Hi everyone. This is my attempt to a constructive discussion about this wonderful game

I've heard a lot of critics about the new Cthulhu LCG environment with respect to the old CCG times.
In this post, I want to try to summarize them, giving an explanation of every "bad thing" as I've understood them
during my discussion with Carioz and Graham at Stahleck 2009. To explain in the best possible way I'll refer
to the_Most_fAmous_Game_wIth_Cards, but I'll try to keep things separate, so if you don't know it you can still
read this post without losing generality.

Design of the cards:many people are complaining that the new cards are bad; what does "bad" mean?
The basic thing I've understood is that most of the cards are situational: this means that you can use a specific
card only in a specific and determined moment and usually the specifications are so stricted that the card becomes
useless (over-exagerated example: you can play this card only at 8.00 am of a rainy day and if you are drunk).

This is only partially true, in my opinion. It is true that many cards, to be used, need a "sorrounding environment"
but this is the basic of every card game I've seen so far. In every expansion, there are cards thar are useful _only_
in that expansion, because they are synergic with other cards in that expansion. Only few cards are "always good".

At this point, is a matter of numbers: a big expansion of the_Most_fAmous_Game_wIth_Cards has around 230 new cards.
To have this number of cards in Cthulhu LCG we need 11 AP (every AP has 20 cards, the math is simple).

At the moment, we have the two first AP (Mountain and ancient horror) + the first Cycle + 2 packs in the Dreamland
cycle (I don't have the last AP, but it doesn't make a great difference).

If we consider only the Standard format of the_Most_fAmous_Game_wIth_Cards, we can easily see that the situation
is (more or less, obviously depends on the expansion we are considering) the same of the Cthulhu LCG: decks with
creatures and removals for creatures. Having a real combo deck with only one expansion is really hard (I would
say impossible, but I'm not a real expert of Standard format). Anyway, you have to consider that in Standard you can use
the last two expansions + basic set, that means that you have more or less 1.000 cards you can choose from to build
your deck. (so, I would say that right now, the situation for Cthulhu is more similar to a Draft, than to a real format).

The situation is totally different if we consider big formats: Extended, Legacy and Vintage. Here the card pool
is HUGE compared to Standard, and is not even comparable to Cthulhu, in my opinion. And in any case, despite
the huge amount of cards you can use (we are speaking of more than 10.000 cards for legacy or vintage) the
actual number of cards that are commonly used is really small (I would say less than 5%), just because good cards
are good, and that's it.

Now, try to consider cards that we can call "good" in Cthulhu for every faction: I don't want to make a list (although
I think is possible) but I want to point out that THERE ARE cards that are good on their own in the White Border World.
(a couple of examples: Aspiring Artist, Dogs - this is even TOO good -, Descendant of Eibon).

What I think is sort of "funny" is that Graham and Carioz were both playing card from the LCG environment in their
CCG decks during the tournament. Graham quote: "Today I play the Messenger deck only because I've seen Hideous Guardian
(NB: White border Yog-Sothot character), because with this card I can handle Agency deck, otherwise I have autolose to every
deck playing Agency".

This, just to point out that they are complaining about new cards (and, I repeat, I can unserstand why) BUT they
are using some of these new cards, that maybe at this point, I have to say, they are not so bad if you are using them:)

How to solve these problems? I think we need just to wait. The card pool is (slowly) expanding, and I'm quite sure
we will see new useful cards, new situational cards and new crappy cards, as in every card game.

Stahleck showed us that in fact there is a dominant deck on the field (hastur+agency+dogs+descendant), but for sure there is
the possibility to beat it; in fact, you can build a control deck to beat it; it was just too easy, in Stahleck,
to have a simple and strong deck BECAUSE there was no metagame defined before (I suppose). In my case, my first choice was an
hastur-yog deck, but after seeing so many hastur-agency, I switched to this combination to have more removals (I didn't try
Cthulhu, although there are many removals even in this faction, just because I've never played that faction...and to play it,
I needed to radically change my deck without testing...not a good thing).

I think, honestly, that the whole point is that we miss a real combo-deck at the moment. Why a combo deck is missing?
Mainly, I think, for two reasons: first, there are not enough combo-cards; second: there are not (at all) cost
reducers, except transient cards (that are quite bad, usually).

The first problem can be solved just waiting, to have some combo-cards printed (and I think that something like
Opener of the Gate is a good candidate as combo-card, for example. I don't play combo, usually, so honestly is hard for me to
"see" a potential combo card).

For the second problem, I'm not a game designer, but for what I've read
of the CCG period the cost-reducer way is a bit too dangerous if you make even a small mistake in the desing phase,
because the risk is to totally by-pass the resource phase, making totally useless the concept of "wait to build
a domain to play big cards". I think we need a way to deal with this game-structure but without breaking the structure
for every type of deck (I mean: in some way, if you want combo-enablers, you must be sure that ONLY combo deck
can use the acceleration in a useful way, otherwise you have a situation where everyone is so fast that at turn 2
the game is over).

