Another VTES player, perhaps inspired by my Barbed Wire decks, made his own limited card selection challenge: Atom Weaver’s “Deck Bashing Challenge.” This challenge revolves around making as competitive a deck as possible by combining two starter decks of your choosing. While I like the idea, I do have a few reservations about the idea.

For one, starter decks in VTES are much like Magic: the Gathering and are set specific. If one were to find a great combination of starter decks to make an excellent general purpose deck, the starters you were using might be out of stock two years down the road and simply be of little use to the proposed newbie who needed it. Secondly, the starter decks all revolve around a certain strategy; by combining two of them, all you are really going to be able to do is refine that strategy a bit. The starter decks themselves are not toolboxy enough to really serve as the blank slate that I like as a deck constructor. Of course, one could combine two separate starters, but that runs into it’s own problems. Lastly, VTES is a game that has always favored certain strategies such as sneak and bleed or vote and cap. Starter decks, such as the Malkavian or Venture starters from Keepers of Tradition, will be quite competitive whereas working with the other starters from that set means that you will be building a deck that will simply never be as competitive. That’s just the nature of VTES and CCGs in general.

Ever after a challenge, I chose to work with the Brujah starter in Keepers of Tradition. The deck’s contents can be found here. Clearly this is a combat deck, and, unfortunately, it doesn’t contain many support cards that would allow it to overcome the obvious handicaps that that strategy fosters. For one, there is simply no multi-acting in the deck. I’ve played similar decks based on Gwendolyn (who has Fortitude for multi-acting and damage prevention), the predecessor of Adana de Sforza, and those decks contains either Forced March of Flurry of Action or both.

An example turn might consist of bleeding with Gwendolyn for the base 3 at one stealth from Forced March, and paying 1 to untap (use of 1 card). Then having Hrothulf burn the edge to rush my predator’s largest standing minion (a free action), then having Gwendolyn take another action to call Reigns of Power to simultaneously damage my prey while gaining pool because the largest of my predator’s vamps was taking a dirt nap. Those kinds of turns are powerful and great fun to pull off if you can manage it.

Unfortunately, this deck has no multiacting cards at all: no Flurry of Action, no Forced March, nothing. So the deck is going to be dramatically less powerful with no multi-acting ability than a similar deck that had one. To add insult to injury, this particular deck is promotion a new type of rush mechanic using the card, Enrage. In essence, it looks like the deck designer wanted you to bring up a fighting minion and a smaller minion (such as Garret) to take the Enrage action to allow your fighting minion to rush someone at +1 strength. That mechanic is inherently inferior to just having your fighting minion rush someone using a card (which is inferior still to just having your fighting minion have a built in rush like most dedicated combat decks do).

So the deck is crippled in a number of ways, right out of the box. Furthermore, it has precious little bleed defense (a couple of Major Boons) and the only blood management it has is Entrenching plus Vessel. Paying a pool to get a blood doll as a trifle Master Phase action to drain some blood off of your minion in the hopes that it will be able to regain some of it using Entrenching requires a action from a large minion. Since the deck has no multi-acting, the actions of the largest minion is at a premium, and so this Entrenching strategy is subpar even in the best of situations. In short, the entire deck is simply a horrid lesson in inefficiency.

One could, as The Lasombra suggested, combine this deck with the Torreador deck to try to help it a bit. In theory, that would allow for a decent deck because both clans share two out of three disciplines. Unfortunately, unlike in the Jyhad edition, the Brujah vamps have no Auspex and the Torreador vamps have no Potence. You’d be forced to rely on using the Master Discipline cards to try to correct for some of that, and it could get messy. The deck itself would need to really focus on being a Celerity combat deck with Presence bleeds to make a bleed and bruise deck using Auspex for bounce.

