Monodiscipline Deckbuilding Challenge #3: Obtenebration

This latest entry in the NWWYP series is a bit more adventurous than previous efforts. Obtenebration is a support discipline rather than a meat-and-potatoes affair, providing stealth and a pretty wide range of effects which are reasonably good but which aren't particularly useful for any one function. Light intercept, combat defense, one of the few combat payload cards in the game, some mostly crappy offensive combat and a few weird outlier effects are all available to vampires who sport the tentacley shadows, but most of that stuff never sees the light of day (marvel at that thematically deployed cliche!).

That's because Obtenebration is one of the better stealth disciplines in the game, and it usually comes packaged with Dominate, and in Ye Olden Dayes, was most often spotted on a hefty selection of titled vampires who often sported Presence for additional vote-related antics. Obtenebration's heavy blood cost keeps it from being a Tier One stealth discipline - accept nothing less than Obfuscate if you want to go for the top-shelf stuff, because no other discipline in the game can compete with it - but it's certainly a solid contender for second-best. Being so good at stealth, and being so closely tied to bleeding and voting, means that there haven't been many occasions for people to bother dusting off their copies of Darksight or Summon the Abyss.

Today, that changes! We're going to put an end to the tyrannical stranglehold stealth has had on the history of Obtenebration, you and I. Together, like we used to. Like a family. So step into the shadows with me, etc.

Deck Name : Shadows Fall
Author : John Eno
Description : Obtenebration intercept/combat. Test version to mine for workable ideas.

Crypt [12 vampires] Capacity min: 1 max: 8 average: 4.83333
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1x Conrad Adoula 8 DOM OBT POT ani cel Lasombra:4
1x Henri Lavenant 7 DOM OBT pot qui Lasombra:3
1x Onaedo 6 DOM OBT aus pot Lasombra:4
1x Otieno 6 OBT POT ani dom Lasombra:4
2x Andrew Emory 5 OBT aus dom pot bishop Lasombra:4
2x Ermenegildo, The R 5 DOM OBT pot Lasombra:4
1x Leila Monroe 4 dom obt pre Lasombra:4
1x Hester Reed 3 obt pot Lasombra:3
1x Lucy Markowitz 3 dom obt Lasombra:4
1x Margarite 1 obt Pander:4

I thought about including a copy or two of Dame Hollerton in here, as she's as cheap as superior Obtenebration gets. But thinking it over a bit more, I decided that it was better to make sure that my non-nerd vampires were Lasombra, so that they could reap the benefits of Drink the Blood of Ahriman (see below). Dodge/additional strike/hands for two is a lot more menacing than "well, I could dodge or strike hands for two," after all. Theoretically, keeping the focus mostly on one clan despite there being one and a half clans available with Obtenebration as a primary discipline also means that I can utilize more clan-specific cards in the library, but it turned out that there really weren't many that I wanted to use.

Library [80 cards]
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Master [16]
1x Barrens, The
4x Blood Doll
1x Channel 10
1x Elysian Fields
1x Giant's Blood
3x Jake Washington (Hunter)
1x KRCG News Radio
1x London Evening Star, Tabloid Newspaper
1x Rumor Mill, Tabloid Newspaper, The
1x WMRH Talk Radio
1x Wall Street Night, Financial Newspaper

Obtenebration really isn't meant to be a frontline intercept discipline, so I the methuselah am going to have to do some helping out on that score. I had wanted to run some Therbold Realty in here to offset the cost of the locations, but even including Club Zombie (which got dropped for its massive expense), there would have only been eight other cards for the Realty agent to encheapen, and the likelihood of drawing it late in the game and it not having any effect loomed large in my mind. Noting that the only source of bloat in the deck is by pulling blood from my vampires, and also that rather a lot of the minion cards cost blood, I decided to drop the Realties and instead put in a bunch of Jake Washingtons. He's solid bloodgain in any deck, of course, but I hope that the Drinking the Bloods will synergize well with his sometimes difficult timing window.

Action [11]
3x Abbot
1x Aranthebes, The Immortal
2x Black Metamorphosis
5x Drink the Blood of Ahriman

Having standing intercept that you don't need to tap to use is critical to decks that want to block but don't have good access to transient intercept, just like this deck. Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of options for that if your vampires don't have Animalism, but Abbot should help to fill that gap a little bit.

The Drinks are both combat offense and better than Paths of Night, hopefully. I'd been collecting Drinks for a while without any real idea of what use they'd have, and it seems to me that using them in a reactive deck is probably the way to go, as that should hopefully allow me to get some use out of them before I even need to pay for them (ie, by blocking people and fighting them on their turns). I also think that they'll be hot with the Nocturns, since that combo allows me to get a free Nocturn and untap to do something else.

I'm not sure about the Black Metamorphoses, not because they lack a strong effect, but because I'm doubtful that I'll be able to successfully complete the action to get them. They're a zero-stealth action, for some reason, and I don't expect that my combat will be scary enough to deter blockers early in the game, which is when I'd like to get the Black Mets. On the other hand, these provide some much-needed combat offense for the guys with inferior Obtenebration, who can't make use of the dodge/additional/hands for two combat package that's the focus of the deck. These cards might be better as Shades, which are much less likely to get blocked since they're at stealth to acquire and because they're not so threatening as to automatically make people want to block, and which are also half as expensive.

Action Modifier [2]
2x Leverage

My sole ousting tech. Also playable by Nocturns.

Ally [9]
9x Nocturn

As mentioned above, these guys should be really good with the Drink the Blood of Ahrimans. They're also handy for getting in cheap bleeds of one while I've still got vampires with Dominate untapped, at least until people twig to the fact that I'm not using Dominate in this deck. But that's really unlikely to happen in a blind environment, given peoples' expectations of what Lasombra decks do.

Combat [20]
10x Arms of the Abyss
4x Darkness Within
2x Entombment
2x Target Vitals
2x Weighted Walking Stick

Arms of the Abyss/hands for two sounds like a pretty good combat package, so that's what I'm focusing on here. Entombment and Darkness Within are good cards that I don't think are normally worth their cost, but they should shine when played by a vampire who's Drunk. The Target Vitals are for the Nocturns, and the Sticks should work well with the rest of the combat options.

Equipment [3]
2x .44 Magnum
1x Sport Bike

I dream of having a vampire with a Black Metamorphosis and .44, though it's unlikely to happen. I may need more intercept equipment here, like more copies of Sport Bike and possibly some Phased Motion Detectors.

Reaction [18]
5x Darksight
5x Eyes of the Night
4x Forced Awakening
4x On the Qui Vive

I know that this is awfully wimpy for a deck whose supposed main function is to block stuff, but you go to war with the army you've got. Darksight is another card that I'd normally pass over due to its cost, so this is partly an experiment to see if Drink makes it worthwhile. I may want more wake tech, particularly On the Qui Vive if I find that Nocturns are surviving past the end of my minion phase and could also wake and block something. Most of the intercept locations are usable by allies as well as vampires, so getting double duty out of free Nocturns would be great.

Retainer [1]
1x Mr. Winthrop

Well, duh.

I can already see the blueprint for a Kiasyd deck along these lines beginning to unfold in my head, one which is better thanks to more reliable intercept and combat, as well as some Dominate for bloat, bleed and bounce. But for now I'll try out this little weirdo and see what works.

