You Sir, Play Like a Child!

Earlier this year I was visiting a friend, who had recently started playing the Call of Cthulhu living card game (a living card game is similar to a collectable card game in that there are expansions and you create your own decks but when you buy an expansion pack you get all the cards instead of a random subset). I hadn’t played the game before but am always up for playing something new, so when they offered to teach it to me I accepted. A quick summary of the rules/purpose of the game is that players place cards under their ‘domains’, which are later drained to put other cards into play, the more powerful a card the larger the domain that needs to be drained to play it; the played cards are then used to both complete stories and prevent your opponent from completing stories, with the first player to win three stories winning the game.

After we had played a few games I felt like I had a good enough grasp of the rules, timings, and card interactions to ask a few of the questions that had been nagging me. The first was why are our two decks not the same size? I had noticed this straight away and as a semi-serious Magic the Gathering player the idea of a deck being larger than the minimum size without a very good reason was irksome. The answer I was given was that when deck building my friend liked to pull out any cards that looked good or fun and put them in the deck and refine later based on deck performance. This also answered my next question, which was going to be why are there so many big monsters in the decks, so rather than asking that I instead asked if I could make a deck? I was then given a box of cards and told to go for it.

Having no real idea of what was the best strategy for this game I decided to build the deck based on three simple ideas. First removal is good, that is cards that get rid of your opponent’s creatures. No card in the deck should require a ‘domain’ with more than three cards under it to play, my friend’s decks contained cards that required domains with six cards under them to play, the logic being that I could stop putting cards under the domains after only a few turns and also lets me play my threats early. The final idea was that ‘card advantage is king’, card advantage is the concept that if one card can produce or remove two or more cards then this helps you win as you have more cards/resources to call upon than your opponent. I should also mention that my deck was the minimum size. So we played a few more games of my new deck against the old decks and each time the result was a solid victory to my deck.

After this second round of playing I rather uncharitably informed my friend that he ‘plays like a child’, by which I meant that he focused too much on the big monsters and not enough on fast efficient cards. His retort to this was that my deck wasn’t fun and completely failed to capture the flavour of game, how could I play Call of Cthulhu and not included even one Great Old One in my deck? In Magic the terms ‘Timmy, Johnny, and Spike’ are used to describe the three main types of players. Timmy likes to win with big creatures, Johnny likes to win in funny ways, and Spike just likes to win. I guess I’m a Spike while my friend is a Timmy.

We then went online to look at the decks used in tournaments and noticed that almost all of them only played cards that required a domain of three of fewer. No wanting to give in to this ‘unfun way of playing’, my friend made a new deck which I’m pleased to say was both competitive and played the Outer God, Shub-Niggurath to win, although it was snuck into play by a card requiring a domain of only three.