I'm a new player, and nowhere near ready to play in the championship tournaments yet, but is there any casual play going on at Gencon?

I wouldn't mind a chance to meet up with some veteran players and learn a bit from their wisdom.

The Thursday and Sunday events, although "tournaments" will probably be low key. I will be hanging around the card room off and on with my decks if you want to play a game or so...

dboeren said:

Psh, can you make/do you have a deck with at least 50 cards and follows the banned/restricted list? If yes, then you should compete for the championship! As long as you go in with the mindset to have fun, you will!

Seriously, all you gotta do is know how to play and have a legal deck. Sure there might be a cut throat or two (I apologize in advance...) but no real harm in giving it a go. Worst case scenario is that you make some friends Look, you already made one!

I, of course, extend this invitation to anyone that is or is willing to attend gencon!

Otherwise, I too imagine I'll be in and out of the hall throughout the con. Probably not nearly as much as I did the last few years, but should always have some decks on me (if not my entire collection, its larger than it was last year so I'm hoping to leave it at the hotel).

Hope to see ya there.

Magnus brings up a good point here - participating in Worlds will increase your experience, create friends, and improve your skills. So what it you don't win? All but 1 player will not win (and there's a good chance Magnus will do it again anyway! :-)

TheProfessor said:

I know right? It just keeps happening!

I kid, but its quite obvious that dboeren should play in the championship.

Just sayin.

OK, I'm game. The registration listed it as "Extensive Experience Required" so I didn't really think about joining the event, but if you guys don't mind then why the heck not?

From what I hear about previous World's, even if I lose every game I may still be in the top 5

So... questions for you guys. Is there anything special I need besides some cards? I thought I remembered reading somewhere that card sleeves are required for the tournament - is that true?

If I can only attend one, would I be better off going to the practice tournament on Thursday or the real thing on Friday? Friday may have better attendance prizes, but people may be more sociable since it's not "for real". On the other hand, on Friday I'll be handing them a free pass to the next round. Is that going to mess up anything for the Swiss pairings?

Any advice on deck building? I've got a package arriving tomorrow with the Core set and Secrets of Arkham. I also have some old cards, a pair of Arkham Edition starters and some Common/Uncommon sets from one of the older sets - not sure which. Unspeakable Tales maybe? Some of them I know are no longer legal cards in the LCG - "Unstoppable Hound" is one I noticed no longer exists.

I still have some time to pick up something before the con if I need to, but I'd be interested to know what factions might make a good mix out of these cards. I tend to prefer the non-Human factions if possible.

Once I've got something put together It would be great to set up a time to test the deck out on LackeyCCG if there are any takers (as well as to learn how to play online). I'm in Atlanta, Eastern US timezone.

OK... So lots to think about all of a sudden I think I'll start by pulling up a list of cards restricted to the Core + SoA sets and start browsing through them, then maybe weed through my old CCG cards and try to find out what's still usable there and note any changes.

Great, glad to hear it!! My, opinion, friday will be the better day. Based on previous cthulhu 'side events'... attendence will likely be low.

Sleeves are necessary if you are using black border versions of white border cards. However, while you can technically get away without using sleeves if all of your cards are white bordered its just a good idea to do so even its just to protect your cards. After all, in a tournament... theres lots of shuffling.

As for deckbuilding... be consistant. Playing best of 1 matches means you'll want your deck to perform the way you want it to. So based on your collection pick a faction or two that seem to have the most of a similar effect that you want to use. For example. If you want to get characters out of the way while being offensive you might look at syndicate and agency as they have a slew of cards that say "go away while I get success tokens." In essence pick a theme among your collection that you think you'd enjoy and put in as many cards that fit that theme.

As for online play... I'd love to help but the odds I'll have time is pretty low (basically non-exsistant, way behind on things as it is). That and I never actually used the lacky... not that its not awesome just have trouble finding opponents myself. So hopefully someone else can help u out there.

I wonder how many other 'hidden' players we have out there that are put off by the description on the gencon event page. While its not inaccruate... just might not be bad to grow the attendance before we scare off newer players.

If you're interested in the warm up tournament, I know there will be at least three other newb to semi-newbs in attendance. It will be my first constructed Cthulhu tournament, though I've played in AGOT for years (and one Cthulhu draft a couple years back!) and it will be the first time for Photonurth and Darryl as well. (My cohosts on the forthcoming Domain Drain Podcast- and occaisional cohosts on 2 Champs and a Chump)

Magnus Arcanis said:

A newbie might be discouraged from playing the game ever again because the 'pro-players' are complete dorks who enjoy gloating about wiping the floor with the newb.

Reading some of the vitriolic posts on this board by former CoC CCG players definitely left me with the impressions that these are not persons I'd want to meet face to face anywhere ever. So, it's quite understandable if someone new to the game might be reluctant to join a tournament. All it takes is a few bad seeds to poison the entire community.

jhaelen said:

It's always possible, but rather unlikely from my admittedly limited experience. Every competitive event I have attended for this game was rather pleasant to downright convivial.

Arkham Nights was a good example of newbs and experienced players mixing well in a competitive environment. If I was up against an inexperienced player then I took my time to make sure they knew the ins and outs of my deck as I played so that they not only had fun but came away from the game with a better understanding of its mechanics even if they did lose.

So in closing, the community just doesn't seem the sort, at least not nowadays if it ever was like that. But I do see your point about scaring newbs away. I think everyone does and realizes that the community is simply not large enough to act like a pratt and risk losing more players.

