This Sunday, Black Moon Games hosted a Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game draft at their store in Lebanon, New Hampshire. Three of us traveled down from Burlington to meet up with three more players, which makes for the most people I’ve seen playing Cthulhu at the same time in one place, outside cutaways in Fantasy Flight’s live streams. After drafting cards, we played three rounds with the decks we built, first with random match-ups, then pairing manually based on the wisdom of de factor tournament organizer Rod. I got three matches on camera for Decked!, so you can look forward to those posts in the coming weeks, as well as an over the shoulder shot of Ray drafting his cards. My hope is for that to become a mini-series, where Ray explains his thinking on his selections card by card, both for himself and with regard to what he deduced his neighbors were doing.

As for myself, my first pick was a Syndicate card, Carnivale Sentinel, and then I rapidly realized that I was not be receiving any useful Syndicate cards at all from my neighbors — later on, I discovered both Rod and Carlo had built decks with significant Syndicate presence — so I shifted gears toward Miskatonic University when I got an Alternative Historian and Yog-Sothoth for the affordable cultists and sorcerers. Then Carlo passed me Carl “Goddamn” Stanford, as he’s known locally, and I found myself drafting three factions.

My mantra was “Characters win drafts,” as Rod told me once, and I tried to stick to that, keeping in mind cost, icons and useful abilities. Some characters wound up always getting resourced — Richard Pike, for instance, and Magnus Stiles; too narrow an ability and too high a cost, respectively — and most of the support cards wound up feeling like chaff, barring Cryptic Writings — shutting down Henry Knoll at one point, delightfully — and Guardian Pillar proving super helpful the one time I got Unending Festivities into play.

Overall, I won two matches and lost the third to Rod and his Syndicate deck. I’m pretty happy with that for my second time ever drafting, especially after tanking so hard the first time.

Stay tuned for draft picks and play commentary on coming episodes of Decked!