Looking for advice on how to beat my wife's deck please!

My wife has created a deck I have only beaten once due to luck. Currently, I am using an all Black Goat deck with every Mi-Go available and all the Shub's (even the new ones just realeased). We use a 75 card deck each and while mine is filled with three of each card she mostly only uses one of each. She is also a huge Lovecraft fan and has read all his stories several times (as well as those by August Derlath, Robert Bloch, and others).

She chose probably 80% of her cards because "those were the ones she liked," not based on what the cards could do. The rest she chose as Domain Resources or cannon fodder. Several of the cards listed below she's never used against me (Cthulhu) and others (Ravager, Dimensional Rift, Beneath the Mire, etc.) come into play nearly every game. Her deck consists of:

Neutal - 12 cards:

1. Whately's Diary - x 2
2. Nyarlahotep
3. Tulzscha
4. Written in the Sky
5. Tcho-Tcho Talisman
6. Dinmensional Rift
7. Seeker of Mysteries
8. Azathoth
9. Broken Space, Broken Time
10. Magnifying Glass
11. Beneath the Mire

Yog-Sothoth - 26 Cards:

1. Crazed Shoggoth
2. Wilbur Whateley
3. Son of Yeb
4. The Tower of Koth
5. Yog-Sothoth
6. Reawakened Elder Thing x 2
7. Guardian of the Key
8. Cursed Skull
9. The Silver Key
10. Calling Down the Ancients
11. Forbidden Shrine
12. Visitor from the Spheres
13. Disciple of the Gate
14. Spell-Bound Shoggoth
15. Guardian Elder Thing
16. Wizard of Yog-Sothoth
17. Elder Thing
18. Tcho-Tcho Tribe
19. Forgotten Shoggoth
20. Eltdown Shards
21. A Single Glimpse
22. Servant from Out of Time
23. Ritual of Bellephar
24. Dreams in Limbo
25. Cthugha

Cthulhu - 37 Cards:

1. Lord of the Silver Twilight
2. Hydra
3. Sword of Y'ha-tallo
4. Cthulhu - cost 6
5. Cthulhu - cost 10
6. Cerenerian Deep One
7. Adult Deep One
8. Ghatanothoa
9. Ruinous Star Spawn
10. Guardian Shoggoth
11. Keeper of the Golden Path
12. Ocean Crawlers
13. Dark Quagmire
14. Lord of Y'ha-nthlei
15. Giving Thanks
16. Followers of R'lyeh
17. Kassogtha
18. Ravager from the Deep
19. St. Erasmus' Home for Mariners
20. Young Deep One
21. Shadow-Spawned Hunting Horror
22. Day of the Deep Ones
23. Touched by the Sleeper
24. Noises in the Hills
25. Shadowed Reef
26. Black Seas of Infinity
27. Dreamlands Fanatic
28. Innsmouth Troublemaker
29. Pulled Under
30. Mature Deep One
31. Tidal Pool
32. Dagon
33. Primal Fear
34. Dwellers Below
35. Deep One Rising
36. Mnomquah
37. Bokrug

I've tried The Agency, Miskatonic University, Neutrals, Hastur, The Syndicate separately and in various combinations against her deck and only the stacked added effect of the Mi-Go has come close to beating her deck. I don't mind losing, but I at least want a decent chance of winning before I play a game. Right now I lose every game. Advice / suggestions MOST WELCOME!

Thanks!

Hi Guyver23

Shame there isn't a "Guyver Defence Mode" card that allows you to just destroy everything in its path.

Anyway, I'm writing just to say that I feel your pain, rather than to offer any advice. I'm in a similar position where my partner has started handing my arse to me in every game using her Shub/Mi-go deck. It has no bells or whistles, it just breeds. And breeds. And when you cut a bloody swathe through the breeders, they just come back into play at the same time. On the one hand, it's crushing, but on the other hand, it's quite fair because my Yog deck was the one to beat in our household for ages. Now the boot is on the other foot and I've just had to roll with the punches. To make matters worse for myself, I've just gone and bought her the new Shub deluxe expansion (I'm hoping she doesn't snaffle up particular cards that I have earmarked to work in a Cthulhu deck, but we'll see).

The only advice I can offer, off-the-cuff, is Hastur cancellation or hand destruction. Can't bring anything into play if her hand is empty.

Good luck!

I'd try the Mega Smasher. But anyway...

First, there are two Nyarlathoteps, two Wilbur Whateleys, two cost-6 Cthulhu's, and three Yog-Sothoths, which ones is she using? Not that it makes THAT big a difference.

