Elder Things podcast Episode 4 is online

By dboeren1, in CoC General Discussion

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Sorry for the extended delay since our last episode, the holidays, traveling out of town, and all that sort of thing kept popping up and making it hard to get together to record. Now that all that is past we should be getting back to a more regular schedule.
But now we're back and to help make it up to you we have a little bit bigger episode than usual and our first contest where you can win a full 3x set of Dreamlands common cards. How do you win? You gotta listen to the podcast to find out!
In this episode we talk about the previews for the upcoming The Key and the Gate expansion, the Cenacle 3 player rules, a Miskatonic faction overview, Banned & Restricted cards, and more.
You can download the episode from cardgamedb.com:
They're having some oddity with their software, click the "Download this podcast" button to download or you can listen streaming on the site.
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Great episode!

Just a couple of comments about the restricted list conversation. My understanding is that certain cards on there are to break combos, most notably the following two:

Things in the Ground and Nyarlathotep - If you get Nyarlathotep out T1 (with his text going into effect your T2), he screws up your opponent for the whole game.

Diseased Sewer Rats and Doppelganger - excellent targeted wounding gets better when you have twice as good a chance to draw it. It created too big of a swing in board early game, and was pretty NPE.

Itinerant Scholar - After some infinite combos in the CCG days with such cards as the Scholar, I'm surprised something like it was printed again. Yog has the best recursion in the game, so it's not unlikely to recur the scholar and use it multiple times each turn. I think they are just skiddish of an NPE combo coming out of this card and some other recursion effect; I don't think there is a current combo in the cardpool to abuse this right now, but I'll leave that to the masterminds to ascertain.

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Danigral said:

Itinerant Scholar - After some infinite combos in the CCG days with such cards as the Scholar, I'm surprised something like it was printed again. Yog has the best recursion in the game, so it's not unlikely to recur the scholar and use it multiple times each turn. I think they are just skiddish of an NPE combo coming out of this card and some other recursion effect; I don't think there is a current combo in the cardpool to abuse this right now, but I'll leave that to the masterminds to ascertain.

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That's true, the Restricted list can also be used to break up combos. It's hard offhand to say which cards are on there specifically for combo reasons though. Things in the Ground and Nyarlathotep specifically disrupt normal gameflow even when not used in conjunction with each other. They don't seem to have any special synergy other than messing things up even more though. What I mean is, the TITG guys are put into play outside your resourcing phase, so they aren't affected by Nyarlathotep's text. Both at once would probably be over the top as you say and I'm glad that's been disallowed. Really I don't see another good way to do this specifically BECAUSE their text does not directly relate to each other so an errata wouldn't work.

Doppelganger is effectively as good as any character on the board, plus more because it can choose according to the needs of the moment (and yet also less because it goes back to hand if the other is killed). But I can certainly buy that extra copies of a too-strong card that's specifically tailored to the early game is worse than extra copies of something that doesn't strike until the opponent has had more chance to get established like Deep One Rising. Over here Lee is fond of slapping down a Sacrificial Offerings on the bottom of Turn 1 with none of his own characters in play as another way to gain early character advantage, but you've just got to tough it out :)

Itinerant Scholar I think walks a thin line as you've always got to be careful not to open up a nasty combo but so far FFG has been very good about using errata to break up infinite combos. The Shub Necronomicon has already been said will be addressed, so was The Large Man/Offer you Can't Refuse one a while back. I think overall errata has become the more favored tool for combo-breaking over using the Restricted list but it's good to know that historically it didn't always used to be that way and some entries may go back to those earlier days.

Anyway, I'll see if we can fit in a brief addendum in the next episode to talk about the combo-breaking uses of the Restricted list.

Another reason not to miss our next episode is that we've been given permission by FFG to spoil a card from the upcoming The Key and the Gate expansion!

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Awesome, congratulations! It's very cool that FFG has gotten involved with your podcast.

Just as a brief addendum, you mentioned why Jim Black may have designed the Descendant to be so powerful. I've heard from Chris Long that he designed the Descendant for a blackborder cardpool, and the fact that it was only released after the game was restricted to whiteborder that dramatically increased its relative power level.

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Interesting, I hadn't heard that story before. Makes a certain degree of sense though. I do know that the card was changed later on to cost 2 success tokens intead of 1 as it originally did, but even so it's still pretty hoss - not the least because you can often expect to get your token back off the Investigation icon meaning that in the end it didn't really cost you anything.

I don't know if I'd say that FFG was "getting involved" really, but we're very thankful to them for allowing us a spoiler card to help promote the game and of course our podcast as well. Now for another story… This isn't the first time they've done this. FFG gave a Netrunner spoiler card to a German Netrunner website a few months back as well. Talking to the guy from the Netrunner website he said they just asked for it and it was approved so we followed pretty much the same process.

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jhaelen said:

Danigral said:

Itinerant Scholar - After some infinite combos in the CCG days with such cards as the Scholar, I'm surprised something like it was printed again. Yog has the best recursion in the game, so it's not unlikely to recur the scholar and use it multiple times each turn. I think they are just skiddish of an NPE combo coming out of this card and some other recursion effect; I don't think there is a current combo in the cardpool to abuse this right now, but I'll leave that to the masterminds to ascertain.

Actually, there is currently a combo that allows using the Itinerant Scholar as often as needed to drain all of an opponent's domains after his refresh phase. However, it relies on Shub's Necronomicon which will hopefully soon receive errata.

Ah, yes. That crazy Logan, Altar of the Blessed, Shub Necronomicon combo.

Cool news about the spoiler! When is the new episode going live?

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We haven't started recording yet, hoping to work on it this week though. I would say about a week? It's hard to say as it depends on what night we can get together and how quick we can get the editing done. We'll post the usual announcements (BGG, here, CardGameDB, Twitter) as soon as it's available though.