Great Cthulhu, Highest of the Great Old Ones - Hecatomb

THIS IS HALLOWEEN!!!

Cthulhu dresses up as the giant squid from Jules Verne.

I mentioned this in my Moloch post, but here is the genuine article. Cthulhu is a monstrous alien/deity who first appeared in H.P. Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu". Since then, the character has cemented the genre of cosmic horror fiction and has become deeply engrained in our popular culture. What is it about Cthulhu that makes him so popular? I'm not certain. If I had to guess, it's because the character is so strange and so different. He is practically a god, but instead of being an idealized human who swears his ways are beyond our understanding, he isn't idealized or human at all, and his ways and himself are beyond our understanding. Cthulhu represents something so utterly terrifying that we can't fully comprehend what it is, and because of that we fear it.

Let's look at the card. The art is something I have been bloody waiting for. Most of the art so far has been one color scheme, causing everything to blend together. Here, Cthulhu's slimy green body is sharply contrasted by the orange background, making him stand out very prominently. The art is a slightly different interpretation of the usual image, the full octopus head on a massive body, and instead seems stretched out to be more fluid and squid-like. I am perfectly fine with this, I have no idea how the traditionalists feel though.

The effects play well with the flavor in my opinion. The come-into-play effect causes your opponents to discard their hands, the sudden presence of this eldritchian abomination causing them to lose focus and go mad from the revelation. In the ongoing ability, if a player wants to attack you, they first must pay tribute to Cthulhu. Only when he is appeased will he let them pass.

Happy Halloween! 

Horseman of Conquest - Hecatomb

"I'm still waiting for a call for Darksiders III."

So, here's an issue I've been sidestepping. Most games have some sort of goal behind them. In Monopoly it's to acquire all property. Magic the Gathering is two wizards trying to reduce the other's life to 0. What is the goal of this game? To reap 20 souls so you can destroy the world. What. Ignoring the fact that destroying the planet you're standing on is an idiotic move, the game casts its players as villain protagonists. This was another innovation of the game, a world where you cast the players as villains instead of the hero, but the game also was trying to build some sort of story, and this didn't help. In Magic the Gathering, you have the freedom to switch worlds and build characters. Here though, the game makes it very clear this is set on Earth. The planet most of the protagonists are trying to destroy. How do you makes us care about them? We don't want them to succeed, not just because they're evil but because once the Earth is destroyed, that's the end of the story. The final expansion tried to rectify this with the introduction of the aliens, presenting the possibility that there are other worlds out there for them to destroy, and providing a way to survive the destruction of this one. That said, the story was still kind of grounded. It's hard to build up a world when your characters are intent on destroying it.

Well, enough with that rant, here's our card, appropriately enough a horseman. One of the horsemen actually. For those who never read Revelations, there is a sequence with the breaking of the seven seals. When the first four seals are broken, they summon the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Conquest, War, Famine, and Death. Pestilence is a side-interpretation/member, I guess the part-time Horseman, usually standing in for Conquest or Death. As shown above, Conquest is depicted riding a white horse. He carries a bow and arrow and he wears a crown on his head. I personally feel Conquest steps a little too far into War's territory, which is probably why most writers depict him as Pestilence.

Another mechanical note about these cards. Notice how the text box is red. Look at the four other corners. Notice the blue triangles. When you place a card on top of another, called stitching, you rotate the bottom card by one so the text is clear under the plastic edges. This causes one of the four triangles above to appear in clear triangle on the text box. If the colors match, it triggers the effect in that text box. In this case, if you stitch Conquest on top of a destruction minion (remember, destruction is red, deceit is blue), you will trigger the text in the red box. This is Hecatomb's version of encouraging multicolored play and off-color triggers.

Moloch, Eater of Children - Hecatomb

Moloch no like light.

The Gods in Hecatomb are probably the most powerful cards in the game. In the same sense Magic lets you summon planeswalkers to aid you, Hecatomb lets you summon Gods. They usually came with a come-into-play effect (the yellow text). followed by a continuous effect. The Gods themselves were pulled from various mythologies and H.P. Lovecraft. One of the Gods is Cthulhu. Seriously, it's the card name and everything.

This guy, Moloch, comes from the former sources: classical mythology. Moloch was a God associated with the Ammonites and with child sacrifice. He's even mentioned in the Bible, God telling the Israelites not to sacrifice their children to him. I find it very sad that they had to be told not to sacrifice children to the death god, and it makes me shudder to think what they were doing before hand. Moloch also receives a cameo in Paradise Lost, Milton following the tradition of listing some of the old pagan gods as fallen angels. When they made that Sinister film, it astounds me they didn't use Moloch, the evil child-sacrifice god, and instead opted to make up a demon.

Art wise, this guy is freaking terrifying! I think it has the same color scheme problem, but the details that matter, the doll parts hanging from his horns, come in loud and clear.

Slaughter Wheel - Hecatomb

Some history first. Back in the day, Wizards of the Coast tried publishing more games besides Magic the Gathering. One such product was Hecatomb. The main gimmick featured was five-sided plastic cards. Four of the sides were a clear plastic that allowed players to stack cards and easily see the text underneath. I've heard no complaints about the game, and it actually seems rather innovative. The problems though are in practicality. You needed special sleeves, boxes, and pages if you wanted to store cards. The cards as I said were plastic, which made them more durable but was also a more expensive material. I can only imagine how the sheets were even cut. Hecatomb was a neat concept that was sadly too much of a drain on collectors and manufacturers to keep being produced, receiving only two expansions.

But enough with that, let's have a card.

Bob the Builder finally has his revenge.

