The Leader in the Club House is ...

Welllll .... last day of the month so I thought I'd share some thoughts before we inch one day and one month closer to GenCon and the Warhammer world chanpionships. Lately, I've been VERY intrigued by the Destruction bolt thrower decks popping up in random regionals and I have to say that they are VERY appealing. It's no surprise that I'm a big advocate of the Order BT decks, touting it's greatness to anyone who cares to listen or cares to well ... care.

I think my biggest issue with the Order RBT deck is that it's sometimes very difficult to win if an opponent saves Innovations until you Flames them. If that happens, a lot of the time they can replay the majority of what was bounced and still overrun. Now, I understand there's ways to play around this but sometimes you just have to bounce everything earlier than what you would've liked.

The biggest differences in the deck, other than the fact that one destroys and one Fogs/Bounces characters, is the economy. It's not uncommon for the order deck to be generating 20+ resources in the midgame where the destruction deck should really only be generating around 10 or so. Is this a problem? No, not at all really, it's just different.

What makes the destruction deck so good is the Chaos tactics. Far and away there's nothing better in this deck than Firestorm and co. It's the glue that holds the deck together. It's so good that I intially brainstormed about a Chaos capital board until I realized that Orc has to be much better just because casting Troll Vomit and Lobber Crew reliably is pretty important too. You have to actually GET to the midgame, so you just need to run the Orc board out there. Also, you can make opponents keep awkward hands against you if they see an Orc board. Me personally, if I see an orc board I'm going to prepare mentally for orc/skaven aggro.

Without further rambling, here's the list I'm currently running. A lot of the cards keep coming in and out so nothing is 100% final and as shouldn't be treated as such.

Capital Board: Orc

Units:

3 Lobber Crew

Tactics:

3 Innovation

3 Troll Vomit

3 Pillage

3 Easy Pickin's

3 Tzeentch Firestorm

2 Cacophonic Scream

3 Seduced By Darkness

1 Nurgle's Pestilence

2 Slaneesh's Domination

Supports:

3 Warpstone Excavation

3 Contested Village

3 Reaper Bolt Thrower

3 Treasure Vaults

3 Armory

3 Abandoned Mine

1 Har Ganeth

3 Chaos/Orc Alliance

1 Chaos/Dark Elf Alliance

1 Orc/Dark Elf Alliance

Annnnnnnd, there it is. Currently I've been satisfied with about everything. The Domination's have been either amazing or completely awful and as such would like for them to be something else. Everything else is in there for good reason. Maybe the two 10-cost Spells are awkward for you, but for me they've been game winners against decks that hold a Pillage or something for your BT. A lot of the time you can strand them with the Pillage and just burn a zone at the beginning of your turn.

As always, feel free to comment.

- SF

The Dark Elves in Warhammer

Annnnnnnnnnd we're back. My last play session consisted of Bolt Thrower being thrown at everything in the gauntlet and passing with flying colors. What has changed since then? Well, for one, the Orc deck had to adapt quite a bit to be able to beat the unitless deck a decent amount of the time. In the process, it made a few other matchups not quite as good, but to be fair, the Dark Elf matchup was already pretty poor and the Dwarves still can't beat you two-out-of-three unless they pick their perfect 7 out of their deck twice. Basically, you absolutely HAVE to run the full amount of Pillages in the Orc deck and mulligan for one if you see a High Elf board across from you. After that, you have to hope you just draw the right set of dudes to get the job done.

In game where an early Contested Stronghold was Pillaged, I was severely crippled and more often than not could not come back if they followed that up with a few 2 attack creatures. It was even worse if they went first, started off with a Greyseer, and then did a turn 2 Pillage + Clan Moulder's Elite. I still feel the Unitless BT deck is the best deck, but if decks are starting to adapt to it's existence, then it starts to become much less attractive. That said, if people are going to stick to Dark Elves in tournament play, I see no reason to NOT play the BT deck as you can go get a snack from the concession stand, take a nap, then come back and destroy the DE deck so bad they won't even know what hit them. They have no Pillages (unless they severely want to cripple their resource base), and no real way to ever disrupt you. Yea, sure, they have Hate to mess up your first or even 2nd turns. BIG DEAL. They do nothing at all of any consequence to you in these turns anyway. Sure, the Thanquol, double Elite draw will beat you still, probably, but that's true of any Skaven deck regardless of capital board.

