Fantasy Flight Games

Dark Magic and Dark Young

Published 25 June 2015 | Call of Cthulhu LCG

Dark Magic and Dark Young

The Thousand Young Is Now Available for Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game

"Do not call up any that you can not put down."
–H.P. Lovecraft, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

A new gate has opened in southern Louisiana, and new powers make their way into our world, tempting mortals toward evil with the blessings of their blasphemous mother, the fecund Ancient One and All-Mother, Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods… The Thousand Young deluxe expansion for Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game is now available at your local retailer and online through our webstore.

Focusing on the Shub-Niggurath faction, The Thousand Young expansion introduces 165 new cards (three copies each of fifty-five different cards), nearly two-thirds of which lend new strength to the Black Goat of the Woods, her countless progeny, her cultists, and their tactics. Simultaneously, it explores Shub's influence amid the bayous of southern Louisiana and within the streets of New Orleans. There, sinister Monsters walk unnoticed among the unsuspecting populace, Cultists conduct foul rituals, and Shub's more Independent followers hunt for powerful and arcane knowledge amid the city's seediest Locations.

However, Shub-Niggurath and her followers are not the only forces at work in The Thousand Young. The malevolent Ancient One Nyarlathotep also prowls the Big Easy, assuming different guises to insinuate himself among the game's various factions and advance his inscrutable agenda, whatever it may be. Finally, all of the game's factions find new characters and support cards that allow them to lend their support to Shub-Niggurath or Nyarlathotep or to work up their courage and stand against them.

Will you join the cult of Shub-Niggurath? Will you join humanity's fight against the rising Ancient Ones? The choice is yours with The Thousand Young… provided you dare to dabble with its dark and powerful magic and its newly-spawned Dark Young.

Rituals, Spells, and Invocations

In our earlier previews of The Thousand Young, we looked at the hordes of new creatures that Shub is spawning, we explored the secrets concealed behind the closed doors of New Orleans and within the thickest groves of Louisiana's muggy bayous, and we witnessed some of the many tricks that four-time World Champion Tom Capor packed into his Champion card, The Archmage's Attaché (The Thousand Young, 37). We even caught a glimpse of Nyarlathotep in action in the expansion's announcement.

Still, there's more to The Thousand Young than its Locations, Monsters, Avatars, and its host of other characters. Otherworldly Ancient Ones like Shub-Niggurath are immensely powerful and defy human understanding as do their powers. Moreover, they can bestow some of these powers unto their followers, even as some exceedingly bold mortals may attempt to tap into them via foul spells and dangerous rituals. Many of these Rituals and Curses appear in The Thousand Young, and some may even offer you and your deck the secret to immortality.

The Favor of Eshu (The Thousand Young, 29), for example, allows you to use the resources that you stockpile in one of your domains as though they were cards in your hand. The ability to create a "second hand," as it were, has previously been explored within the Yog-Sothoth faction in The Key and the Gate and has been proven to be extremely powerful. While it's true that playing cards out of your domain then reduces that domain and limits your ability to pay for future cards, it's also true that no faction does a better job of building massive domains than Shub-Niggurath, which features such powerful cards as Feed Her Young (Written and Bound, 11), The Festival (The Key and the Gate, 51), and Nug (Seekers of Knowledge, 49).

Just as it's easy for a Shub player to shape an entire strategy around resource ramping, you can also punish those who don't by incorporating such characters as Elspeth Baudin (The Thousand Young, 11) and Yeb (The Thousand Young, 20). Paired together, these Shub devotees force players to pay a premium for their cheapest characters and then build their domains beyond the costs of the cards they want to play lest they risk having to sacrifice those cards later in the game.

Shub-Niggurath's insidious influence reaches in other directions with the Curse Twisted Consecration (The Thousand Young, 30). This zero-cost, two-steadfast event starts out like most support destruction, but then takes a dark and deadly turn, one which those well-versed in eldritch mysteries may be keen to master. It reads:

"Action: Choose and destroy a Location support card. Then, that support card’s controller reveals cards from his deck until he reveals a Location support card. Set that card aside, and shuffle that deck. Then, put the set aside support card on top of its owner’s deck."

The fact that the curse is limited to Location destruction seems to justify its zero cost, as does the fact that it allows the support card's controller to place another Location on the top of his deck. However, the card's most truly powerful effect lies hidden within the act of replacing the destroyed Location; your opponent must reveal cards from the top of his deck until he reveals the next Location support card. When you play Twisted Consecration, you guarantee yourself not only a limited measure of support destruction, but also a valuable measure of insight into the nature of your opponent's deck.

Depending how few Location supports your opponent plays, your Twisted Consecration may even force him to reveal his entire deck. If Tom Capor's preview of his Champion card left you wondering to which deck you should attach your ensorcelled valise, playing Twisted Consecration could very well provide you enough intelligence to make an informed decision.

