Campaign Manager 2008: A Breakthrough?

I had a game of Campaign Manager 2008 finish yesterday where I built an infinite deck and lost. I'll need to look into the game more to see what really went wrong but I tried to get aggressive with playing out attack cards once I went infinite and lost control of the game. I scored up several states in a row but ended up behind after that. But what is really interesting about the game is my opponent used a two card combo to pretty good effect against me and I think it might have potential to break open the stalemate...

There's one difference between the two decks that I have yet to cover. Each player has three media support cards in their card pool. Two of these three cards are the standard 'pick what happens when a new event comes up' ilk which seem ok but not overpowering. The third one for Obama makes your opponent roll twice on the 'bad stuff' chart when he goes negative. The McCain card means McCain doesn't roll at all when he goes negative.

This is interesting but I rarely see anyone go negative. The problem is 3 of the 4 'go negative' cards actually require you to discard 2 extra cards to play them. I do this every now and then to win a powerful state but the problem is it sets you back a lot in card quantity. The 4th card doesn't require a discard but doesn't really coordinate well with itself. It gives you 1 defense and 1 economy in a single state.

So what my opponent did was he set up the no roll card and then kept cycling through his very small deck to play that card over and over. The support gains might be unrelated but Obama can't counter both of them. Eventually you'll get into a position to just overwhelm him in one category or the other and he doesn't have a counter. Even if he plays the same card he has to roll for bad stuff and 1 time in 6 McCain will net a support so Obama just loses in this situation...

But is it sustainable? Pretend we hit a 2 card deck with 2 cantrips in the discard. Open with the negative. Then play Oprah into a cantrip. Then play a cantrip. Then play a cantrip. We're back in the same gamestate as at the start except we've gained 5 support over 4 actions. This is certainly sustainable!

Now that I look at it a little more this seems decent even without the right media support card in play. Assuming it's an infinite vs infinite game the extra card draws won't help your opponent and the key demographic swap does nothing so 4 of the 6 outcomes have no game effect. And even when the negative roll hurts you the best it can do is give your opponent back the support you'd gained. Tempo might work out poorly for you but by and large this seems like it should allow you to break out of the stalemate! Time to put a higher focus on drafting that card!