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
I love seeing this deck in action and I hate playing against it. I feel that my weakest moments when playing this game are when it comes time to select cards to resource. I understand resourcing and when to stop, but I always feel like I picked the wrong cards.
ReplyDeleteCould you give specific advice when playing this deck what you would typically like to use for resourcing and which cards you would never use? Is never too broad? Is there an instance in which you could see yourself using just about any card if the situation demands it?
One of my favorite things about the deck is the redundancy in the characters. This allows me to play pretty much any character, without fear, as a resource at any time. Obviously this isn't true 100% of the time, but close enough. Let me give an example. Here's a sample opening hand:
ReplyDeleteDr. Carson
Prize Pistol
Twila Katherine Price
Beneath the Burning Sun
Government Exorcist
Nathaniel Elton
Dream Dagger
Dreamlands Scholar
So, when deciding to mulligan or not, you have to consider a few things: Do you have enough early game to stop an opposing deck from quickly winning stories? With this hand, the answer is yes. It has a Prize Pistol along with an Agency character and it also has a Dream Dagger with 3 Dreamers in hand. Right off the bat, a few things can be considered when selecting starting resources:
1. Dr. Carson isn't the best character early in the game. I know that sounds awkward, but I really only want to draw him later in the game when I'm trying to win stories. He lets me not worry about Terror so much. Early on, he's a coaster. He goes into the resource row.
1 - M
2. With 3 Dreamers that cost 3, I don't need to keep all of them. Nathaniel is easily the best of the group and will be the prime target for your first Dagger so he stays. Twila is better than the Scholar, even if he does draw you cards. Her discard effect is actually pretty relevant the majority of the time. So the scholar goes.
1 - M
2 - M
With 2 Miskatonic domains, we clearly need an Agency one.
3. We have BtBS, Nathaniel Elton, and GovEx left. Exorcist is going to be our turn 1 play this game so he has to stay. We aren't going to give him a Pistol so BtBS becomes a lot less good this early in the game. We'll row that and just plan on drawing one a little later in the game. Depending on what we're playing against, we can just go all in and suit up Nathaniel Elton with all our goodies or maybe we'll draw a John Henry Price. At any rate, this is our worst card.
1 - M
2 - M
3 - A
We arent too upset by this. Let's assume we're going second this game (I like to test decks going 2nd anyway to make sure it's still capable of stopping rush decks when they go first).
Draw: Norman Blackwood Jr, Dream Dagger
We resource Norman here as he's a lot less good since we already resourced one of our 3 Day cards in the deck.
1 - MA
2 - M
3 - A
Now we have our ideal set up. We play our Exorcist and pass the turn. Starting turn 2 we can resource our worst card and start playing out our Dreamers with the Daggers we've been drawing. This game will likely end in our favor as by turn 4-5 we'll have 2 dreamers w/ daggers, and an Agency guy with a Pistol. Not sure of any deck that can reasonably keep up with you.
Thanks for the questions / comments!
- SF
Interesting points!
ReplyDeleteI don't know what else to say ... If I do agree with pretty every points from Hastur's analysis, I would have to say that only the penguins seems less interesting.
Despite my opinion is not totally objective, as I have the same amount of every cards you've listed in my Shub-Hastur deck, except them ...
For a 2 coaster, I really prefer playing Demon lover ...
My point is the penguins costs 2, give you 2 icons+ 2 skill+ an unusefull text.
If you consider that, for the same price, you should have a character with the same skill and an usefull text, it can be interesting.
Concerning the icons, OK, penguins have a C one and Demon lover has Arcane. If you consider the possible play of the magah birds early game, this card is interesting as it can lower the skill in front of you and makes you benefit of the fast!
But this is quite fine, as you can use the text to lower the skill of the early game characters of your opponent, drive them insane with your T icon and even us it to have your blind submission work on a 4 coaster with the text.
Hope my reflexions might help.
(Who was the european player you were speaking about ??)
I'm not sure of the player name from Europe, sorry. :(
ReplyDeleteConcerning Demon Lover vs. Penguin, I still prefer the Penguin. The Combat icon is more important than you'd think for Hastur. I'd consider Demon Lover in a slower deck because his ability would be more relevant, but in a deck that tends to attack more often, I don't care for him much.
Yes, I'm aware you can ready him from the result of an Arcane struggle, but I'm still not impressed.
He's a fine character though. I'd surely never call him "bad" or "unplayable" by any stretch of the imagination. :)
Thanks for the comments!
- SF
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDeleteSorry about the double post
ReplyDelete