On to the real subject: Dark Elves.

I see why people are playing these guys in tournament play. They have all the tools to beat any unit based deck, which is pretty much every deck right now. To me, the most attractive feature of any DE deck is the card Hate. Hate is absolutely abysmal to play against and even more so if your opponent can turn that resource into a Chittering Horde or other value play. I've been playing Chittering Horde and let me tell you, Hate into Chittering Horde is one of the best plays in the game.

Oh, random sidetracked thought; I need to give a lot of props to Clamatius and his play group. I do not know these guys personally but they have to put a lot of time into this game just based off their refined deck lists. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you need to go to deckbox.org, do a people search at the top for Clamatius, and you get to see his decks, regular and single set. The guy is a beast. While I don't always agree with his card choices, he definitely knows his shit.

End side thought.

Yea, Dark Elves. If you're truly expecting a field of Dwarves, Orcs, whatever else plays Units, this is the deck you should be playing. There's enough subtle card combinations in the deck to satisfy any player that needs to whet his appetite for control. There are a few things I don't understand though:

1. Caught the Scene is awful. Unless you're not running any Skaven in your deck, the triple loyalty cost is an absolute nightmare. Unless you get a Har Ganeth + Walking Sacrifice hand, you can't feasibly cast the card for 2. Even casting it for the absolute minimum still isn't very good most of the time. If you could only ever draw 1 card a turn in this game, I'd be all for the card. The fact that any reasonable deck is going to be drawing 2-3 cards a turn is a real big turnoff.

2 . 3 Har Ganeth is a must. I can't believe I've actually seen DE decks with zero to two of this card in their decks. Yes, it's unique. No, I don't care. Play three. You need games with this deck where you can go t1 Har Ganeth into your Kingdom, Innovation into Vile Sorc. into your Quest. You can't really do that with 2 Har Ganeth and even with 3 it doesn't happen THAT much more often. 2 Walking Sacrifice seems perfectly legit, but 2 Har Ganeth is not. If you don't know how it works with Vile Sorceress, then you don't need to be playing the deck.

3. The deck has soooooooo many tricks with Deathmaster that's it's not even funny. All the minus HP effects are mind boggling. At times, I think there are too many, but it's probably necessary and what makes the deck work so well. Redundancy is pretty important in card games and boy does this deck pack a ton of it.

4. Finally, do not try to play Dark Visions in your deck. I know the card is really appealing, but it's not that good really. The loyalty cost is annoying as you can't play it off of a turn 1 Hate unless you went first. It really turns into the Chittering Horde vs. Dark Visions argument and that's a loooooooong discussion. I'll side track myself to point out a few things:

• Chittering Horde - Forces you to play Skaven like Poison Wind Globadiers. While I don't think this is entirely all that bad, it is less than desirable at times.
• Dark Visions - All but forces you to play 3 Walking Sacrifice. Again, not an entirely bad thing, but again, that's less than desirable. Also, can't play off a turn 1 Hate. Which is the biggest kick in the ass.

Both of these cards are going to get you 1 extra card into your hand (per se), with the Visions giving you a pick and Horde getting you a random Skaven (you won't miss with Chittering Horde that often, trust me). A good bit of the time you'll just Visions into a Greyseer or Deathmaster anyway so what's the point of trying to double loyalty yourself?

A lot of these are points that most of you already know, but I always feel the beed to point out the obvious to me because what's obvious to me might not be to everyone. As usual, questions, comments, and concerns can be published directly to this blog. Just click the "comment" button and we'll talk about it.

- SF

Call of Cthulhu Regionals. Or: "Why I missed it and what I should've done."