Finally, few Spells threaten to make as dramatic and immediate an impact as Iä! Iä! (The Thousand Young, 32), which allows you to remove all the wounds from any or all of your characters and assign them to your opponent's characters, divided between them as you see fit.

Let's begin our examination of this Spell by looking at its ability to "heal" your characters. This is an exceedingly rare and powerful ability that shouldn't be undervalued. After all, there are very few other cards in Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game that remove wounds, and of them, only Mu (Seekers of Knowledge, 24) removes wounds from any character. This means Iä! Iä! opens strategies that may not have previously existed, and it gives greater fuel to others.

For example, you begin to get much greater mileage out of such new Shub characters as Jean Deveraeux (The Thousand Young, 4), Mi-Go Worker (The Thousand Young, 6), and Baka (The Thousand Young, 9). Additionally, Iä! Iä! opens room for some truly terrifying combinations with the Cthulhu faction and The Terror of the Tides (The Terror of the Tides, 67). The fact that Iä! Iä! is loyal makes it tricky to play around in a deck that combines two factions, but The Terror of the Tides can be played for three resources of any color as an action from your hand. Then on a subsequent turn, you can play Iä! Iä! to heal the Terror's four wounds and deal those wounds to your opponent's characters.

This, of course, is where Iä! Iä! is most obviously terrifying – in its ability to inflict mass damage – and it's highly likely that Shub's forces will soon take advantage of their toughness and Pervasive Toxemia (The Thousand Young, 34) to decimate whole hordes of opposing characters.

Baleful Dark Young

Finally, no expansion dedicated to the forces of Shub-Niggurath would be complete without introducing another of her Dark Young, so The Thousand Young gives us both Dark Sargassum (The Thousand Young, 22) and the Baleful Dark Young (The Thousand Young, 10), an excellent defensive character that you can sacrifice to buy time to raise your army of unholy spawn.

When Baleful Dark Young leaves play, you may instead remove it from the game to choose a story and force the player with the most success tokens at that story to remove success tokens from it until he has no more success tokens than the player with the fewest success tokens. Ideally, this allows you to strip four success tokens from a story that your opponent was about to win and at which you had zero success tokens. Or even better, if you're playing toward the long game, you can remove as many as nine of your opponent's success tokens from Negotium Perambulans in Tenebris (Dunwich Denizens, 80), ensuring the conspiracy continues to trap your opponent's cheapest characters.

Ultimately, such tactics allow you to play toward an endgame in which your largest and most expensive characters, like Dark Sargassum, can simply outmuscle (and out-terrify) your opponent's minions, and no faction does a better job than Shub at building quickly toward an overwhelming horde of late-game Monsters, Servitors, and Ancient Ones. The only question is which characters, supports, and events you'll use to stall your opponent until that point, and with which you'll devour all humanity once you've gotten there.

Awaiting the Summons

The Thousand Young is now available at your local retailer and online through our webstore, and its new characters, supports, and events await your summons. Will you devote yourself to Shub-Niggurath and her unholy spawn, or will you look elsewhere for the power to stand against them? The choice is yours to make, and the power lies just within your grasp. Be mindful, then, of what powers you choose to call up, lest you find yourself unable to put them down…

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The Archmage's Attaché

Published 17 June 2015 | Call of Cthulhu LCG

The Archmage's Attaché

A Preview of The Thousand Young by Guest Writer Tom Capor

"All conjectures about him were spiced with references to the bygone magic of Old Whateley, and how the hills once shook when he shrieked the dreadful name of Yog-Sothoth in the midst of a circle of stones with a great book open in his arms before him."
–H.P. Lovecraft, The Dunwich Horror

As we've seen in our earlier previews of the ninth deluxe expansion for Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game, The Thousand Young, its 165 new cards (three copies each of fifty-five different cards) greatly expand the hosts and powers of Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods and Mother of a Thousand Young. However, we've also seen how it houses arcane secrets of every kind within the new Locations it introduces, and these secrets give power and support to each of the game's other factions. Today, we continue our exploration of what The Thousand Young offers to players with a look at its Champion Card, The Archmage's Attaché (The Thousand Young, 37).

2013 North American Champion Tom Capor on The Archmage's Attaché

No player has had a greater impact upon the shape of Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game than four-time World Champion Tom Capor. For years, his name has been synonymous with top-level play, including an unbroken string of victories at Gen Con Indy that date back to 2009 when the convention was the site of the game's World Championships.

However, it's not just his name and his results that have become synonymous with the game; because the game's World Champions earn the right to work with the developers to design their own cards, Tom has added to the game's card pool, as well. The Mage Known as Magnus (That Which Consumes, 111), Hall of Champions (Written and Bound, 20), and The Mage's Machinations (Terror in Venice, 30) are all his design, as is The Archmage's Attaché, which appears in The Thousand Young and which he earned the right to design by winning the 2013 North American Championship, once again at Gen Con Indy, the home to so many of his biggest victories.