It lacks any real ousting power, so I'll have to try to be Johnny-on-the-spot with regard to blocking the bloat actions of my prey. Stealth-vote will likely murder me. Real combat decks will probably have all kinds of trumps that I'll have no recourse against, except to attempt puppy dog eyes. Stealth/bleed decks will probably sneak by me, though I may be able to run them out of stealth if I get lucky, except that they'll likely turn me into their bitch if they're my initial predator. Other than that, I'm not sure what could go wrong with this masterpiece.

Monodiscipline Deckbuilding Challenge #3: Dominate

The third entry in the NWWYP series. (I guess it could be considered sort of the second entry, since Karl pointed out that the Potence deck disqualified itself via use of the prince/justicar "discipline.")

Deck Name : Guns Don't Kill People, Dominate Does
Author : John Eno
Description : Weenie Dominate with guns for combat defense and some "stealth."

Crypt [12 vampires] Capacity min: 1 max: 5 average: 3.41667
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2x Banjoko 5 DOM obt pot Lasombra:3
1x Isabel Giovanni 5 DOM NEC pot Giovanni:2
1x Kurt Strauss 5 DOM aus tha !Tremere:2
1x Gloria Giovanni 4 DOM nec Giovanni:2
1x Ingrid Russo 4 DOM for !Ventrue:2
1x Ember Wright 3 aus dom !Tremere:3
1x Saiz 3 aus dom !Tremere:3
1x Christine Boscacci 2 dom vic Pander:2
1x Mustafa Rahman 2 dom Tremere:2
1x Samson 2 dom !Ventrue:2
1x Royce 1 dom Pander:2

Standard Dominate/Govern chain here. The six guys who have inferior Dominate can all Govern down to the others who also have [dom] once they receive a skillcard. I put in two copies of Banjoko to keep as many Sabbat vampires in the crypt as possible, since I want to use Abbot and Hungry Coyote, and it's unlikely to make a difference that one guy is doubled up. As a side benefit, Banjoko prevents Fall of the Sabbat from ever being played! That's quality crypt-building right there.

Library [80 cards]
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Master [14]
2x Anarch Troublemaker
3x Dominate
1x Humanitas
1x Hungry Coyote, The
2x Jake Washington (Hunter)
3x Life in the City
1x Misdirection
1x Police Department

A good amount of bloodgain, some combat defense, and a light selection of minion-tapping tech. Originally I considered using a bunch of the intercept locations and Therbold Realty, but as I figure I'm going to be putting those cards into the ridiculous mono-Obtenebration deck I've got on the back burner, I don't want to build too many decks at the same time which are similar to each other.

As is the case in every deck which doesn't have at least one, this question needs to be answered: Why is there no Pentex Subversion here? In this case, I felt like using cheaper alternatives, and I hope to have enough combat defense to not worry too much about getting blocked. The advantages of Misdirection over Pentex are that it's cheaper, has about the same effect if you don't run into something like an Earth Meld wall as your prey, and forces someone using lots of bleed bounce or reduction to play a wake for each of those cards that they play. Since I've only got bleed as offense here and might be able to take down the unwary with my combat, I'm more worried about that last part than I am about needing to shut down one superstar.

It's a gamble to choose not to use any blood-to-pool reclamation tech, and something along those lines might very well be better than putting Dominate skillcards onto dorks in order to turn those dorks into poolgain machines via Govern - those Governs can be pretty easily blocked, after all. Since this is a prototype deck, though, I'll stick with the unconventional choice for the time being.

Action [11]
1x Dominate Kine
1x Far Mastery
8x Govern the Unaligned
1x Graverobbing

Bleed, bloat, and some miscellaneous stuff. I'll be able to play Dominate Kine every game, of course, even if at inferior, but Far Mastery and Graverobbing are the kind of cards that I like to throw into something untuned and not really tournament-worthy like this deck. I fully expect to discard them, but if circumstances come up that they turn out to be useful, they tend to turn out to be really useful.

Apparently the Abbots I mentioned above got dropped somewhere along the way, so now the only Sabbat-only card in the deck is the Hungry Coyote. I may end up putting them back in, so I'll keep an eye out for situations in which it would have been useful to have them. The Coyote is another card that I'm really not sure of, and might very well be something better. If it turns out to be the case that it's not worth the investment it requires, I'll also change out the second copy of Banjoko for Catherine du Bois.

Action Modifier [21]
5x Bonding
2x Change of Target
2x Conditioning
3x Foreshadowing Destruction
4x Seduction
1x Sleeping Mind, The
4x Suppressing Fire

If this were your daddy's weenie Dominate deck, there'd be at least twice as many bleed modifiers and probably far fewer Bonding (which is good stealth for a discipline that doesn't provide stealth, but not a good bleed mod for a discipline that's got loads of them). But I like to have the Power of Truth on my side when I say, "But it's not that kind of deck!"

The Sleeping Mind is total pants, of course, but I'm curious to see if it ever comes in handy should I find myself in a corner of the case. It would also be a funny finisher against a deck that relied entirely on Second Tradition, though I seem to be the only person who makes such decks, locally.

Is Suppressing Fire any good? Probably not, but it might mess with someone's math enough to allow me to squeak an action through now and again. Originally I thought I was going to use a giant pile of these, but their effect seems so wimpy that I just couldn't bring myself to. Should I go for what seems to be a totally nutpunchy exercise anyway? I'll put the question to the audience, and if there's a overwhelming response I'll retool the deck before playing it.

Combat [18]
4x Fake Out
6x Target Vitals
8x Zip Gun

The original plan here was to run seven or eight each of Concealed Weapon and Saturday Night Specials. The deck should play in such a way that I'll need to hang onto a lot of cards for what might be a long time - I don't have enough serious bleed mods to throw them around willy-nilly, for example - and so I didn't want to put another two-card-exclusive combo* into the deck and foul up the slow cardflow that I'm already expecting to be working around. This decision is what led to putting more bloodgain into the deck than I normally would, since the Zip Guns essentially have a cost every time that they're used. It may end up being less work to simply pay the pool upfront for the guns and save master card slots for something else, like maybe hand-management tech to make sure that I get the Concealeds and guns together.

Reaction [16]
6x Deflection
2x Delaying Tactics
3x On the Qui Vive
2x Redirection
3x Wake with Evening's Freshness

Nothing particularly special here. The low number of actions, combined with the need to not make myself very busy until it's time for a lunge, means that I can lowball the number of wakes a bit. Redirections aren't very popular, for a reason that should be clear, but I like to throw a few into decks which are looking to conserve blood.

*What I mean by this is a two-card combo in which the cards aren't playable, either usefully or at all, without each other. Concealed Weapon/Saturday Night Special is a good example of this, as the former isn't playable at all without the latter, and if you take the action to acquire the latter, it wastes the action (compared to if you'd used a Concealed to get it) and has a tendency to mess up cardflow later in the game, when you're drawing Concealeds for which you don't have any accompanying gun.

The Failure of Strength In Arms

We were hunkered down around a pile of beads and two decks each, one short and one tall, just like our ol' grandpappies used to back in the days when you couldn't get white onions because of the war. Josh's last-minute arrival to our gaming night bumped us up to the dreaded six players, but we'd already sat down and begun our first turn of a game of V:TES, so we agreed to try to play fast and set a time limit to see if we could get through a six-player game.