First, something I should say and something I alluded to on the CoC forums:

I play both Warhammer and CoC and every blog won't be about both. So be patient, follow my blog and read what you want to read. :) As usual all feedback is highly appreciated and I will respond to every comment that I'm physically able to to answer questions or just brainstorm with someone about decks or gameplay.

End rambling.

As soon as I read on the FFG webpage that Call of Cthulhu and Warhammer: Invasion worlds were going to be on 2 different days at GenCon, I immediately got excited and bought all the Warhammer stuff. I am a die hard gamer and anything in genres that I like, I'm magnetically pulled toward. Warhammer is something I've always been interested in, as well as the LCG format in general, so this was a no brainer.

I've been going to GenCon the past several years to play in the World of Warcraft card games National Championships. This year, they've moved location freeing up my entire weekend more or less. Because of this, I've been playing LCGs pretty much non-stop trying to learn everything about them and trying to be as innovative as possible. In the LCG format, there are obvious "best decks." Because sets are only 20 unique cards, on a monthly-ish basis, the format never really changes all THAT much. Whatever the best deck was 6 months ago is probably still a VERY good deck, even if it isn't the "best" anymore. This is true of last years CoC worlds winning deck. With recent errata to Descendant and banning of Aspiring Artist, the deck lost a ton of power. That said, with the addition of Maga Birds, Hastur is still the best sub faction for an aggro deck. You can disagree all you want but if you're playing aggro without hastur, you're doing it all wrong.

If you can tell me with a straight face that Victoria Glasser, Birds, Giant Albino Penguin, Power Drain, and Infernal Obsession aren't overpowered then maybe I'll take things a little more seriously. Until then, I'm gonna keep playing Hastur in all my aggro decks, thank you very much.

Regionals was this past weekend in New York and I didn't make the trip like I had planned to. It turned out that making a 10 hour drive to and from the city wasn't worth it. Go figure. I'm used to playing games where significant monetary prizes are given out on a regular basis. I'm not knocking FFG for not doing such prizes, but they can't honestly expect people to travel MANY MANY hours to one of 5 regionals in the entire US for prizes that are barely passable. I hate to complain about prizes, but it's really pretty silly. I play games because they're fun foremost, but some decent prizes for dumping loads of money into a game would be nice.

If I were to go to regionals, the following is the deck I would play. It has beat pretty much everything thrown in front of it for the past several weeks and I wouldn't dream of playing anything else in any event from now until something beats this deck pretty regularly:

Agency / Misk Control

---------------------------

Miskatonic:

1 Dr. Carson

3 Obsessive Insomniac

3 Chess Prodigy

3 Anthropology Advisor

3 Dreamlands Scholar

1 Twila Katherine Price, Queen of Unknown Kadath

1 Professor Armitage

1 Professor Nathaniel Peaslee

1 Randolph Carter

1 Dr. Ali Kafour

1 Professor Albert Wilmarth, Folklore Expert

Agency:

1 Repo Man

3 Government Exorcist

3 Undercover Security

2 Femme Fatale

1 Steve Clarney

1 Marshall Greene

1 John Henry Price

2 Nathaniel Elton

1 Norman Blackwood, Jr.

1 Price Manor

3 Behind Bars

3 Small Price to Pay

3 Beneath the Burning Sun

Neutral:

3 Dream Dagger

3 Prize Pistol

I'm sure to most people the deck looks really random and very unfocused but it's exactly the opposite. I only play 1-ofs of the unique investigators because other than Nathaniel Elton I really don't care which ones I draw. To me, they're all the same. 3 and 4 cost dudes that cost less to play with an Advisor in play and provide enough icons in combat to be relevant.

The way the deck plays out could be different than how most people play. You don't particularly care to win stories right away. You'd much rather focus on developing your board and getting control of the game. Usually this involves a Prize Pistol on a Willpower Agency dude. If you have Beneath the Burning Sun in play, pretty much any Agency guy in the deck can kill any relevant character on your opponents side of the table. Something to keep in mind, you will most definitely be behind a story the majority of your games. Do not panic. This is normal. As soon as you take control, your opponent can do very little to stop you.