"Today, I have the distinct pleasure and honor to show off The Archmage’s Attaché!

"If there was one thing that Lovecraft's stories and I have in common, it would be our attachment to strange objects. For almost the entirety of my tabletop gaming career, I’ve been lugging around a briefcase. In the older times, we didn’t have all these fancy ways to carry around decks and other gaming bits that we do now, so while most were transporting their cards in their assorted boxes, binders, and book bags, my solution to the problem was the briefcase.

"However, as I continued to attend events and tournaments, the briefcase became more than just an efficient way to carry my things. It became an ice breaker, and it became my symbol. It showed that I was serious, but didn’t take myself too seriously. I mean, come on, who brings a briefcase to a card game?

"Personality quirks aside, when I earned this opportunity to birth a card into Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game, and after I had already briefly hinted at the briefcase’s presence in The Mage’s Machinations, it became clear to me that the briefcase should be the feature of my attachment card. When played, The Archmage's Attaché attaches to a deck and then 'opens' as an action, revealing the top card of that deck, and allowing you to play it as your next action, ignoring resource matching.

"In the spirit of flavor, The Archmage’s Attaché carries a lot of potential, adds a lot of choices, and allows you to pack more opportunities to react to the current game state. On one side, you have your own deck. You know what it is trying to do and the Attaché will help you get there faster. On the other, if you can correctly piece together your opponents' strategies, the Attaché might allow you to utilize or disrupt their options, as well. Herein lie the two major ways to play The Archmage's Attaché.

Your Stuff Versus My Stuff

"It’s all good stuff, but in order to determine whether you'll get more value out of the Attaché by attaching it to your deck or your opponent's, you'll need to take into account cost curves, card types, synergies, and various other factors. The choice will force gamers to really stretch their analytical muscles… and I like that.

"The safer choice is always attaching the Attaché to your own deck. After all, you know what to expect out of your deck. In this case, the Attaché acts as a faux draw engine, and it comes at a relatively cheap price.

In this example, we've attached The Archmage's Attaché to our deck. Exhausting it during our operations phase reveals Garden District (The Thousand Young, 49), which we can now play as our next action if we choose. Because cards played by The Archmage's Attaché ignore resource matching, we not only gain the "false draw" it offers, but an extra economic efficiency since we can pay for it with our open domain that contains just one Miskatonic Resource, rather than needing to spend the Silver Twilight resource that exists only in our open domain with three resources.

"Of course, there's also the risky choice: attaching the Attaché to your opponent’s deck. Due to the nature of most decks, you’ll have a use for most of your opponent’s cards. After all, most of them will be attempting to do the same thing as you, in a different shape. They'll have characters, events to surprise you, and supports to reinforce their positions. However, many decks may also include a hodgepodge of cards that are completely uselessness to you, especially niche decks that don’t conform to typical standards. Still, while there's a chance that you'll reveal The Seventy Steps (In Memory of Day, 30) after your opponent has already won a story or a copy of a unique character your opponent already controls, there's also a chance that The Archmage’s Attaché will present you with the unique opportunity to let you utilize your opponent's most critical cards against him, using them to advance your strategy, or simply using them to keep your opponent from advancing his. Good times either way.

In this example, we take the riskier play with The Archmage's Attaché, attaching it to our opponent's deck. Now, when we exhaust the Attaché, it reveals our opponent's Nyarlathotep (The Thousand Young, 36), which we cannot afford to play, meaning our use of the Attaché was "dead" for this round. However, had we been able to play Nyarlathotep, we could have potentially denied our opponent the use of one of his most powerful unique characters, likely disrupting more than one element of his overall strategy.

"Your deck, or your opponent's. Which will you choose?

My Thanks

"I’d like to thank FFG for this amazing opportunity and Damon Stone for his patience, wisdom, and his help in bringing The Archmage’s Attaché to life. Of course, I also wish to thank the Cthulhu community for your continued support and hope that all can enjoy this little gem of an attachment card."

Thanks, Tom!

Throughout the years, Tom has proven his mastery of the eldritch secrets of Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game, so it stands to reason that The Archmage's Attaché will be packed full of all manner of tricks, and it's likely to hold more than just your cards or your opponent's. With all the possibilities it contains, The Archmage's Attaché may very well open a gateway to an alternate reality, or it may hold the secret to crossing the boundaries of time and space.

A Thousand Terrible Secrets

The Archmage's Attaché is just one of the many new cards coming in The Thousand Young, and all of them introduce new abilities and deck-building possibilities. In fact, The Thousand Young is something like a briefcase full of cards, itself, containing tools and answers for nearly every strategy. How will you make use of them? You'll soon have the chance to decide. The Thousand Young is scheduled to arrive at retailers later next week!