Hecatomb had a Magicesque cost system, with four different colored types. Blue was Deceit, gray Corruption, red Destruction, and green Greed. This guy belongs to Deceit. What exactly is deceitful about a steamroller is lost on me.

Actually, the art on this reminds me of the original Juggernaut from Magic the Gathering. A huge wheel crushing people underneath it. This subsequently reminds me of Malefic Steamroller, from Wizards miniatures game Dreamblade. While Hecatomb was a horror game, it delved a bit into black comedy, hence the humorous imprints on the wheel. My only real complaint art-wise is that the color scheme is pretty much one color, making it harder to pick out any details, especially in the background.

One final comment is the subtype, Animate. The Wheel here falls along similar veins as Christine, an animated vehicle trying to kill you. This has the bonus of being able to power up its Animate brethren. Stephen King, write a sequel where Christine teams up with a homicidal steamroller.

Undead Duck - The Nightmare Before Christmas TCG

Blood not included.

I love card games that give me the power to collect and play the weirdest things. How many games in the world let you play a card named Undead Duck? It's so completely random yet awesome that I love it. It's a freaking vampire duck!

Mechanics wise, this is one of the Creations, the things your characters are supposedly making for the holidays. The main benefit is the scare value, usually on the high end which means more scare points at the end game. There are several creations in the game that are tied to several of the characters. Sometimes having a certain character reduces the cost to play it, and others just give you a bonus effect. How each creation is linked to each character is unclear. I suspect these are the "toys" the residents of Halloweentown made, each group of characters having made one toy. That or the game developers just went with whatever character was in the same stillshot. I'm hoping it was the former.

Hanging Tree, Murderous Host - The Nightmare Before Christmas TCG

Branch for four?

This one is really creepy to me. Technically, it's just an anthropomorphic tree with skeletons dangling from its branches. Plants in general need a lot of work to accomplish being scary. It's not enough just to make them animate; there has to be something unnerving. When you try to make plants scary but fail, you get stuff like The Happening.

So why do I find this frightening? The ability. You can lower the tree's cost by 1 by discarding 1 character from your hand. You are making this thing cheaper by hanging your own characters! That's the flavor I get from this. Whether the lynching allusion is what the designers were really going for is unknown to me.

On a random note, had they called in an illustrator instead of taking film stills, I would have told the artist to show three skeletons instead of four. Why? To play this card for free you need to discard three characters. That's the maximum number since you can't pay a negative number. Three hangings, three skeletons.

Jack's House - The Nightmare Before Christmas TCG

I get the feeling insurance premiums are really high in Halloweentown.

Time to talk starting locales. Like Outfits in Doomtown and Strongholds in L5R, this is the card you start the game with and that determines what actions you can take. Each starting locale has 3 Functions, and each turn you're allowed to activate 1 of them. Usually, the first function draws cards, the second function adds pumpkin points so you can play cards, and the third one lets you move cards.

The number in the corner is the scare threshold. Usually, you need characters whose total scare value is equal or more than the threshold in order to activate the locale's function. Starting locales all have a threshold of 0 though, meaning you don't need any characters at that locale to use its functions.

Card design wise, the starting locales are kind of boring. They're all associated with different characters, but they all do pretty much the same thing thanks to card frame restrictions. You can only fit so much text in the spaces given before it gets too tiny to read, hence the three basic functions: draw, add, and move. There are probably character cards that interact with the appropriate starting locale, but I haven't combed through the entire set yet to see if this is true. I feel like these cards could have a lot more interesting designs, and possibly functions that interact with their characters, if the frame allowed more room for text and the font wasn't so bloody big.

Clown, With the Tear-away Face - The Nightmare Before Christmas TCG

Tim Burton plus clowns is a scary combination.

Clowns can be terrifying. Yes, there are a lot of nice clowns in the world, but it takes very little to make a clown into a serial killer. This guy for example is a clown with razor sharp teeth. The subtitle is also unsettling. Of all the adjectives that could describe a face, tear-away should not be one of them.

The ability is that you can sacrifice him to get rid of a character 1 cost lower. I imagine what he does is tear his face off, causing the less scary character to run away with screams of terror. Even residents of a Halloween plane can be terrified of clowns! They're that scary.

Shadow on the Moon - The Nightmare Before Christmas TCG

It's that time of year, the Halloween season, which means its time to get a bit festive. The game I'm looking at though is very weird. The Nightmare Before Christmas TCG. In the game, you take 12 rounds (the twelve days of Christmas, ha ha) to build your own Halloweentown and make your own Christmas-themed creations in time for the holidays. In the end, you tally up the values of your characters and creations, and the highest number wins.

This was weird. Whether you're a Tim Burton fan or not, there is only so far you can go when basing cards off of the film. Ideas were going to run out very quickly. The second set (yes, this actually got two sets) expanded the scope by introducing Christmas characters and locales, but this only gave the game one good final breath before expiring. Which is a shame because I do like the design of the game, I just also knew it was doomed. Anyways, enough ranting. Here's the card.

How many people have the "This is Halloween" song playing in their head?

This is a Surprise card. They're the Trainers of this card universe, except the game developers already came up with an idea to limit the number you can play. This card is also not typical of Surprise cards, since this one attaches to a character, and is therefore a confusing choice to start things off, but I'm sticking with it.

So, what does it do? Characters in the game have only one number on them, a scare number. Everything including how much it costs, when different location effects activate, and how many points you get at the end are determined by this one number. This lowers an opposing character's scare by 1, making them less scary. This makes it harder for your opponent to trigger locales, and it takes away 1 point for your opponent in the end game. I like to think that you are casting a shadow over the opposing character.