Friday Night Fight!

I had some free time last Friday so I called for an impromptu Vtes game at my condo. Usual worries were getting enough players to show up and the fact that I didn’t bring any Vtes decks so I had to either use an old deck lying around the place or build one from scratch. I did both with some tweaks hehe.

Since I got my KoT earlier than expected I brought along all the new vamps from the set leaving behind all the Toreadors and Caitiff because I wasn’t inspired enough to play around with them. That left the new Ventrue and Brujah vampires with their shiny new off clan disciplines and fancy artwork and the Gangrel who certainly looked ferocious enough to make a few interesting combat or intercept decks. The Nosferatu and Malkavians were kinda just thrown in the box for emergencies.

I wasn’t surprised when I found out that I didn’t have enough time to make a totally new concept deck using the vamps. I had dome errands to do during the day and they only left me with an hour to make a deck which is normally impossible for me since I like fiddling around with card ratios. I quickly decided to do a semi-trick deck with a hopefully fun twist. An all Jyhad Deck! The deck had to contain nothing but cards from the Jyhad base set with no banned or restricted cards.

I had a plan to play the first game using an all Jyhad crypt and library so I settled on the most tried and tested deck design for that particular base set: Old School Ventrue Law Firm! Nothing like the good old team of Nash, Crowley and Bridges to get a game going hehe. As a further twist to make things interesting I decided to play it using 8x First Traditions and Parity Shifts. Can I have some cheese with that? Yes please.

It actually did well but not as spectacularly as I would hope, managing to get only 1-2 VPs but no table win. There was a surprising number of votes on the table! Intercept wasn’t much of a problem strangely since adding some seductions for key actions was often more than enough to get through.

The next game was also different since I then switched crypts using the new KoT Ventrue with Posh Spice Justicar Beckham to speed vampire transfers. This game I had some minor problems with intercept as David managed to get an early KRCG and I drew into my Sudden Reversal one turn too late. Despite all that it still managed to get around 1-2 VPs before being ousted in the end. Then again my memories of that night are kinda fuzzy since we all stayed up til 3:30ish in the AM! This was due to a late game start of 9:00 PM due to the heavy pre-christmas traffic.

Despite it being the same old pure Jyhad deck, using it with the new vampires made it seem different. The titled Vampires were lower in capacity and had some interesting powers. It goes without saying that the discipline spreads were also different but with a trend towards DOM for more bursty bleeds with Conditioning.

Last game was a 6 man table but Aurelio had to leave on account of the late hour and the fact that his girlfriend was also falling asleep hehe. Here’s the funny part: we decided to let him scoop up his cards but left his pool where it was for his predator to go through. So in effect it acted like a pool wall between me and Faust. Interesting thing that happened? That pool wall lasted longer than Faust and Jason! It even gave David a hard time hahaha! Definitely the best predator I could hope for hehe. I switched decks and decided that one of the decks lying around the condo was still salvageable with a minor tweak. So I used the good old fashioned Stanislava Baltimore Purge deck -evil grin-

The MVP card of the night? Forced March. Nearly everybody was using it that night! I also noticed that Stanislava had the necessary disciplines to carry it off so I quickly added some before the last game. Another fun thing about the last game was that I didn’t even need to purge in the first 30 minutes since a few vampires went to torpor through some unfortunate combat care of Mark and Faust. Stanislava happily graverobbed some of David’s and Jason’s vampires with Beastmeld for unblockable tech. Needless to say that I got my only game win on that last game.

I’d like to thank the guys who showed up for playing until the early hours (3:30am!!) of the morning: Faust, David, Aurelio, Jason (Faust’s friend) and Mark.

Hot New Justicars From Keepers of Tradition

Took some pictures of the new Justicars. I think I’ll try to make a deck using all three of them haha! They have several overlapping disciplines so it’s not exactly an impossible deck concept. Just not tourney viable but fun!

Keepers of Tradition First Impressions

The cards are finally here! There’s so much information to process so this may get cut into several posts. The best thing for me about a new VTES expansion is always the new Crypt cards. The first thing I always consider when making a new deck is which vampires can do the job effectively and as cheaply as possible. I don’t want to waste my transfers and pool on a 9 cap titled vampire when a 6 cap vampire has all the disciplines I need at superior.

So I was very excited to find out that each clan in the Camarilla would be getting around 16-17 new vampires! More vampires means more options for deck building and that’s always good.

The first thing I noticed when I opened the starters was the packaging. It looked similar to the Blood Shadowed Court mini expansion which had a plastic protector covering the traditional cardboard starter box. I took a photo using my iPhone’s camera indoors so the picture may be a bit blurry. I must say, the new packaging was a very nice surprise! I think future VTES expansions should follow this trend. The standard cardboard box actually doesn’t have any indication of what clan it contains so it’s perfect for sealed deck play. Best thing about the new vampires? The artwork! No more mono artists per expansion like the much talked about Christoper Shy and Larry Snelly (although I do have a fondness for Snelly’s non-photoshopped work).

When I was sorting through all the vampires from the booster box I opened there were 3 standouts that immediately grabbed my attention: the three hot new Justicars from Brujah, Ventrue and Tremere. And I really mean Hawt. The new Tremere Justicar alone is almost soft core porn! I think a lot of people will play her just for the janet Jackson nipple effect hehe.

The Calm Before the Storm

Things are a little slow this month as players are still waiting for the release of Keepers of Tradition. Spoilers for all the pre-cons have been released and new library cards and vampire crypt information is almost complete. It’s interesting to see how the new group 4-5 Camarilla clans have been designed. The Toreadors have a number of vamps with either dom or DOM. The ventrue on the other hand have lost the much needed OBF and gained some interesting new off clan disciplines that seems to be pushing them towards combat or intercept. Hardestadt is really going to be a fearsome combat monster.

I can’t wait to get the new cards so I can try to make a working Ventrue combat deck using: POT FOR and PRO! A Ventrue intercept deck is also interesting…

Hopefully I can tear myself away from WOW to make some more Vtes decks before Keepers hits the Philippines but I doubt it hehe.