Arkham Horror LCG Basic Deckbuilding Strategy

the first thing that you want to do in Arkham Horror living card game is to select one of the five basic character types there is Guardian seeker mystic rogue and finally survivor Guardian style characters are great if you like using weaponry whether it's handguns or machetes this is a great character for you to play if you like beating up the bad guys and fighting them this is who you want to be the next is seeker and this is a really key part of the game is getting clue tokens to advance the stories in the game The Seeker is a great character class to play to pull those clew tokens off in a very quick and effective manner the seeker though isn't very combat oriented so you're gonna have to rely on the other characters Seekers typically having a high intellect score but some of their other skills are a little bit lacking the next is the mystic which is almost like the sorcerer in arkham you have a wide variety of spells and a wide variety of sort of ritualized artifacts and relics that you can have at your disposal these characters excel at really versatility they typically have a really strong willpower ability score which is used to cast their spells their spells in general are fairly powerful but when you're drawing chaos tokens you can sometimes have a spell backfire on you and all sorts of awful effects can occur to you and sometimes your party based upon what you draw from the chaos bag so if you're someone that likes to play like a spell caster style character the mystic is for you rogues are your deceptive sneaky style characters they typically have a pretty decent agility they also have the ability to generate resources from various means effectively these characters are really fun if you like evading the enemy as opposed to directly fighting them out in the open use bad luck to your advantage by playing the survivor class these characters have a host of skills and abilities that when things go wrong you can actually benefit from that in the game it's a lot of fun to play it's a little bit strange when you first start playing this character class but once you get into it I think you'll really enjoy it once you've selected the character class that you want to play for the campaign go ahead and take all of the different characters of that class and put them out on the table from your collection what you want to look at is their special abilities and their ability scores a lot of these characters have some really really cool special abilities and some fun effects that really make the game shine and it gives them a unique personality once you've selected one start thinking about the theme how you're gonna build that character what things you want to potentially include in that deck this is one of the most fun and exciting parts of the game is starting a new character and really putting that build together and thinking through what you want it to do after you choose your character class the next part of deck building is going to be your assets as a general rule and this is just a general rule I recommend putting roughly ten assets in your deck to start with assets are going to form the core of your strategy assets typically remain in the game for long periods of time so this is the best place to start when you're doing your deck building you've already selected your character class you know what sort of special abilities your character has now start building those assets around the character and I'm gonna go into some of my recommendations for doing this the first thing that we're going to talk about our offensive cards these are typically weapons but they can also be spells as well in the case of some of the mystic cards look for cards that do bonus damage you know something that's +1 +2 or up and up and up the game is somewhat timed and what that means is that you're constantly putting doomed tokens out every turn and that will end the game every single action you take therefore matters think of it as almost like a timed event if you're only hitting for one point of damage every attack it's gonna take you a long time to bring down those enemies it's kind of gonna kind of stall out the game so always look for cards that have some bonus damage associated with it I'm not saying don't ever use cards that don't have it but just it hits harder and it's a lot more impactful to the game the next thing I want you to look out for is when you're using some of these cards a lot of them have either charges or ammunition associated with them and just understand that when you put it out you're gonna have a limited number of uses typically these are around you know three or four different charges that are on the card itself so be really mindful of that and then also be on the lookout for stuff that doesn't have ammunition so always try to recommend to people put some weapon cards in your deck that don't have ammunition and then that way no matter what happens you can use it over and over and over again and it's not going to run out then the final thing I want to talk about is that some of the weapons are two-handed and what that means is you can only have one of those weapons out and play typically so if you have let's say the baseball bat out and then you want to put out something else like the fire axe you're gonna have to discard the baseball bat to bring out the fire axe be really mindful of that I see a lot of new players they get a little bit frustrated when they're using their deck for the first time and they have a nice two-handed weapon out and then they want to bring a second weapon out and they can't because both of their hands are full so be really really mindful of that if you're gonna use those two-handed weapons just be aware of that and make sure that you plan for that one final note on really all of these upgrade cards and assets in your deck think about the future if you're playing one of the Arkham Horror campaigns you're gonna be going through anywhere from three to eight missions depending on which campaign that you're playing so think of it as the future once you start getting experience points can you upgrade certain items you know case in point the 45 automatic is a card that you can upgrade so if you like playing the 45 automatic plan for the future look through your collection of cars and see what some of these cards can turn into and what they can advance into in the future and that might help you for deck building in the future once you start gaining that experience and you start completing the emissions next we're going to talk about allies and I recommend for new players and new decks just go ahead and put a pair of allies into the deck it's the same one just put two copies into your deck allies do two different things first they give you some sort of benefit or bonus oftentimes it's one of the ability score bonuses that you get which is a fantastic upgrade for you you can be spending less skill cards to make those skill checks later secondarily and a lot of players kind of don't see this when they first start playing Oracle but they have health and sanity values your allies so if you get hit your allies can actually soak up that damage which improves your character survivability and it keeps you in the game longer one other thing I see sometimes with new players they'll put in a bunch of allies and I I kind of you know don't recommend that and the reason why is that you can only have one ally out in play when you first start the game so if you have a ton of allies it's gonna bog down your hand so you're gonna have a bunch in your hand and you can't really play them so I just recommend having one set when you first build your deck finally I'm going to talk about the last class of cards and these are sort of accessory or body style items that you can use to enhance your characters we've kind of talked about the other assets and by now you probably have roughly eight assets in your deck so the remaining two slots go ahead and start