Posted something like this in the Gencon Worlds thread, but I figured it'd be better to make a separate thread for it in the appropriate subforum.

Having gotten a lot of games under my belt the past month or two (and a pretty solid understanding of the rules), my current focus has turned to deck building, and getting the most out of my cards on that level.

I've noticed a lot of people online showing decks with 30 characters - while perhaps not set in stone, have people found that number to be the best balance between characters and events / support?

What do people aim for on resource curve? Depends on the deck?

Any thoughts from veteran players would be appreciated.

so - 30 cgaracters is a lot - in ccg times you were able to play with 24-26 (sometimes less, not to mention combo decks that had none - with Shub being an exception, due to ability to sac characters on the table to play bigger threats from either hand or deck).

In lcg i see that due to luck of events (good, solid ones) you need to make up the deck with more characters - and that's depend on the faction you play. Human factions will - usually - have more of cheap characters while shub will have more medium chars (cost 3+), Hastur I see as an exception to this since hastur has a lot of good 1 and 2 drops (prince, aspiring artis, stealthy byakhhe demon lover etc) and can be regarded as mythos rush-faction (or at least the closest thing to a rush deck mythos factions can have).

I don't consider myself a solid deck designer, but here's my 2 cents :

In Black boarders day, we, French Players, used to play a lot of differents decks and finally consider that the ratio 32 character for 18 Events/Supports was the best ratio we should admit in a competitive deck.

Consider that you had the 4x copies rules in those day. I meant 32/4 = 8 characters. Which ment that we had integrate the unicity of a small amount of characters, which was a big problem, as we consider that we have to play 3x max of each (having 4x of a single unique was really slowing the game down). As those characters were pretty popular, we finally assum that having 30 characters was the best, as we always get something like 2 or 3 slots more than the 50 limit.

Our National Player has a maxim for this : "The Card limit is to be consider as the threshold and the ceiling of a good deck". This way, the deck are to be perfectly tested and must involved big consideration to the meta. Playing 8 differents characters is a good way to design your deckconcept peacefully.

Most of us finally joined this point of view, as well-cuted decks do dominate our meta, based on regularity and character's ability. As Cthulhu LCG is a game where supports provide some characters huge advantage, we do consider the deck as made with two entities (characters - stuffs). The events and the supports provide extra power to character in the CCG days, but the LCG did change a lot of things.

The new cards really shake the meta up, and we innerit new deckbuilding precepts. It's not only due to the potentially lack of usefulness of events or supports, but the huge propension to generate new characters with nice ability more often (despite Cthulhu is the only faction to have so little characters), and a lot of lowest price to pay to have them in play.

Consider that a card like Marchall Greene or Julia herself has so many way to be usefull in a game. You need them out when you want to enjoy their text. But the new limit restrain your drawing chances and you must limit the slots to thier tiniest portion, in a way to limit the number of inappropriated cards.

In a game, T0 brings you 8 cards, T1 9 or 10, T2 11 or 12 and so on. So you can assume that T3 have seen about 1/3 of your deck out.

In case you need a card, that meant the card you're looking for exists in 3x in 2/3 of your deck (37 or 38 cards). If you do limit the number of differents cards under this limit, you'll probably know a little more about your potential drawing. Once you reach a T5 or T6, you approach 20 cards drawn. you might have understand your opponent strategy in turn 3 or 4 ... with luck and experience !

i also stick with 25-30 characters.

the other thing i do is i lay out all the cards. first just characters seperate, and then all the cards and lay in them lines of cost. then i look for like a curve with the bulk of the cards being in the middle and the ends (high and low cards being less). obviously in a rush deck this doesnt work that well. but the idea is that most of the cards are 2-4 cost. since high cost cards arent much use early game and low cost cards arent much help late game. its a very good starting point for me, after playing the deck i can tweak it but this way i have a balanced deck of sorts never playing it before.

I'm fairly new to the game. We have a small group playing in Calgary.

I have been having a hard time deciding what is a good curve for characters. If you could give more of a break down. Like how many 1's 2's 3's and so on.

Thanks

I'm an old-time CCG player, so most of my decks had 4x card limits, but even so I had a quite different approach to those above.

The question I first ask myself is, "How will this deck win?" For example, my tricky-story-sniper deck specialises in winning stories unopposed in one shot (e.g. with Professor of Archaeology and Open for Inspection). So, I work out how many cards to devote to the 'win' effect, how many to devote to 'enabling' effects, and how many to devote to 'disabling' effects to prevent my opponents from winning first. Note that acceleration is (almost) always a key 'enabler'.

Using that deck as an example, eight key cards were used to add the necessary investigation icons to stories (four each of Professor and Open). Another four Local Historians help out, too. Four 'On the Lam' and eight other enablers (two each of On the Grift, Intimidate, Dry Gulch and Seventh House on the Left) help ensure that my story winners will face no or minimal opposition. Four Seduction of the Tombs accelerate out the Professors (and help recycle them), and four of Ancient Gold help accelerate everything else. Four Anthropology Advisors provided a little more minor acceleration, but are not central to the deck. To prevent the opponent from winning I decided to attack their ability to play cards, so four In the Gutter and four Howard Phillips Lovecraft let me do that - especially in combination with the Professor of Metaphysics. Two Unspeakable Research to find key cards if I hit mid-game and haven't won yet. That's about it - on a good draw it will usually win at least one if not two stories by the end of turn 2, OR it will have emptied the opponents' hand and stopped them from playing anything. Not my strongest deck, but didn't need a huge amount of tweaking between initial design and consistently winning (only about eight versions).

So it's designed from the ground up, and then cards which fit the strategy are evaluated against each other on the basis of synergy, faction-ratio and cost. More expensive cards means more slots devoted to acceleration. Fewer characters means more slots devoted to disabling my opponents (since I'm less likely to have blockers). The deck above has 20 characters, 20 events, 10 supports, a faction split of 26 Misk, 20 Synd and 4 Neutral, and an average card cost of 2.4 (which is pretty darned expensive for my tastes).

So, character-wise my decks vary from a characterless (ok, 4 chars) Yog-Cth-Agency deck to a cultist summoning deck with 27 characters (Cth-Shub). Some decks such as my Mi-Go deck were rather expensive, so had to include a lot of acceleration to compensate (and, therefore, weren't necessarily as well focussed at winning). As a result, none of mine are championship decks, but they're generally themed and fun to play.

I don't know if that helps, but it's always fun to talk about one's own decks.

Edit: To specifically address the question of cost curve for characters, if there's no major acceleration I'd generally opt for 6-8 one-cost characters, about 12-14 two-cost characters, and 4-8 three-cost characters if absolutely required (I'd prefer more one or two cost if possible). If I'm lacking in cheap characters, then I need something to slow down the opponent (e.g. Clover Club Torch Singers, lots of Xenophobia and Demon Lovers, Dampen Light - whatever suits the deck).

to keep things fair, do you agree on the amount of cards each before hand with your opponent?

No, a legal deck is a legal deck regardless of what your opponent is wielding. So long as both are legal, no agreement should be necessary.

Having said that, I'd be surprised if either player has a deck which is not in the 50-55 card range, with a heavy emphasis on the magic '50'.

i usually go 51 that way i have a deck of all playsets. but if i dont own a playset of something it mess with things. or if im trying out decks i might only have 2 of just for more variety of few cards im undecided with.