Unfortunately, this reasonably suggestion is hamstrung again by the contents of the Brujah starter; the only celerity combat cards are three Psyche!s, four Stutter-Steps, and five resist Earth’s grasp. The Torreador deck doesn’t help much in this department having only three more Psyche!s and six Pursuits. If we added both decks celerity packages together, we’d have six Psyche!s, six Pursuits, five Resist Earth’s Grasp, and four Stutter-Steps for a total of 23 celerity combat cards. All in all, that doesn’t sound too horrible because we could make the resulting deck a 60 card library to get what we needed, but the four Stutter-Steps simply have very little synergy with the rest of the concept we are going for because it doesn’t combo with the available weapons the deck has access to: Desert Eagles, Tiger Claws, Mark Vs, Sengir Dagger, and Ivory Bow. The Stutter-steps do have some synergy with Bundi, but the Brujah deck only have two and there’s just no way to build a deck around that.

In essence, any attempt to combine or work with these decks in any way will result in a subpar result, and that’s just the nature of these particular starters. Of course, that did not stop me from trying. So I made two decks from combining two of the Brujah and Torreador Starters. The Brujah Starter deck contains five Harrases, which when doubled will allow for gratuitous rushing of other minions. It has a smattering of decent bleed cards in Public Trust, and some decent combat gear with Sengir Dagger, Bundi and Tiger Claws. Unfortunately, that’s really all there is to work with. The Master Cards given allow for limited bleed defense with Major Boon, a single good combat support card in Tension in the Ranks, and… damn little else. I dare say that KRCG News Radio is a waste of pool in a deck with little intercept; sure, if your predator or prey do not have stealth then it would conceivably shut them down, but if they do have stealth then you’ve just wasted two pool. Furthermore, there’s always the temptation to use KRCG News Radio to help a cross table ally gain enough intercept, but, at a pool a whack, that’s pretty pricy.

KRCG represents an attempt at a catch and kill style strategy, but attempting such a thing is fraught with difficulty. For one, it requires an untapped vampire or many On the Qui Vive to be of any use and the way the card pool is thrown together untapped vampires are at a premium. Furthermore, if one were to try to use this strategy in a typical constructed deck, it would require the use of multiple intercept locations rather than two copies of a single unique intercept location. It would also help if the vampires themselves had some level of intercept, and two copies of Phased Motion Detector just isn’t going to cut it.

When it comes to Crypt selection, the I prefer some vampires that have votes because it allows you table talk options and can often give you vote lock at a table without a political angle. That would allow for you to diablerize opposing vampires once they had gone into torpor with impunity or convince a cross table ally to do it for you (which I actually did in one of my games with this deck). Furthermore, a built in bleed represents a powerful option for what is, in essence, a bleed and bruise deck. For all of these reasons, I’m going with the IC member Adana de Sforza.

If one tried to construct a deck without the two large vampires Adana de Sforza or Jana Berger, then you’d be left with Tomaine, Herbert Westin, Reginald Moore, and Garret. Unfortunately, Herbert Westin is a horrible vampire for this deck because of his discipline spread: OBF PRE pot for a five cap vampire is all kinds of horrible. So now we’re down to just three vampires, and there’s no way to design a deck around small and midcap vamps. Once again, with this deck, we are all kinds of screwed.

Here’s the deck I ended up with:

Crypt
Adana dr Sforza(11) x4 CEL POT PRE PRO OBF aus +2 Bleed, IC
Tomaine(6) x4 CEL POT PRE Primogen
Garret(3)x2 pot pre
Reginald Moore(4)x2 PRE

Master Cards 8
Tension in the Ranks x2
Potence x2
Celerity x2
Major Boon x2

Reaction Cards 3
On the Qui Vive x3

Combo Cards 6
Resist Earth’s Graspx6

Political Action Cards 5
Finding the Path x4
Year of Fortune

Actions 14
Public Trust x6
Harass x8

Combat 48
Immortal Grapple x4
Weighted Walking Stick x6
Psyche x6
Taste of Vitae x6
Stutter Step x4
Brute Force x10
Slam x4
Relentless Pursuit x2
Torn Signpost x6

Equipment 6
Sengir Dagger x2
Bundi x4

This deck is a combat deck. I’ve designed a lot of combat decks in my time, but this is one of the most rugged of combat packages. Every time this deck gets in combat with an opposing vampire, they seem to go to torpor empty- which is nice. Unfortunately, that’s the decks only saving grace. It requires the player to attempt to leverage that one dimensionality of the deck to deal with all other elements of a VTES game. A daunting challenge (both times I played the deck I got zero VPs), but one that at least teaches the player the pitfalls of a combat only focused strategy.

