Or rather... one of them found me from seeing my forum posts. Either way, it's a start and we're going to be trying to get some other guys interested and see if we can get a group going here. So far we have three players.

Last night we got together for our first games. I took the same deck I used at Gencon, plus a mono-Cthulhu "Deep Ones" deck I put together. I feel like I can tune up my Shub/Syndicate Gencon deck a fair bit but I wanted to play a couple more games with it before modifications.

Lee brought two decks as well - an Agency/Miskatonic investigators deck, and a mono-Yog.

First game was my Shub/Syndicate vs. his Investigators. My first draw was pretty bad so I mulligan'ed and got a very nice starting hand. I was going first and I was immediately able to get some good characters in play - dropping One of the Thousand to put in a discounted Hungry Dark Young who piggybacked in an Albino Goat Spawn. Second turn another Hungry Dark Young and Albino Goat Spawn showed up and they just couldn't deal with all these creatures. On his side he had a pair of Anthropology Advisors and a Local Sheriff. Soon his Chess Prodigy showed up but it was too late and we took it 3-0. One thing that I think hurt him was that he used a Transient resource twice early in the game, which means his domains never built up any momentum.

Second game was my Shub/Syndicate vs. his mono-Yog deck. It was basically spell city, with the intention of playing Yog himself nearly for free once he made it through enough of his deck. I had a slower start, plus some of my characters got spell-fried to death. But he seemed fairly short on characters, while we were able to replace ours and run unopposed a fair amount of the time. Yog actually did come out right before the end. He kept him in reserve figuring Yog's 8 skill could keep me from winning one of the two stories I needed to finish the game, it was his only character in play. But, with his attention on the Dark Young he'd forgotten about my mobsters. Yog took a Low Blow and that was it. That's right - gut punched an Ancient One ftw

Third game I was up against Josh and his Cthulhu/Shub deck still with my Shub/Syndicate. I got a good enough start, but then he dropped a major bomb. He equipped an Albino Goat Spawn with the Khopesh of the Abyss and she took out four of my characters in a row. Brutal! Well, I never really recovered from that. I had one chance, which was getting Shub out to put my characters back into play, and I concentrated on that. I had Shub in my hand along with one other card, just couldn't quite afford to play her yet. My opponent won The Seventh Gate (where I had 4 success tokens, a painful loss) and he chose to enact Congress of the Keys which forces both players to shuffle their hand into their deck and draw new cards. I lost Shub, and never found her again. My original plan was to win The Seventh Gate myself (using only Dark Young characters), enact The 9th Plague to take out his characters at the story, drop Shub, and get my Dark Young back - both those who died to the Plague as well as those chopped up by the Khopesh earlier. But it wasn't to be, and we went down hard.

Final game I was back against Lee and he swapped back to his Investigator deck. I wanted to try my mono-Cthulhu deck which I'd made up a few days before and never tried. Well, first of all, Cthulhu felt glacially slow to me after being used to Shub. I was happy enough with my hand, but most of my characters cost 3. I made a mistake (I think) and resourced a Lurking Deep One instead of Young Deep One - his Skill 0 was to come back to haunt me as he was unable to help me make progress at stories. But, I wanted to keep my two Deep One Stowaways to help remove enemy characters. Anyway, he managed to get 4 success tokens on two different stories by the time we were able to put up a decent resistance. He managed to win one though, the story that lets both players search for a Support card and put it into play. That proved to be the dam-breaker, as I was able to fish out a Devil's Reef and finally get a discount on my Deep Ones. After that they started flowing much better and both Deep One Stowaway and Deep One Rising took out his guys when they came into play for some nasty 2-man swings. By that time I also had a Shadowed Reef in play so my Deep Ones were scary as well as combative, and he couldn't keep up. We ended up winning the story that makes both players lose a story too, so despite his early alarming lead he ended up losing 3-0. What really hurt Lee was that his cheap 2-cost characters were getting loaded up with support cards, packing Lightning Guns, Shotguns, two pistols on one guy. So whenever I dropped a Deep One Stowaway or Deep One Rising he wasn't just losing the character, he was losing 1-2 support cards as well, which proved to be crippling in the long run.

Talking with Lee afterward, I felt that both of his decks were too low on the characters and he revealed that they only had about 25 so I think he may be well served to increase that to maybe 30 or so for next time at the expense of some of the numerous support cards in his Investigator deck. Yog can maybe do with a lower number of characters but a couple extras wouldn't hurt, and maybe more removal or something like Living Mummy as one of them.

I wonder what would have happened against Josh if he hadn't managed to get the Albino Goat Spawn/Khopesh bomb off on me. Later in the game I finally found a Dutch Courage which prevented a second round of Khopesh slayings when he put it on a Ravager but I didn't have it when I really needed it. Maybe next time... What would have been even better would have been having an anti-support card in hand or some other way to deal with the card without taking a bunch of wounds. I'll have to see what I can do about that when I start modifying my deck.

Anyway, that's about it. I've got a friend I've been trying to get together with for the last couple weeks to teach him the game, but I think he's too far to meet up with us regularly. We'll be on the lookout for a 4th man though, it would be a big step up to have two games going at once.

Congratulations for finding local players ( I wish I'd find someone willing to play against me somewhat regularly instead of once or twice a year... ) and thanks for a very interesting report! I'm currently fiddling with a Syndicate/Shub deck myself, so it's good to hear yours has been doing well.

The Khopesh certainly has me worried, too. A very strong card, that! Then again it's part of the reason I've been looking into Shub: It's one of the best factions to deal with support cards.

If I was a better player I might go for a three faction deck, adding a bit of Yog or the Lodge but I don't really trust my ability to always resource well.

Yeah, I was very happy to find some local opponents. There are more players out there somewhere too, because there's a shop across town that sells Asylum Packs - only these guys don't play at the store. I realize that's their right and all, but it really hurts the community of smaller games when people choose to play in secret. If they played at the store on an established night people could find them, and the group could grow. I've got to try to figure out a way to hunt these guys down and at least make them aware that we need to put together a way for players to contact each other, even if the actual games take place in someone's basement.

The Khopesh by itself seems to be a good card, but combining it with a cheap character with high Toughness seems kind of overpowered. Albino Goat Spawn is probably the best character you can use it with in terms of how much you can kill versus the cost.

I'm fairly happy with the combination of Shub and Syndicate so far. Shub can put out a lot of characters that can compete for Terror and Combat, and when something comes up they can't deal with well Syndicate is there to exhaust it for me. I'm definitely going to work on tuning the deck further though. It's got a few really slack cards in there that can be cut, and I've got a better idea now what my weaknesses are. I'm going to try to set up another night soon and have a revised version ready to play then.

I also want to work on the Cthulhu deck and maybe try something new though too, so I don't know how much I'll end up running each one.

Being a newbie, a three faction deck sounds rough to pull off well. A bad resourcing decision could haunt you all game, or even an uneven card draw.