So I have made this Mono Order of the Silver Twilight deck and it just beats the crap out of all my other decks I have made so far (like Mono Cthulhu Serpent deck, Yog/Miscatonic cursed skull/M.U.). I am playing this game with friends, but I am the only one to have a collection so I have to build decks for the others, too. Now what I am looking for are decks to could have a chance against this one. I do not want to build a deck designed against this one, since there would be no point in that either. Do you have any ideas what to build?

Thanks in advance!

3x Rich Widow
3x Young Initiate
3x Errand Boy
3x Protector of Secrets
3x Master of Blades
3x Unscroupulous Aquisitionist
3x Disgruntled Chef
3x Initiate of Huang Hun /ez valami iszonyat undorító lap/
3x Knight of the Outer Void
3x Lord Jeffrey Farrington
3x High Wizard of the Order

2x Secret Handshake
2x Brazier Enchantment
2x Unbound!
3x You Know Too Much
2x The Silver Lance
2x Ritual of Inferno
3x Hidden Agenda
1x Tcho-Tcho Talisman

I don't know much about Silver Twilight, but I'll see if I can put this deck together tonight and try it against a couple of others I've got.

I'm mainly playing a Cthulhu Deep Ones deck and a Syndicate deck at the moment. I was working on a mono-Hastur deck without much success so I'm switching over to Yog for now, or maybe a Yog/Hastur mix. But I'd like to learn Silver Twilight too

mephistopheles said:

Over at CardgameDB a new, very good milling deck has also been posted. Maybe you should have a look at it, too.

I assembled the deck last night but didn't get a chance to play it. Hopefully soon...

My initial thought after flipping a few sample draws is that any deck with a lot of "enters play" sort of effects might potentially be a good match and a counter to Huang Hun. For instance, you've got Cthulhu decks that destroy characters when Deep Ones enter play, Syndicate decks that exhaust characters, some Shub, a little Hastur, and any combination of these in a mixed-faction deck. It's not necessary for all characters to have these sort of effects, as long as some of them do. I've already got a Deep Ones and a Syndicate deck made up so these are the first I'll be trying out against it.

Any special play tips we should know to use the Silver Twilight deck to best effect? I'm new to playing them so I could be missing some potential tricks or combinations.

dboeren said:

First of all thank you all for your efforts. Here are my tips:

This is a rush deck not a control deck. You want to keep your opponent under permanent pressure. You should be able to get an early advantage. Many of the cards help you to obtain the status-quo which is good for you. You want to win asap, since the longer the game lasts the smaller chances you have.

It's important how you manage you domains. You need 1 domain with 4 resources and 2 with 2 resources. If you manage to draw an early Huang you might want to make 3x2 first since he can always take back himself. This way you can bounce 3 chars back from your opponent! Knight of the Outer Void is awesome to take back Lord Jeffry Farrington or High Wizard. Alternatively Rich Widow can be taken back since she will hit the board through her special anyway. Don't be afraid of losing the cheap character like Errand Boy or Young Initiate. They are your operation human shield. In of the games the only struggle you have to fear is the Terror struggle. Let Young Initiate or so get insane. You can always take back an insane or exhausted character and then re-play it. In the early game playing characters is way more important than playing You know too much or Ritual of Inferno. That's all that comes to my mind. Remember you have to be the one who dictates the speed!

Here's my idea on stopping that deck:

The opposing deck seems to rely on to things to gain victory, speed and bouncing effects to keep board control. There are some good synergies going on there and i can imagine it's a hard deck to play against. Ok, what tactics beat the strategies in that deck but still keep the deck playable against any opponent? Bouncing can be controlled with ComesIntoPlay effects, and preferably cheap ones as we are facing a rush deck here. One of my favourite characters that does stuff when it comes into play is Victoria Glasser and she is quite cheap also. Insanity is also a great speedbump against rush if you can overwhelm opponent with it. So, what other stuff we should play along with her? A great strategy i have been tinkering with is to bounce Victoria into and out of discard, so let's take Hungry Dark Young into deck also (resurrection and more terror). To get Victoria into discard we can just send her into hopeless fights, but more effective method is the Shocking Transformation. You play shock, sac Victoria, tutor a Dark Young into play and resurrect Victoria, which is a pretty nice tiny combo.