Another point of discussion was card wording: in this case I agree with the critics; from a competitive point of view many cards
need a clarification or contain mistakes. Even if often is obvious the purpose of the card (so it is quite obvious how to play
the card in a for-fun environment...see for example Bringer of Fire), it is true that a poor wording makes the game not-so-enjoyable
for people looking for competitive playing (and I like to consider myself in this category).

SO, considering the actual state of the game as described above, what I think we need?
- Some kind of only-for-combo cost reducer
- Some kind of destroy-every-type-of-card effect, to have the possibility of building a more consistent control deck
- power balance: at the moment, hastur and agency have too many good cards, with respect to others faction. But this
point is not so clear, since I've never faced a pure "control" deck. I'll try to build something, especially with a couple
of new cards I've seen that I like.
- less neutral cards: there are too many neutral cards in this game, and these cards are too much good. I want to see more
faction-specific good cards and less neutral. If you create a good neutral card, it happens that is an auto-include in
every deck (see: Dogs and descendant)
- more review work on the wording of the cards, to avoid stupid mistakes and potentially bad situations

Obviously, everything stated above is just my opinion ...discuss, if you like

bye

Konx.

Hi Konx,

I think we must watch out for cost reducers, even for combo only cards because in the ccg days there were too many games that were finished before the game really started to take off (turn two or three winners). I think its also fun to see some big badass character cards on the table. At the end of the ccg era the only expensive character you saw around was of course Ghoul Khanum which you knew would hit the table at the moment your opponent played shub and got a domain with three resources (shocking transformation!!). All the other big ones were almost never seen on the table. In my opinion tournament play got too fast those days.

Maybe for tournament play its better for now to use some drafting set-up. Something like both players get to pick two factions from one core set and receive all the cards from those factions. First player picks one faction, player two picks two faction, player 1 picks his last faction. The neutral cards could be picked one at a time. Then throw in 6 AP and everyone gets the cards of his two factions. Draft the neutral cards again, one pack starting player 1, second pack starting player 2 and so on. Then construct a deck of 50 cards. You get about 85 cards to make a deck from (40 + 7 CS, 6 per AP). Both players get 15 minutes or so to construct their deck. This should make fun games I think. I played a few games right out of the box picking blind two factions and all games were tense. Ok, no deck building at all, but the game is fun right out of the box.

About too many neutrals in the packs, I agree. Better have three cards for some factions and about 2 or three neutrals, An even distribution would be 3 AP's from one block with 4 fact x 2 cards and 3 fact x 3 cards and 3 neutrals and the other 3 AP with 3 fac x 2 cards and 4 fac x 3 cards and 2 neutrals. If you add it up 21 factions get 3 cards which is perfectly divided by 7 factions. I believe AP's at the moment are more like 7 fact x 2 cards and 6 neutral cards.

I cant say anything about the card wording. Did not have a problem so far but only used the core set to play with. Only got confused with a story card which says: put all characters from your discard pile in play insane. I presume characters with terror icons dont come into play insane? But how will they enter, exhausted or refreshed?

Konx writes a very nice thoughtful post, a complete argument. Nice job. I think you present a fair assessment for where we are.

I agree that the card pool has been too small for too long. We are years into the AP and we're just seeing tournaments with crafted LCG decks for the first time. We have our first era of powerful cards - the Eibon, Sledge Dog, Agency, Hastur deck currently tops. The equivalent of say Arkham Edition play speaks to how early into LCG we are. But I do support keeping it slower and seeing the big cards emerge. Less neutrals would be fine by me. Each AP could beef up one or two factions instead. The wording in AP Silver Key looks thorough and specific. The game doesn't play like the engine it once was if you played at that level, or learned from the masters those card strategies and implemented them into your own lesser decks (like me). I have not seen that FFG is dedicated to putting out cards that affect past cycle mechanics to make that myopic small cycle feel go away. Examples are very few - 607 Water Street. Instead we'll have to see what dreamlands deck wins it all this year to see if intra-cycle mechanics can win out over classical application.

Like Konw said, the pool is just too small to be judged ... And if the actual meta has a huge love for Agency and Hastur, it's mostly due to the inner power of those faction (denial, shoot).

I agree less neutral can be done, but, before cutting neutrals to a smaller amount, you'll need to developp a basis pool, which will be done at the end of Dreamlands? New mechanisms and situation are build by the developpers, and I must admit, even if some mistakes are made, the work is about to be perfect and mistakes to be banned.

Just remember that there was 'junks' in every extensions, and FAQ are here to repair. We have a really small list right now, maybe this will change in a while. But the game is now really understandable for beginners and we don't have problems to help new players starting. Which is fine to me. Maybe we'll need to explain things further in an "Expert Rule" or something, but I can now judge the existing meta, it's just too small to even consider ...