Adding to the influx of post-Gencon topics...

Just bought the Core Set at Gencon and a handful of the Asylum packs, though I'm taking it slow and not mixing them in yet. Over the last two nights I've taught two new people to play and while doing so arranged human vs. monster matchups: Agency/Miskatonic vs. Cthulhu/Hastur. One important thing to note: I've been playing trading card games now for about 15 years off and on (started with Magic back in '94) and the people I taught were both veritably newbies at this sort of game.

Night 1 saw me playing the human deck vs. the monster deck. I was a little concerned about how to get past the terror checks but I did pretty well and took all three games we played.

Night 2 I played against a different friend and this time took the monster deck while giving him the human deck in case the shenanigans on night 1 were a case of the human deck being stronger. It didn't seem so - I won both games on night 2 as well, though the second was a tighter game until I pulled Hastur and Pull Under on the same turn and used that combination to kill my buddy's just-committed Gmen, wrecking his already thin character stack and pretty much ending the game. After those two games my buddy was convinced that the deck matchup we played is significantly unbalanced in the direction of the monsters. Being relatively new to the game myself (with 5 games under my belt) I don't feel like I know enough to say... but I did with games with both decks.

So the question is, for those in the know... how do you feel about the Agency/Miskatonic vs. Cthulhu/Hastur matchup just from the Core Set? Balanced enough to play? Would one human and one monster vs. the same be a better build so that one player doesn't have so much vulnerability to terror compared to the other? Any matchups you're familiar with that might be balanced better and/or fun, again just in the core set?

Thanks for your help.

my exp is that shub and cthulhu are rather stronge for the mosters

agencey and uni is what i use and if you pull the right bits its very strong

haust and syndicate work very well

but mine are the core set and teh anicent horror ap pack

(sorry spelling gone out the window on this one i think)

I'm playing with CORE SET and AP for a while now, and I consider the game balanced, with myabe an enhancement of forces for Shubb and Agency.

Cthulhu and Hastur are a little bit more difficult to play, and Synd and University are both subtle. Yog is a good faction to discover the game, as it is strong andbased on recursion, which is easy to understand while discovering the game.

Maybe you're a little (much ?) more experienced and skilled than your opponent. That's why you tend to win the games ...

Thank you for responding. I think you're right, the base set feels fairly well-balanced. As a test I solo played the same matchup I referred to in the original post and although Agency/Uni won, that deck's third story was just barely won with Cthulhu/Hastur having 4 success tokens on it, so one little swing otherwise would have meant a tie game.

(Incidentally, it was while playing this matchup that I learned that 'Torch the Joint' is a misprint and should be played as an event. Talk about confusion! I'm a little confused, too, as to why this made it into the final 2.0 FAQ for the CCG but wasn't replicated for the 1.0 FAQ for the LCG. Ah well, just means I had to print both FAQs out instead of just one.)

Hum, Torch the joint is now an event , in the LCG CORE SET, if I do remember well (checked the DeckBuilder, it is OK !)