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Blending In

Published 6 May 2015 | Call of Cthulhu LCG

Blending In

A Preview of The Thousand Young Expansion for Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game

"There were legends of a hidden lake unglimpsed by mortal sight, in which dwelt a huge, formless white polypous thing with luminous eyes; and squatters whispered that bat-winged devils flew up out of caverns in inner earth to worship it at midnight. They said it had been there before D’Iberville, before La Salle, before the Indians, and before even the wholesome beasts and birds of the woods. It was nightmare itself, and to see it was to die."
–H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

As we saw in our last preview, The Thousand Young deluxe expansion for Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game spews forth a whole host of new Monsters, Ghouls, Chthonians, Mi-Go, and other characters to swell the already bloated ranks of the Shub-Niggurath faction. Yet even as this expansion offers the Shub faction's fans a wide range of new characters, tactics, and tools from which they can piece together their decks, it transports the game from staid, stoic, eerie New England of H.P. Lovecraft's fiction to the culturally diverse streets of New Orleans and the steamy, dark, terrifying bayous of southern Louisiana.

Today, we look at some of the ways that The Thousand Young explores and exploits its setting, both as it allows Shub's followers to blend in with an already rich collection of mixed cultures and as it conceals some of the faction's vilest activities deep within swamps full of moss-covered trees.

In the Streets and Behind Closed Doors

With its unique blend of French, Spanish, and African influences, New Orleans has long held a special place within the American psyche. It's a place of mystery, wherein a multitude of rich cultural, artistic, linguistic, and spiritual traditions bleed together, transforming them so that any person on the street may appear both familiar and completely "other" at the same time. This also makes the city an ideal place for Shub's Cultists to hide their personal worship of the fecund Ancient One.

In New Orleans, few would blink an eye at a man or woman blending Voodoo traditions with Roman Catholicism, and what do Shub's Sorcerers do but add a few more elements to that mixture? Of course, the religious practices of a shadow mage such as Jean Deveraeux (The Thousand Young, 4) aren't quite like anything else within the city. Though they may outwardly appear to blend some of the same elements, they are far darker and much more immediate.

While the costs of his devotion are likely dire, they are unknown, but the benefits are truly impressive. As a reward for his faith, Shub grants him an unholy, inhuman Toughness, along with a commanding presence that can melt the minds of lesser men. Moreover, Jean Deveraeux gains the ability to exert an unusual measure of control over the events he witnesses; whenever he is committed to a story that your opponent wins, you may choose whether or not to trigger its effect, as though you had won the story. Not only does this grant you the power to decide whether or not the story effect triggers, it makes you the primary beneficiary of any asymmetrical story effect, such as that on Chaos Unleashed (The Shifting Sands, 8).

It is terrifying, indeed, to think that someone with powers so dark and unnatural may freely roam the city's streets, but it's more likely that he spends his time secreted away in some hidden part of the French Quarter (The Thousand Young, 26).

Designed to enhance the Resilient keyword that the expansion introduces, French Quarter is one of eight one-cost, unique Location supports that reveals the top card of your deck until the end of the phase in which you trigger it, and it's an easy way to load your characters with the Terror or Combat icons that feature prominently among Shub's most Resilient characters. Of course, the character you find doesn't have to bear the Resilient keyword, but if you have characters with the Resilient keyword, you can make certain they'll find their way to the top ofyour deck when you need them most.

For example, you could play a Baka (The Thousand Young, 9) to wound a Baka, along with an opponent's character. Then you could send your wounded, Resilient Baka back to the top of your deck before you trigger French Quarter. Alternatively, you could return Baron Samedi (The Thousand Young, 19) to your hand to lower the cost to play Nyarlathotep (The Thousand Young, 36), but choose, instead, when removing Baron Samedi from play to place him on the top of your deck with his Resilient effect, rather than back in your hand.

Such foul rituals aren't limited to the French Quarter. Each of the game's other factions gains a Location support with a similar effect, revealing the top card of your deck for a potential benefit. Whether you look for mad musicians within Tremé (The Thousand Young, 43) or the secretive Lodge members that dwell within the mansions of the Garden District (The Thousand Young, 49), the time you spend trodding along the streets of New Orleans is bound to be eventful.

Any wrong turn may lead toward madness or death. The question is: will you be able to identify the followers of Shub-Niggurath before it's too late?

Spawned in the Bayou

Meanwhile, even as Shub's Cultists and Sorcerers find anonymity amid the diverse and blended culture of New Orleans, other of the Black Goat's spawn find room to grow within the bayous of southern Louisiana, tucked deep into the darkest swamps, and sheltered from human eyes by trees laden with Spanish moss.