Crypt

7 x Stanislava, Gangrel Inner Circle Member, +2 Bleed, Allies can not block, retainers lose abilities in combat, DOM CEL PRO FOR ANI
5 x Ingrid Rossler, Prince of Geneva, +2 Transfers when ready, ANI PRO FOR dom

Library

Master Cards

Golconda: Inner Peace x3
Ecoterrorists
Dominate
Legendary Vampire
The Barrens
Dreams of the Sphinx x3
Storage Annex x2
Minion Tap x5

Actions

Restoration x2

Political Actions

Anarchist Uprising
Ancient Influence
Ancilla Empowerment
Banishment
Disputed Territory
Parity Shift x2
Reins of Power

Action Modifiers

Conditioning x3
Earth Control x5
Forced March x8

Combat

Claws of the Dead x4
Earth Meld x4
Forn of Mist x4

Reaction

Guard Dogs x5
Cat’s Guidance x4
Obedience x4
Deflection x8
Second Tradition: Domain x2

Combo Cards
Rapid Change x4
Murmur of the False Will x7

This deck would be classified as a tool box by most VTES players because it does a lot of different things. It has a lot of cards to end combat, but it also has some aggravated hand damage which can give your opponents pause about getting into combat with you. It has some political actions which it can call to great effect, but for the most part it seeks to redirect bleeds to its prey and, if needed, finish the prey off with a bleed for 6 at stealth.

More than anything, the deck is a reactive deck. It has 30 reaction cards (more than a third of the deck) dedicated to simply reacting to what other people do. Combine that with the stealth cards that you can play on your turn, and its very clear that the deck seeks to largely stay out of combat and spent most of its time simply reacting. The deck works best against a heavy bleed predator because it has a combined total of 14 cards to redirect bleeds as well as additional cards (Guard Dogs) that allow minions to untap in order to surprise would-be bleeders with last minute redirects. As such, this deck is excellent for tournaments when many competitors dust off their sneak and bleed decks to try to win the tournament.

In the absence of a strong sneak and bleed predator, the deck can still generate its own offense: the votes can cause quite a bit of damage and the Murmur of the False Will can be used to pump Ingrid’s bleeds to 2. A bleed of Stanislava for 3, plus Ingrid for 2 can wear down preys who are not prepared for bleeds at stealth. However, most preys will be packing their own bleed redirects, which thwarts this offensive. At that point, you have to either decide whether its best to try to block their minions with a few of your limited intercept cards and torpor them with the few aggravated hand damage cards you have, or rather whether you should just wall up and wait.

The deck can do a lot of waiting. It has a strong vote presence, so its a natural deck to include in a vote coalition which means a lot of cross table votes will do one point of pool damage to your prey simply to get your six votes. It has a lot of defense against combat decks, particularly ones that can’t deal with a strike to end combat, so it doesn’t have much to fear there, and we’ve already gone over how many defenses the deck has against a bleed deck. As such, if the time isn’t right to act, the deck can simply wait a few turns until the picture changes. Often, your predator may be ousted by a new aggressive sneak and bleed predator, or perhaps your grand prey will start torporing your preys minions. The situation can often change in a turn or two and then it will become a far better time to act.

Meanwhile, the deck actually has a great mechanic that it can use which it’s waiting: the tap and Golconda combo. The crypt is simply multiple copies of Ingrid and Stanislava. You should transfer up Ingrid first, and her additional transfers should help you to bring up Stanislava in 2 additional rounds. From there, you can Minion Tap Stanislava, to being her down to a low pool total, and start transferring up yet another Stanislava. When the time is right, you can Golconda Stanislava out of play during your master phase to gain 11 pool, and then transfer up another copy of her during your influence phase to start the process all over again. The can lead to some ridiculous pool totals if no one interferes with you.