Second, most Cthulhu discussion is on Cardgamedb.com. You may want to get an account there and they also have an excellent deck builder so you could post your deck in a more readable form that lets people see the cards. The easier it is, the more replies you will likely get.

Then, the deck. You probably don't care at this point but this deck is not legal as it has three different Restricted cards: Nyarlathotep (assuming you're using The Black Pharaoh version and not the one that came out a few days ago), Broken Space Broken Time, and Ravager from the Deep. Sine they are all 1x's though, it's not a big deal. Also, as you know decks only need to be 50 cards so it could be trimmed down quite a bit. Again, it sounds like you're just doing your own thing at home and you're both operating under the same rules so probably not a big deal.

I don't know what your deck looks like, but this one doesn't seem particularly strong. She has very few low cost characters, which means that she will have trouble defending early in the game. I would think that nearly any deck with a better cost curve should do well against it. Plus it has the disadvantage of being inconsistent with almost everything being a 1x.

Just to check, you must pay for a card with a single domain, you cannot combine them. That's the only thing I can think of that would make a deck of predominantly high-cost characters more viable.

A decent Mi-go deck should do well, although it's far from your only option. In addition to the Mi-go themselves you would want some acceleration in there such as Priestess of Bubastis, Feed Her Young, etc... and then supplement with some more cheap guys to help cover the early game. Black Dog would be a good option, and I'd also suggest Book of Iod to help your draw and improve consistency. If you want a second faction you could blend with Miskatonic or Silver Twilight and get access to some cheap Investigation and more shenanigans.

Or, you can shift gears and go with a different deck type. For instance, you might try Syndicate and look for cards that can exhaust her big guys. Lots of options.

What I would suggest is that you tell us more about what happens in the game that you are having trouble dealing with. Not just specific cards, because at 1-of-75 it's highly random whether a particular card shows up. But in general, what is the flow like and where do you run into trouble?

Also, can you tell us something about your resourcing? This is one of the biggest "invisible" reasons you can lose because it's easy to gloss over the cards you don't play - they tend to be forgotten. You should be keeping some inexpensive characters from your initial 8 cards and resourcing expensive stuff, duplicates, or cards you won't play for a little while.

Finally, what do you have to build from? It sounds like your card pool is pretty good but I don't want to suggest cards you don't own, that doesn't help

dboeren - uhm - wow. You brought to light a lot of things we weren't aware of so first thank you for that! Next, I will go over to Cardgamedb and see what happens there.

The Black Goat has always been my favorite Lovecraftian Horror so I've been very biased and always had them in my deck. I teamed them with Miskatonic and Neutrals at first but had no wins. I then used the Agency and Neutrals with Black Goat and REALLY got squashed. I haven't tried the Syndicate or the Twilight cards. I have a decent supply of all factions - a little over a deck box full of each one save Cthulhu and Black Goat due to buying the Deluxe expansions for them so they both have more and Twilight has significanly less.

I shifted to an all Black Goat deck as incorporating all the Mi-Go's and a few choice other cards made the probabilities of drawing another faction pretty remote. We opted for 75 card decks due to the amount of cards we have and wanting to give adequeate play time to them all.

We have tried different house rules such as needing five story/conspiracy cards to win to try to give the Mi-Go's more time to ramp up, but inevitably the Ravager or Dimensional Rift comes out and tears the Mi-Go apart.

Typically when resourcing I try to use cards that have the lowest impact of my play or that I have multiples of in my hand except the Mi-Go's.

I am most grateful for your comments and suggestions and will look into the other factions and different cards. We're still new to this game and learning so finding this forum and other members has been very helpful!

Thanks!

" Typically when resourcing I try to use cards that have the lowest impact of my play or that I have multiples of in my hand except the Mi-Go's."

That sounds like a reasonable approach, although "low impact" may result in resourcing inexpensive cards that could be useful now and instead keeping stronger cards that won't see play for a couple of turns. Here are a couple of articles that might provide some further insights to resourcing:

https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2014/5/30/the-resourceful-investigator-part-one/

https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2014/6/5/the-resourceful-investigator-part-two/

" We have tried different house rules such as needing five story/conspiracy cards to win to try to give the Mi-Go's more time to ramp up, but inevitably the Ravager or Dimensional Rift comes out and tears the Mi-Go apart. "

I would stick with the standard rules if possible, the game is balanced around 3 stories and it's hard to say how things might get unbalanced if you extend the game to 5. For one thing, your wife's deck with so many high cost characters probably benefits from this. Under normal rules the game would be over before too many of her Ancient Ones, etc... made it into play. If you want to use big decks you can, but in the case of the Mi-go the deck relies on getting to a certain "critical mass" of having enough Mi-go on the board buffing each other. A 75 card deck could be making it difficult to hit this point because the percentage of Mi-go cards is being diluted. Or, you are having to include weak Mi-go cards just to keep the overall percentage up. Neither is ideal, and a deck that doesn't rely on specific synergies as much (like your wife's) is less affected by this. Of course it's counter-acted by you not having mostly 1x's, but it's certainly a way to easily improve your deck by slimming it down.

