Brothers and Sisters, the Gathering is upon us… which means it's time to place your bets!

Yesterday, the Portland "Mythos n' Microbrews" group help our first Highlander tournament. We had 12 players who battled over 4 rounds of Swiss until there was only one. Can you guess who beheaded the competition to take home the prize?

In my attempt to bring back a little life to these boards, I'm doing something different than the standard tourney AAR. I'm going to write up what happened in our event as a Cthulhu-esque horse race. I'll reveal the winners and losers round-by-round while you guys vote on whom you think took home the top honors.

As this forum doesn't have polling software, here's what I'll do:

1) I'll list all of the decks in a separate thread. In that thread, you guess which deck went all the way to first place.

2) I'll make a separate thread for each round, listing the match-ups. In that thread, you guess the winners and losers of each match-up.

Are you ready to win some bragging rights? Then polish your theory-crafting skills and let's gamble!

A few rules you may want to know:

Each round lasted 50 minutes. Players earned 1 point for a win, 0.5 points for a draw, and 0 points for a loss. The player with the most points at the end of 4 rounds won the tournament.

We had random match-ups for the first round, then winners vs winners and losers vs losers in the second. For the third and fourth rounds we used strength of schedule to determine the pairings.

We had 3 levels of tiebreaks. First, we used stories won, with each story equaling 1 point. Next, we used head-to-head, and finally strength-of-schedule.

Good luck on your bets!

Sincerely,

Matt

EDIT 1: Here's a link to the 12 deck lists. Go check 'em out and vote!

www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_foros_discusion.asp

EDIT 2: Here's a link to the round 1 pairings.

www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_foros_discusion.asp

EDIT 3: Here's a link to the round 2 pairings.

www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_foros_discusion.asp

EDIT 4: Here's a link to the round 3 pairings.

www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_foros_discusion.asp

EDIT 5: Here's a link to the final round and ultimate victor:

www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_foros_discusion.asp

To tide you over while I type up 12 Highlander deck lists (no easy feat, I tell you!), here are some pics of our event:

A photo of our prizes.

We had 3 new playmats, 2 sets of 30 custom success tokens, a novel, a deck of 18 custom domain sets, and a $10 gift certificate to the host's game store for our last place winner.

Here's our group for the Highlander tournament. Sadly, in 5 hours 11 of them will be headless.

Getting ready for the first round's action with a "pile shuffle ritual."

It's all smiles now. The tears come later (in my Cthulhu pillow at home).

Stay Tuned! More pics to come.

The Highlander resourcing dilemma…

The tension mounts!

I'm close to being milled.

Lady Lu Chu commits to the block alone. Will she survive?

Alright, it's taking a long, long time to type up and organize each Highlander deck list. I realize it's pretty hard to guess which deck won our event without the deck lists, but not to worry, I should have all of them up by tomorrow evening.

In the meantime, here are some photos from our Regional Championship earlier in the year:

Arcane Artifacts (i.e. the prizes)

The infamous Cult of Microbrews.

Our table signs (stations 1-12).

Joel, our amazing bartender and all-around good guy.

Sounds like you guys had a great time. I'm interested in seeing how the threads develop.

Hey, that's me rocking my awesome new "The Summoning" playmat. Thanks Hellfury!

Indeed! And that is one sweet-looking playmat I might add.

I have a few more pics to add later on. For now, I'm busy typing up deck lists. Whew!

Here's a link to the Highlander deck list thread:

www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_foros_discusion.asp

Go check 'em out and vote on who you think was swinging the biggest katana.

Looks like it was a lot of fun. Makes me wish I lived in Seattle again. One of these days…

it was great fun to pay in the tournament and with these guys. anyone in the portland area should definitely come to GG and throw down with us.

bricks16,

I'm glad you and your group could make it and had a fun time. It wouldn't be the same without you. You, Nick and Christian are the guys I look forward to playing against each month. At our next meet up I may have try out your "Speed Cthulhu" just to see what it's like.

And yes, if you live in the Portland Metro area and you're into H.P. Lovecraft, CCGs, Cthulhu boardgames, or beer (that should cover most bases), then definitely stop by for one of our "Mythos n' Microbrews" game days.

We're expanding into Akrham Horror, Elder Sign and Mansion of Madness, and I'm always willing to teach Call of Cthulhu (I have plenty of decks on hand for people to try out). Plus I generally have some cool goodies to give away to new players.

Moving to Seattle isn't a possibility for me, so I'll just have to enjoy your reports from afar. We may have to try a highlander tournament over here, but I'm concerned whether it might be hard on the newer players who don't have as much card pool to work with. Did you see any issues with that?

Speaking of Elder Sign… This isn't strictly relevant to face-to-face gaming but if you play this game on your iPhone/iPad definitely pick up the latest update - the free new Tsathoggua campaign is really good and a bit tougher than Azathoth. I've only had one game so far (with random characters) but it was a real nail biter and felt very different in playstyle. I'm almost thinking about paying $2.99 for one of the premium campaigns now

I don't think having a limited card pool is a problem, though I can understand your concern as it's one I had too. After playing in our tournament, here's what I learned about Highlander:

1) It's more about in-game choices as opposed to deck-building. How and what to resource, aggressive play, and resolving the right story at the right time are critical elements to this variant (it was interesting to see which stories became far more desirable to win).