We saw some hints of the monstrosities within the bayous presented in The Call of Cthulhu when Lovecraft related the tale of Inspector Legrasse, who led nineteen officers into the swamps to break up some foul ritual that was being conducted therein. The Inspector had thought of the ritual as some form of Voodoo, but the truth is that it was another form of ceremony. It was something truly evil, an ancient religious practice directed toward the ancient powers that lie just beyond the standard range of human perception, and its consequences were even worse than the horrid and grotesque movements, sounds, and sacrifices it involved.

The Thousand Young gives us yet more reason to fear the darkest swamps of southern Louisiana.

Baleful Dark Young (The Thousand Young, 10) arise from those fetid regions where Shub-Niggurath is busy Birthing a Thousand Young (The Thousand Young, 33).
Giant, lumbering Marsh Gugs (The Thousand Young, 14) prowl the bayou for prey, and to them, nearly everything is prey.
Finally, if you should meet someone who might be able to provide you guidance, there's no guarantee you'll want to follow that person's advice. You're more likely to meet some Bayou Shaman (The Thousand Young, 5) eager to dwell close to the source of his unholy power than you are to meet some kind-hearted, benevolent spirit.

The result is that by transporting us to New Orleans and the swamps of southern Louisiana, The Thousand Young explores a new sense of dread and terror, where commonplace cultures and flora are tinged by the darkest elements of the mythos. When the sun sets and the sweltering night swallows the sky, there's no telling where Shub-Niggurath's followers may wander, nor what evil schemes they may pursue. In a faction that's so well adapted to responding to any situation that may arise within a game, where Shub's Cultists and Servitors often undergo Shocking Transformations (Core Set, 140), the seemingly disparate characters and abilities of The Thousand Young may fit perfectly into Shub's grander designs. If there are enough spawn, if they are given enough time to grow strong, if they have a wide enough array of talents, no power on earth can stop them.

Out of the Swamps

The Thousand Young transports Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game to the streets of New Orleans and the swamps of southern Louisiana, but Shub's ambitions reach far beyond those boundaries. It can only be a matter of time before her Cultists and her spawn begin to travel outward. Will you be ready? Will you seek the Black Goat's blessings and join her tribe? Or will you take a stand against her and her thousand offspring? Make your choice carefully.

In the meantime, head to your local retailer today to pre-order your copy of The Thousand Young!

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A Shub-Niggurath Bestiary

Published 20 April 2015 | Call of Cthulhu LCG

A Shub-Niggurath Bestiary

Preview The Thousand Young Expansion for Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game

"They were pinkish things about five feet long; with crustaceous bodies bearing vast pairs of dorsal fins or membraneous wings and several sets of articulated limbs, and with a sort of convoluted ellipsoid, covered with multitudes of very short antennae, where a head would ordinarily be."
–H.P. Lovecraft, The Whisperer in Darkness

When we announced the upcoming release of The Thousand Young deluxe expansion for Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game, we promised that it would offer a more diverse assortment of characters than the game's other recent faction boxes, such as the For the Greater Good expansion that focused on the Agency and the Denizens of the Underworld expansion that focused on the Syndicate. While those lent a great deal of aid to a limited number of subtypes, namely the Government and Criminal subtypes, we promised that The Thousand Young would offer "a wide array of subtypes and abilities, some of which allow you to bring characters into play in surprising fashion, some of which allow you to trigger effects when characters enter play, and some of which continue to support the faction's strengths in support destruction."

Such boasts demand to be backed up, so we begin our previews of this expansion by exploring more of this "wide array." Today, we delve into four more chapters of The Thousand Young and the Shub-Niggurath bestiary.

The Countless Spawn of Shub-Niggurath

Nearly every faction in Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game seems to have its signature subtype or subtypes. As noted above, the Agency has its Government operatives, and the Syndicate has its Criminals. Meanwhile, the Order of the Silver Twilight has its Lodge members, and Miskatonic University boasts a great number of Investigators and Explorers. Cthulhu's Deep Ones are nearly as iconic as the game itself. Yog-Sothoth is well-known as the Ancient One behind the Yithians and many of the game's Sorcerers. Hastur's ranks are full of Lunatics.

Shub-Niggurath, on the other hand, while it boasts a great number of characters and notable subtypes isn't quite as synonymous with any one of them. It seems that the All-Mother has a harder time playing favorites; her Dark Young are truly terrifying, but so are all the Ghouls, Monsters, and Mi-Go that pay her fealty. There's even a great deal of room within her ranks for those deranged humans who seek her favor; Cultists may gain her blessings and become Sorcerers or Servitors. Her ranks even include the subterranean Chthonians and the multitude of unfathomable Ancient Ones to which she gave birth.