The original idea for the deck came from a post on the FFG CoC forums. A guy had posted a deck that won some tournament in Europe and it seemed pretty good to me. To be completely honest, most decks I see posted on the forums seem really bad. They lack focus and are REALLY random. That doesn't mean that they're not enjoyable to play, that just means I'd never in a million years play it in an event. Anyway, I saw this deck and immediately started to make it better. I had the Day Dreamer in for a while, like that guy, but quickly found out that he's completely awful. As soon as I saw the Day card from Secrets of Arkham, I quickly cut Day Dreamer and started to alter the deck.

Femme Fatale was another welcome addition as any time you can play free characters off of 2 Advisors you're a happy man. She's no Undercover Security, but she gets the job done as she's one of the few characters with Fast in the deck. That's also the only reason Chess Prodigy is in the deck. Despite being an Investigator, I absolutely dispise him and would like it to be ANYTHING else. As it is, Miskatonic is really lacking in playable cards, in my opinion, and he's a necessary evil in order to have enough Misk cards in your deck to satisfy loyalty for Obsessive Insomniac and to just make sure you don't draw a hand of 8 Agency cards (which I have still done).

If you have a hand with no Insomniac, you typically want a domain with agency, a domain with misk, and eventually a domain with 1 of each. Though the last might not happen until turn 2 when you set your 3rd card under your first domain. Typically, here's how my domains look by my 2nd turn:

1: AAM

2: A

3: M

That's pretty common and quite normal. If you have insomniac hands, they tend to look more jumbled like this:

Turn 1-

1: MM

2: A

3: A

Turn 2-

1: MMA

2: A

3: A

Those games tend to be a little different but eventually it'll balance out to be a little more even.

Unless something drastic changes in the enxt few months, I'll be playing this deck in Worlds. I'm not sure if I want to add any cards from Whispers in the Dark to this or not. The Agency card that makes you exhaust 2 dudes with combat to kill a dude is appealing, but I'm not sure how much I'm loving to exhaust 2 guys if they aren't attacking or blocking. The new Misk that draws a card is also REALLY good, but having 6 2-cost Loyalty Misk guys is just asking for really absurdly bad opening hands where you just can't play anything.

That's all I got for this afternoon. Hope you enjoyed!

- SF

High Elf Unitless in Warhammer. Better than you think.

Just some random musings this morning. I read the Warhammer forums daily, several times a day, and can't believe that people still think the Unitless deck is overrated or bad or whatever they think of it. First, let me tell you a few things about the deck that you probably already know but tend to store in the back of your head hoping that it's not true:

First, the deck is INCREDIBLY hard to play correctly. I would NOT recommend this deck to anyone who doesn't understand card game math or players who don't plan ahead several turns. If you like to play guys into the battle field and attack, this is NOT the deck for you.

Every single turn of every single game is a grind. You have to know what to play and where to place it at all times. If you make a single mistake, you open yourself up to certain death. I think it's for that reason that players think the deck is overrated.

Well, it isn't.

Second, the deck beats aggro decks. You can build the fastest Orc deck in the entire world and yes you can still lose to the slowest deck in the entire world. As soon as your BT opponent casts a Reap What Is Sown, you've lost the game (unless they draw 5-6 absolute blanks).

I played a game recently where my opponent had double scout by turn 3 and I still won. Multiple times. If you happen to draw a Reap and draw into Flames of the Phoenix and a Fog effect or something it's very difficult to lose the game.

All that said, the deck is an absolute grind fest. The only thing keeping me from playing the deck at worlds is because of the mental capacity required round after round after round. If worlds were tomorrow, I'd probably play Empire. I don't know what it is but I pretty much always have Will + Judgement to destroy 2/3 of my opponents board. I also pretty much always have Runefung of Solland w/ Peasant Militia. The deck is very good vs aggro decks and can actually beat the BT decks if you can Will them early enough to make Judgement crush them. Runefung goes a long way in doing that as you can cast a free Judgement early enough for it to matter.