looking at some of these other cards in the game some of them will do things like healing another host of cards and these are very valuable they allow you to draw additional cars and keep your hand size nice and strong always be on the lookout for those cards and then finally there's a bunch of these talent cards that allow you to spend resources and it typically will buff up to different ability scores that you have so be really conscious of having those in your deck I think having a couple of those especially if you have a high resource deck is a really good option to round out the last of your asset flaws now we're going to move into the event cards in your deck these are going to constitute in my opinion roughly twelve of the thirty that you're gonna be placing into your deck first and foremost I'm gonna mention the emergency cash this is a card I think that really shines in any deck you play it it's a zero cast event and you gain three resources it's really really good to have two copies of these in any deck I really haven't found a deck that I wouldn't put that into the rest of these events are gonna be sort of theme based around what your character does so try to focus on the feed is the person an attacker is the person an investigator do they like to do evasion are they a spell cast or things of that nature there's another set of cards that allow you to move for free without consuming an action or they allow you to move to the far side of all of the locations very quickly so keep that in mind something what I want to recommend is that when you're putting your events together try to look for a lot of them that are one and two resource cost the more that you have that are in the three to four range it's gonna be really unlikely that you're gonna be able to have the resources to play those but these nice zero cost events and the one cost events these are really great you can have them in your hand and you can use them almost at any time because one resource isn't that much two resources is pretty economical but once you start hitting three or four resources to play a card it's gonna take you many many turns to recover and in Arkham Horror sometimes you don't have that many terms to get the job done correctly so to sum it up now focus on twelve event cards that are based around your assets and your character and then this is gonna build out most of the flesh of your deck finally what I want to talk about are probably the least important cards in your deck you still need them but they don't have as much impact as the permanent assets in the events in your deck and these are going to be the skill cards which have this symbol at the top these are going to allow you to enhance your skill checks when you're drawing chaos tokens out of the chaos bag themselves so the first thing I want to recommend and this is this should be pretty obvious but if it's not put two copies of unexpected courage to your deck with the question mark icon you can use it for anything and it's two of those icons as well so that's really versatile next I really like these skill cards that are dedicated one per ability score so this one is dedicated to the agility ability score so when you play it you can add two of the agility icons to the skill check and it also allows you to draw a car so this is a really good way to keep your deck sort of flowing so even though you're spending a card you're getting one back so I think these are great other cards I really enjoy for the skills and there's a whole set of these as well one for each ability score is that when you start taking a lot of sanity damage and that's pretty easy to do in this game a lot of the characters maybe only start with you know five or six sanity so if you've lost three sanity you can use these cards to your advantage it actually adds four icons of that ability so be on the lookout for these cards as well if they're in your collection next we're gonna move on to some of the more dedicated ones and what I want to recommend is that look for cards with a lot of the question marks I think these are very versatile sometimes they have a little bit of a catch to play and sometimes it's a little bit situational but being able to have three three icons is really amazing and then other things who is be on the lookout for some of these cards and this is this is one that has three different icons it's very versatile so you can use it to buff up a lot of your event cards that you're playing a lot of your attack options evasion ability spells whatever it is that you're doing and so these are really good as well and then finally don't rule out cards that really add something to your deck themes so in this case we have vicious blow although it only adds one icon it allows you to add one damage to an attack so if your damage-dealing sort of deck and you want just that extra little push to wipe the enemies out faster be on the lookout for these skill cards as well and these are really beneficial so to sum it up I'm going to suggest that you put eight skill cards into your deck and kind of go from there you're gonna look at the overall mixture and you're gonna adjust it accordingly and I'll show you kind of how to do that next once your deck has been put together if you have your thirty core cards you're gonna go ahead and add your character weakness to the deck the character also usually comes with a few cards that are you know just designed for them so you can go ahead and add those into your deck and then finally you're gonna add one random weakness and as your collection grows the number of cards that you can draw randomly and put into your deck will also increase dramatically so it's kind of fun as your collection grows the amount of options for your weakness also grows as well when I'm done putting my deck together what I like to do is remove all the weaknesses and do sort of an opening hand assessment it's gonna simulate what my first hand in a game is going to look like taking into account the Mulligan I'm gonna show you what that looks like in this case I built an Ursula downs deck so I'm gonna take my draw back and I'm simply going to draw five cards off the top of the deck and this is gonna simulate what my opening hand would look like and then I'm gonna take these cars and they'll look through them and see would that be a suitable opening hand and if not I'm going to draw an additional five cars to look to see what my hand would look like if I Mulligan all of the first five cars and I'm gonna repeat this process two more times and what this does is it allows you to take a look at right out of the gate right when you start playing your first turn is usually the most important when you're trying to set up your deck strategy do you have the carbs you need to be successful for your strategy in your opening hand and if you don't can you get to those cards by using the Mulligan rule so think of it as you're looking at sets of ten cards to assess the strength of your deck by doing this I have found numerous times that there's something not quite right about the deck and I can make some critical card changes before I start playing once you start playing a campaign you've kind of locked the cards in and your deck is kind of set it's going to cost you experience points to replace any of those cards even if they have zero pips on them so this is something I highly recommend go ahead and try it out for yourself do an opening hand assessment on your newly created deck I want to thank you today for joining me with this video hopefully you've learned some tips and tricks so next time when you're building an Arkham Horror living card game deck you kind of know what to do you know where to start thanks again for your time and as always have fun gaming

Channel: Fossil Ridge Gaming

Views: 15,497

Rating: 4.9814386 out of 5

Keywords: Arkham, Arkham Horror LCG, Gaming, Game, Card Game

Id: oL5L33qQVZs

Length: 16min 14sec (974 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 22 2020