I've gone over the rules and checked out a few beginner guides online, plus I'm a huge fan of the Mythos. The only other LCG I've played is AGoT.

What I wanna know is: how good are the decks you can build out of the core set? After splitting up the core set cards, how many playable decks will one have?

What's a good faction combination for a beginner who's pretty much sure that he's NOT playing any of the 'good guy' factions? So far after reading through the cards on Card Game DB, the combination that's appealing to me the most is Cthulhu/Shub-Niggurath.

Hamster Friend said:

If you split a core set one player will end up with three factions and one player with four factions. So, one player can create three different decks, and one player can create six different decks.

I think one player should get Cthulhu, the other Agency, since that's probably the two strongest factions. Shub is also pretty strong.

Hastur is somewhere in the middle; Syndicate and Miskatonic are mostly supportive factions (Syndicate being the stronger one) and Yog is the weakest (considering Core-only).

Decks built from the cards within a single core set will not be competitive with ones built out of a large card pool. But you can still build many decks, as the above poster has said, and have plenty of fun.

A friend of mine introduced the game to me, after he bought a core set. We generated decks by various random methods, as he slowly bought more cards. It was fun. At some point, we found another player in our area who built his own (competitive) decks. Since then I've dropped a 200-300 Euros on cards, and we all play strictly with decks that we build according to the official deck building rules. We recently lured a fourth (former Magic player) into our group.