That was unfortunate. VTES, like any collectible card game, isn’t much fun if there’s not a community to play with. With the failure of the Austin playgroup, Dallas stood as the only regularly operating playgroup in Texas that I knew of. Worse still, the Lafayette, Lousiana playgroup seemed to be following a similar fate. It’s understandable that CCG playgroups die, and quite frankly amazing that a game such as Vampire: the Eternal Struggle, which was originally published under the name Jyhad in 1994, is till being played at all. The vast majority of CCGs that came out after Magic: the Gathering have merely been splashes in the pan that died out shortly after introduction. I remember playing the CCG Netrunner, which was the third game published by Wizards of the Coast under the monicker “Deckmaster” and enjoying it a good deal, only to see if soon fade from play altogether.

Let’s face it. If Wizards of the Coast can’t get a CCG off the ground, it just doesn’t bode well for the viability of the genre. That’s not to say certain games don’t find an audience, they do. But the key seems to a small publisher finding, nurturing, and responding to the needs of a small market. In our case, the small market of VTES players seemed to be getting smaller by the month.

It’s can be discouraging to watch the player base decline. You start to wonder when you should just get out of the game altogether or find a new hobby. Of course, we in Dallas have also had some victories in attracting new players. So it’s not all doom and gloom. Still, I didn’t like seeing the Austin playgroup fall off the map.

In early June, I logged onto the #VTES chat channel on Sorcery.net to spend some time chatting with Team Ossain (as the VTES players who frequent that channel call themselves). I saw the usual faces there for Matt Morgan and Kevin Mergen, but I also saw Eric Leal- an Austin player. My curiosity was certainly piqued because the Austin playgroup had been declared “dead” after all. Come to find out, Eric had been diagnosed with Hodgekins Lymphoma and was logging in from his Chemotherapy appointment. Of course I was sorry to receive this news. If there was a silver lining, it was that I have a good friend of mine who has survived two separate bouts with Hodgekins Disease, so I new it to be far more beatable that other forms of cancer.

Eric and I made some small talk and he said that the Hodgekins disease was probably why he stopped playing VTES: the disease rendered him too tired to do much of anything. But that now that he was on the mend that he’d really like to play some cards. I wanted to make that a reality for him.

I went to the main bulletin board for VTES in the Texas area, Presence and made a post where I described the situation to try to arrange an organized VTES event in Austin. Ben Peal, who’s both an excellent VTES player as well as an investment client of mine, kindly agreed to make the event an official qualifier. I attended and won the event last weekend. Here’s the post I made to the Presence forum about the deck I used:

Here’s the Decklist

Crypt
Enkidu, the Noah x5 (11) for ANI CEL OBF POT PRO, Red List, Rush any minion, +2 Strength
Aksinya Daclau x4, cel tha (9) ANI FOR PRE PRO, Discard a master to redirect bleeds
Janey Pickman x3, (6)for ANI PRO, can burn a blood to make hand damage aggravated

Master Cards (22)
City Gangrel Connections
Fame
Giant’s Blood
Life in the City x6
Pentex Subversion
Powerbase: Montreal
Perfectionist x2
Regent x2
Talons of the Dead x2
Tension in the Ranks
Villein x3
Yawp Court

Political Actions (1)
Anarchist Uprising

Actions (2)
Dark Mirror of the Mind x2

Retainers (11)
Homunculus x2
J.S. Simmons, Esq.
Jackie Therman
Mr. Winthrop
Murder of Crows
Raven Spy x4
Tasha Morgan

Allies (1)
Mylan Horseseed

Action Modifiers ( 8 )
Forced March x8

Reactions (11)
Cat’s Guidance x3
Guard Dogs
Rat’s Warning
Sense the Savage Way x6

Combat (34)
Canine Hoard
Carrion Crows x6
Drawing Out the Beast x6
Flesh of Marble x8
Immortal Grapple x5
Sideslip x4
Taste of Vitae x4

I’ll be making a blog post at some point, but this deck has an interesting history. I’d been tinkering with it for years, most of the time as an Enkidu Anarck deck hoping to make use of Diversion. Then I came up with the current combat package by just copying the typical Gangrel combo of Crows/Drawing/Flesh of Marble. Seemed to work alright.