Still, none of these carry the faction-defining weight that other subtypes carry within other factions, and the result is that the Shub-Niggurath faction appears to be defined more by its collective, a vast horde of abhorrent spawn under one foul fertility goddess. And it is this idea that comes forward in The Thousand Young. You won't find one subtype given weight above the others. Instead, you'll find a whole host of dark and twisted characters, all clamoring for their blasphemous Mother's blessings, and it is up to you, as the player, to bring them together toward your own foul ends.

Monsters

Monsters are the most populous of all Shub's spawn, and they are once again represented in The Thousand Young in greater numbers than each of the other subtypes. Still, among the expansion's 165 cards (three copies each of fifty-five cards), only fifteen of them are Monsters (five different characters).

Nonetheless, it is hard to think of Monster as the defining subtype for any faction, largely because it is such a vague descriptor. Its a term that can hold nearly anything, and that's more or less the case in The Thousand Young. The Baka (The Thousand Young, 9) shares very little in common with such a subtle and refined Monster as René Bonvillain (The Thousand Young, 12), but they both lay claim to the Monster trait.

It is true that most Monsters boast Terror and Combat icons. However, this distinguishes them little from the Dark Young or Ancient Ones that also boast those icons, and, in fact, most of the Monsters in The Thousand Young share only circumstantial synergies with other Monsters. Instead, while the Keelut (The Thousand Young, 8) boosts each of your Monsters, other characters, like the Smoke Serpent (The Thousand Young, 15), offer more and greater synergies with other characters that share the expansion's Resilient keyword.

Ghouls

In the eerie fictional world described by H.P. Lovecraft, ghouls are subterranean and vaguely humanoid creatures that like to feed on human corpses. Despite this, they're not necessarily hostile to humans, and such people as the artist Richard Upton Pickman were even able to befriend them.

That said, the nocturnal Ghouls of Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game can also be quite stealthy, sneaking into play from the disard pile like the Ghoulish Hag (Search for the Silver Key, 73) or leaping into play from your hand like the Ambushing Ghoul (The Thousand Young, 2).

Finally, though Ghouls don't always feel compelled to attack humans, their talons make them fearsome foes once roused. Ghouls like Rend (The Thousand Young, 13) and the Frenzied Ghoul (The Thousand Young, 7) can offer punch to any Shub deck primarily focused on other icons and abilities.

Chthonians

Though they've earned their place in the greater Lovecraft mythos, the game's Chthonians were not actually among Lovecraft's personal inventions. Instead, they were originally conceived by author Brian Lumley, who described them as immense, worm-like, tentacled creatures that were covered in slime and could live for more than a thousand years.

To this point, there are just three different Chthonians in Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game: Displaced Chthonian (Conspiracies of Chaos, 53), Grasping Chthonian (Initiations of the Favored, 51), and Telepathic Chthonian (The Gleaming Spiral, 92).

Despite their limited numbers, however, these Chthonians go a long way toward establishing Shub-Niggurath as the game's strongest faction for support destruction. This is largely due to the fact that if you can play characters to destroy supports, instead of using events, you're establishing your presence on the board even as you're weakening your opponent's. Moreover, so long as you don't need supports on your side of the table, the Displaced Chthonian is the most efficient support destruction in the game, firing once every turn.

Of course, one of the truths about support destruction is that you need it when you need it. The game is full of supports like The Plague Stone (Terror in Venice, 32), Rite of the Silver Gate (The Key and the Gate, 25), and Stygian Eye (Into Tartarus, 96) that can easily turn a game on its head. When your opponent plays one of these, you can't afford to delay its destruction; if you don't have the appropriate card in hand, you're likely to fall swiftly behind in the race for control of the game's eldritch secrets.

Accordingly, though it adds but one Chthonian to the game, The Thousand Young makes this select group of characters even more formidable with the introduction of Ancient Chthonian (The Thousand Young, 21), which you can bring into play as early as turn one through the use of Ghoul Tunnels (The Thousand Young, 24) to stack the top of your deck with whatever Chthonians you desire, ensuring you control of your opponent's supports through all the key points of the game.

Mi-Go

The alien Mi-Go rank among some of the game's fans' favorite characters. Not only are they truly bizarre and firmly established within Lovecraft's fiction, they offer a wealth of obvious synergies that make your Mi-Go deck stronger for each Mi-Go that enters play. They give each other Combat icons, Investigation icons, skill boosts, and Toughness. They come into play cheaper once you play your Inter-dimensional Transporter (The Twilight Beckons, 12), and they're resilient, able to return to hand from your discard pile en masse anytime you play Mi-Go Dreams (Sleep of the Dead, 94).

Despite that, Mi-Go have always taken a hit in more competitive matches because they require their synergies in order to be truly effective. Naturally, the more pieces you need in a combination to get it up to speed, the more fragile it is. There have been plenty of moments when one player's Mi-Go were just about to start extracting brains and run through stories at will when his opponent triggered The Plague Stone, devoured them all with Cthulhu (The Sleeper Below, 19), or wounded them with Nodens (Kingsport Dreams, 36).

