Shub and Yog. Yog and Shub. are they destroying the game ?? that is my question. with yet another very powerful combo for the very powerful Faction combination, i'm wondering what people's thoughts are on this and how they can possibly bring the other Factions up to speed ?? and is power creep here to stay ??

the combo in question is The Oracle and Shocking Transformation in your starting hand.

simply sac The Oracle into discard to bring forward the Invulnerable Forgotten Shoggoth, and with cards like Master of Myths it basically means wiping an opponents success token off the board 'for free' every time you win an Arcane struggle (something Yog can do quite easily). if the opponent has no flat out destruction methods, how can this be stopped ??

of course there are ways, but most of them lie within the AO Factions themselves, which is a bit annoying.

Another little gem that MAY be practical if i put my mind to it (or perhaps not) is (recurring??) twilight gate to use with the new Nathaniel Peaslee. swap-a-roo and then Peaslee goes back to your Domains from the opponents side of the board, ready for the next one.

and with Claude Owen around, is it now too risky to be fielding the Itinerant Scholar and Patsy etc. ??

and that's just the tip of the ice-berg from the next release of a Faction already very powerful and popular.

what do people think ??

Is this a "combo"? You're basically just doing what Lost Oracle does and the other cards are pretty much superfluous. It's not like it's that hard to get her killed normally that you need a special plan for it. Nor is it required that the cards be in your starting hand, and even if they were you can't play it turn 1 so what's the big deal about starting hand?

A mixed Shub/Yog deck isn't automatically going to win all the Arcane either. Shub isn't that strong in Arcane and there are are several other factions as good at it as Yog is which might not even be diluted with a lower Arcane faction as a partner.

So yeah, using her in a deck with good Arcane can be handy as long as it doesn't hurt you too much elsewhere. Shub is one way to add some combat backbone into the list, but not the only way.

Also Forgotten Shoggoth is neat with the Oracle, but basically destroys the possibility of other interesting discard interactions that both Yog and Shub love so much if you bring it out too early

GrahamM said:

Good point. From what we've seen the new Yog box likely has a fair number of "from discard" effects and that would shut them down, on top of Yog's standard discard stuff. Not necessarily a huge issue, you just build your deck around knowing you can't make use of those cards so you design from a slightly smaller card pool.

GrahamM said:

Does Forgotten Shuggoth's ability also affect opponent's cards? It's not like conspiracies, right, where "your" refers to both?

yeah. cant say that 'starting hand' was the right use of words, but basically what i meant was having them early.

the big problem with 'The Oracle' and 'Forgotten Shoggoth' combo is when you get 2 or 3 'The Oracles' in your discard. im currently devising a way to do this before bringing out 'Forgotten Shoggoth' and one way that springs to mind is 'The Festival'. add in some delaying tactics like 'Black Dog' and 'The Master of the Myths' etc, bring into discard your 3 'The Oracles', then shazzam the 'Forgotten Shoggoth', whether via 'Feed Her Young' or 'Shocking Transformation' etc.

the reason why i said it only super charges the already monstrous Shub / Yog is that this combo rarely uses the discard anyway, so with a simple few cards from Yog including the 2 combo cards, it can, if successful with 'The Festival' or a good draw, start wiping out 3 success tokens for EVERY arcane struggle you win. with a 'Ia Ia Shudde M'ell' play this could amount to a 9 success token sweep.

its all in theory though. have to wait for the release to see if its at all practical.

COCLCG said:

Doesn't work. You can only play one Response per each trigger, so having multiple Lost Oracles in your discard doesn't allow you to discard multiple tokens.

hmm. i think you'll find that you can. EACH response on EACH card can only be activated once per trigger, otherwise every action ever made could only ever have one response per player. seeing as they are different cards (multiple copies), EACH can activate for EACH arcane struggle won. its a bit like saying only 1 Dreamlands Fanatic could respond to a character leaving play even if you had 3 in hand.

COCLCG said:

This is an interesting question, though, since up until now cards have only had distinctive identity while in play. In fact, if a card leaves play, and re-enters play in some way it is considered a different copy of that card (even if it is the same physical copy). So now what does it mean when a card can retain that distinctiveness even in an out-of-play area, in this case the discard pile?

(I say it retains its distinctiveness because otherwise a card could be triggered over and over as "different copies" if it wasn't so. Snow Graves will prevent that card from leaving the discard when it triggers, so it sits there even after triggering.)

Yes, I also agree to COCLCG's and Danigral's oppinion. From the rulebook (p. 13):

Note that a response may take effect multiple times if multiple copies
of that effect are in play (but still only once per card per trigger).

I know that this doesn't necessarly also apply for the discard pile since it is not in play, but I'd assume this rule is also valid for discard and hand. Like COCLCG said… if you have 3 Dreamlands Fanatics in hand, you could put 3 of them in play because of 1 opponent's character leaving play. And I see no reason for 2 or 3 cards of the same title in the discard pile being considered indistinctive and only having 1 effect in the whole.

I think the central issue is that most factions have very little control over the discard pile - except for Shub and Yog. As discard-pile-specific abilities multiply, that allows the discard pile to become a "safe zone" that Shub and Yog can play out of but which the other factions can't touch. That's a significant design issue, and one that isn't fixed by having everyone pack Snow Graves in their decks.

Miskatonic got some relief on the discard pile front with Atlantis (which combos well with the Shortsighted Librarian). But other factions definitely need some help in dealing with discard pile strategies.