Here are the round 1 pairings from our Highlander tournament.

Who do you think opened the event with a win? Don't forget that story cards are used as tiebreakers, so scoring 2 stories on a loss is still an important factor.

1) Grant's "Can You Spell Mi-Go?" vs Christian's "Minions of Insanity and Chaos!"

2) Chad's "Straight Jacket" vs Katherine's "Dreams and Ghouls"

3) Nick's "Crazy Cthulhu" vs David's "Make Me Go Away"

4) Matt's "Lo Pan's Panacea" vs Mart's "Miskallaneous, Etc…"

5) Jason's "Femuhlhu" vs Greg's "Darius"

6) Jefferson's "Government Payroll" vs Gavin's "Skill"

You can find a detailed list of all the decks here:

www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_foros_discusion.asp

GRANT (Shub-Niggurath / Yog-Sothoth)

An ambitious Highlander deck - both thematically and mechanically - that manages to cover all the bases. Character-wise, the deck has a good variety of early blockers, icon boosting and late-game heavy-hitters. It also utilizes the resource acceleration and support-card destruction of Shub, while at the same time taking advantage of Yog's card recursion and sacrifice effects. It achieves a nice balance between the 3 card types.

VS

CHRISTIAN (Cthulhu / Hastur / Miskatonic University / Syndicate / Yog-Sothoth)

The tournament's most complex deck in terms of faction-resource management, this has a little bit of everything. It can repeatedly drive characters insane, steal characters, exhaust characters, sacrifice characters, win the investigation struggle, discard, mill and recite from memory arcane and ancient manuscripts the likes man was never intended to read… in seven different languages, no less. Basically, it does it all.

QUICK GLANCE

This is a good match-up. Both decks have card recursion, strong characters and decent sacrificing effects, with the edge going to Grant. Christian's deck has investigation and it looks to be a little faster, but with so many factions will that slow him down? Or will Grant's deck-searching, resource acceleration, and support card destruction be able to buy him enough time to seal Christian's fate?

CHAD (Mono-Hastur)

Bring on the crazy train! This deck is laser-focused on winning the terror struggle and driving opposing characters insane, with the added fun of some character theft to make things even nuttier.

VS

KATHERINE (Mono-Shub-Niggurath)

The most thematic deck of our tournament, it makes excellent use of the Zoog's resourcing abilities and Shub's cost reducers/resource accelerators to bring out some heavy hitters. This deck also draws upon the Dreamer subtype and Night to attack opponents from an unexpected angle. It is heavy on Support cards at the expense of Events.

QUICK GLANCE

Two mono-faction Highlander decks squaring off for a duel to the death. Chad's deck, with it's all-in gamble on the terror struggle, looks to be in trouble. Katherine has protection against terror, interesting resource management options, cost reducers, and some powerful characters. Chad's hopes for victory rest with his character theft options and his edge in Event cards.

NICK (Cthulhu / Hastur)

With a central theme of Byakhees, this deck has plenty to drive characters insane, steal opposing characters and power through the combat struggle. It also has a smattering of character destruction and hand discard/milling.

VS

DAVID (Mono-Order of the Silver Twilight)

This deck is all about character bouncing, burning through your own cards and characters to gain an advantage, and using a smattering of investigation to go into the stories unopposed for the quick win. It also has some higher-cost characters to give it stamina during longer games (which can happen in Highlander).

QUICK GLANCE

This is a tough call. If David gets the early momentum through card bounce, committing characters to the stories by surprise, and a little investigation on the table, he can seal the deal before Nick's deck gets up to speed. However, Nick's hand-discard effects may come in handy vs the Silver Twilight, along with his dominance of the terror struggle.

MATT (Hastur / Syndicate)

This sprint deck combines skill reduction, exhaustion/removal, and character theft with a hint of investigation. It's cheap, fast, and has just enough character removal to disrupt an opponent's tempo in the hope of a quick win.