Paul Johnson, an LA player, has gone through a divorce recently and loved to come play with us, but didn’t have the time to put a deck together. I would always lend him this one, and, when he was done, he’d tell me what to change. In this way, Paul continually tweaked it for a couple of play sessions. Then, one day, a bunch of LA players were done with their round early, so I asked them to break the deck apart and make suggestions. The players were, Paul Johnson, Matt Wedge, and Robert Scythe. They recommended 11 card swaps that included cards I hadn’t considered before such as Talons of the Dead (which was a huge improvement) and Canine Hoard (“You need 1 just in case”). Also recommended was Anarchist Uprising (“It’ll always pass if there’s a breeder deck at the table”) and so on.

The only last improvements I made were swapping out two Shadow of the Beast for two Dark Mirror of the Minds. The deck is expensive and, unless you get your Villein, you can get run over pretty quickly. So I wanted those to help with the pool management. It’s a marginal all whether that or Shadow is Better.

Thanks to the LA crew for helping me make the deck. I wouldn’t have won without your suggestions.

As far as an actual tournament report, during the first round, I had Jon Glass as my prey playing Malkavian Madness Network deck and my predator was Taylor playing a Beast rush deck. My grand predator was playing a Lutz vote deck and it soon seemed clear to everyone that the game was going to quickly collapse to a three player game between Jon- Lutz vote- and me. Unfortunately, I had Villeined off of Enkidu to go down to 4 blood, and he proceeded to get torpored by Jon and Lutz blocking Enkidu and every opportunity and taking 3 agg to the face and only giving hands for 1. This was rather frustrating considering the six Life in the Cities and four sideslips in the deck, not to mention the Taste of Vitae. Oh well. Jon then won in the heads up game.

In round 2, my prey was an Ishtari deck and my grand prey was the Beast rush deck. Andy Smith was playing my predator with a hunters deck and my grand predator was the Lutz vote deck. I figured Lutz would eventually grind out Andy’s hunters, so I never blocked or interfered with any of Andy’s tool up actions. My prey reduced my grand prey to a single pool, which caused me to adopt a policy of minion elimination. I would torpor or burn every minion my prey brought out, else I feared he would oust his grand prey. Having the threat of his predator eliminated, I encouraged the Beast rush deck to attack forward into the Lutz vote deck which eventually ousted Andy. I ousted my prey, and then proceeded to torpor or burn every minion that was left on the board (sorry Beast) at which point I was declared the winner.

In round 3, my prey was Adrian playing a Ravnos wall deck and my predator was an Ishtari vote and bleed deck. I was a bit concerned about the speed of the pool damage that the Ishtari deck could shell out, but Enkidu was able to eventually come up and start torporing people. After crippling my predator, I was able to start gradually putting forward pressure on my prey by rushing his minions. I ended up with the game win this round and three VPs as I spent the rest of the game building strength, bleeding, and torporing minions.

In was second seed in the finals behind Jon’s Madness Network deck which was having one hell of a day. I chose to sit under Eric Leal’s weenie Potence deck knowing that my Flesh of Marble would reduce most of the threat to my minions. Of course, my grand predator was the Lutz vote deck again, and I knew he would spend most of his game rushing backwards anyway. This would give me time to set up Enkidu. Ethan was playing a !Torreador Palle Grande deck and Jon chose to sit as my grand prey with the Madness Network. Lutz put a lot of forward pressure on Eric, but soon Jon was able to oust both of them in consecutive turns with Homunculus Malkavians bleeding at the end of the each players turn.

Jon chose to make a deal with me to make it a heads up game after I ousted Ethan, which was a good choice for him. He was sitting looking at a Pentex Subversion and an Ivory Bow. He waited till I ousted Ethan (which was made much faster since I was using Askinya to redirect a three point bleed into my prey every single player turn) and then Pentexed Enkidu and equipped an Ivory Bow to start torporing minions. I had long since ran out of deck, but I held the 1 Canine Horde in the hand that I had drawn much earlier in the game. Thus when Jon ran out of deck and relied on the Ivory Bow to start torporing my minions I was able to destroy it with first strike. I was able to slowly pull ahead with Askinya as she had a Raven Spy, a Perfectionist, a Homunculus, and a Murder of Crows.

