I play CoC with my GF. It's her first card game. I live in Philly, but I don't know anyone else who plays around here, so it is just us. I own the Core and Silver Twilight Expansions and I plan on buying the other deluxe expansions. Should there be a rhyme and reason to buying any asylum packs or is it just specific faction preference?

Well, if you both like the game it would be worth it to get more cards and try out new decks I think.

Also, there is a group of Cthulhu players at 7th Dimension in Jenkintown PA near Philly. We even had a Regional championship there last summer. If you ever are interested in playing shoot me a message and I will let you know when we gather next!

Secrets of Arkham would be a good next step, lots of great cards in there.

For Asylum packs, it's mostly whatever order you want. However, you might want to grab the Shifting Sands pack as this includes a new set of 12 story cards in addition to the normal 20 new cards @ 3 each that all the packs have.

dboeren said:

You know, I never noticed that

But, it's still nice to get some extra story cards, not to mention that these are the current story cards used for tournament & such just in case you ever want to try one out.

In also recommend Secrets of Arkham. It works really well with the 2 core sets I already have.

I usually see two approaches to buying asylum packs.

One is to buy them by cycle. You can either get all six at once, or buy them over time, doesn't matter. The theory here is that cards in the same cycle often are made to work together or use similar mechanics.

The other is to buy packs that have specific cards you want. For instance, when I started I wanted to make a Syndicate/Dark Young deck to take to Gencon. So, I browsed through the deckbuilder on Cardgamedb.com and wrote down cards I thought might work well and what packs they were in. Then, I started buying those specific packs - prioritizing ones that had my most favorite cards or which had more than one card on my list.