Yipe said:

Its significantly harder to play because almost all of your decisions are on the fly so you either need to know your deck extremely well or be very flexible. we were doing 1 min 30 seconds to 2 mins for each persons turn. it takes some getting used to.

also doesn't help that we like to play with all story cards face down (so you don't know what you are committing to) and if you win one you have to use its ability. talk about mixing it up.

Yes, cycling Marcus Jamburg for Ice Shaft or Infernal Obsession was quite handy.

I didn't take Master of the Myths in my Hastur/Syndicate deck because I don't like to use out-of-faction cards, even those that you pay 1 to put into play. 

Personally, I think the Master should be limited to the Silver Twilight in some way.  They have such a small card pool as is, it feels like a shame that one of their best guys can be used and abused by anybody.

It's the same reason I decided not to put Snow Graves in my deck, though I knew there would be a lot of Yog/card recursion.  For whatever reason, it bothers my OCD style of deck design.  Then again, I'm pretty neurotic when it comes to my decks.

 you can also do the same with dirk sharpe. i think it would be a good idea to make them steadfast or something and free to play maybe? i would like to see one of these for each faction though that way you don't break faction. i hope silver twilight gets the next big upgrade like miskatonic got or is getting soon.

also i have started working on a new deck for our next clash of madness inducing titans!

I don't want to derail things too much, but I think any pay to play cost should have an inherent Steadfast 1.  That's just me, and I can see the arguments against it.

As for a new deck… I'm working on one as well.  Mwuhahaha!  Ha.  Err, yeah.  I'll see you in November.

bricks16 said:

That sounds interesting, have to try that sometime.

bricks16 said:

Yes, Nick, David and I played a Cencale multi-player game using the face-down/must resolve story rule, which led to a pretty amusing scenario…

I won The Secrets of Arkham (resolve all other non-conspiracy cards in play), and with 5 other unknown story cards on the table, things got a bit crazy.

I chose The Thing at the Gate (each player sacrifices all characters in play) next, and then The Secret of the North Woods (each player puts into play all characters from his discard pile).

Unfortunately for me, Nick had played Snow Graves on my discard pile so while everyone else got a ton of characters, I was wiped out.  Somehow, beyond reason, I was able to sneak in some investigation on my final story card to win the game.

dboeren, if you haven't given this variant a try, then go for it - definitely entertaining when used with the Core set and Secrets of Arkham story decks.

 lol yeah snow graves is brutal, zero cost no steadfast makes it very good. if i'm playing someone and i don't think they have any card recursion then i use it as a resource every time. either way its pretty awesome. 

 One thing i noticed about these games is that almost no one had card recursion. i think i was really the only person that did. my first thought was wow milling then wow recursion. i was really surprised there wasnt more of that. 

Yeah, with slower than normal decks it seems like Milling might be more successful than usual, but I haven't gotten to try Highlander so that's just conjecture.

The first deck I built for this tournament was a Miskatonic / Shub / Yog deck that focused on rush investigation, deck search, recursion, and milling.  Due to the slower nature of Highlander, I felt milling could be a viable strategy.  I like the deck a lot.  It's my first 3-faction deck and it's quite competitive, though not unbeatable.

As for Shub's deck-searching and Yog's card-recursion abilities, I thought those were a no-brainer (as was taking Doppelganger for my restricted card).  Being able to repeatedly recycle Cursed Skull and A Single Glimpse, or picking Y'Golonac out of my deck on the first turn seemed like a great strategy for this variant.

Unlike the standard format, in Highlander it's difficult to achieve sustained character removal (one reason I believe we didn't see a lot of Cthulhu).  This also makes destroying characters with invulnerability - like Y'Golonac - quite difficult.

Jhaelen wisely pointed out his experiences from playing with just a Core set and how some cards, namely Ravager from the Deep, can be very tough to get rid of when you only have 1 copy of a particular card in your deck.  I felt being able to throw down an Ancient One early on and then do the rinse-repeat sacrifice on my opponent's characters would be too much for most decks to handle.

However…

I made my second deck - the one I used in the tournament - on a whim.  I wanted something fast and fun.  More importantly, I wanted to keep my other deck a secret in case no one else had figured out the goodness of Shub + Yog + Highlander (which apparently a few did).

I needed something to bring to our highlander test session the month prior so I took "Lo Pan's Panacea."  Surprisingly, my Hastur / Syndicate deck did so well that day (undefeated in 8 straight), that I was starting to have second thoughts.  Was my Hastur / Syndicate deck really that good, or were people sandbagging the test session (as I thought I was, I might add)?

I couldn't make up my mind until the morning of the event.  I opted for the faster Hastur / Syndicate combo simply because I like those factions.  We'll find out if it was the right choice…

bricks16 said:

Design-wise, my big surprise of the day was that we had 5 mono-faction decks out of 12 players!  I would never have guessed that for a Highlander tournament.

 same here. almost all the decks i played, in the tournament and just for fun that day, were all mono faction. very surprising. 

And a few more pics to top things off:

Gavin vs Jefferson.  Good game!

Gavin making a hard choice in the finale vs Matt.