Hello everybody, I'm a long time player from Spain

I've been lurking this forums lately in search for solving some minor weird questions, and saw some of the discard/reshuffling clarifications when a sinister and possibly broken and wrong idea came to my mind:

-When you discard a card, it goes to the bottom of its proper deck.

-Eltdown Shards allow you to roll for a Lore check in order to remove a Doom Token from the AO, and then you discard this Unique Item.

-Ashcan Pete Scrounge ability allows him to draw from the bottom of the Unique/Common/Spells decks when he draws.

-With all of this, when an Investigator uses 'Eltdown Shards', Pete could camp on Curiositie Shoppe with some $ and remove 2-3 or who knows how many doom tokens this way…

Is this legal? I find this extremely abusing and wrong, and I'm not sure this is correct.

Sorry for my bad english. You can think of me as an Innsmouth native or so haha

It is a legal combo indeed. Many scrounge-camping combos have been thought up in the past, but they haven't been wholly successful.

Pete would need quite a bit of money, and then also the sanity and lore to read the book in the first place. Note that you would have to commit Pete to the Curiosity Shoppe indefinitely (I guess if he keeps being successful then it doesn't matter). If you need more characters with sanity/money/lore, you'd have to commit a second character to the store! Hardly a fine use of time.

You're welcome to try and pursue this yourself, but I don't think it'll wind up working so well.

Tibs said:

My thoughts exactly

You would almost certainly need a second character involved.
Pete only starts with 1$ so even with a bank loan he would only be able to buy it twice (and then there is a 50% chance he would loose some of it and only be able to buy it once).
He also has a maximum lore of only 3. With the -2 modifier he would need to spend on average 3 turns every time he wants to use it.
And he could only use it twice before he would have to leave for the asylum (three times if he discards Duke).
And even though you buy some extra time for the other investigators, it doesn't really get you any closer to winning.

It is definitely a good thing to have Pete buy some really good discarded items when the timing is right and give it away to other investigators. But not worth loosing one or two investigators for the entire game.

Thanks for the fast replies!

Yes, it may be kind of boring and hard to achieve, but for a desperate scenario… There is also that Relationship card from MH that allows your partner to read the same tome you read. Well, that would be extreme luck.