Game One: When Combat Decks Collide
me (Potence princes) -> Scott (Menele CEL/dom) -> Josh (Marconius vote) -> Chris (Unnamed Cog bleed) -> Greg (? barons) -> Matt (Synesios + Setites)

For this game I decided to play The Only Study of a Prince, my mono-Potence entry in the NWWYP project. Lady luck was grouchy and so sat me down next to the only other deck with offensive combat out of five other decks, meaning that Scott and I would expend a lot of effort beating each other's minions up and fail to achieve anything like victory. Joy.

On the other side of the table, Chris was had a hard time getting anything going with the Unnamed, whose bleeds of one vanished into the maw of endless bleed reduction that characterizes most of Greg's decks. Since the bleeds weren't successful, the Unnamed wasn't untapping after his Flurries of Action, meaning he wasn't able to take whatever follow-up actions he'd planned on. Greg wasn't doing much better, having drawn a lot of vote push but no Fee Stakes or political actions. Matt attempted some forward movement, but couldn't seem to scare up the stealth required to get past my Second Traditions, and I beat down his vampires enough to keep them scrambling for blood. Josh was sitting pretty thanks to Scott's deck not doing anything and me occasionally molesting his vampires. I wasn't able to get out more than one guy with superior Potence until late in the game, so my combat wasn't particularly effective, and though I did manage to deal some pool damage to Scott via my votes and twisting Josh's arm in order to give him my vote support, Matt also began landing enough bleeds of three that my pool started to look rather droopy.

It had been some time since I'd played an Anathema deck, so I made the idiot mistake of choosing Menele rather than Synesios once I'd passed one of them. Ten pool seemed so much better than eight, but I'd forgotten that Menele could fight and this incarnation of Synesios couldn't, that I needed Menele around to try to keep Josh somewhat reined in, and that I'd have been much safer stripping Matt of his primary offensive weapon than trying to take down Scott's best fighter. I wasn't particularly invested in this game, which led to a lot of mistakes, most of them revolving around Menele.

After Anathemizing him, I also put a Haven Uncovered on him, figuring that if Nikolaus's rush failed, I could follow up with some of my less fighty dorks. Nikolaus's rush did fail, and then Scott played Taste of Vitae to undo all my hard work. Soon after I got out Murat and sent him to Menele's apartment, but Murat managed to get himself knocked into torpor during his first action and only reduced Menele to two blood. I was focusing on trying to get my pool to one lower than Scott's so I could call the two Parity Shifts which had piled up in my hand, so I failed to press on to kill Menele. That turned out to be a huge mistake, as our big fights had stripped all the combat cards out of Scott's hand, so when Marconius realized that he could just stroll on over to Menele's pad and slap him into oblivion, he promptly did so.

Josh ousted Chris, and then Matt ousted me because I'd tapped out for two turns in a row without much pool or any wakes in hand. I supposed I'd been trying to cycle into some wakes? Probably the combination of waiting to clear space off the table so I could eat the Thai food I'd ordered and not thinking that I had much chance anyway caused me to slack off. Matt then ousted Scott, Greg ousted Matt, and Josh squirmed through Greg's bleed reduction to finish him off. I wasn't paying any attention to the game at that point, as Chris had broken out some Mesna shape-recognition game that he was mocking Scott and I with. Apparently I'm even worse at shape-recognition than I am at placing workermans.

Conclusions: If I want to win, I should pay attention to the game and also not play like a total gump. Getting ten pool and burning your predator's primary vampire for the cost of one action and one blood is a pretty good deal. Lowering your pool to puny levels and then not bothering to defend it doesn't make for a good path to victory. The Only Study of a Prince might actually be a good deck with some tweaking, if I take the time to learn how to play it. Warsaw Station should be doubled up in it, and I should put some more bloodgain in.

Game Two: O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Matt (Helo) -> me (Cavil) -> Scott (Kat) -> Josh (Ellen) -> Chris (Cain) -> Greg (Zarek)

After briefly considering the merits of playing another six-player game of V:TES, we decided instead to break out Galactica. Greg hadn't ever played before, but Josh didn't have his set with him and none of us felt like taking the Pegasus expansion stuff out of Matt's set, so we threw Greg into the deep end, though we decided to ship him off to Kobol rather than New Caprica to keep the game from getting too complicated. We gave him the barest rendition of the rules possible and launched into choosing characters. I picked Cavil because I didn't want to mess around with any sympathizer/sympathetic cylon rules and he's the one cylon leader whom I hadn't played yet.

We'd decided to play with a houserule that I'd first encountered at Origins whereby the allegiance of the cylon leader's agenda card determines how many hidden cylons are infiltrating amongst the humans. My agenda was The Illusion of Hope, dictating that the cylons had to win but not before the humans first reached six or more distance. Since I was playing for the cylon team, I built the loyalty deck to contain only one You Are a Cylon card.

The game started out smoothly for the humans, who assumed that I was full of hate for them since I drew Treachery during my first few turns. They got through their first jump cycle without any real excitement, in spite of me using Cavil's power to add a basestar, some raiders and civilian ships to the board. Chris chose a three-distance destination card, and I knew I had no time to dilly-dally around. I couldn't seem to find anything useful to do with Cavil's skillset and special abilities, as I was now convinced that taking an action to summon a basestar wouldn't be of too much use if the humans were cooperating well enough to skip through their jumps without much infighting. It seemed clear to me that the hidden cylon hadn't shown up yet, or was too afraid to risk exposure to really be doing much to help us win, which meant that the humans were working together so well that there was little I could do to sow distrust amongst them.

The humans skated through another jump cycle, during which they had so little to do that they threw me into the brig. I used Cavil's OPG ability to take three actions during my turn, shedding a body in order to return to the Resurrection Ship and then farming two supercrises, which seemed to be the best way to directly impact the game at that point. Chris chose another distance three destination, which meant that the other cylon had figured out his origins but also that we were pretty much sunk. Earlier in the game, Greg had assigned Chris to be his arbitrator, and it didn't take long for us to figure out who had received a coded message, as Chris's first action after the sleeper phase was to head over to the Admiral's Quarters and then use the powers of the Arbitrator to hustle Kat through a quick court-martial. He dumped his entire hand of skill cards into the check, resulting in a high enough result for him to use Cain's power to force Kat to skip the brig and head directly out the airlock. Scott revealed that he was human, surprising no one, and chose Tyrol as his replacement character.

Another jump cycle was completed while Chris was still admiral, in spite of him being an obvious cylon, but he was presented with two-distance and three-distance destinations. He picked the three, in order to tax human resources unnecessarily. Everyone's hand of skill cards was really thin, so I revealed that I'd set up a bomb on Colonial One and the humans weren't able to figure out how to defuse it before it took a chunk of their morale away and dumped Zarek into Sickbay. Morale was a bit low, and was really the only dial which had any chance of hitting bottom, but Greg made a successful speech and also used Zarek's ability to turn people into happiness. Chris revealed and joined me in cylonville, and we rejoiced to see a pair of cylon attack crises show up. I activated the raiders from the Cylon Fleet and they destroyed no less than four civilian ships, but two of those ships turned out to be decoys and the others only removed a few points of population. Sneaky humans! They ended up having plenty of people left and made an early jump, leaving us cylons wondering where the hell Kobol was and shaking our fists impotently.