But one source of instant insanity isn't enough so let's throw in Dangerous Inmate, who can lock opponents cheap characters, preferably the ones whose ability hurts your plan most. And as we are using insanity The Greatest Fear is a natural pick, while The Seventy Steps holds down rush for a while and gives you time to blast opponent with madness. Now we have a good solid core of cards for the deck.

3xVictoria Glasser
3xHungry Dark Young
3xDangerous Inmate
3xShocking Transformation
3xThe Greatest Fear
3xThe Seventy Steps

The rest is up to you. I personally build a similar deck to this by using those cards as basis and the focused the rest of the deck to cheap effects against various strategies and situations i might face. A little bit of support hate. Maybe some cancels. Some more tutoring effects like Gibbering Soul for example. Speed in form of Priestess of Bubastis......

And of course as we play Hastur and Shub, bombs like Infernal Obsession and Y'Golonac are always a good choice

So there you go, effective deck with a functional strategy, that has a good chance of beating that mono-order deck without being just a boring antideck. When i built this kind of deck, it instantly gained 50% win ratio and has been improving constantly. Just recently it went 2-0 against a vicious Cthulhu/Agency rush/destruction deck, so rush/bounce should not be too much of a problem.

Hope this helps ^^

Thank you Shangfu!

Unfortunately I miss the entire Dreamlands cycle. Otherwise I like your suggestion. I think I might just proxy the missing cards and give it a tray. I am a big fan of combos so this Hungry Dark Young + Schocking Transformation + Victoria Glasser thing really got my fantasy going!

Cheers Mate!

Great i could help! ^^

That one really is one of the most fun decks i have played, as there's plenty of nasty tricks in there but none of them too complex to be too hard to use. And it really is very effective also, unless you run into a deck that abuses Ancient Ones as only tool in your disposal against those is to try to slow them down with Y'Golonac and change into full rush mode with other characters.

I have on mono-Lodge deck, which I posted here some time ago. It was mainly done only with Order of Silver Twilight-expansion cards. It used only tricks to destroy characters (with Unbound) or move them to opponents hand (Lord Jeffrey and high Wizard of Order). Mainly that system did kick ass against my other decks (which was annoying) but my friend played some kind ot Agenzy/Yog-Sothoth (?) deck, which did try to slow down my system to get charachters to enter play (like destroying them right away or destroying resourses (which is also very annoying)). My deck has always been quite slow to work, but when I did get control of the play, I did mostly win the game. I even managed to win one story with that deck, but destroying resourses was quite critical to me.

I've seen your deck here Deadsong. I think our decks totally differ in strategy and playstyle. Yours is, as you stated, more a control deck. Mine is a rush deck. I had games when I won my 3rd story by turn 4. The key against my deck would be to slow it down asap since my version gets weaker with time.

I was able to squeeze in three test games last night.

First, I played it against my mono-Cthulhu Deep Ones deck. It seems like they don't like large amounts of Terror. I ended up getting Shadowed Reef into play on turn 1 and this did a good job holding them up until we could simply overwhelm them. Also, cards like Deep One Stowaway make excellent bounce targets - enabling me to destroy some extra Silver Twilight characters. Strong victory to Cthulhu.

Second game was against Syndicate, and resulted in a Silver Twilight victory. Arcane was big for Silver Twilight, letting them get more mileage out of their characters while Syndicate had to split theirs between active and passive turns more - plus good combat icons on Disgruntled Chef. Reasonable close game, but Silver Twilight won it.

Third game was a rematch against Syndicate, this time with a Syndicate victory. We basically outrushed the Lodge this game and used our exhaustion and uncommit tricks to grab stories and arrange for a couple of kills in combat where we could. I actually have several characters in the deck with enter play effects but didn't really draw them this game. 3-0 for Syndicate.

Based on this limited look, I think any deck with a lot of Terror (not just a little) might be a decent match for them as long as they can also protect themselves a bit in combat from characters like Disgruntled Chef, Master of Blades, etc...

Huang Hun has been interesting, but as pointed out in other threads he slows down your own character development as well. I think he works best if you don't over-use him and pair him with characters like Rich Widow that can reduce his "cost" of use. I think you made a good choice in including multiple cost-1 guys in the deck.

