From a metagame perspective it looks like a lot of players went for sneak-bleed decks which was kinda appropriate given the status of the tournament. I saw at least 2 Malk 95 sneak bleed, one of which made it to the finals and 2 DOM/OBT bleed decks (Lasombra and Kiasyd respectively)

The only straight forward combat deck that I noticed was Haig’s weenie potence deck. All other decks that had an element of combat also had another way to win/oust/defend such as intercept or votes/bleed. Mark’s Ventrue Alastor deck, Toad’s Raptor wall and Eric’s Cock Robin wall deck (which also made the finals) are just some of the decks with mixed combat themes.

Like the last major tourney we had, voting/political decks were in short supply. The only decks I could see that used political actions as a primary way of ousting was YY’s Ayo Igoli with Ventrue support deck and Paul’s Ravnos Kholo deck. Both of these decks barely got a VP after three rounds so I guess it was a good call not to play politics on that day. This is in contrast to last year’s ACC in Singapore where I saw a lot of political decks, 2 of which made the finals! (Le Fei’s Daughters of Cacophony and Gee Hwan’s Ravnos Kholo)

I played a deck I’ve always been curious about. The Girls deck. This deck has been making waves on the TWDA for some time now and when I saw the deck list, I’ve always wondered how/why it was successful. I actually researched the deck and followed some discussions on it and it’s eventual evolution. Btw, that’s an awesome thing for a deck. I love the way it evolved! From an OBF/PRE module to it’s current incarnation of just using ANI.

Based on my limited play experience with it, I can see the potential for the deck. It is indeed hard to oust. My main problem was how to oust my prey. Asides from Cybele bleeding for 3 every turn (with no stealth) I don’t see any lunge opportunities other than Fame. This is especially hard since in all three rounds of the tournament, my prey was always a wall deck with permanents (murder of crows, guardian angel Ahrimanes in the first round, .44 magnum and flak jacket Tremere with chantry in the second round, and Cock Robin with Raven Spy in the third round)

I must say, with the amount of bloating the deck can definitely survive almost any kind of sneak bleed/harmful votes. Villein/Giant’s Blood is just insane. Villein and Golconda on your own vamp is also an excellent panic button. Giving you enough pool to survive and still bring out another big cap vamp. I just question the ousting power but then again I might just be playing it wrong.

The finals table was pretty interesting in that it was mostly a bleed table with three players playing bleed and two wallish decks (although Stephen’s Ahrimanes were more of a toolbox than a focused wall)

The shocking play was seeing Eric reduced to 5 pool after just 5 minutes of play time. Gee Hwan certainly made everyone in the finals table nervous enough that they all ganged up on him in an effort to stop the big bleeds.

I saw some opportunities where Karl could’ve had a chance at winning, especially when he managed to oust Gee Hwan and Eric in one turn! This of course made the other meths nervous so a Sensory Dep on one of his Trujah stalled him. Very interesting plays in the end game by all three players!

In the end, Stephen defended his title as Asian Champion, congrats Stephen!

A nice write up on the finals table can be found in Stephen’s blog (singingvtes) and thanks to all who attended the event! A fun time was had by all! (I hope)

Can’t wait for next year’s tournament!

More details/information can be found on our FaceBook page!

Only a few days to go and I still don’t have a deck lol! It’ll be interesting to see what the current meta will be since this is a high profile tourney. Historically, the Philippine metagame will almost always have a fair number of combat decks (rush or wall) so I always keep it in mind when building my decks.

I’m excited!!!

Excitement for the upcoming major event (ACC 2011) seems like a nice reason to get out of torpor! We would have had a little over 20 players for the ACQ but some players really couldn’t make it for various important reasons. (Work, Family, Sick etc)

Still a good turn out and one of our biggest in recent years. Although back in our heyday, the largest number of players we would get for a tourney was around 25-35! I think this was during the storyline tourney with the envelopes (forgot the name now)

I already posted the tourney report/TWD somewhere in the VEKN forums and the list of qualified players over at the manila vtes facebook page. Sorry for the lack of links!

Tri Snakes with Philippine Flag elements

We’ll be doing a qualifier tourney on September 3, 2011 for practice since I’m pretty sure we’re all quite rusty with the lack of regular games.