Conclusions: Cavil is as bad as I suspected he'd be, at least in a six-player game. He might be good in a game with fewer players, but cylon leaders have so little power over what happens during a game that using movement abilities is critical to their success. That lack of agency is a direct result of regularly receiving fewer actions than humans and unrevealed cylons, since no one is likely to give you an XO even if you're infiltrating. Unlike Leoben and Six, Cavil's movement ability is a OPG rather than a daily special, and his daily special is generally too dependent on luck to be a worthwhile use of one of those precious actions, in a game featuring enough players (ie, five or six) that it's entirely possible that a jump cycle will be completed before your next turn.

That everyone assumed I had an anti-human agenda because I chose to draw Treachery early on was really a mistake on their part, even though they turned out to be right, due to the pro-human agendas generally containing some kind of "...but also screw over the humans in some way" clause. At the same time, it's not really worthwhile to draw Treachery rather than Engineering when playing a cylon leader, both because of that suspicion on the part of the human players (appropriate or not) and due to the low strength of the Treachery cards as compared to the Engineering cards. If you want to spike checks, it's quite likely that Engineering will allow you to do so as often as Treachery, and the value on those blue cards is higher.

The humans played well, but I think luck was definitely smiling upon them this game, to such an extent that the cylons didn't have much chance of winning. That only two of the four of the humans needed to use their OPGs is a pretty good indicator that the game never developed much in the way of tension, and they also made several self-admitted mistakes which nevertheless didn't seem to turn the tide against them. One of Galactica's greatest strengths is the way that every game plays out so differently within the same framework of rules, but the downside to that high variety is that sometimes it's possible to have games which are something of a turkey shoot for one team or the other. After the game was over, a few of us discussed the cylon agenda houserule, and came up with some other variations of it that I'd like to try out. Matt's idea was to keep two hidden cylons in a six-player game, but have the allegiance of the cylon leader determine when one of them is placed into the loyalty deck - pre-sleeper if the leader is pro-human, post-sleeper if the leader is pro-cylon - and leave the distribution of the second cylon loyalty card up to chance. I really like that idea, and I think I'll use it next time circumstances warrant.

Eli Con 2010

EliCon 2010 was a one-night gaming gathering hosted by Feuerstein the Mighty, probably as part of one of his many nefarious schemes, but it was a great time regardless of how it fit us cogs into his diabolical machine. His son Eli was good enough to give his dad the night off, mostly sleeping soundly in spite of the excited nerdery taking place just downstairs from his room.

Games played included Dominion, which I successfully managed to avoid, Ben Swainbank's prototype superhero card/boardgame hybrid, and a game called something like We Didn't Playtest This At All which totally lived up to its name. (It was like Fluxx, but even more random and less interesting. It was basically a series of cards that invented the kinds of rules that get laid down during a game of Asshole, which aren't really any fun if you're not drunk and looking to get drunker.) In addition to these appetizers, the main courses involved overt Norsemen and covert robots, so all in all a delicious feast was had. Hopefully a small beer spillage and my abuse of Eli's plates and sippy-cup won't be enough to dissuade Josh from hosting again in the future.

Game One: Drunken Fortress-Building and Snowball Fights
I haven't got much to write about the first non-warmup game I played, as I'm still so bad at worker-placement games that I can't understand their basic rhythms well enough to really get a sense of the overall shape of the game. Suffice it to say that it seemed like a lot of other people gathered materials without needing to resort to the axe, whereas I didn't seem to get anything for free unless I happened to accidentally have one of the surviving vikingmans in an area which had been cleared of hostile forces by other hostile forces. I did pretty well at the card-playing aspect of the game, winning at least as many fights as I lost and mostly losing only the fights that I didn't care much about anyway. But while everyone else's forts grew pretty substantially, my own didn't amount to much more than a circular dog run and adjacent outhouse.

By the end of the game, I'd officially had my pants beaten off. I had no pants! Very embarrassing, especially in mixed company. Not only was I dead last, the folks who were vying for the top two spots had more than double the amount of points I did. Any general advice on how these kinds of games play, or if I'm overthinking the whole affair and ascribing skilled play to what might turn out to be randomness, would be greatly appreciated.

Conclusions: I really don't know what I'm doing. My inability to correctly figure out the placement of workermans is shameful.

Game Two: Man, This Show Is Brutal
Josh (Apollo) -> Matt (Roslin) -> me (Tigh) -> Ben (Adama) -> Kevin (Tyrol) -> Jen (Starbuck)

Since Kevin had never played Galactica before, we stuck with the basic game. We chose to use the No Sympathizer variant, which meant that our resource dials began the game slightly reduced from their normal starting positions. After Josh and Matt picked their characters, I was left with the hard choice of picking a military leader or Tyrol, none of whom really excite me. Helo is pretty good by my reckoning, but picking him as the third character in a six-player game meant that I'd be spending a lot of time shooting up antirad meds rather than participating meaningfully, so I discounted him as a choice. I've found playing Adama to be boring, and Tyrol as well. Saul Tigh is probably the weakest character in the game, but given my choices and the fact that I had a bottle of beer in my hand while looking over them...well, I let destiny decide. Looking at my loyalty card revealed that I was a human, meaning that I'd be drunkenly muttering under the aegis of the first definition of "Cylon Hatred," at least until the sleeper phase.

As the game began, I suggested that Matt give up the presidency, since Roslin's a pretty terrible president and works much better as a kind of back-row artillery character, lobbing lots of Investigative Committees and Executive Orders around the table rather than trying to take a more active role. Matt wanted no part of that suggestion, and though I briefly entertained the notion of telling him to go frak himself and declaring martial law, that seemed like just a bit of a hasty play.

The matter was mostly taken out of my hands by a succession of three cylon attacks, and everyone spent their time ordering the two pilots to get themselves in gear and go kill some raiders. Unfortunately, Starbuck didn't live up to her reputation as an ace pilot, and she managed to get herself shot down twice before we made our first jump. We also took some hits to civilian ships and the resource dials, both from all the excitement in space and from some failed crisis cards. Further darkening our spirits, Ben picked a Tylium Planet as our destination for the jump, ensuring that we'd have more fuel than we'd know what to do with but leaving us woefully distant from reaching Kobol.

The second jump cycle was uneventful in terms of Explosions In Spaaaaaace, so we got right down to the business of accusing each other of being cylons. This didn't bear much fruit, as nobody seemed to be sabotaging the crises, and we blew through this jump cycle so quickly that we didn't have much time to get our bicker on. Once Admiral Ben picked another one-distance destination, though, there were a lot of groans and furrowed brows and at least one instance of the phrase "cylon admiral" being muttered.

It seemed that our allegedly cylon admiral had called ahead to his buddies in the cylon fleet and told them where we'd be heading, and they'd spent that time traveling there while we were mucking around with limp-wristed accusations during our second jump cycle, because oh my sweet bottle of ambrosia did they show up in force during our third jump cycle. We got hit with a total of four cylon attack crises during this period, and after the game was over, Matt said that he'd used Roslin's ability to bury a fifth one. Evidence suggests that the cylon One True God has a thing for statistical improbability.

During this relentless assault on everything humans hold dear, at one point it became clear due to a spiked crisis and the associated card draws that either Kevin, Ben or myself must be a hidden cylon. The indicting color was purple, of which I drew the most, so I came under some suspicion. I'm sure that this was intentional on Ben's part, but his poor choices of destination still kept the majority of suspicion on him, with me as a good second choice should he prove himself to be trustworthy. Matt decided that there wasn't any reason to take more chances, and Encouraged Mutiny to make Starbuck our admiral.