But the quest for fun is not deterred by a few minor setbacks! And the Mi-Go gain two powerful additions in The Thousand Young.

The Mi-Go Worker (The Thousand Young, 6) is a fantastic, low-cost addition to the subtype. It brings a Terror icon to the table, making it one of the few Mi-Go to possess the icon naturally, but more importantly, it greatly accelerates your ability to play the Mi-Go you need to get your combinations together. At a cost of just two Loyal Shub resources, your Mi-Go Worker can easily enter play on the first turn and start reducing the cost of your other Mi-Go.

In one ideal situation, you might resource one domain up to two, use it to play an Inter-dimensional Transporter and then drain a second domain of one for your Mi-Go Worker. Then, you could wound your Mi-Go Worker to reduce the cost of an Ageless Mi-Go (Secrets of Arkham, 23) to gain a second point of toughness. On your second turn, you could then increase your primary domain to three resources and wound your Mi-Go Worker once more to play Xlizxcte-Oonth (The Thousand Young, 18).

Once you get the lord of the Mi-Go into play, you can play your Mi-Go at will from your hand or discard pile, and if your opponent bothers to kill your other Mi-Go, Xlizxcte-Oonth's ability makes it easy to recover your pace, reducing the cost of the first Mi-Go you play each turn by the number of Mi-Go in your discard pile. Notably, this ability doesn't come with any limitation, so you can potentially play your first Mi-Go each turn for free. Altogether, it's the sort of grand design that one might expect of an alien race that mastered interstellar travel and practices for removing and preserving brains that are so genius as to make the term "surgery" sound grotesque and slanderous.

Of course, since so much of The Thousand Young focuses on combining subtypes, rather than finding the most synergies within a single subtype, you could alternatively play Xlizcte-Oonth in a deck that also uses Harvesting Mi-Go (The Twilight Beckons, 11) to accelerate your domains in order to play other, more expensive characters like the Telepathic Chthonian and Displaced Chthonian.

Anything Can Happen Within the Darkest Bayous

The Thousand Young doesn't wrap all its main themes around a focal subtype. Instead, it touts a menagerie of all of Shub-Niggurath's strangest and foulest spawn. It's a patch for a wide variety of existing decks, and it's a toolbox of darkness and alien design that begs for exploration and experimentation by the game's most talented deck-builders. How will you make use of the expansion's thousand spawn?

Head to your local retailer to pre-order your copy today. Then keep your eyes open for more previews and Call of Cthulhu news as you start dreaming up your dark designs!

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The Thousand Young

Published 19 February 2015 | Call of Cthulhu LCG

The Thousand Young

The Ninth Deluxe Expansion for Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game

“Ever Their praises, and abundance to the Black Goat of the Woods. Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young!”
–H.P. Lovecraft, The Whisperer in Darkness

Fantasy Flight Games is proud to announce the upcoming release of The Thousand Young, the ninth deluxe expansion for Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game!

Deep in the bowels of the fetid swamps and shadowed woods of Louisiana, evil lurks. Dark Priests of hidden religions make blood sacrifices in the name of the All Mother, The Black Goat of the Woods, the mighty and terrible Shub-Niggurath. Soon this darkness will cover all of the city of New Orleans, for her thousand young are spreading and ready for flesh…

With its 165 cards (three copies each of 55 different cards), The Thousand Young adds new depth and resilience to the Shub-Niggurath faction. Nearly two-thirds of the expansion’s cards bolster the All Mother’s ranks with Ghouls, Dark Young, Monsters, Mi-Go, and Cultists. You’ll also find ghastly new Locations, foul Curses, and a new version of the Villainous Dark Mother, herself.

Still, the Black Goat of the Woods is not the region’s only corrupting influence. In the heart of the Big Easy, Nyarlathotep’s many Avatars play a deep and complicated game, manipulating human agencies and monstrous cultists, alike. These Avatars infiltrate every one of the game’s eight factions, even as the factions all gain mysterious new Locations that afford players new interactions with the top cards of their decks.

Spawning a Thousand Young

"Of Their semblance can no man know, saving only in the features of those They have begotten on mankind; and of those are there many sorts."
–H.P. Lovecraft, The Dunwich Horror

One of the most terrifying and mysterious of the Great Old Ones, Shub-Niggurath is known primarily as the All Mother whose worship was banned in nearly every nation and throughout all eras of human history. Still, her influence continues to shape the world, unabated. Her worshippers include the foul, towering Dark Young; the strange, fungoid, aliens known as Mi-Go; and human Cultists who give themselves to her, aspiring to be transformed by her powers or to help her populate the world with her monstrous spawn.