Humorously enough, the only reason I was able to win was because Askinya had a lot of retainers that would normally be held by Enkidu, and the only reason for that was because my opening crypt draw did not include Enkidu. Therefore I brough up Askinya and had her recruit the retainers that were in my hand at the time. Gradually Askinya was able to grind down Jon’s minions and I was able to free Enkidu from the Pentex subversion. Jon had a ton of pool (roughly 30 or so) but all of his minions were in torpor so he wasn’t able to bring any more out. He conceded, and I was declared the winner.

• Blood Rage or Blood Fury
• Theft of Vitae
• Walk of Flame
• Drain Essence

Walk of Flame is a powerful card, but it (like Cauldron of Blood and Drain Essence) requires you to make it beyond the first round of combat, and that requires some form of press based combat. I found from play testing that Traps worked quite well with the overall combat package. You could drain off the opposing vampires blood with a Theft in the first round and, if all went well, burn the opposing minion with a Walk of Flame in the subsequent rounds. That makes for a fairly threatening combat package. It can’t deal with a strike to end combat, but that’s something the Tremere are notorious for having a problem with.

Having decided on a rough combat package, the next step was in selecting the crypt. The Group 1 Tremere vampires include:

• Ulegh Beg, the Watcher:(10) THA DOM AUS cel for pot, Justicar, Extra Discard
• Cassandra, Magus Prime (10) THA DOM AUS pre cel, Primogen, +1 Strength
• Lazarus (9) THA DOM AUS pot cel, Primogen, Strike for 1R
• Cardano (9) THA FOR DOM aus cel ani, Prince of Boston
• Justine, Elder of Dallas(8)THA DOM AUS obf
• Astrid Thomas (7)THA DOM aus pot
• Thomas Thorne(6)DOM tha cel aus ani
• Lydia Van Cuelen(6) tha dom aus pre, +1 Bleed
• Sabine Lafayette(5)tha pot dom aus, During untap, can move 1 bleed to another ready Tremere
• Merril Molitor(5) THA dom aus, Can treat 1 point of agg as normal once per combat
• Sarah Cobbler(4) THA dom
• Ignatious(4) tha dom aus
• Jing Wei(3) tha dom
• Dr. John Casey dom aus
• Roreca Quaid(2) tha

In looking over the original Jyhad set Tremere vampires, it’s pretty clear that the designers tried to give the Tremere access to celerity; five of the original fourteen vampires have minor celerity. If you had a mind to, you could add some celerity skill cards and add some Psyches!. That would give the combat package both a reliable press to get to the second round as well as an answer to strikes to end combat. Psyche!, however, is a card that’s in short supply when it comes to putting these decks together, so I decided against that. Eventually, I decided to go with a traditional bruise/bleed strategy. For me, it was too card intensive to both pursue a combat strategy as well as a intercept strategy, so the deck I designed was oriented towards bleeding my prey with minions that had superior thaumaturgy.

Here’s the crypt I settled on:

Crypt

• Cassandra x2 (10) DOM AUS THA cel pre, Primogen, +1 Strength
• Ulegh Beg- The Watcher x2 [10- DOM AUS THA cel for, Justicar, Extra Discard
• Lydia Van Cuelenx2 [6- tha aus dom pre, +1 Bleed
• Merill Molitor 5- THA dom aus, can treat 1 point of agg as normal
• Sarah Cobbler x2 [4- THA dom
• Ignatius 4- tha dom aus
• Jing Wei 3- dom tha
• Roreca Quaid 2- tha

Lydia Van Cuelen’s inherent +1 bleed seemed important to the bruise/bleed strategy. Unfortunately, she has inferior Thaumaturgy, so I decided to include a couple of Thaumaturgy Master Discipline cards. The resulting crypt featured five vampires with inferior Thaumaturgy, which the two Master Discipline cards should adequately cover. Here’s the library I went with:

Library

Master Cards(9): Thaumaturgy(2), Protracted Investment(2), Mob Connections, Metro Underground, Haven Uncovered(2), Chantry,