Worth noting, neither of the decks I tested against make much use of attachments. Bouncing characters with attachments is extra-nice because you're getting rid of their attachments as well. My main local opponent uses quite a few and I'm sure Huang Hun would give him fits. So when you're tailoring the opposing deck you can keep an eye to lowering your dependency on character attachments so Huang doesn't get any 2-fers.

Edit: btw, when I mention attachments, this is not specific to Huang Hun, but to any card/effect that bounces character back to the hand/deck. So it would also apply to things like Farrington, High Wizard, Unscrupulous Acquisitionist, etc... Huang is just sort of shorthand

I have a mono Cthulhu Serpent deck with Degenerate Serpent Cultist, Brood of Yig, Feathered Serpent so lots of Terror and Combat stuff. Mass destruction like In the Wake of the Sleeper and Y'ha-nthlei Statue are in there, too. Still every time I play that deck against the Silver Twilight deck it's a clear 3:0 or 3:1 victory for the Order. Well it lacks Deep One Stowaway of course.

Did you use the 1 time mulligan option when testing? There are hands you just have to reshuffle with that Order deck.

dboeren said:

Thanks for the detailed play report!

I'm going to test how my deck fares against it, today. I would have tested it earlier, but the new FAQ made some changes necessary (which I'm still not quite happy about ).

mephistopheles said:

I did not use the mulligan. To be honest, I feel like I do not yet have a good enough understanding of the deck to know when to mulligan and when not to. If you have specific recommendations I'd be glad to use them. For instance, in my Deep Ones deck I am much more likely to mulligan if I don't start with either type of reef (Devil's or Shadowed). Unless I get a really nice set of other cards, I probably will.

The deck has Deep One Stowaway (which got used at least twice), Y'ha-nthlei Statue (which wasn't drawn), and In the Wake of the Sleeper (drawn twice but not played). Brood of Yig is in there, but not Feathered Serpent or Degenerate Serpant Cultist. I've actually been meaning to swap my Innmouth Troublemakers for DSC but haven't gotten around to tuning the deck. But, with Shadowed Reef on turn 1 I think every character save the Innsmouth Troublemaker had Terror, and even he came in handy to take a wound for me. What else? Deep One Rising was used at least once to take out a character as well. Those are the main specifics I can recall. Well, and then too since your deck is mainly Serpents and this is mainly Deep Ones there's bound to be some major differences between the two. Deep Ones tend to have a lot more combat for instance?

jhaelen said:

It depends a bit on how easily the opposing deck can deal with those attachments. For instance, I've been working on a Yog deck. I know it's still not very good, I don't have a good understanding of the faction yet. Anyway, my opponent was using Syndicate and to deal with my Terror he threw out a couple of Alhazred Lamps on his characters. It ended up working well for him because I had no good way to deal with the attachments directly and my character removal is all stuff that lets him pick so he could ensure that somebody else was being sacrificed to A Single Glimpse, etc... In this case they paid off well and I barely hung in there long enough to bring out Glaaki before he got 3 stories. Of course, AFTER Glaaki dropped we were all over them because he could strip off their lamp-granted icons. We won the game, but nearly didn't because we couldn't deal with the early rush that well. I'm trying to think now of what changes to make to do that better but that's a subject for another thread.

I think it's OK to have some character attachments in the deck, but not to rely on them. If you do come up against a faction that's good at removing them the worst thing that should happen is that you've got some easy resourcing decisions coming up, but if you DO rely on them then you're likely in trouble. Also, non-character attachments seem to be quite a bit harder to get rid of so those are probably fine.

On the new FAQ... Couple of rulings in there seem odd to me too. I'm definitely dropping the Hired Thief from my Syndicate deck, not sure if I'm making any other immediate changes though.

dboeren said:

I have no experience with Deep One decks. I know my Serpent deck can generate quite a lot of Combat icons with Feathered Serpent's ability and all the Terror Icon boost in there, like River of Serpents or Stygian Idol. Also Disguised Serpent Man comes with 3 Combat icons. As a restricted card I play Descendant of Eibon in it. The only time this Cthulhu deck lots by 3:2 only was when it drew 2 early Eibons. Going through my collection I noticed that Deep Ones are a bit cheaper to play so that might be the key, since you can stop the Order earlier and play more characters / turn when they are bounced back.

