I'm very new to the game. I still haven't put together a real deck yet, though I've had one go at playing with a friend. I'm trying to jump in head first. I ordered 7 asylum packs by mail and both of the big expansions to my local game store. What are the best asylum packs for Shub-Niggurath? I'm hoping to build a mono shub deck if possible.

If you go to a card database, like http://cthulhu.dbler.com/ for example, you can look through the various Shub cards, see what you like, and see what asylum packs they came from. It is hard to make recommendations without knowing what kind of Shub deck you are wanting to build, but with the database you can see what your various options and explore your choices before making the purchase.

I'm a big Shub fan. The Mi-Go are my favorite subtype, and part of the reason I jumped into this game. I feel that most of the go-to Shub cards come in the Core set and Secrets of Arkham, but you may want to take a look at the Yuggoth Contract cycle for some nice options, such as:

Shub-Niggurath, Dark Mistress of the Woods (The Cacophony)
Mi-Go Guard (The Spoken Convenant)
Mi-Go Scalpel (The Spoken Convenant)
Ferocious Dark Young (Whispers in the Dark)
Optic Warehouse (The Wailer Below)

From Summons of the Deep, I like:

Under the Porch (The Horror Beneath the Surface)
Grim Wraith (The Spawn of the Sleeper)
Insect Swarm (The Thing from the Shore)

Both these cycles also come with great cards for the other factions too, so they are a good place to start.

TheProfessor is spot on with his advice about using a database to plan your purchases. I like Cthulhu dabbler a lot as it's fast and simple to sort through what you want, but unfortunately it hasn't been updated since the Rituals of the Order cycle. For cards from the newest cycle - Ancient Relics - go to cardgame database ( http://www.cardgamedb.com./index.php/CoC/CoCCards.html ).

Note, the Dreamlands Asylum Packs haven't been reprinted in the new format yet (x3 copies of each card), so I would wait on picking up any packs from that cycle. Also, the Order of the Silver Twilight expansion only includes 2 Shub cards as it focuses primarily on launching a new faction.

Last but not least, welcome to the game!

What sort of sub-theme are you wanting to do within Shub?

Yipe for instance prefers Mi-go. I'm planning to get around to trying a Mi-Go themed deck sometime myself now that I think they have enough cards, but my first Shubby love was for the Dark Young.

When I started the game less than a year ago I wanted to build a Dark Young deck for Gencon, but as I was new I didn't want to spend a lot so I used the deckbuilder at carddb.com to build a list of all the cards with the Dark Young keyword. Then I looked at what other Shub cards were in each one of those packs to find other useful stuff and try to rank the packs. Then it was fairly easy to build a prototype based on how many packs I wanted to spring for.

Now, I didn't want to spend enough to go mono-faction so I ended up with a Shub/Syndicate deck instead - this was something I could do with a very minimal investment, but the same principle holds and would how be how I'd go about building a mono-faction deck from scratch too - just with the expectation that it would take more packs to do it.

Also, in the deckbuilder, filter out the Dreamlands cycle since those haven't been reprinted yet.

Now you might want Mi-Go, Dark Young, Cultists, Ancient Ones, or just general Shub without any particular subtheme, but knowing will help us make better suggestions.

Dark Young, I think, would be my style.

OK, so the first step then is to pull up a deckbuilder ( http://www.cardgamedb.com/index.php/CoC/cocdeckbuilder.html ) and get a list of all cards with the trait "Dark Young".

There are 9 of them:

Ancient Guardian: Core
Collector of Sacrifices: Silver Twilight
Ferocious Dark Young: Whispers in the Dark
Hungry Dark Young: Core
Predator of the Night: Perilous Trials
Rampaging Dark Young: Secrets of Arkham
The Mother's Hand: Secrets of Arkham
Trampling Dark Young: Initiations of the Favored
Watcher of the Wood: Core

In addition there are some other related characters you'll probably want:
Priestess of Bubastis: Core
One of the Thousand: Perilous Trials
Shub Niggurath (Dark Mistress of the Woods): The Cacophony

You don't need all of them, but this give you a list to work from. Priestess/One of the Thousand are accelerators that I feel work well with the general Dark Young theme of swarming the opponent. Shub is a bomb, if you get into a longer game or are having trouble with your Dark Young getting killed she can bring them all back which is pretty devastating.

I would say that some of the most key ones are Ancient Guardian (refresh your characters), Ferocious/Hungry Dark Young (bring out extra characters), and possible Mother's Hand and Watcher in the Woods (provided you have some support cards). Trampling Dark Young is useful too for keeping the weenies away. The one I've found least use for is Rampaging Dark Young who I consider too expensive.

Now you'll probably want some other characters to round things out. In particular, most Dark Young cost 3 and Hungry brings out a free 2-cost character so you'll want maybe a couple good 2-costs in there. In my deck I used Albino Goat Spawn which gives me a cheap blocker with Toughness, she's from Secrets of Arkham.

Then, we can do the opposite search. Load the deckbuilder with all the sets you have, filter it to Shub, and see what cards we might want from your existing collection. This gives us a list of 43 cards to go through.

A few potentially useful ones:

Albino Goat-Spawn: Cheap character for Hungry DY and good blocker
Alter of the Blessed: Cheap support for Watcher and also +1 skill which can be handy
Binding Worm: Control character
Bred to Survive: Protect your characters
Burrowing Beneath: Good support removal
Come to the Altar: Let you trade a cheap guy for a better one
Degenerate Ghoul: Good cheap character
Ghoulish Predator: Potential cheap character/Hungry DY target
Ghoulish Worshipper: Maybe to help make Shub cheaper? Look for other Monsters?
Horrid Mutation: Extra Terror when you need it
Priestess of Bubastis: Discount on characters, you want her
Shocking Transformation: Fun event
Sinkhole: sort of a different form of Burrowing Beneath
Slavering Gug: Shocking Transform target
Small Ghouls: Shocking Transform target
The Black Goat's Rage: Useful *if* you end up with enough Terror or can enhance it with Horrid Mutation
Unspeakable Transformation: generally useful event
Y'Golonac: You want him, he's great for 4

Forest Sister, from the Core set, is also a nice 2-cost character. And I think she fits with your Dark Young theme.