Not too long after, Ben revealed and left me with the parting gift of two handgun rounds to the chest as a reward for my decades of friendship. Thanks, buddy. That was actually a mistake on his part, since Kevin and I were the only people on Galactica at the point that Ben revealed, and he would've been better off choosing Kevin to send to Sickbay since Kevin's turn came next. It ended up not mattering much in the end, though.

Our morale had been taking a beating - the crisis that made it mostly obvious that Ben was a cylon had been caused a morale loss after several other crises that he probably spiked, in retrospect, had done the same, and the first of many civilian ships that we lost to the swarms of raiders on the board was the party barge - and was critically low at this point. President Roslin received an Executive Order to make a speech with my Strategic notes to back her, and we got a little happier, but she then started muttering about how she knew our species was doomed anyway without realizing that the microphone was still on. In spite of my providing Strategic speechwriters a second time, the human journalists had a field day with her hypocrisy and we didn't gain any more morale.

It was all over but for the task of breaking out the cylon champagne stores at this point, and humanity got too sad to bother trying to continue shortly afterward. We all sat around for a while and bitched about the fact that the crisis deck apparently held a grudge against Josh, and assured Kevin that while the game is somewhat predisposed against the human team, it wasn't normally so one-sided as this game had been. Sadly, there hadn't even been a second hidden cylon amongst us, and Ben said that he didn't really do much crisis-spiking until near the end of the game, which meant that extremely bad luck had been our worst enemy. I cast back and tried to remember if I'd ever seen a game finish before the sleeper phase and couldn't remember any instances of that happening, so we'll put this down as my Official First Time that the game ended before the sleeper phase.

Conclusions: Well, our group selection of characters kind of sucked. Characters in Galactica are designed to be balanced internally rather than against each other; Boomer's special abilities are much stronger than Zarek's, for example, but at the same time she has a crushing disability and a skill set that's not so great. It's therefore possible to have groups of characters that are weaker or stronger than others, though there's not a huge amount of variance. Three of us picked characters on the low end of the power scale (Adama, Tigh, Tyrol). Roslin was prevented from being powerful due to refusing to give up the presidency, though the president is most useful during times of peace and we didn't have much of that, so that probably didn't make a huge difference.

Having two pilots should have helped a lot, due to all the cylon attacks that came up, but there were so many raiders in the air that our pilots had to hold onto their Evasive Maneuvers just to try to stay alive, which meant that unmanned vipers were being torn apart like tissue paper. During the last attack crisis that came up, for example, Josh wanted to launch Apollo in a viper in order to get out of Sickbay, but we told him that he couldn't because there weren't any vipers left. He explained to us that the rules have been clarified to explain that pilots can take a viper off the board in order to launch in one, and I replied that I knew that, but that we only had a single viper left, and Starbuck was already in it.

Ultimately, though, I don't think that there's really anything that the human team did wrong. Even if we'd chosen better characters to play, that dense clump of cylon attacks which came up would've likely still ended us. Maybe we should've been Launching more Scouts, even in the midst of the heavy fighting, but I think those of us able to do so were assuming that probability would smooth out and we wouldn't get hit with yet more attack crises. Still might have been worthwhile, to ensure that we got jump icons and could leave the damn party already, but it can be difficult to rationalize doing so when there are actions that can be taken which provide more immediately concrete benefits. I've yet to play Dualla in a game, so perhaps next time we're playing with the Pegasus expansion, I'll choose her and see if keeping the raptors in heavy rotation in spite of what's happening elsewhere on the board is a sound strategy or not.

Monodiscipline Deckbuilding Challenge #2: Potence

While watching Thirst and contemplating how it isn't very vampirey for a vampire movie, for some reason it suddenly occurred to me that I had been needlessly conflating "mono-Potence" with "weenie Potence," and that it wasn't necessary or desirable to do so. To this end, I started casting about for ideas that could use Potence as their primary engine but not rely upon weenie vampires, and I remembered reading something about Nikolaj Wendt building a deck that was all about princes who have Potence. I also recalled seeing Dave Pennington play a deck that seemed to be built around the same core concept, so I opened up ARDB and got to work.

This is the second entry in the NWWYP project, which will probably take me the rest of the year to complete, at the rate that I actually play V:TES these days.

Deck Name : The Only Study of a Prince
Author : John Eno
Description : "War should be the only study of a prince. He should consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes as ability to execute, military plans."
-Niccolo Machiavelli

Crypt [12 vampires] Capacity min: 2 max: 8 average: 5.5
------------------------------------------------------------

2x Selma the Repugnan 8 OBF POT ani for prince Nosferatu:1
2x Nikolaus Vermeulen 7 POT ani for obf prince Nosferatu:2
1x Donal O'Connor 8 CEL DOM POT prince Brujah:2
1x Murat 7 OBF POT ser prince Nosferatu:2
1x Calebros, The Mart 5 ANI obf pot prince Nosferatu:2
1x Volker, The Puppet 5 CEL pot prince Brujah:2
1x Hector Sosa 4 POT pre Brujah:1
1x Duck 3 obf pot Nosferatu:1
1x KoKo 2 pot Nosferatu:1
1x Lupo 2 pot Brujah:1

Group 4/5 was very tempting, featuring the awesome combo of Tara and Karen Suadela, but it doesn't have much in the way of other midcap princes with Potence, particularly at superior.

Since I've only got fairly good defense in the form of hurting people (don't want to do it as it wastes my resources), the threat of hurting people (doesn't usually work in my playgroup), and Second Tradition (good), I also need to include some bloat. Parity Shifts are good but risky, plus I only own three copies that have grown-up backs, so I'm going to use a bunch of Fourth Traditions to get vampires on the cheap. To that end, I've created a staggered chain of vampires so that, hopefully, I'll be able to continually bring out fresh vampires as the game continues.

I went with an all-Camarilla crypt even though a lot of the cheapest vampires with superior Potence are Sabbat, because I want to be able to play Judgment: Camarilla Segregation without hurting myself. This will be a deck that won't have a great deal of aggressive offense and will want to knock people off the table as quickly as possible, making J:CS is a good choice.

Nosferatu not only have good midcap princes with POT (and a good special, in Nikolaus's case), they've got access to some pretty good clan cards, so I focused much of the crypt around them.

Library [80 cards]
------------------------------------------------------------
Master [14]
5x Blood Doll
1x Creepshow Casino
2x Fame
1x Giant's Blood
2x Haven Uncovered
1x Labyrinth, The
1x Papillon
1x Warsaw Station

This should be largely self-explanatory. Some people might question the addition of the stealth locations in a fighty deck, but I've found that smart players know enough to block really evil actions (like Parity Shift or a rush targeting an Anathema'd vampire) even if it means that they'll lose their blocker. Having the option to add stealth to those actions is a good investment, as long as you don't have to leave the stealth card sitting in your hand until you need it.

There may be too many Blood Dolls and not enough bloodgain in here. A second Warsaw Station might also be nice, since the card is so boss, but this is a good starting point.

Action [12]
8x Fourth Tradition: The Accounting
1x Judgment: Camarilla Segregation
1x Rampage
1x SchreckNET
1x Third Tradition: Progeny

Mostly nuts and bolts stuff. Probably could use another two Segregations if I want to get serious about ousting people. Rampage often isn't great, but the ability to punch, say, the entire city of Chicago into rubble with a single action is too funny to pass up.

