“…That spawn of the blankness of primal time, that tentacled amorphous monster which was the lurker at the threshold, whose mask was as a congeries of iridescent globes, the noxious Yog-Sothoth, who froths as primal slime in nuclear chaos beyond the nethermost outposts of space and time!”
    –H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth, The Lurker at the Threshold

The Key and the Gate , the fourth deluxe expansion for Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game , is now available at your local retailer and online through our webstore !

The Key and the Gate is sure to delight fans of the game’s faction centered around the tentacled, amorphous Ancient One, Yog-Sothoth, and it’s sure to please players who like the faction’s strengths in discard, recursion, and control rooted in arcane knowledge. Nearly two-thirds of the 165 cards (three copies each of fifty-five different cards) in The Key and the Gate are devoted to enriching the Yog-Sothoth faction, its mysteries, and its minions. It brings Yithians to the Living Card Game® format, adds new Sorcerers and Spells , and introduces a new version of Yog-Sothoth ( The Key and the Gate , 8) that is capable of mastering the fates of other cards.

Meanwhile, The Key and the Gate bolsters each of the other factions with versatile support cards and characters who share powerful abilities and the new Fated keyword.

Altogether, the wealth of strategies it adds to the Yog-Sothoth faction and the powerful options it provides each other faction makes The Key and the Gate a fantastic companion to the game’s Core Set . It’s never been easier for players to explore the rich, intricate, competitive, and rewarding strategies of the Yog-Sothoth faction, so those investigators who work to preserve humanity’s best interests had best take heed: the stakes have just risen!

The Interstellar Migration

“It was evident that the coming doom so desperately feared by the Great Race—the doom that was one day to send millions of keen minds across the chasm of time to strange bodies in the safer future—had to do with a final successful irruption of the Elder Beings.”
    –H.P. Lovecraft, The Shadow Out of Time

Two deck lists printed on the insert in The Key and the Gate highlight a couple of the strategies its cards permit. Both “The Great Race of Yith” and “The Affairs of Wizards” use only the cards in The Key and the Gate and one copy of the Core Set , and both approach the task of winning stories from dramatically different angles.

However, while the game’s primary victory condition is winning three stories, it is also possible to win by “milling” your opponent, depleting his draw deck of all cards. This secondary victory condition appeals to some players because it is visceral and thematic; against a standard Investigator deck, it’s as though the investigators are racing to uncover the secrets of the game’s stories before the Ancient Ones and their unfathomable minions can burst into our world and destroy it.

As the lurker beyond all Space and Time, Yog-Sothoth has long controlled the best cards for mill decks, and now, with The Key and the Gate , these types of decks are more effective than ever. In fact, the sample deck below uses a few tricks to stall its opponents just long enough to unleash a massive turn of discards, all fueled by the Yithian event, Interstellar Migration ( The Key and the Gate , 37). Furthermore, every single card from this deck is from The Key and the Gate !

Characters (20):
Claude Owen x1
Jeanne D’Ys x3
Keeper of the Great Library x3
Nadine Eskiy x1
Professor Nathaniel Peaslee x3
Scientist from Yith x3
Scholar from Yith x3
Yithian Scout x3

Supports (18):
Dark Passenger x3
De Vermis Mysteriis x3
Displaced x3
Frozen Time x3
Lost City of Pnakotus x3
Rite of the Silver Key x3

Events (12):
Interstellar Migration x3
Mists of Lethe x3
Return to Yith x3
Studying the Void x3

As you help your Yithians prepare for their Interstellar Migration, you’ll be drawing and discarding cards at a prodigious rate. In fact, you’ll often push yourself to the brink of a discard loss in order to get the combination in place to mill your opponent.

Your draw engine is built upon the back of the Keeper of the Great Library ( The Key and the Gate , 16) and its ability to draw a card each time you discard a Yithian . If you have two of these in play, you draw two for each Yithian you discard, and you can further accelerate the process by discarding two Yithian cards after drawing two cards with Lost City of Pnakotus ( The Key and the Gate , 27).

Of course, you have to stop your opponent from winning before you can discard all his cards, so the deck uses some tricks to seize control of your opponent’s characters. Professor Nathaniel Peaslee ( The Key and the Gate , 6) is an excellent early character who can swap places with someone more threatening to your plans. Likewise, Displaced ( The Key and the Gate , 19) allows you to steal one of your opponent’s characters for a turn, though at the cost of sending a Yithian character to the bottom of your deck…when you most likely want that Yithian in your discard pile!

Sometimes, there’s nothing you can do to prevent your opponent from sending his characters to stories, but you may still keep him from winning a final story by rerouting one of his characters with Mists of Lethe ( The Key and the Gate , 32). This Spell can also give you another breath of life late in the game when you need more cards in your deck; you can move it from your discard pile to the bottom of your deck to bounce one of your Yog-Sothoth cards in play to your hand.

The deck has its vulnerabilities, of course. Timely destruction of your Keeper of the Great Library can set you back, as can timely support destruction, and Snow Graves ( At the Mountains of Madness , 15) is the deck’s absolute bane! Fortunately, Frozen Time ( The Key and the Gate , 22) can blank the text of whichever single card proves most troublesome, so long as it isn’t immune to Polar effects.

Will you be able to get the pieces into place for your Interstellar Migration? If you do, your opponent’s deck will evaporate in instants, giant chunk by giant chunk, and your Yithians will escape the impending doom for at least one more game!

All Time and Space at Your Retailer. Now.

Head to your local retailer today to unleash the madness of Yog-Sothoth, the Yithians , and the other great cards from The Key and the Gate !

Based on the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft and his literary circle, Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game takes two players deep into the Cthulhu Mythos where investigators clash with the Ancient Ones and Elder Gods for the fate of the world. The Living Card Game format allows players to customize their gaming experience with monthly Asylum Pack expansions to the core game.