2) It encourages multi-faction decks and experimenting with all the cards in your collection.

You look less at factions and more at functions, picking cards that do similar things across a wide spectrum of characters, events and supports, and then try to make it all work. In our tournament we had several 3+ faction decks, which is a first.

Before, I wouldn't have built a 3-faction deck. Now I think they are totally playable and a ton of fun. Whether you're a beginner or a veteran, the one card restriction shoves you through new doors and makes you reconsider how to build a deck in Call of Cthulhu.

3) The decks aren't as efficient, allowing for slightly longer games that allow players to build up their resources and try new combos. This is a bonus for newer players who may be blown out of the water by a streamlined deck. All of your unique characters also become instantly playable, which is good for the human factions.

4) The icon struggles become more important as there's less consistent indirect character removal/board control. As this is really the heart of the game's tension, I think that's a good thing.

To sum up:

The player plays the deck as opposed to finding the deck's rhythm and then riding it to victory.

You also play with a much larger variety of cards, which is great for beginners as it gives them a good understanding of how different cards work in tandem, or how to tell which cards are better in certain situations.

For these reasons I think it's a perfect way to start out playing Cthulhu. It teaches you a lot - from knowing when to take the risk to mulligan to learning tempo - and forces you to make hard choices right from the start about what you need in your hand to win.

it was nice facing different cards for a change. ones you'd never see in typical competitive play. also, i got to play a few bigger cost characters than i would usually grab for when assembling a deck.

another thing i noticed was there were several card effects and story resolution effects that were nullified by the highlander format.

i'll give highlander another chance, actually. i just didn't get my deck right, so i'll blame that totally on me, not on the format.

piszcadz said:

On the flip side this also made some cards amazingly awesome to have in your deck. Cards like

Bating your opponents to commit their characters and crushing with black dog or master can give you a huge advantage or even cycling

Yipe said:

Its significantly harder to play because almost all of your decisions are on the fly so you either need to know your deck extremely well or be very flexible. we were doing 1 min 30 seconds to 2 mins for each persons turn. it takes some getting used to.

also doesn't help that we like to play with all story cards face down (so you don't know what you are committing to) and if you win one you have to use its ability. talk about mixing it up.

Yes, cycling Marcus Jamburg for Ice Shaft or Infernal Obsession was quite handy.

I didn't take Master of the Myths in my Hastur/Syndicate deck because I don't like to use out-of-faction cards, even those that you pay 1 to put into play.

Personally, I think the Master should be limited to the Silver Twilight in some way. They have such a small card pool as is, it feels like a shame that one of their best guys can be used and abused by anybody.

It's the same reason I decided not to put Snow Graves in my deck, though I knew there would be a lot of Yog/card recursion. For whatever reason, it bothers my OCD style of deck design. Then again, I'm pretty neurotic when it comes to my decks.

you can also do the same with dirk sharpe. i think it would be a good idea to make them steadfast or something and free to play maybe? i would like to see one of these for each faction though that way you don't break faction. i hope silver twilight gets the next big upgrade like miskatonic got or is getting soon.

also i have started working on a new deck for our next clash of madness inducing titans!

I don't want to derail things too much, but I think any pay to play cost should have an inherent Steadfast 1. That's just me, and I can see the arguments against it.

As for a new deck… I'm working on one as well. Mwuhahaha! Ha. Err, yeah. I'll see you in November.

bricks16 said:

That sounds interesting, have to try that sometime.

bricks16 said:

Yes, Nick, David and I played a Cencale multi-player game using the face-down/must resolve story rule, which led to a pretty amusing scenario…

I won The Secrets of Arkham (resolve all other non-conspiracy cards in play), and with 5 other unknown story cards on the table, things got a bit crazy.

I chose The Thing at the Gate (each player sacrifices all characters in play) next, and then The Secret of the North Woods (each player puts into play all characters from his discard pile).

Unfortunately for me, Nick had played Snow Graves on my discard pile so while everyone else got a ton of characters, I was wiped out. Somehow, beyond reason, I was able to sneak in some investigation on my final story card to win the game.

dboeren, if you haven't given this variant a try, then go for it - definitely entertaining when used with the Core set and Secrets of Arkham story decks.

lol yeah snow graves is brutal, zero cost no steadfast makes it very good. if i'm playing someone and i don't think they have any card recursion then i use it as a resource every time. either way its pretty awesome.

One thing i noticed about these games is that almost no one had card recursion. i think i was really the only person that did. my first thought was wow milling then wow recursion. i was really surprised there wasnt more of that.

Yeah, with slower than normal decks it seems like Milling might be more successful than usual, but I haven't gotten to try Highlander so that's just conjecture.