Some help please guys!

1) Ravager From The Deep - '...wound all other characters at that story.' 2) Muddy Waters - '...exhaust a character.' 3) Cthuga - '...all other characters do not count their combat icons.' 4) Neutral Ground - 'Treat all Neutral characters...' 5) Guardian Elder Thing - '...Pay 2 to wound all characters committed to this story.' 6) Dimensional Rift - '...destroy all character and support cards in play.' 7) Shadow-spawned Hunting Horror - '...each committed character loses an investigation icon.' 8) Bokrug - '...choos and wound another character committed to that story if able.'

?? There's a pattern emerging

I normally play with just one other person...so do the above cards refer to all cards or just my opponent's cards? If it's all them some cards seem a bit suicidal? I try to apply the terms 'destroy' and 'sacrifice' to determin whose cards but some cards leave me very confused.

Also:

X cost cards:

Unspeakable Resurrection - '...cost X or lower.' - is X the size of the domain you drained in order to pay for the card?

Deep One Assault - '...cost X or lower.' - is X the number of Cthulhu resources in the domain that you drained to pay for the card (Loyal keyword on card)

and Finally:

i) Cthulhu - 'After a player draws cards during his draw phase, he must sacrifice a character if able.'

a) characters in play?

b) characters you just drew from the deck?

c) is this card any use? You have to discard a character every time you draw cards on your draw phase?

ii) Reawakened Elder Thing - 'After an event card is played, exhaust Reawakened Elder Thing if able.'

Again, any point in this card if you have to exhaust it every 5 mins?

Thanks in advance.

komakino said:

Phew thats a long one.

1) Take it literally. It means all other characters that is not the ravager of the deep. Yours and your opponent's.

2) I believe that when a cost is demanded, you have to pay it. In this case, you exhaust your own character.

3 - 8) See #1

Concerning X costs: You are correct

i) See #2 You must sac a character that you control when you draw a card. Same goes for your opponent.

ii) Yog s a tricky elder god. There are uses, though limited. But I believe the drawback of exhaustion is to allay the supposed bonuses of the cost and the icons you get with him.

Thanks! That clears things up quite a bit.

Just a last point on paying costs. Say I've paid to get a character/support into play...unless the card specifically mentions paying a cost subsequent uses of the effects on that card are free yes?

Once a card is put into play, it doesn't "know" how it got there. So your normal drain a domain to bring a character into play vs. some action that puts a card into play result in the same thing - your character is in play.

So, a card that is already 'in play' doesn't need to impose any cost for an effect unless otherwise stated?

Example: Neutral Ground - 'Treat all neutral characters in play as if their printed text boxes were blank.'

Once I've paid the cost of 2 to get it into play, the effect in the text applies whenever without having to pay 2 again everytime I wish to apply it?

Correct, other wise it would read, " Action : Pay 2 to treat all neutral characters in play as if their printed text boxes were blank."

Excellent...I'm getting there.

Last question...steadfast.

I think it's just me but the wording in the rules isn't too clear?

I have 2 Cthulhu steadfast icons on the top of a card I want to play. Does that mean:

1) Each of my domains need to have 2 or more Cthulhu resources (like multiple loyals)

OR

2) The total number of Cthulhu resources added up across all of my domains needs to be 2 or more

?

Your #2.

Steadfast is different than Loyal. For Steadfast you just need to have that many resources of the appropriate type - they don't all have to be in the domain you drain. In fact, in some cases there don't have to be any in the domain you drain. Sometimes the Steadfast icons are of a different faction than the card you are playing.

Thanks again.

The help from everyone should be more than enough to help me enjoy the game a lot more!

I'm currently using a 2 faction deck of Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth that is 65 cards in size including 20 neutral cards. Is this too big a deck or does it not matter?

Officially it does not matter how many cards you have except that there is a minimum of 50.

But consider, when you draw cards, you want to draw your "best" cards that work with your deck's strategy. Suppose you have 3 copies of a card you want to draw. On your very first draw, you would have a 3/65 (4.6%)chance of drawing it, but if you had only 50 cards in your deck, you would have a 3/50 (6%) chance of getting it. So by having less cards the chances of getting what you want is significantly higher.

In the competitive tournaments, players almost universally use exactly 50 cards in their decks to maximize the chances of things working how they'd like.

Of course if anyone here really deals with statistics in the real world, they know that you need a really large sampling to actually get any statistically meaningful difference between these numbers. Seriously a thousand games is really going to be what it takes for it to really payoff. I flip a coin 10 times it is well within statistical probability that I end up with 80% heads. When I flip the coin 100 times 65% is still well within statistical probability. When I flip it 1000 times we start to see some actual improbabilities present themselves about one side showing up more frequently in significant numbers.

I always advocate starting with a large deck (and by large I mean maybe 60 at most) and just slowly weed out the cards that you find are less useful. When you get around the 55 card mark if you can't easily determine what to cut from there based entirely on the games you are playing you are probably at a pretty fair point. The ideal is to get down to 50, but building up a deck to 50 allows for too many opportunities for you to misread what cards will be useful in your meta and in a new deck. The chances of this does get smaller the longer you play, because you start being able to predict shifts in the metagame a lot easier and get better at evaluating cards, but reductive deck building still makes more sense to me.