VS

MART (Mono-Miskatonic University)

This deck includes the standard strengths of M.U. - cheap characters, multiple investigation struggles, superior arcane and investigation icons - with the added attack strategy of gaining extra success tokens through events and character effects, as well as stealing them from your opponent.

QUICK GLANCE

Mart has the upper-hand on investigation and skill, negating both of Matt's primary paths to victory. However, Matt's deck is more flexible in terms of the icon struggles, can remove or steal opposing characters, and plays very fast. Can the academics bust the crooks on tax evasion charges in the courtroom, or will it all come down to a back-alley beat down?

JASON (Hastur / Miskatonic University / Order of the Silver Twilight)

This deck's theme is "the ladies of Cthulhu" - hence the name. Jason put in as many female characters as he could find. It has investigation and a fair amount of terror and "drive insane" card effects.

VS

GREG (Agency / Miskatonic University)

A fast, cheap, character-heavy deck with plenty of combat and investigation designed to get rolling from turn 1 and wrap things up in a hurry. It also has a decent amount of control cards (either through direct damage or icon removal) to take out troubling characters early on. A classic weenie "G-Men Go to College" deck.

QUICK GLANCE

Both decks have investigation, with the edge on terror going to Jason, and the combat struggle to Greg. It all comes down to Greg's indirect character removal and Willpower, vs Jason's Silver Twilight surprises and Hastur Event cards. I expect whomever establishes board control early on will win this match.

JEFFERSON (Mono-Agency)

A well-rounded mono-Agency deck with lots of combat, solid support cards (weapons), some investigation and a few heavy-hitters.

VS

GAVIN (Hastur / Syndicate / Shub-Niggurath / Yog-Sothoth)

This deck utilizes the Syndicate's skill reduction, exhaustion and investigation, paired with the character theft abilities of Hastur, and the card recursion and sacrifice effects of Yog.

QUICK GLANCE

Both decks look to be fast out of the gate, with an equal amount of character removal options. The edge in flexibility goes to Gavin with his deck search, character theft, and recursion abilities. However, will those advantages be off-set by resourcing troubles from so many factions, especially against a streamlined mono-Agency deck? Perhaps that will give Jefferson the time he needs to gain an early lead and never look back.

Based solely on these descriptions, I'll say Shub-Yog beats the 5 faction deck, Shub beats Hastur, Cthulhu Hastur beats OoST, Hastur Syndicate beats Miskatonic, Agency/Misk beats the Ladies (apologies for the phrasing), and 4 factions beats agency.

I am ready to look like a fool

There's no looking like a fool. This is mostly just for fun, and to A) report what happened at our tournament in a different way and B) start some conversation around here. It's been quiet of late. Too quiet.

What a fun idea! Thanks for putting so much work into these writeups, Yipe!

My guesses for the winners:

1. GRANT

2. KATHERINE

3. DAVID

4. MATT

5. GREG

6. JEFFERSON

Generally, luck factors can be quite high in highlander matches and resourcing decisions are very tough. Therefore I'd expect decks with many factions to have troubles. In the only highlander tournament I played so far, I used a Mono-Shub deck that basically included almost every card released until then which still worked surprisingly well, but it wasn't as good as decks specifically designed for highlander.

resourcing is a bit of a snag for most people. what i in my deck was i have cards specifically for resourcing. like my highest cost characters, or support/event cards that were very situational.

that way i can play almost all my cards and not have to worry about who im going to resource. it keeps the number of resources no higher than 3 unless you need a big dog to lay the smack down.

also depending on how you build your deck, i had 3 main strategies to do, you can just go with whatever strat you have the right cards for and resource the ones that wont help.

example if you have hastur lets say 6 "take control of character" type cards then its a good idea to go with that strategy and just resource the other faction cards.

I'm going to go with:

1) Grant's "Can You Spell Mi-Go?" vs Christian's "Minions of Insanity and Chaos!"