My first GenCon worlds was 3 years ago, and I had only been playing for 2 months.

I had a wonderful time, made friends there who I still look forward to seeing again at each GenCon. I think there was 1 player that whole time who I thought was a "sore winner". The others were very nice - after the tournament they discussed strategies and helped me improve my game.

Don't be worried about the GenCon crowd - they are a good bunch and want to get more people involved in the game!

I've been going to Gencon for several years now and have played in tournaments large and small for other games. There are sometimes players who are like that, who put winning the game over enjoying the game. Usually this seems to be less prevalent in the smaller tournaments/games where there is not so much on the line though. I could see it being a bigger issue back in the CCG days when significant money was spent prepping a deck and so on.

About losing.... It's going to happen. I expect to lose every game (unless maybe against another beginner) and probably lose fairly badly. That's fine. What some people don't realize is that that's actually a GOOD thing. I look at it like this. If a beginner has any significant chance of beating a veteran, that is a sign that the game has a low skill factor, which means that in the long run that game is uninteresting. You SHOULD lose nearly every game for quite a while against veteran players because you're still learning the ropes. How to build a solid deck, how to make good judgements during play, etc... If these types of skills don't matter enough to the game to massively affect your chances of winning then why am I here?

I don't know if the Gencon event descriptions are driving a lot of players away. I can say that I was disappointed that there was no casual event for CoC, some sort of open play time or whatever. There are no "Learn to Play" events either, nor anything else. Just the tournament, the warm-up, and what looks like a preview of the next cycle which is sort of interesting. I would have liked to see some of these other events, maybe a "deck tune-up" where you could get advice from some experienced guys, that sort of thing, but I realize all these things take manpower too. At a minimum, maybe change the warmup tournament to specify a lower experience level and add something to the description indicating that newer players are welcome. If they can stretch a bit further, then maybe add an open play event (which usually takes minimal supervision). I've run and helped run various events at Gencon before, I don't think an open play would take more than 1 guy at the most, and it's often not too hard to get volunteers if you offer some free stuff in return proportional to hours worked. Fantasy Flight could probably run an open play for ALL their LCG's in one area with two guys overseeing it and pay them off with some complementary card packs or whatever.

Next, decks. I went through all my old Cthulhu CCG last night and checked them against the deckbuilder on cardgamedb. A higher percentage of them no longer exist than I had anticipated. I ended up with roughly 10 cards for each faction that are still playable. Once Core & Secrets of Arkham come in that will give me roughly 40 cards for each faction.

Package came in yesterday. I've finished sorting all the cards and adding in the ones that are still legal from my old stuff.

The old black borders still look better to me (more of a dark brooding look that IMHO fits the theme better) but I'm getting used to it. Sort of wish they'd gone with maybe a brown or something though. The new cardstock isn't as strong either, so I'm definitely going to invest in some sleeves to protect them. What I really thought was strange though is that some of the cards have slightly changed their artwork by framing it differently. Look at Arcane Initiate for example, the "camera" has panned noticeably to the left from the old pic to the new one. Weird!

Next step is to make up a sample deck and play some test games against decks made from both my new and old cards (not mixing them though). If the old decks have slightly stronger cards from the CCG days maybe that will serve to simulate a better opponent.

Any suggestions on where to buy a decent card case that I can use to store my whole collection as it grows (not just a single deck)? All I've been able to find so far are cardboard boxes and hard plastic stuff made for baseball cards. These latter are probably OK for sitting on a shelf since you don't normally carry baseball cards to the game store or cons but I don't think they'd work well for CCG/LCG use, they'd probably crack if dropped. Ideally I'm thinking of something made of soft plastic that snaps shut with a handle on it.

Hello Brother Cultist... I prefer the ENDURA Deluxe Series Steel Carrying Case made by ROOK. See sample towards bottom:

http://www.iconusa3.com/online/Rook_SCarryingCases.htm

The cases are magnet friendly so mine sports a very real looking hazardous waste warning sign.

Thanks, I'll check those out.

I may also reuse a plastic case that currently holds my Netrunner cards (so then they'd need a new home). I looked it up last night and found out it's a Plano 5325 which is made to hold up to 2000 cards. I got it in a trade with the cards for some old boardgames long ago. However, they seem to be out of production and most of my searching just turned up dozens of threads of people asking where they could buy them.

Last night I worked on my deck some. I've chosen to go with Shub, planning for the majority of the deck to be them with just a splash from the second faction, still working on that part but I'm starting out trying Syndicate for some exhaustion effects, a couple of cheap investigation characters, some re-readying, Patsy to help me out of a jam, and Dutch Courage to toughen up all my Shub characters. Got a couple of neutral cards in there as well for the moment, but every time I draw them in my starting hand it seems to create a resourcing problem so I may end up removing some/all of them. I didn't want to do the Mi-Go deck as it seemed more combo oriented (needing to get several cost 3 guys out at once to really reap the benefits) so I'm doing more Dark Young and what I see as good "non-affiliated" characters like Albino Goat-Spawn. I did throw in a couple of Ageless Mi-Go to soak hits for me since they're only cost 2. Between them, Dutch Courage, and some Bred to Survive I'm hoping that my characters will be annoyingly hard to kill allowing me to build up a character advantage over time.

I'll start a thread later in the Deck Construction forum with more details and some thoughts on what I'm thinking of adding to it. I think I'm currently up to around 40 cards and I'm working on picking out a few Asylum Packs to get the cards I want to help round it out.