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.