Political Actions(1): Ancient Influence

Actions(4): Govern the Unaligned(2), Cryptic Mission (2),

Action Modifiers(4): Threats/Conditioning (4),

Reaction(11): Wake With Evening’s Freshness(3), The Spirit’s Touch(2), Telepathic Counter(2), Telepathic Misdirection(4)

Combat(25): Blood Fury/Blood Rage(7), Trap(5), Walk of Flame(4), Drain Essence(2), Dead-End Alley(2), Theft of Vitae(5)

Equipment(6): IR Goggles(2), Flak Jacket(2), Phased Motion Detector(1), Sport’s Bike

As I mentioned earlier, the Tremere are challenged in that they need to have a combat package, but neither of their other two disciplines offers much in the way of combat support. I added some equipment to the deck to help round out both their combat, as well as the threat that their intercept. This gave the deck some inherent problems. Because none of the vampires could take more than one action a turn, the deck was ponderously slow in you brought up a ten cap such as Cassandra or Ulegh and spent a couple of turns having that vampire take equip actions. The only solution was to first transfer up a small vampire, such as Roreca, and have her take all the equip actions for the equipment in hand, then have the larger vampire take a single equip action to take all of the equipment off of the smaller vampire. This was not an elegant solution, but it was the best I could do.

The inclusion of Metro Underground allowed for key minions to be untapped at the end of the turn; granted, it cost a pool every time, but it was as close to multi-acting as I could get with the basic Jyhad set. The Telepathic Counters allowed for an untapped vampire to defend against bleeds while still remaining untapped to later redirect another bleed or block (and hopefully torpor or burn) an acting minion.

Still, the deck suffered. A having a strongly offensive deck, such as the Malkavian sneak and bleed deck or even the Ventrue or Nosferatu vote deck, as a predator often spelled certain doom for this fragile deck. I set out to try to change that. I tried an unusual mix (for me at least) of many intercept cards, Telepathic Counters, and bleed redirects. I included many bleed redirects in this deck (8, which is more than any of the other decks) but they are Telepathic Misdirections or Murmur of the False Wills, they are all useful in a two player game; this is a real benefit compared to most decks which have to discard their deflections when the game becomes two player.

Here are the changes I made to bring the deck to its new configuration.

Changes:

-1xSarah Cobbler
-Jing Wei +2xAleph
-2xCryptic Mission +2xSpirit’s Touch
-2x(Blood Fury/Blood Rage) +2xTelepathic Misdirection
-2xDrain Essence +2xMurmur of the False Will
-1xTrap +Hawg
-1xWalk of Flame +Thaumaturgy
-Ancient Influence +Wake with Evening’s Freshness
-2xDead End Alley +Telepathic Counter
+Rutor’s Hand
-Sport’s Bike +Pier 13, Port of Baltimore
-4x(Conditioning/Threats) +4xEnhanced Senses

Unfortunately, the Jyhad Tremere vampires do not feature midcaps that have superior Thaumaturgy. Vampires such as Aisling Sturbridge, a 5 cap with THA AUS dom, are simply not to be found in the Jyhad crypt. This necessitated the inclusion of Aleph in the crypt. Although not a Tremere, he has the right disciplines with AUS dom. His superior auspex allows him to redirect, intercept, or reduce to zero most problematic bleeds, and that takes a lot of the pressure off of the ten cap vampires to always be ready.

Although I would build the deck differently if card rarity weren’t a factor (Eyes of Argus would be amazing in this deck), this deck ended up being the best Tremere deck I’ve ever made. It does particularly well when it had a sneak and bleed predator, or one that depends on actions at low stealth. It still has the power to burn minions in combat, and, with the inclusion of Rutor’s Hand and Pier 13, Port of Baltimore, now has a multi-acting component to it that was sorely lacking for the earlier version. While it’s true that neither of those cards are Jyhad cards, they are both relatively inexpensive to obtain, and so make an easy inclusion. I’m looking forward to trying out this deck in my next play session.

VTES was designed to be a group game. It doesn’t play well with only two players, and many players won’t bother with a 3-player game either. Four or (preferably) five seems to be the preferred number of players to capture the dynamics of the game. It has consistently been recognized as the best multiplayer CCG ever. That also means that it requires a decent player base in order for play groups to really thrive.