Here’s hoping that a lot of our local methuselahs can make it to the event!

With 2011, I’ll no longer be reading this (or any other) USENET group.
I’ll still be on boardgamegeek, so feel free to post rules questions
there. —LSJ

Depending on the player, this might be a big change for vtes in terms of online presence. Extrala has already mentioned another important site for vtes news/events, the VEKN website which now includes a forum for general discussion. I’ve been using board game geek for boardgame reviews anyways so this is not gonna affect me much. Hopefully this will also promote the game with better exposure for other people who may be interested in trying out the game.

Not sure about my future posts since I hardly get the chance to play vtes here in iloilo (I blame warmachine!) but I’ll still keep on updating the few folk who read this on more vtes news/info. Oh and I still have to post my deck list from the Asian vtes championships!

I started building up on votes by influencing Lambach for his votes since I kinda sensed this table was vote heavy. True enough, Le Fei called some devastating votes on Louie doing 5 and 4 damage to his pool pretty early in the mid game. G1 at this point started negotiating with me since he felt he had no chance of ousting me with his stealth and combat. So with very little pressure from the Ravnos, I started bleeding Bann every turn. I was pretty confident with my hand since I had a nice mix of untap, intercept and combat. Bann influenced weenies and basically bled for 1 each during his turn. Louie had influenced out Theo Bell and Volker and was pretty intimidating to the Ravnos and Daughters due to the possibility of Immortal Grapple. G1 was kinda screwed since he was between Theo Bell and Lambach. A combat rush predator and a combat wall prey was just too much for his deck so he needed to wall up and bloat with consanguinus boons, basically giving me zero pressure.

I took advantage of this by building up Lambach with raptors and influencing out some other Tzimisce and bleeding Bann every turn.

The critical move of the round was when G1 used a sensory deprivation on Theo Bell, crippling the Brujah’s offense/defense. Le Fei used this move to quickly oust Louie with more votes.

At this point everyone but me and G1 was low on pool (I was using Powerbase: Montreal) so I bled through Bann and Le Fei in one turn with Lambach using a conditioning. (I only had 1 in the deck! LOL)

G1 was playing a slow game, trying his best to get half a victory point for timing out. He told me at this point I had the game win since I got 2VPs and if it times out I get another half VP. I of course wanted to get more VPs as possible so I did my best to oust him.

He took his time on his turn, stalling a bit but he did have some complicated plays (stealth vs intercept, combat ends, bloat with boons etc) while during my turn I basically bled for 1 each and collected pool from the powerbase and edge and finished my turn in less than 2 mins. This wasn’t enough as time was called with G1 down to less than 10 pool on his turn. Ah well. I had the game win anyways.

Round 3 seating was Hidetoshi (khazar giovanni) going first bleeding BK’s Salubri anti combat bleeding Me bleeding Le Fei’s daughters vote bleeding Ayukata’s anarchs

This was my first time to play with the Japanese players so I didn’t know what to expect from their decks. I was pretty confident of blocking Le Fei’s daughters as the only heavy stealth card I saw was forgotten labyrinth in the last game (she used it to beat Louie’s 2nd Tradition).

I brought out Meshenka and I think Caliban or another small weenie so I was pretty much set for defense. This was a relatively fast game for me since Le Fei started out strong with Scout calling out votes dealing 5 and 4 pool damage to Ayukata. I actually didn’t have a good hand for this round since I had a lot of untap but not enough intercept. The critical point was when BK rushed me with his 9 cap !Sal and torpored Meshenka! (He cancelled out my combat card with deathseeker) This would have been ok as I would have rescued her during my turn but he used a weenie to diablerize Meshenka! This left me with a weenie and no votes so basically Le Fei had vote lock. She swept the table soon after this. Awesome vote deck!

Players from 3 different countries break for lunch and share a table at a local hawker station

I brought along my knitted nosferatu edge for goodluck and it got me a game win on round 2!

Finals table with me about to be ousted by Le Fei's Daughters of Cacophony vote deck

BK and Bann with my little nosferatu edge in the center of the table

Danz with Louie and Ayukata and Hidetoshi

Ayukata's awesome blood counters!

Attendance was kinda small for a major tournament but this was during the time of the white-wolf announcement that vtes would no longer have any expansions so I guess that dampened some spirits.