Combat [34]
10x Immortal Grapple
4x Taste of Vitae
4x Thrown Gate
2x Thrown Sewer Lid
9x Torn Signpost
5x Undead Strength

Again, nothing particularly thrilling here. I apparently traded away more Signposts than I'd realized or else there'd be a tenth one here instead of one of the Undead Strengths. Though I've not no way to play them without a little help from my friends, I like having a few Sewer Lids in any Potence deck just to have an answer for people who get all smarmy about out-maneuvering me. The Gates are less good for that, but can deliver a fair amount of damage while possibly keeping my minions safe from harm.

Political Action [12]
2x Anathema
2x Archon
5x Kine Resources Contested
3x Parity Shift

I don't have enough available actions or any vote push to justify playing any more votes. Realistically, this is probably already too much, since I've got no other means than getting out more princes to try to push votes, though many of these are sellable enough that I might be able to talk my way to passing them.

Reaction [8]
8x Second Tradition: Domain

Probably just enough defense, though the largish number of actions makes me wonder if a few more wouldn't help.

Monodiscipline Deckbuilding Challenge #1: Celerity

Here's the deck whose genesis kicked off the NWWYP project.

Deck Name : Juggernaut's Folly
Author : John Eno
Description : Gunless weenie Celerity.

Crypt [12 vampires] Capacity min: 2 max: 5 average: 3.58333
------------------------------------------------------------
2x Dodd 5 CEL dom pre !Brujah:2
1x Rigby, Crusade Van 5 CEL PRE aus pot !Brujah:2
1x Jimmy Dunn 4 CEL POT for Pander:2
1x Parmenides 4 CEL qui Assamite:2
1x Scarlet Carson O'T 4 CEL pro !Gangrel:3
1x Victor Tolliver 4 CEL pot !Brujah:2
2x Sarah Brando 3 CEL !Brujah:2
1x Carter 2 cel !Toreador:2
1x Jesus Alcala 2 cel !Gangrel:3
1x Kanya Akhtar 2 cel Assamite:2

With these kinds of weenie decks, the question always arises as to whether it's better to smallify the crypt as much as possible and use Master: Discipline cards, or increase the average capacity a bit and use mostly vampires who have the discipline in question at superior and fill out the crypt with a few support nerds. The answer to that question will usually depend on how good the discipline in question is at basic. It's totally possible to coast along on basic Dominate or Obfuscate until you start drawing into skillcards, for instance. Celerity at basic, on the other hand, is possibly the worst discipline in the game, and I figure this deck is going to struggle mightily to accomplish anything in any case, so I don't want to gimp my chances extra by needing to wait to draw master cards to make my minions effective (or as effective as mono-Celerity can be, at any rate).

The crypt is staggered so that I can make the most use out of Powerbase: Zurich. I'm not sure if this will actually work out in play or not, and I might need to add some Wider View later on in order to make sure that my larger vampires can gain me some free pool during my turn, but this looks like a reasonably solid starting point from which to gather some actual play data.

The cheapest vampire with basic Celerity, Antoinette DuChamp, was cut out of the crypt after I finished building the library for two reasons. The first is that there are enough Celerity actions and strikes in the deck that I worried that her disability would cripple her more quickly than the one pool she'd save me over using one of the two-caps was worth, and the second was that her basic Celerity means that she can't use Sideslip as damage prevention, and would quite likely end up having to hunt every other turn even if her special didn't trigger.

Library [90 cards]
------------------------------------------------------------

This is a significantly bigger library than I normally run, even for combat decks. I'm not entirely sure why it ended up being so big, though I strongly suspect that the reason is me overcompensating for what I perceive as Celerity's inability to deliver the goods in combat, so my combat card selection probably got overzealous. I'll try it like this, but I expect that I'll probably end up cutting the library size down by about ten cards.

Master [10]
1x Barrens, The
1x Dreams of the Sphinx
1x Elder Library
2x Fame
2x Frontal Assault
3x Powerbase: Zurich

A fair bit of hand-tuning tech here, required stuff for any deck packing as large a combat module as this one. Some light offense in the form of Fame and bloat from Frontal Assault and Zurich are probably all that the deck has room for, given that it intends to play quite few cards during the course of the game.

Action [20]
8x Bum's Rush
12x Flurry of Action

Here's the meat of the deck. The plan is for my minions to bleed with Flurry, hopefully without being blocked, and then untap and do something else - hunt if they're low on blood, get a +bleed permanent, bloat via Zurich, rush someone, or possibly call a vote if the political situation looks favorable. Staying untapped to block might also be an option if the deck sits down with a non-sneaky predator. Flurry's basic option also provides more hand-tuning potential if it's needed.

Combat [52]
4x Infernal Pursuit
8x Psyche!
4x Pulled Fangs
8x Pursuit
8x Sideslip
8x Target Vitals
4x Taste of Vitae
8x Weighted Walking Stick

Whole, whole lot of cards here. As I mentioned above, this is probably overkill on my part, but I do feel like Celerity has so little to offer in terms of combat payload that these are all going to be needed. Pulled Fangs is good tech to work with both Fame and Dragonbound, and with the extra damage I can inflict, dodges and damage prevention, it shouldn't be too difficult to play them.

Equipment [2]
2x Laptop Computer

Event [2]
2x Dragonbound

Political Action [2]
2x Perpetual Care

Retainer [2]
1x J. S. Simmons, Esq.
1x Tasha Morgan

The rest of the deck is ousting tech, which feels too light to me. The Perpetual Care seem especially fringey to me, but Darby Keeney has assured me that they can do plenty of damage in a rush deck, even if that deck lacks titles of its own. I'll give them their day in court and see what verdict comes back.

Never Whistle While You're Pissing

Or in other words, focus on one thing at a time. (I can't think of an equivalent phrase that works for women as well as men, but NWWYP has countercultural cachet, so I'll stick with it.)

I've been due to make a new batch of V:TES decks for a while now, but haven't had any incentive to do so since I've not been playing V:TES. Some recent changes in my work schedule have made it so that I'll at least be playing occasionally, so it's time to actually figure out what to build. Unfortuntely, all of the ideas that I stormed up last go-round have been sitting unbuilt in my head for so long that I'm already bored with them. Aksinya Daclau's cover band takes on the Deep Song tap-and-bleed? Weenie !Salubri swarm with 30 copies of Hide the Heart? Weenie Obfuscate vote? !Ventrue bruise/bleed? Shattering Crescendo trophies? (Okay, I did build and play that one once, but it was a weird game and the deck needed so much work that it was basically still a first draft.) All bored with them already, without ever having played them, due to having spent too much time thinking about them during slow periods at work.

But then a couple of weeks ago, Juggernaut made a statement on the newsgroup that gunless weenie Celerity is a tournament-viable deck, and I pointed out to him that I'd never heard or seen such and that what he was saying sounded dumb to me. Not wanting to be a total jerk and call him out on something without checking it out for myself, I drafted a decklist of exactly what he was talking about, though I haven't played since then. But the process of drafting that deck got me thinking.

I haven't played a lot of monodiscipline decks. While I can understand the allure of having a deck that knows what it wants to do and does it very well at the expense of allowing itself broader options, I'm not often interested in playing such a deck for any longer than it takes me to learn how it works. And since those decks are generally pretty simple in terms of what they do, that's often just one or two plays. But there are a lot of disciplines out there, and a lot of them don't get much in the way of spotlight time all by their lonesomes. So what I'm going to do is put on my best Uncle George impression and act like a sleazy producer who's giving these young hopefuls their shot at fame. I don't expect much out of them, but then that's the fun of surprises, right?