GRANT

2) Chad's "Straight Jacket" vs Katherine's "Dreams and Ghouls"

KATHERINE

3) Nick's "Crazy Cthulhu" vs David's "Make Me Go Away"

NICK

4) Matt's "Lo Pan's Panacea" vs Mart's "Miskallaneous, Etc…"

MATT

5) Jason's "Femuhlhu" vs Greg's "Darius"

GREG

6) Jefferson's "Government Payroll" vs Gavin's "Skill"

JEFFERSON

btw, thanks for the sheer amount of effort you put into all these reports.

AGoT DC Meta said:

btw, thanks for the sheer amount of effort you put into all these reports.

My pleasure. The boards have been slow these last few weeks, so I figured this would spark some conversation while we're waiting for the Seekers of Knowledge boxed set to hit.

Plus, I don't think anything like this has been done for Call of Cthulhu before. Like most game forums we get a lot of theorycraft, but not as much "actual play" reporting.

I'm going to reveal the first round results this evening (PST). If you haven't voted yet then what are you waiting for? Get in the game and post your picks!

jhaelen said:

jhaelen: that was pretty much my strategy. with a larger pool to work with i was able to fine-tune my selections and zero in on certain desirable effects over others, but for the most part it was as you describe. and i found that it wasn't as good.

jhaelen said:

yeah that usually doesn't work very well when you just grab one of each. regardless of a regular deck or highlander i think its always best to find one strat/character/support/event card you like and build your deck based on what makes that card better.

an example would be like my cultist deck that is based on

you just make sure every character you have is a cultist so you can use his ability to the max. cards like even here she dwells will help you pull more cultists also. your cost stays low, so you can have lots of cultists out and feed them to carl. another good one is The three bells. with so many cards to sacrifice it can be pretty dang good when all paired together with the ritual of summon by silver twilight.

Yipe said:

I think in part card games are a lot harder to do "battle reports" on. Back when I spent most of my time on various miniatures game forums it was more common for people to post battle reports with pictures and it's much easier to do that when all you need to do is take a cellphone pic after each turn and add some brief commentary (which the pic itself reminds you of what happened). I used to do a lot of them myself.

But with card games a good chunk of the information is hidden in your hand, in your domains, or only visible briefly as the cards keep changing state. So, I'm not sure what's a good way to capture the information viewers would want to see while keeping the report a reasonable size. I may have to experiment with this and see if it produces anything useful.

Ladies and Gentlemen, here are the results from round 1!

I listed the final standings below, along with how many story cards each player has won. We use story cards as our first tiebreak, so even picking up a few stories on a loss may prove a key factor in subsequent rounds.

ROUND 1 RESULTS

1) Grant's "Can You Spell Mi-Go?" vs Christian's "Minions of Insanity and Chaos!"

CHRISTIAN wins!

2) Chad's "Straight Jacket" vs Katherine's "Dreams and Ghouls"

CHAD wins!

3) Nick's "Crazy Cthulhu" vs David's "Make Me Go Away"

NICK wins!

4) Matt's "Lo Pan's Panacea" vs Mart's "Miskallaneous, Etc…"

MATT wins!

5) Jason's "Femuhlhu" vs Greg's "Darius"

GREG wins!

6) Jefferson's "Government Payroll" vs Gavin's "Skill"

GAVIN wins!

STANDINGS
Chad (1-0 / 3 Stories)
Christian (1-0 / 3 Stories)
Gavin (1-0 / 3 Stories)
Greg (1-0 / 3 Stories)
Matt (1-0 / 3 Stories)
Nick (1-0 / 3 Stories)

David (0-1 / 1 Story)
Jefferson (0-1 / 1 Story)
Katherine (0-1 / 1 Story)
Grant (0-1 / 0 Stories)
Jason (0-1 / 0 Stories)
Mart (0-1 / 0 Stories)

Funny to see my deck picked to win …

I learned in the first round that a good pull of cards to start makes a HUGE difference. I got hit with Terrors in the Dark on the first round.. Shortly after that, a bunch of support cards came out that kept the top card of my deck revealed and another card exhausted to discard it. I watched Y'Golonac and some others go away that way.