15 players attended the event with representatives from 3 countries. (2 from Japan, 4 from the Philippines and 9 from Singapore) The tournament was held at Games Garage and it started a little after 10am (we were late getting to the venue thanks to Danz’s amazing directions)

Oh yes Danz, who, asides from giving vague directions, also gave us a wrong number for his phone! We couldn’t even call him for more directions since it was a wrong number! Eventually after a bit of wandering around, we managed to stumble upon the place. (I sense sabotage there!)

A few weeks before the event, I was planning on using my Stanislava sleeze deck but being me, I chose a different deck literally a few days before my flight. I grabbed an oldie but goodie deck for me: Tzimisce combat-intercept with Meshenka and Lambach as the main vampires. It was also a kinda trick deck because I was using raptors for my permanent intercept instead of the usual raven spy or revenant. I liked the idea of reducing my prey/predator’s hand size to give them less options for surviving my combat. This also had the potentially unfortunate effect of allowing them to cycle some useless cards from their hand if I only had 1-2 raptors of course but I didn’t put much thought into that.

Here’s how old and unmodified the deck is: I didn’t even use Deep Song which is pretty much an auto-include card nowadays. I orginally built the deck as a tzimisce showcase deck (with some warghouls) to teach some players basic vtes deck concepts like intercept-wall and combat and also to highlight the strengths of the various clans. In hindsight, some deep songs would have been useful for the tourney!

Round 1 was me bleeding Stephen playing Ian Forestal summon history (singing vtes blogger) who was bleeding BK playing Salubri anti-tribu combat (Games Garage owner?) bleeding Bann playing Obf weenie bleed/vote bleeding Derek playing Tremere bleed

First round was rough for me! I was still getting used to the Singapore vtes playstyle (much much table talk with lots of deals going back and forth) so I was still in cruise mode. Just bring out a titled vamp and tool up. Derek bled me for about 6 pool with Govern the unaligned and conditioning while Bann brought out 3 obf weenies and called some damaging votes against Derek. When I brought out Lambach (3 votes) he had to ask me for my vote support to hit his prey. Stephen was tooling up in the meantime with summon history which I didn’t block since I had my hands full with Derek’s DOM bleeds. He had 2-3 minions, one of which was Carna vs my 1 Lambach so I had to conserve my wakes. It looked bad at the start since Bann was either bleeding Derek or calling some damaging votes. This was my first mistake, I should’ve asked Bann to hit Stephen for 2 or 1 pool since I had a Cardinal but I was still getting used to the playstyle of the group.

BK was just bleeding Bann for 1 for each of his minions after securing a deal with Stephen for a max bleed of 1 pool per turn. Stephen was tooling up with allies and equipment since he basically had no pressure from me but promised to help me if I don’t block certain actions. Notice the deals going around the table? Yeah pretty common for most groups but keep in mind that I was kinda rusty playing vtes and I usually do deals in a less direct way, more like suggestions!

At a certain point in the game, Stephen sent the Remnant of the endless storm after Derek’s DOM vampire since I was down to less than 5 pool. He wisely left Carna alive (with the heart of cheating) to block Bann’s bleed attempts in a nice table balancing way.

Being left with just Carna, I was pretty confident of blocking Derek’s only bleeder with my Lambach who had tooled up with about 2 raptors. The only way Derek could bleed me successfully was if he got a seduction (which he did once or twice) and so I was able to finally focus my attention on Stephen. I blocked some of his minions or I attempted to bleed him and he blocked me with a werewolf, I forget at this point, but the end result was I destroyed 2-3 of his minions with my combat.

Highlight of the round for me was when i was down to 5 pool and Derek bled me with Carna using Govern the Unaligned and Seduction, I took the bleed and he modified with a conditioning. Luckily I just drew into a telepathic misdirection so I bounced it to Stephen (who had 6 pool) and it would have ousted him but he deflected it to BK who at that time had tapped all his vamps and no wakes. He was also down to 6 pool and Derek declared his conditioning at superior (a mistake for him) thus giving Stephen the VP. It snowballed from there since everyone was at 6 pool or less. Bann bled through Derek and Stephen got Bann, I was down to 1 pool for several turns and Lambach was also low on blood (1 blood also for several turns). Eventually stephen bled me for the game win.