I'm just going to skip right over the fancy bloodlines disciplines, as their crypt options aren't usually good enough to allow the weeniefication that's necessary for just about any monodiscipline deck to have a hope of functionality. As for the rest, I'll go through the list of disciplines and consider which are viable candidates for this particular experiment.

Yes
Abombwe: This is kind of a fancy bloodlines discipline, so it might seem like I'm already violating the rules that I just set out for myself three seconds ago, but since it's got a discipline card that can be used to give it out (one which is a trifle, no less), I'll give it a go. It's toolboxy enough that I'm not immediately sure what route I'll take with the deck. Due to the restriction on who can learn it, the crypt will probably end up largely laibon, which gives me access to more funky tricks.

Celerity: See the introduction above. I might even make two of these, the crappy rush one and another try at weenie !Brujah breed/boom, which by random chance doesn't use any disciplines other than Celerity.

Dominate: I've tried weenie DBR (which also happens to be mono-Dominate) before, but found that it really wasn't to my liking. Too much need to aggressively attack people cross-table in the early game, which doesn't suit my playstyle or my wish for the people I'm playing with to have fun. Aim&Chain has been looking enticing to me for a minute now, though, as has trying out something silly with Zip Guns and Suppressing Fire, so that seems like it could all come together here.

Protean: For such a toolboxy discipline, it still seems like making a working deck using just Protean will be nigh-impossible. Hark! A challenge! The 1/2 crypt for this is very solid for the weenie angle, so that's a good starting place.

No
Animalism: I've already done this one, several different times actually, which is enough to disqualify it. For what it's worth, I also found it less interesting to play than !Nosferatu, Ahrimanes, or Gangrel/!Gangrel, any of which can do all the same stuff that weenie Animalism can but also adds spice and options on top of that basic build.

Auspex: Never played it, but it's generally so one-dimensional that I already know how it would play. It's certainly a discipline I like and play a lot of, but I've got no desire to see what happens when it goes solo, especially since weenie Auspex is already an established tournament-viable deck archetype.

Fortitude: See Auspex.

Obfuscate: I like stealth, but I can't think of anything not boring to do with it if it's not coupled with some other discipline. I could make a deck with Heidelburgable bleed permanents and use lots of Night Moves and Powerbase: Zurich! Just writing that sentence had me reaching for a blanket and pillow, though, let alone building the deck or playing it.

Potence: See Auspex, minus the part about me playing it a lot.

Presence: Already played it quite a bit, and also see Auspex.

Maybe
Chimerstry: Hmm. Seems like it might be fun, but every time I've made a Ravnos deck I couldn't bear to play it more than once. I'm not sure what that's about, given that individual Ravnos and Chimerstry cards certainly have the capacity to get me excited to play them, and Ravnos have so many good clan cards that it seems like I ought to keep a deck built just to use them. I'd been wanting to make an Edged Illusion deck for a long time, but that desire evaporated once Shattering Crescendo was printed, and mono-Chimerstry doesn't offer much other than stealth, light bleed, and "haha your guys can't untap" tech. I've long thought that David Cherryholmes' Red Herring deck looked interesting, so maybe I'll give that a shot. Even if I don't, I should probably buckle down and try to do something with that giant pile of Chimerstry cards I've had laying around for so long.

Dementation: Pretty unlikely. I've got zero desire to play the "Jackie taps to attempt Kindred Spirits, add Confusion, repeat" weenie Dementation bleed deck that would be the most obvious choice. And while there are a lot of amusingly janky Dementation actions that mess with other peoples' minions, they're all removable by an action which Dementation weenies are going to be neither willing nor able to block. I've considered using a bunch of Passions to make a Dementation tap-and-bleed deck, but that turns out to just be weenie Presence without access to S:CE, so no thanks.

Necromancy: This discipline has a few good cards, a few more middling ones, and then quite a bit of garbage. What's more, the good and okay stuff doesn't really mesh very well - how do I work Divine Sign, Puppeteer and Call of the Hungry Dead into the same deck? The only mono-Necromancy deck I've seen was one in Ben Peal's series of amazingly annoying "get one million permanents so that no one sitting near me can play and then bleed for one a lot" decks, but I've been meaning to do something with Baleful Doll and Jar the Soul for a long time, and I need to build something to give Sennadurek a home while I'm still working out what's the best deck for her to be in.

Obtenebration: See Obfuscate. The thing to do would be Shadow Twins, but I've played that deck already and it was just as dull as Cryptic Mission, surprise surprise. There are enough combat options and crappy intercept cards for Obtenebration that an intercept/combat thing might be unexpected and funny, but it sounds bad enough that this is close to the bottom of the list of potentials.

Quietus: I've tried this before, with a really bad Baal's Bloody Talons deck that I made just to have an excuse to make terrible jokes about Sticks and Baal's, but maybe I'll try something that's a little less juevenile. Some kind of bleed/vote thing using the good Assamite clan cards but eschewing their one good discipline and instead using Quietus might be the way to go here.

Serpentis: Serpentis has one very good card, a small number of decent ones, and then a whole swath of complete crap. Part of the point of this exercise is certainly to dust off some crappy cards that wouldn't normally see play, but so many of the low-end Serpentis cards are so cost-intensive and situational and yet still have no appreciable effect on the game that they've gone beyond bad to become intimidatingly bad. These cards are the kids hanging out in the back of shop class and sticking safety pins in their forearms just because they're bored, the kind of cards that'll say, "you knew I was a snake when you picked me up" as you lose while playing them. I'm not even talking about the truly unplayable cards from the drug-addled WotC days of Ancient Hearts, either, but some of the more recent stuff. I don't think I've got the werewithal to walk this path.

Thaumaturgy: I've done the Cryptic Mission thing and it made me yawn. That was a while ago, though, and Thaumaturgy has gotten a lot of interesting tricks in the interim. It's got even more cards than it deserves to since so many of the Visceratika outferiors are Thaumaturgy. Combined with enough copies of Spirit Summoning Chamber to get what I want when I think it'll have the most humor impact, I think this might be leading the pack of the maybes.

Vicissitude: Seems like it would make for a good monodiscipline deck, since it offers a fair number of different effcts. Unfortunately, Vicissitude is one of those disciplines which barely has any effect on the game at the basic level, the crypt for weenie Vicissitude isn't very good, and I'm already signed up to build what will probably turn out to be two "aggpoke with light bleed elements" decks (Abombwe and Protean), so I'm really not sure that a third is going to be any better or more interesting than those. The other obvious route to take would be a War Ghoul deck, but it's already an established tournament deck, etc.

I'll be going through the process of making these decks in future posts, or if I'm feeling lazy I'll at least post the decklists and some explanation of how I arrived at the decisions to build them the way I did. Stay tuned.

Friday Night Gaming Pre-Season

(Note: I've gotten bored with posting the creamy hot reportage that's made up the bulk of this blog so far. Since I'm not gaming as much as I was when I started State of Play, I've got less raw material to write about, but that comes bundled with more time to think about the games that I do play. As a result, I'm going to shift the focus of these posts to session-summary rather than -storytell, and focus more on strategy and musing about the games played.)