The best thing Christian did was to execute a story effect that made me shuffle my hand back into a half-discarded deck. Mi-Go dreams was my next play and could have made a big difference. It was a lost cause after that.

I might have expanded the deck to get more support card destruction to in there, but that may have weakened the resourcing.

Christian played well, but that was the first time that deck had been beaten. Oh well, the mulligan may be the most important strategy in a highlander game.

-Grant

grant_babb said:

I think people aren't used to seeing effective 3+ faction decks.

I now realize they are a lot more viable than I used to believe, especially in Highlander where you need consistency in terms of the deck's execution as opposed to its resourcing. The resource matching isn't really that hard - it's picking which cards you're going to resource!

By the way, I thought I beat that deck during our practice session at my place? I remember going 1-1, though I was using my Miskatonic / Shub / Yog rush-search-replay deck. Or is that the wine and beer talking?

Anyway, you're right on the money when it comes to the Mulligan. Even with standard decks, in a competitive setting you have to know when to ditch your opening hand. Typically I want to see 2-3 "must have" cards in my initial draw. If I don't, or if it feels even slightly off, I always redraw because it can't really get any worse.

Highlander added a new twist to the Mulligan. If I had too many cards central to my deck's success and no reliable way to bring them back (through card effects or the stories), then I would Mulligan as well. My deck was all about controlling the tempo from the start so I needed a strong opener to have any chance at victory.

bricks16 said:

I forgot to respond to this post - bricks16 makes some insightful comments about Highlander decks here.

While my deck didn't have any situational cards specifically designed for resourcing - all were low cost and most were useful in a variety of ways - I agree 100% about building in multiple paths to victory.

In a normal deck I would go with a primary strategy, and if it's a rush deck, I would include a secondary avenue of success to secure my third story card. Otherwise, I may only have 1 real angle of attack and go all-in on that approach.

For my Highlander decks, I was building in 3-5 different ways to attack my opponent and win stories. Like bricks16 wrote, depending on what my deck gives me, I just switch gears and go with it. Of course, knowing when and how to change things up isn't easy, especially in a fast-paced deck where one wrong resource can really mess up your rhythm.

The real trick is getting all those strategies to have some cross-pollination in terms of effectiveness. There might not be a direct correlation between a skill-based deck and character theft, but when using Mr. David Pan or Parallel Universe, a surprise character swing from one side of the table to the other can be huge.

Yipe said:

You are right … technically. I switched out some cards since then. Greg also beat me with a black -border deck, so I should probably retract the win-loss statement. I intended to state that I was quite happy with the deck, I just should have played it more before the tourney.

Grant

grant_babb said:

I live and die by technicalities.

You're not the only one who needed more practice going into the tournament. I hadn't touched my deck since our last "Mythos n' Microbrews", and neither had Mart.

Heck, it wasn't until the morning of the big day that I finally settled on which deck to bring.

Well, that are some surprising results!

grant_babb said:

I'm no stranger to 3+ faction decks, indeed it's what I prefer for standard gameplay, but I'd still be reluctant to try it in a highlander scenario. Maybe it's just because I'm thinking of certain key Loyal cards that become a lot harder to play, and are thus not really playable in HIghlander.

Thinking some more about this, however, I have to say that my preference for 'toolkit' decks might work well within the Highlander restrictions. Hmm…

I also played a very large number of games using only a single core set, and one thing I noticed is that there are a couple of game-winning cards, e.g. the 'Ravager from the Deep'. It can cause a stalemate situation for the rest of the game because it's very hard to get rid of for an opponent in highlander.