So I'm not exactly a newbie to CCG's, however I'm quite green when it comes to LCG's.

First things first: What should I know about getting into this? I have a couple of friends who love Lovecraft (I do as well) and we were all huge on games like Yu-Gi-Oh and its ilk.

My major question is this, though: I was browsing through some of the cards reading them to better understand the game after watching the flash tutorial video and I noticed cards like Cthulhu himself have bold abilities like "Villainous" and "Loyal". What do these effects do? More importantly, is there a list of them somewhere with their meanings?

Help me out guys, I'm at your mercy.

Oh, and what are the basic deckbuilding guidelines? How many of ecah card, etc.

Welcome. Download Instructions from support page and new faq, download deckbuilder and images and unzip images into correct folders.

Make decks with like 30 characters, many low cost. use one faction or two, look for events that boost you, same for support, but use less.

Random ideas: team MU and Yog. Hastur and Agency, go mono shub. figure our syndicate. make Cthulhu viable. stay on the boards.

My guidelines are just drivel.

Loyal - Loyal cards only 'see' cards of the same faction if you look for resources to play them.

Villainous / Heroic - These won't work together. If you control a heroic character, you can't put into play a villainous character and vice versa. If for some reason you control both heroic and villainous characters (for example, Tyler dies - he allows you to have both - or a character suddenly becomes a hero or villain) you have to choose one side and sacrifice the others.

Just a reminder : You can also play both villainous and Heroic if you got Tyler Scindere on your side of the board.

Is there a list of these abilities in the rulebook?

As a starter, go to the support page . Download the Game rules and read through them a couple of times. Then (and only then or you'll get massively confused by new concepts ... like I did ) download the latest FaQ as well, from the same page.

The main rules define things like Villainous, Loyal, Steadfast etc etc.

Once you've done all that I'd strongly suggest downloading Nyarlazorbec's deckbuilder freeware, here . It's worth downloading the image files as well, it helps keeping straight in your mind which card is which, also the artwork is awesome.