all good. i have no idea what i'm doing either ( hence the ramblings ). and i'm getting no closer to knowing what i'm doing by talking to myself - haha. most of what i've been posting is theory only ( with a few facts - hee hee).

i guess cause i'm sitting at my computer all day procrastinating about belting out another chapter, that i'm on here a lot more than most and am suffering a bit of 'cthulhu burnout' anyway. you haven't heard the last from me!!

i think a lot of posters are really just trying to flesh out ideas and have no-one to do it with in their every day life ( boo hoo ). such is the burden of being the part of a very exclusive and elite niche!! 

but with no feedback, those of us who have no environment to playtest within, and are merely generating ideas, can be left wondering if perhaps these are so pathetically crap that no-one has the heart to tell them!!

COCLCG said:

Exactly. I guess I just have to man up and post my crap ideas more. :) 

ok. a month after buying the game, i built my regional deck and with no play experience or trialling jumped
right on in. in hindsight, i was probably lucky to win, as there were some pretty useless cards in there. but
the core was strong and it served me well on the day ( as did lady luck ). after seeing the potential out there
and gaining a deeper understanding of the game, i put the regional deck away and never played with it again,
instead exploring the card pool and building many new decks ( with varying degrees of success ). some for fun,
some for a challenge, but never anything again similar to this deck or with tournaments in mind.

with a couple more months experience, and now with a MASSIVE 20 games under my belt - haha - and a more expansive knowledge of the game, i decided yesterday to dust off my old trusty and try refining / updating it. what you see below is the initial result to go back into playtesting with:

3 x Priestess of Bubastis
2 x black dog
2 x Blood Magician
3 x Ya-te-veo
3 x Pawn Broker
3 x Hungry Dark Young
3 x Many-angled Thing
3 x The Mage Known as Magnus
2 x Constricting elder thing
3 x Stalking Hound
2 x Telepathic Chthonian
2 x Y'Golonac, The Obscenity
3 x Shub-Niggurath
3 x Yog-Sothoth

3 x A Single Glimpse
3 x Burrowing Beneath
2 x Thunder in the East
2 x Speak to the Dead
3 x Opening the Limbo Gate

the things i love about this deck ( and to explain a little ):

-first of all the originality. i've not encountered or heard of anything using the same engine in this manner
and even the combination of Yog / Shub is hard to find in the 'competative' world. being what is referred to
as a 'johnny' player, this is the most important factor of all

-the ability to throw out an ancient one in turn 3, with the possibility of 3 ancient ones in turn 4, using
no other cards that require being on the table to reduce cost and be vulnerable ( ie seeker of mysteries, beings
of ib etc )

-the use of magnus and him loving the ancients and stalking hound to WANT to use as very high cost destructions
( its quite fun using a 6 cost ancient to take out a 1 or 2 cost character first turn or 2 ), and then him being
able to use multiples of ancients to take out other high cost opponent characters, along with pawn broker and
sacrificing / ya-te-veo to not rely on only him to get the ancients / opponents characters into discard for limbo
gate

-yog sothoths ability to recast the 8 spells. this effectively seems to give the deck the power of a 60 card
deck jammed into 50 cards. its just a pity he can't recast x cost spells - haha

-the lack of supports ( possibly rendering opponent cards useless ) and the ability to have recursion support
destructions ( practically unlimited with speak to the dead returning the copy of itself and a s.destruction or
2 s.destructions ) with t.chthonian linking with all of them. and now constricting elder thing also !!

-stalking hound and the deck FORCING the required activation with limbo gate but also great against uroborus,
master of myths etc, from hand OR discard

-the sacrificing / destruction potential, without being your run of the mill destruction deck or having this as
the main focus ( no cthulhu for starts ) with single glimpse ( recurring ) / magnus / ya-te-veo / many angled /
telepathic chthonian

-not having to go beyond 4 resources to play ancient ones, sometimes even for cost of 2

-speak to the dead being able to rush the deck along to the cards i need

-the deck now has no restricted card, so cannot be accused of winning due to using a 'broken' card

-the character flooding. with the ancients replacing events instead of characters ( though theoretically i still
have 21 events ) and also coming out early, there are also still a lot of low cost characters. priestess of bubastis,
black dog, hungry dark one, a line jumping stalking hound and finally shub niggurath bringing back 2 characters or more for 2 cost, make the deck seem to bring about a lot of characters at quite a reasonable rate of speed.