About the mulligan: the real key cards for this deck are Protector of Secets, Lord Jeffrey Farrington, Rich Widow and Knight of the Outer Void. In an opening hand you want to see some of them. Young Initiate is also good instead of Rich Widow. In some situations taking back a Protector of Secrets due to thew Knight of Outer Voids special is a good idea. Re-play the Protector for its special. Initiate of Huang Hun and the High Wizard don't have to be in an opening hand. Disgruntles Chef, Master of Blades are just fill up characters to have 50 cards in the deck.

I made an important change in the deck. I got rid of the Lance since I never needed it and exchanged it for Rumormill. You can protect a story so your opponent won't solve it before you can.

OK, I'll do the Lance->Rumormill swap here too next time I try it.

Thanks for explaining the Knight of the Outer Void, his forced response initially looked like a potential drawback, but if you don't want to bounce someone to reuse their enter play effect you can always use it on a cost-1 character since you probably aren't using your 1-domain anyway. It definitely seems important to Silver Twilight to have a decent assortment of 1-cost characters to eat bounce effects when you don't want them to mess with anyone vital.

dboeren said:

True that's why I included 9 1-cost characters in it. Young Initiate has a comes into play effect that is very useful and Rich Widow often comes into play for free! Knight of the Outer Void opens many tactical options since you can either take back and re-play a Protector, Lord Jeffrey Farington or Young Initiate depending on what effect you want to abuse. Also it has willpower which is very important.

Okay, I played four test games against this deck. I won the first three and lost the fourth one.

Imho, there's still plenty of room for improving this Lodge deck. There are several cards in the deck that just don't seem to synergize well. I think it could be improved by adding a second faction, e.g. Syndicate (exhausting characters) or Hastur/Miskatonic (preventing characters from entering play outside of the operation phase).

The key cards enabling me to win were:

- Dreamlands Fanatic: Basically makes you immune to repeated bouncing from the Initiate

- The Terror of the Tides: Sometimes it's most effective to not have any characters in play when playing against the Lodge. The downside is that it works best if it surprises the Lodge player, which only happens once. A beneficial side effect of having your characters bounced: Any wounds are effectively healed!

- Khopesh of the Abyss: Evening the odds by taking out the strong Lodge characters before running the stories.

- Descendant of Eibon: Imho, even after two rounds of nerfs this is still the single most powerful card in the LCG environment. As long as you have two success tokens on your side, the Lodge player will always have to take the Descendant into account, crippling his rush strategy.

What mainly caused me to lose the fourth game was a timely played Brazier Enchantment. I also made the mistake of winning a story early, leaving me with less than the required 2 success tokes to put the Descendant back into play. I also didn't draw any Dreamlands Fanatic or Terror of the Tides.

Apart from that I felt I could deal rather well with the continous bouncing of my characters. I just had to be careful about being able to put them back into play.

Now, granted, I'm pretty sure a more competent player could make more out of this Lodge deck. As it was, the Lodge player often wasn't sure what to play to achieve the best results. E.g. in the first game there was an opportunity to play 'Hidden Agenda' but he couldn't figure out when to play it. In the fourth game there would have been a great opportunity to repeat the story phase, but the required domain wasn't ready.

I'm planning to play one or two additional games to see if I was only winning the first three games because the Lodge player didn't know how to play the deck effectively.

IMO SIlver Twilight needs a second splash faction with removal tech to be effect against the current meta (see DL Fanatic). To be clear, what I mean by "removal" is actually killing stuff. I would get rid of some of the cards that do not synergize well (as mentioned above by jhaelen) and replace those cards with Agency or Cthulhu removal, making sure at least some of it is playable outside of your Operations phase.

Played two more test games against my upgraded Mono Cthulhu Serpent deck. The first game was won 3:2 by Mono Cthulhu. Basically an early Descendent of Eibon stopped me. Eibon is still **** broken.

The second game was a 3:1 win for the Order even though Cthulhu had a Ravager from the Deep and an Eibon. In this game I drew all the High Wizards, Lord Jeffrey, Huang I needed and a well timed Secret Handshake was also needed.

After all I came to the same conclusion, that this deck need a second faction. Master of Blade, Aquisitionist and Hidden Agenda are rarely useful. Instead of removal I am thinking of making it an Order/Syndicate deck so I can add the Barkeeper, cheap Syndicate chars and exhaust/uncommit tech to make this deck even more a rush deck.