The odour rising from the newly opened depths was intolerable, and at length the quick-eared Hawkins thought he heard a nasty, slopping sound down there. Everyone listened, and everyone was listening still when It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison city of madness.
- H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

Ah, you’re back. It seemed like aeons to me, to be honest. First, congratulations to Tom ‘Magnus Arcanus’ Capor for becoming the first person to be crowned Call of Cthulhu: the Card Game champion twice in a row! Well done, you truly deserve to be called the Magnus Arcanus.

During Gen Con, The Spoken Covenant Asylum pack launched, so it is now time to look at the fourth installment in the Yuggoth Contract cycle: The Wailer Below. Like the previous Asylum Pack it offers a variant on an Ancient One character. Some would say the Ancient One character.

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. If you have slept for millions of years, you had plenty of times to work up an appetite. Cthulhu, The Great Old One (Core Set F41) clearly shows that well-known, insatiable hunger. This incarnation eats everything in his way, eventually leaving when you can't feed him any more. It's a nice 'fire and forget' type of card, but even this legendary bingeing may have trouble keeping up with the current speed of the metagame, and chewing Magah Birds (Journey to Unknown Kadath, F110) for a couple of turns may be a little underwhelming after summoning Great Cthulhu.

If you fit him in the right deck, Cthulhu, Lord of R'lyeh (The Wailer Below, F64) can pick up some greater momentum, all the while leaving your team alone. He demands a greater dedication towards your domains to use, but once you're in control, you can eat characters as fast as others can play them, soft-locking the opposition out of the game.

The first step is to separate the wheat from the chaff with In an Unmarked Grave (Sleep of the Dead, F88) clearing all those nameless birds, dogs and whatnot from the table, while leaving Cthulhu unscathed. Picking off the remaining characters should be easy after that.

Awakening the sleeper himself can be done with some of the usual suspects in the cost-reduction department. Cthulhu has his own addition to this: Lord of the Silver Twilight (Core Set, F50) Local Sheriff (Core Set, F3) and Visiting Author (Core Set, F26) can be great help too. You'll be needing a lot of resources on your domains to keep Cthulhu throwing an endless stream of A Single Glimpses (Core Set, F117), and the sheer advantage this creates makes it worth using and reusing these Transient resources. Your domains won't grow bigger over time, but having access to 2 domains per turn to pay 3 for the ability means nobody is really going anywhere anyway. And using the ability when you want to, instead of just the draw phase makes a huge difference.

Like the Lord of Carcosa (The Spoken Covenant, F46) the Lord of R'lyeh can swing the end game in your favor, changing the pace and helping you stabilize. Pack enough destruction and start preparing for the stars to come right.