Fantasy Flight posted a new For the Greater Good preview Monday afternoon for Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game. In addition to new cards revealed — Overworked Bureaucrat with a Khopesh of the Abyss? Let’s do it! — the preview includes two sample deck lists. One is all Agency, all the time. The other is based on the concept of a hidden cabal within the Agency turning its work toward their own benefit, with the aid of cultists of Shub-Niggurath.

I love when these sets include deck lists. It helps new and inexperienced players, among whom I count myself, get an idea of deckbuilding without having to track down strategy articles and podcasts like Elder Things. I especially like the trend of previous sets’ sample lists drawing on that box and one core set. The Sleeper Below shook that trend in two ways: the sample deck list was online — which is fine, if there had been more communication in the product that people could find information like that on Fantasy Flight’s website — and it called for a non-core, non-Sleeper Below card, the Temple of R’lyeh.

Now, the Temple is an amazingly helpful card for the Cthulhu faction and a new player building this sample deck only needs one additional pack of cards, so that’s not terribly far from the original premise of sample deck lists drawing on the relevant faction box and one copy of the core set. In contrast, the two sample lists for the Agency in this For the Greater Good preview draw on a much wider card pool. Just glancing, I can pick out cards from the core set, Terror in Venice, the Rituals of the Order cycle and Summons of the Deep cycle.

The implication here seems to be that the deck-builders feel they need a wider variety of cards to choose among in order to build useful sample decks. In doing so, however, they lose the selling point to new players that it’s easy to build a fun deck from a core set and a faction expansion. To further complicate matters, some cards, like the Descendent of Eibon and Marshall Greene, come from asylum packs that are hard to find at the moment. Fortunately, they don’t look to be critical to success in those lists, but availability is a consideration for someone trying to figure the game out. Availability is improving already, too, as Fantasy Flight shifts toward offering the older card packs as print-on-demand products, which they began last week with the Dreamlands cycle.

I dig that For the Greater Good‘s previews are coming more frequently, and expanding beyond showing sample cards and already-published cards they have interesting interactions with. Here’s to more deck lists, though preferably with an eye toward keeping the game accessible to new players.

There’s a new preview of For the Greater Good, the Agency faction expansion for Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game up on Fantasy Flight’s website now. As teased previously, the Agency has been developing tricks with domains and resources. General Edward Irving can be paid for with multiple domains — a development I wish could be applied in retrospect to many characters who seem not to make the cut of most decks because they’re too costly and not quite as good as another option of equal cost — like The Foundation, a high cost character in this new set that was revealed previously.

Interesting, the Agency is also going deep into conspiracies. This new update features four, and they all do something interesting and non-standard. The Anderson Building requires the player who succeeds at a story to trigger the card’s text. Given the frequency with which I see people opt not to use story card text because it wouldn’t shift the game balance the way they prefer, being forced to trigger effects like Village of Ash every time they succeed at the skill check.

That said, I’m looking a little askance at the prospect of at least Agency conspiracies in this box. How often does someone include more than one conspiracy in their deck? That’s a lot of slots in the Agency’s faction box to give over to cards that aren’t the kind of “wow!” characters other factions have received to date. Maybe I’m just not getting it yet. There’s only character to do with conspiracies revealed so far, Intelligence Agent, who can put a conspiracy back in its owner’s hand, which is novel. Maybe there are more conspiracy monkeyshines to come, letting players bounce them in and out of play fast enough to achieve some cool stuff with the passive, “while in play” effects they create.

I am, of course, watching the discussion over at CardgameDB.com to get the experienced players’ perspective on how to put the Agency’s new cards to work.

Last night, I taught Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game to someone at the Fletcher Free Library’s game night. She didn’t care for Research Assistant‘s duckface, so the poor woman died to fulfill the prophecy A Vörös Hal’l Jön. Some heartier folk of the Explorer stock popped into play shortly afterward, so it was clearly for the best.