I have a friend who has the core set and I was thinking about building my own deck instead of using his cards. The Asylum Packs say you don't need the core set you just need more cards. So I'm wondering how many Asylum Packs would I need to get to build a decent deck? You could build a 50 card deck from one 60 card Pack, but I'm guessing it wouldn't be a good deck. Any suggestions on what to get?

goblin981 said:

While it's technically true that you don't need a Core Set to play the game, it contains a lot of staple cards.

An Asylum pack contains three copies each of 20 different cards. Since the game features eight factions + neutral cards, on average you'll get two to three cards from a single faction.

For a beginner it's probably easiest to play two-faction decks or mono decks. So, you'd need at least five Asylum Packs to have the bare minimum for a deck.

My recommendation would be to get a Core Set and the Secrets of Arkham Deluxe Expansion first. If you agree to play Highlander games for a while (i.e. only using a single copy of every card) that will be enough to try out the different factions and learn what combos look promising.

Ok thanks. Haven't had a chance to play the game properly yet.

I too recommend Core + Secrets of Arkham as the ideal start into the game if you want to be able to customize your decks a bit.

There's not really a standard answer to "how many packs does it take to make a good deck?" question because it varies too much. How good is "good"? Which faction(s)? Which packs? I'm sure there's at least some fairly good deck you can make adding just a few packs if you pick just the right ones that fit that deck's theme, but the same cards may not make as good a deck for the other factions if you're picking and choosing them just for that one list.

I've been posting some beginner's Call of Cthulhu articles on boardgamegeek.com that might be useful to you, look here:
http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/40270/call-of-cthulhu-the-card-game

Part of the series is building several 2-faction decks from a pool of one Core set, Secrets of Arkham, and no more than 4 additional packs from the Yuggoth Contract cycle.

All my packs I think say that I do need the Core Set to play that itsn't a stand alone deck. I would venture you'd need at least 6 chapter packs to put together a single faction deck.

I believe they say that because the asylum packs have no game rules in them. Also, with very limited exceptions they're also missing the necessary Story cards, etc... Basically, you can either have a Core set or spend a LOT more money and effort to work around not having one. It's possible, but not worth it.