-blood magician and his annoying last minute investigation icons, or story manipulation

-and lastly, the fact that mill decks and hand milling actually benefits this deck, helping it to get the ancients
into discard and widening the pool for speak to the dead to grab what i need, when i need it. bring the milling
on, because this deck loves it !! an example is one of my regional games, where byakhee attack let me put yog-sothoth into discard to limbo gate next turn, winning me the game

i've played it only once since yesterday and it managed to win again, so although i've only had 8 games with it now
( 7 in a very small regional ), it still remains unbeaten !! but not for long i feel - haha. i'll playtest this version
along with one changing elder thing for corrupted midwife for even more recursion mayhem and get back to you

thanks for reading, hope you enjoy the idea, and feel free to muck around with it yourself !!

actually. make that 9 games so far. i did have a brief spaz with it a month ago which i'd totally forgotten about ( good meds ), but when i went back through the post i thought ' hey, thats right, that happened' - haha

also, this deck was made way back when before i got all into naming my decks, and i still haven't come up with one, so for now it's simply THE REGIONAL ( Version whatever )

you might also have noticed that grasping chthonian would seem a more logical choice with the t.chthonians, but really, for a more effective icon mix, the constricting elder thing appears to be the way to go, and will likely appear on board before the t.chthonians anyway

another thing is i'm simply trialling the black dog / ya-te-veo ( cp3o ) so it may become the ghouls for a better skill / toughness front ( though ya-te-veo does seem to be the designers shub answer to combing the archives - well done !! )

lastly, it might be a bit character heavy in the above version, but i've found that it in the initial games it made it very hard to keep up with when i had 16 events - now 13 ( especially with the effects bringing other characters with them, most often from discard ), so MAYBE 2 might go ( prob. elder thing ) for another event or something ( prob. walk the path for destroying the destroyers / bouncing the bouncers / scotophobia-ing the scotophobia-ers / milling the millers etc ). we shall see

so then it might look like this:

3 x Priestess of Bubastis
2 x Ghoulish predator
2 x Blood Magician
3 x Ya-te-veo
3 x Pawn Broker
3 x Hungry Dark Young
3 x Many-angled Thing
3 x The Mage Known as Magnus
3 x Stalking Hound
2 x Telepathic Chthonian
2 x Y'Golonac, The Obscenity
3 x Shub-Niggurath
3 x Yog-Sothoth

2 x Walk the path
3 x A Single Glimpse
3 x Burrowing Beneath
2 x Thunder in the East
2 x Speak to the Dead
3 x Opening the Limbo Gate

but as i said. early days of actually playing and refining it !!

I don't think I've done a Yog/Shub for a while, but I've had a couple recent Yog/Hastur decks and I must say that Blood Magician is a very handy guy - I'm sure you'll be happy having him along.

It gives you something useful to do with your small domains and if your opponent somehow doesn't contest you can always grant Arcane or Investigation.

This is actually sometime timely to the Serpent thread going on in main.  The argument there is that Serpents are super-good because they can spend 1 to change their icons, typically from Terror to Combat.

Blood Magician is quite a bit more flexible than this.  For the same price, he can grant or remove any icon to any character.  Nor do they lose one of their existing icons to benefit from this as in the Serpents who "change" one icon to another.

yes, but as i've found out, having NO icons is a weakness serpents don't have. very easy to drive insane from the hastur backlines !! but yes, a nice card in a pinch and a staple of my Yog decks.

hahaha. serves me right for posting online. was playing one of my fun decks on lackey and got my arse handed to me by a cthulhu copy of the above deck !!!! it was very good, but i don't think it would handle snow graves as well as the shub version.

and to continue on with blood magician, the comparison i suppose is similar, but the poor magician is on his own. no cards to combine with or bring him back en masse etc.

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I'm still knew to the game and slowly building my card base. Arer you using primarily newer Asylum Packs or mixing in the older ones as well?

Personally, most of my decks end up as a mix.  There's no real intent either way, which pack they came from is more or less irrelevant information.  You pick the cards that fit what you want to do.  There really isn't any power creep over time, so many cards from the Core set or early packs are just as useful now as they were back then.  Most of the time when I pick a card, I have no idea when it came out anyway.

 Now that i think of it… the pack i dont have yet and want to buy is Spawn of Sleeper - the first AP; but has a few really nice cerds like dr Carson

And dreamlands cycle had many other really powerfull cards, maybe my whining about Khopesh, Maser and Ya-te-voo makes less sense than i thought. 

I think newer packs have less really bad cards, but im not sure.

I really recomend checking databases and buying packs for specyfic cards you want to try in your deck.

Gigantis said:

Hey Matt,

I think you will find people building decks with cards from a variety of asylum packs, boxed expansions. There isn't currently a format that restricts which sets to play with. I recommend going to Cardgame DB and using the card browser. This should help show you not only what cards come in each pack, but what cards you may need to build a deck with that matches your possible style.

In other words, just build decks with what you have. Let me know what sets you have access to and I will try and build a deck that revolves around those so the playing field is more even card poolwise next time we get a chance to play at FFG EC.