All of these appear in The Thousand Young, as do a plethora of Servitors, Undead, and Chthonians. In total, the ranks of Shub-Niggurath are expanded by no fewer than sixty-nine characters (three copies each of twenty-three different characters).

Chief among them, of course, is the All Mother herself, Shub-Niggurath (The Thousand Young, 23). In The Thousand Young, Shub-Niggurath appears as an eight-cost Ancient One, complete with her standard Villainous and Invulnerable keywords, as well as a powerful Response that allows you to spawn a whole unholy horde of minions when you play her. Finally, she also benefits from the expansion's new Resilient keyword.

Appearing on more than a dozen different cards in The Thousand Young, the Resilient keyword ensures that your cards will see play, maybe even multiple times. Whenever a card with the Resilient keyword would leave play, its controller may instead return to the top of its owner's deck. Because this is a passive effect, it cannot be cancelled, and that means that you can keep your Resilient characters, like Shub-Niggurath, from being shuffled into your deck or even from being hit by the growing number of "remove from the game" effects, to which The Thousand Young adds another handful.

Moreover, because Shub-Niggurath and Resilient cards allow you a new range of interactions with the top of your deck, they add to the power of such cards as Frenzied Ghoul (The Thousand Young, 7) and Dark Sargassum (The Thousand Young, 22), both of which you can bolster by revealing Shub-Niggurath or some other powerful Resilient character from the top of your deck.

In Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game, the Shub-Niggurath faction has long excelled at overrunning its opponents with its monstrous hordes, and The Thousand Young only serves to ensure that this strategy will remain viable for the foreseeable future, reinforcing it with the new version of Shub-Niggurath, her myriad new followers, and the Resilient keyword.

Dark God of a Thousand Forms

"It was then that Nyarlathotep came out of Egypt. Who he was, none could tell, but he was of the old native blood and looked like a Pharaoh."
–H.P. Lovecraft, Nyarlathotep

The unfathomable evils of Shub-Niggurath and her followers aren't the only malign influences that The Thousand Young introduces to the sweltering nights of darkest Louisiana. Each of the game's factions also gains a new Avatar of Nyarlathotep, even as the Black Man appears himself within the expansion in the form of The Crawling Chaos (The Thousand Young, 36).

Like Shub-Niggurath, this version of Nyarlathotep is both Villainous and Resilient, and his Resilient keyword allows you to create any number of combinations with his Avatars, each of which is also Resilient. First, when you play Nyarlathotep, you can return one of his Avatars to your hand to lower his cost by three. Then, whenever you succeed at a story to which Nyarlathotep is committed, you can sacrifice him to put one of his Avatars into play, already committed to an unresolved story. Played well, you may be able to use Nyarlathotep's disguises to win uncontested success tokens at a story to which no one was committed before you began resolving struggles, and if Nyarlathotep's new disguise happens to be that of Harley Warren (The Thousand Young, 44), you might just be able to win a story and place one success token at each of the game's other stories.

Of course, it's not just Nyarlathotep's ability to shift from one guise to another that's remarkable. Because he bears the Resilient keyword, his sacrifice need never be truly permanent. You could, instead, merely return him to the top of the deck, in order to play him again on your next turn. And then you could swap him out for some other Avatar. After all, Nyarlathotep is the Outer God of a Thousand Faces, a figure wholly inscrutable by human logic, and he has a long history of appearing where he wants, when he wants, in a guise that is both familiar and frightening to those who behold him.

A Thousand Different Directions

"Iä! Shub-Niggurath! As a foulness shall ye know Them. Their hand is at your throats, yet ye see Them not; and Their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold."
–H.P. Lovecraft, The Dunwich Horror

While the All Mother's progeny ensure that The Thousand Young offers the Resilient keyword a potent introduction into Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game, the expansion doesn't focus as much on any single subtype within the faction. Where the Seekers of Knowledge deluxe expansion allowed fans of Miskatonic University to send Explorers across the globe, and where Denizens of the Underworld added a great measure of depth and focus to the Criminal subtype, The Thousand Young instead offers a wide array of subtypes and abilities, some of which allow you to bring characters into play in surprising fashion, some of which allow you to trigger effects when characters enter play, and some of which continue to support the faction's strengths in support destruction.

Instead of shedding a new light on some clear deck-building path, The Thousand Young leads you into the darkest bayous of Louisiana, where the trees and murky waters conceal all manner of evils, and the expansion offers you a tremendous measure of power to serve Shub-Niggurath in the fashion of your choice. Will you focus on devouring your opponents with Ghouls at Night? Will you muscle your way through stories with your unending hordes of Dark Young? Will you ally yourself with Nyarlathotep and use his Avatars to your benefit? Or will your Cultists usher Shub-Niggurath, herself, into the world?

The choice is yours. The Thousand Young is due to arrive at retailers everywhere late in the second quarter of 2015!

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