The economics of the game are also a bit unusual. Typically the first printing of a collectible are the most sought after and valuable. Not so with VTES. Wizards of the Coast, the company that introduced the game back in 1994, wasn’t sure how many cards to print for their initial print run. The only guide they had to go off of was how many M:tG cards they were selling, so they ended up printing a lot more VTES cards (which was originally titled “Jyhad”) that were actually demanded. The end result was that of all the VTES cards in circulation, the cheapest and most plentiful ones are the ones originally printed. Which is the opposite of what one would expect.

At the start of 2005, I challenged myself to do something with all these original printing Jyhad cards. You could practically get them just for the asking and it seemed a good opportunity for someone to do the classic business maneuver of adding some value to them by repacking them in a more desirable form. Of course, in the world of CCGs, one of the hardest things to come by is a good deck design. So I decided to design decks comprised almost entirely of original Jyhad card stock and make them as competitive as I could. I nicknamed this project the Barbed Wire Project, because it reminded me of the original sales pitch for Barbed Wire in the Old West, “Cheap as dirt and strong as whiskey.” That was my goal for these decks.

I decided to build seven different decks from the Jyhad cards, for each of the seven vampire clans that was introduced in the original set. I knew going in that certain clan decks would end up being much stronger than other clan decks because certain strategies are inherently favored compared to other strategies. Bleeding (which is the game term for directly reducing your opponents life total) at stealth (which makes it hard to stop) is a dominant strategy for victory and a tournament favorite while combat (directly attacking your opponent’s minions) is commonly regarded as a weak strategy. Each clan has certain specialities and the clans such as the Malkavian, which can easily bleed at stealth, are going to enjoy advantages over the Gangrel, who are really only good for fighting in the basic Jyhad set.

The Tremere clan are in a kind of strange middle ground. In terms of the Jyhad set, they have the powers of dominate, which gives them tremendous bleed potential, but no stealth abilities. This situation is largely true of the clan in all sets of the game, but a single stealth card was recently introduced and in the 2008 North American Championship, and I began seeing Tremere “sneak and bleed” decks. The Tremere’s other disciplines, are Thaumaturgy, (which is mostly a combat discipline) and Auspex (which allows you to counter stealth on your opponent’s actions).

The reason the Tremere are a difficult clan to play. They can bleed for a lot with dominate, but they don’t have the stealth to get it through. They can try to go with a traditional “Bruise and Bleed” strategy of a combat threat combined with a strong bleed threat, but that runs into two problems: that strategy is not the strongest, and the Tremere only have Thaumaturgy for their combat. Their other two disciplines, Auspex and Dominate, have very little in the way of combat support. This makes it challenging to have a strong combat threat.

One of the things I’ve found is that the same issues I come up with in constructing that Barbed Wire Decks are the same issues that confront a clan in the larger sense. Sometimes a certain vampire (minion) will be introduced to compensate a clan for its overall perceived weakness, but often what will happen is we will see decks surfaced that are based on that particularly strong minion on not the rest of the clan. For instance, the Gangrel are perceived as a rather weak clan because combat seems to be the best thing they can do with their discipline set. However, Stanislava (who was introduced in the Dark Sovereigns expansion) has superior dominate and +2 bleed. This allows for people to put sneak and bleed decks together utilizing Stanislava’s protean ability for stealth. The Stanislava is certainly a viable deck (I’ve won with it myself) but it doesn’t correct for the overall problem that the Gangrel have a problem.

In my next post, we’ll examine how the I tackled the problems specific to the Tremere in designing my latest version of the Barbed Wire: Tremere Deck. Meanwhile, if this topic interests you, I suggest you take a look at the VTES player’s guide. Ben Peal, an American VTES player who has racked up the most North American Championship wins, is one of the co-authors of the player’s guide to VTES. He is also one of my investing clients so I tend to post discussions and emails between the two of us on this blog. The VTES players guide reviews the dominant strategies for each clan as well as the game in general, and is recommended reading if you are a serious VTES players.