to Carcosa)
2x Quantum Flux (A Phantom of Truth)
2x Live and Learn (Heart of the Elders)
1x Deny Existence (The Circle Undone)

Skills
2x Fearless (Core Set)
2x Take Heart (Heart of the Elders)

Treachery
1x Random Basic Weakness (Core Set)

Enemy
1x Watcher from Another Dimension (The Dream-Eaters)

Ah I see - it's 30 asset cards not to make an effective build, but purely to empty out your deck, hand and discard pile so you can pull off your loop. Kind of like the infinite actions Rita build. Except that the Rita combo was able to take horror into account and therefore was truly infinite, and obviously infinite actions is more valuable than infinite (or realistically a dozen or so) resources.

Of course at this point you have already played every asset in your deck so you have no further need for resources except for Dig Deep/Arcane Research and I guess playing whatever Backpack dredged up.

Plus of course you have the Watcher From Another Dimension weakness which will kill you dead after a couple of loops unless you manage to bring it into play (by failing to evade/attack it) and then disengage from it or have a friend take it off you. And much like the Rita combo you need a basic weakness that remains in play.

13 hours ago, Allonym said:

And much like the Rita combo you need a basic weakness that remains in play.

There're a couple of Permanent ones, aren't there, which would be ideal for such a deck.

8 hours ago, dysartes said:

There're a couple of Permanent ones, aren't there, which would be ideal for such a deck.

There's one, Indebted (which my groups have taken out of the rotation for being too mild).

There's now a whole lot of basic weaknesses. Your chances of getting Indebted are very slim.