"The Black Goat has always been my favorite Lovecraftian Horror so I've been very biased and always had them in my deck. I teamed them with Miskatonic and Neutrals at first but had no wins. I then used the Agency and Neutrals with Black Goat and REALLY got squashed. I haven't tried the Syndicate or the Twilight cards. I have a decent supply of all factions - a little over a deck box full of each one save Cthulhu and Black Goat due to buying the Deluxe expansions for them so they both have more and Twilight has significanly less.

I shifted to an all Black Goat deck as incorporating all the Mi-Go's and a few choice other cards made the probabilities of drawing another faction pretty remote. We opted for 75 card decks due to the amount of cards we have and wanting to give adequeate play time to them all."

Certainly nothing wrong with having a favorite faction or theme And if Mi-go aren't working for you, there's always Dark Young, Ghouls, or just putting in whatever you want to from the faction. If you did incorporate a second faction you're right that you need at least a certain number of cards to make sure you've got resource matches. I usually figure about 1/3rd of my deck as a rough minimum. If you can't find that many cards you want from your other faction then you may just want to stay mono. You CAN go lower than 1/3rd, it's just a little less reliable. This may not matter if you're mostly taking higher cost cards from your splash faction because then you have more time to find them.

As it happens, I started doing a rough sketch of a Mi-go deck the other day. It's still in progress and hasn't been tested much yet, plus it needs to be slimmed down quite a bit yet, but it may be instructive to look at:

As you can see, it's 10 cards too big right now. What I'll often do is start out with a few extra cards and then after playing a couple of games I will have an idea of what I can cut out.

This also illustrates what I consider some of the better Mi-go which might be useful. Then, beyond just being a bunch of Mi-go the deck has some other strategies.

First, Iod gives me more draw which helps me find my Mi-go and other cards I want. Plus, it seeds the discard pile to set up Harvesting Mi-go and B. Ramsdale Brown (and to a lesser extent Xlizxcte Oonth).

Second, I have a fair amount of ramping - cards that help me build my domains or discount my cards. This helps me to get my Mi-go out faster and thus hit critical mass faster. These include Priestess of Bubastis, Harvesting Mi-go, and Inter-dimensional Transporter.

Third, I'm using Pervasive Toxemia to throw some wounds around and hopefully kill off some opposing characters. To make myself largely immune to this, I'm including Ageless Mi-go and August Lindquist. If I have August, he can take the wound and redirect it to a key opposing character. If not, Ageless will let me slough the wound off onto whatever Mi-go is standing around without actually losing them. Since I'm using a Conspiracy and Silver Twilight, I figured I might as well throw in Keeper of the Silver Sphere.

Fourth, I have Josef Meiger and some useful Artifact/Ritual cards he can put into play for free for me. These include Rite of the Silver Gate, Inter-dimensional Transporter (I do not want to play this normally if I can avoid it), and The Doorway.

It can take some time to get set up with Mi-go, as you know, so I also want some inexpensive guys - cost 2 or lower. To augment them I'm including Black Dog and Steal the Soul, both of which cost 1. Thunder in the East is there to deal with opposing Supports and Mi-go Skull helps grant Terror (sometimes a weak point for Mi-go) as well as letting one more character benefit from the Mi-go synergy. The Doorway could be used to help reset B. Ramsdale Brown's Fated tokens, this is sort of an experimental card I would say, as is Deciphered Reality.

Anyway, that's sort of a high level breakdown of the deck and hopefully will spark some ideas for you and give you a little more insight into how the parts of a deck work together. As I said, this is an early rough draft. A finished version would be down to 50 cards (or at most 51), and probably have cut a few cards, maybe dropped a couple 3x's to 2x's, or replaced one card with another, but it probably won't be THAT much different. Just tuning.

Oh yeah, note on Mi-go Worker... Normally you want to be careful about Loyal cards in multi-faction deck. However in this case we're fine because:

1. He's only cost 2. Loyal 2 usually isn't a big deal

2. The deck is predominantly (63%) Shub

Further, Ageless Mi-go helps make him better by granting him more Toughness so you can use him more without killing him.

Now, it's quite likely that the deck has more ramp than it needs. If so, this will come out during testing and i'll figure out a couple ramp cards to trim out OR I may look into whether any cost 4 Mi-go are worth including. Maybe both.