So here's my testing results from the past weekend:

Dwarves (Clamatius' version) vs. Orc/Skaven (Standard list)

- Dwarves hung with them pretty good. The matchup is fairly even but when the Orcs go first they have a significant advantage. Being able to take turn 1 and play an Alliance and Contested Village instead of dudes is pretty huge. On the draw, the Orc deck would usually not have the luxury of building up their non-battlefield areas because the Dwarf deck would just turtle up and make it near impossible to do any real damage. It's amazing how much the tables turn just based on who goes first.

Lobber Crew is very, very good in this matchup assuming your opponent misses Defender of the Hold turn 1. If the Dwarf player plays Defender + Cannon Crew turn 1, you're in for a world of trouble. Ranger + Grudge Thrower is also VERY annoying in this match.

Overall, like I said, it was even. I think Dwarves won about 1o games to the Orcs 12 or so.

Bolt Thrower (Clamatius') vs. Orcs

- Not. Even. Close. Orcs won the first two games as I was trying to figure out how to play the deck properly. After that, none of the games were remotely close. I think one game he burned one section and had 6 damage on a 2nd before I was able to get double Keystone Forge out and Fogged for 2-3 turns in a row to eventually full heal that section back to 0 damage. That's what happens a lot of the time; you get a Forge or 2 out and Fog enough to heal a TON of damage. The matchup truly is a joke if you know what you're doing and assuming they don't draw Triple Spider Riders into Innovation + double Clan Master's Elite.

Yes. That happened one game. And no, there's no heroic story about how I won that game because I got my face punched in.

Overall, Bolt Thrower won 11, Orcs won 4.

That's all I have to say for now. Playing more again Tuesday so I'll have more then.

- SF

About Me ...

I'm sure many of will ask yourself the same question when you click the link to stumble into my blog ... "Who is this guy, and why do In care what he's blogging about?" Well, I'm posting this first blog to help you answer that question and hopefully add some credibility to what I'll say in the weeks to come.

So, about me. I'm 27 years old and live in West Virginia. I'm comfortable driving distance to Columbus, Pittsburgh, places in Maryland, and several other places. The tournament scene in my area is non-existent but the surrounding areas are flooded with events for any game imaginable. Most of my life I have been a gamer. I enjoy playing games and feel like I understand how games "work." I'm good with strategy and have always considered myself a smart player first and a deck builder second. I'm very friendly when it comes to helping people with rulings, deck choices, card evaluations, or anything game related really.

My gaming background in pretty extensive. I've played Magic, World of Warcraft, and VS System on the professional level and and now playing FFG LCG's Call of Cthulhu and Warhammer: Invasion. I enjoy the Living Card Game format a little more than the CCG format for several reasons. While money is really never an issue with a hobby of mine, I feel the LCG format is easier for new players to jump into at any point and not feel overwhelmed with the card pool. I started playing Call of Cthulhu some months back and feel like I really understand that game and am now starting to play Warhammer.

I will be attending GenCon this year and am planning on playing in CoC and W: I worlds. I feel like I have a pretty good shot at winning both of them, honestly. To me, being confident is a big part of doing well in events. If you truly feel like you're going to do well, then chances are you're going to do well. If you go into an event doubting your deck choice or doubting your play abilities, then you're never going to get far. You're going to make silly mistakes and lose because of it. So again, be confident.

In the upcoming weeks leading up to GenCon, I'm going to blog about my favorite decks for both of FFG's LCGs. Some I'll take from the official forums, others I'll make myself. The purpose of the blog will be to help players get better and to be another sound board for those with questions about the game or questions to me in general. Starting this weekend I'll post my current deck for Call of Cthulhu and the dreaded Orc deck for Warhammer: Invasion. So be sure to tune in and read about me Living the Game.

- SF