To help keep your Ghoulish Worshippers alive, perhaps Unspeakable Resurrection?

With Unspeakable Resurrection, if you already have a Ghoulish Worshipper in play, does it cost 1 less to bring back a monster character from your discard pile?

No, that doesn't work. Ghoulish Worshipper only affects the cost to play a character from your hand.

I currently have Open Grave for such purposes, but it could be swapped out for Unspeakable Resurrection easily enough to shift the faction balance if I need to.

Last night I started working on a new version mixing Shub and Yog.

Most of the events have been shifted to the Yog side, with a number of character removal events being put in.

The monsters I've opted for are: Crazed Shoggoth, Enslaved Yeti, Flying Polyps, and Many-angled Thing. Enslaved Yeti is replacing Antarctic Yeti. I've lost the Terror icon but gained an extra Combat icon and a lot of toughness. Plus, his ability is a bit more flexible.

I've also swapped Y'Golonac for Glaaki, we'll see how that goes. He provides a similar ability plus stripping icons, plus there's no cost to it. I just have to afford his greater cost.

On the support side I put in one of my favorite Yog cards - Prism of Many Views.

It's a very rough prototype at this stage so I'm not posting a full list yet. Also, it's a few cards over and I haven't figured out what to cut - that'll take a few plays. Once it's a little more sorted I'll start a new thread.

dboeren said:

Very interesting read. I considered doing a combo Yog/Shub monster deck, but since I wanted to focus on Glaaki, I just doubled up on reducers and it turned into mono-Yog. I had to cull the monster stuff, since it seemed to make the deck too expensive. Seeker of Mysteries, Servants of Glaaki, and Doppelgangers, I could usually get Glaaki out turn 4 on average. Other monsters sure would help to stall, though.

Are you still working on your 'Monster-Deck'?

I have a quite similiar deck using only Ghouls/Monsters and included a Night-Dreamlands mechanic to compensate my total lack of arcane symbols.

Haven't had a chance to for a while, we just got back from an trip out of the country that ate up a lot of time in planning and execution.

Where I'm at now is a rough draft of the Shub/Yog version but it's entirely untested and over 50 cards. My usual procedure is to start a bit bigger and then take note of which cards don't seem that useful to gradually slim it back down to 50 after it's been tried against some variety of other decks.

If I do get a chance to try it out I'll post here on how things go.

do you test it out against other people either in person or using lackey/etc.? or do you goldfish or soloplay it? or both? i'm wondering how to test deckbuilding ideas in a vacuum.

I usually do the following:

1. I do some test draws as it if were the start of a game. If I can't get a playable hand pretty reliably in the initial hand or the mulligan then I must reexamine my cost curve.

2. I play some sample games against other decks I have. This is me playing both sides of the game. At a minimum I usually test against a Syndicate rush deck, a Cthulhu deck, and then whatever else I have lying around.

3. Then I would like to try it against another player. I don't get to play that often though, so this can take a while. I have a local opponent that can sometimes meet up for face to face games. I am not familiar with how to play on Lackey but I know it exists.

dboeren said:

ok. that's what i was hoping. sadly, i'm usually going to be forced into this option myself. any pointers for how best to utilize solo play? do you always make the best available plays? do you run alternate branching plays?

I try to make the best plays for both sides, otherwise I don't think it's a fair test. But, I try not to take advantage of any special knowledge of the "other player's" hand either. But mainly I just play it as a normal game and take note of what things seem to cause trouble for my test deck, what it handles especially well, and so forth. Un-useful cards get noted, and I may jot down some specific cards that may help with whatever it has problems with.