The New England Chowdah and Cahdboard Society hadn't met all summer long, since one of our inaugural members has a very busy schedule and has had all of his free time consumed by being half of the organizational committee of the brilliant Sub Rosa Drive-In. But I've been jonesing for some gaming, and the threat of my stealth/attack cyberdrones makes for a very convincing argument, so I convened an early meeting of the Society, minus our fifth associate. This was unfortunate in that it meant there was no point in playing Galactica, but it did mean that we had the correct number for playing Chaos In the Old World. So gangway for evil deification!

Game One: Blood Fever Sex Magik
Larry (Khorne) -> Richard (Nurgle) -> Kiarna (Tzeentch) -> me (Slaanesh)

Khorne hit the ground running, and the other three of us didn't do enough running of our own to prevent him from getting double-ticks on his advancement dial during the first turn. That enabled the blood-god to continue to harass us everywhere we set up camp, though he took a long time to get to Tzeentch's northern stronghold and was delayed a turn further when the magic god teleported his expeditionary daemonmans back to the south. Nurgle wasn't able to hold Khorne off enough in Bretonnia and Slaanesh suffered just enough casualties in the southern three regions for Khorne to continue to double-tick. He managed to get two dial advancements every turn except for the last, giving him a win by turn five with the rest of us not particularly close to ending the game via victory point win. It certainly didn't hurt his chances that Khorne's dice were as bloodthirsty as he was, giving him at least one kill every time that he rolled dice during the game except twice, but I blame our failure to derail his progress on our own tactics rather than chalking it up entirely to bad luck.

Conclusions: Khorne needs to be stomped on early. But "stomped on," in a game in which fighting usually only helps him, doesn't have anything to do with combat. Instead, it seems to me that the other three gods need to dance around a bit on that crucial first turn, which should be easily accomplished since Khorne's daemonmans cost twice as much to summon as everyone elses' cultistmans. So everyone else should deploy next to the territory that they actually want to occupy, moving to the one that they want only after Khorne has dropped one of his three daemonmans into the region that they currently occupy. If possible, somebody should also play chicken with the initial cultistmans that Khorne normally starts his game with: by placing a cultist of your own in that territory, you either tempt Khorne into also dropping a daemonmns there (and thereby limiting himself to three starting territories, rather than four) or else you'll get to safely wreak your own havoc there. Since Khorne normally airdrops his first mans into populous country, Nurgle is probably the best bet to start staring down that first Khornemans, since Nurgle can just as profitably decamp to an adjacent populous region free of fighting or stay there and reap the rewards. Whether or not Tzeentch or Slaanesh would want to get in on that action will situationally depend on where the nobles and warpstones are, but they might want to try this if they decide early on to play for a victory point win.

With a little luck, this strategy will prevent Khorne from being able to roll any battle dice during the first turn, meaning that it'll be at least one more turn before his cultistmans gain the ability to attack and all hell breaks loose. This will make it nearly impossible for anyone to get more than one dial advancement on the first turn, but since I've only ever seen Khorne to get two on turn one anyway, this doesn't seem like much of a disincentive to anyone else.

For turns following the first, anti-Khorne tactics are going to be a bit more difficult to employ. Since Khorne will already have daemonmans camped out in three regions, those regions won't be safe for anyone else (barring a lucky Slaanesh draw of one of his Fields of Sextacy or Tzeentch zapping somebody away via Teleportation), and Khorne can easily expand from there if no one is crazy enough to come to him. Given that I haven't had a chance to harangue people into trying the first-turn strategy outlined above, I'm not really sure what the gameboard will look like if it's a success or what those of us who aren't trying to killkillkill should be doing to try to keep the skins of our mans intact. I've begun to wonder if Nurgle shouldn't throw some of his daemonmans into regions in which Khorne is attacking cultistmans, even if those cultistmans aren't necessarily Nurgle's. This seems counterintuitive - Nurgle doesn't want Khorne to win by dial advancements, but he also wants to spend his power points to further his own agenda of winning by victory points rather than helping Tzeentch or Slaanesh - but since the dial wins tend to happen more quickly than the VP wins, it might be worthwhile to slow Khorne just to ensure that the game goes on long enough for Nurgle to have a chance to scoop up those late-game VPs that he tends to start accumulating in the last few turns.

Games Two and Three: The Sheriff Isn't Checking His Email

Kiarna had to leave after we were done with our game of Chaos, and none of the rest of us had the mental fortitude to start a game of Fury of Dracula. It's supposed to be a good game for three players, but it's got a playing time of two to three hours and none of us have played it before, so it would of course end up running even longer. Richard had brought his copy of Bang, which is one of the old-school ones that has no English text on the cards, and the expansion Dodge City, which has rules for three players.

In three-player Bang, rather than having hidden roles, everyone knows who everyone else is. Each player is trying to kill one other player, and if he does so, he wins. If his target is killed in some other way (accidentally blows himself up with dynamite, or gets indiscriminately mowed down by a Gatling gun, &c.), the remaining two players duel it out. Distance isn't really an issue, though it can turn into one if somebody gets sassy and tries to ride off into the sunset before the final reel.

In our first game, Richard blew himself up with dynamite and I got thrown in jail in spite of being the deputy. Due to a mysterious* confluence of events, I was shot up really badly while trying to hide behind a barrel inside my cell, even though the jail itself was hidden away somewhere in the wilderness. Unsurprisingly, death.

During our second game, Richard blew himself up with dynamite again, but this time the explosion didn't prove to be fatal. I got thrown into jail again and then shot repeatedly until I died. Apparently, jail is a bad place to be when people are shooting at you.

Conclusions: Bang isn't much of a game with only three players. It's the hidden roles that make the game interesting, and without that it's mostly just a game of who draws the most beer and bangs, with a small side helping of who draws the character with the best special ability. The distance mechanic isn't really a crucial part of the normal game - it seems to be there to keep people mostly in their own corner rather than going cross-table all willy-nilly, rather than fulfilling some more elegant function - but even the loss of that made the proceedings less interesting. I'm not sure if there's some kind of house rule that could make things feel less predetermined, like maybe making a stack of six roles and keeping them secret somehow until characters get killed, but as the rules are written I think I'll keep looking for some other short three-player game. I've been hearing good things about Death Angel, and FFG is good enough to give away their rulebooks for free, so I'll probably have a gander at that.

*Okay, not so much of a mystery: I'm a doofus. Even though I'd made the exact same mistake last time we played, and then recorded it here, and then was told what the mistake was and looked it up, I still managed to make it again. Twice more. Maybe I'm just secretly illiterate.

We Conquer the World Three Times, and Then Get Bored

Game One: Nobody Likes Wagner
At my request, Dan dusted off his copy of Ideology, which I'd seen people playing but hadn't played myself. Apparently no one else had played it since that initial game I'd watched the second half of, so we made a few mistakes that we didn't pick up on until Chris happened to scan the rulebook after the game was over. If nothing else, that gives me an excuse to play the game again in the future, maybe this time playing the game that the designers intended us to play.

Ideology is a game in which each player attempts to sway the world to his particular, well, ideology, in a kind of ahistorical vacuum that seems to assume that WWII never ended but that the sociopolitical fallout from the end of WWII did happen. This lack of historical fidelity isn't any big deal, as Ideology is a mostly abstract game and isn't trying to model any particular conflict in detail. Each player begins play with a single nation under his control and attempts to gain sway over other countries that turn up randomly in a sort of poker pot in the middle of the table, as well as build up the countries which he controls. This ownership is established by using the military, cultural and economic influence which is generated by countries already under a player's control, creating a snowball effect whereby the players who control more countries gain more influence with which to gain control of other countries. The three types of influence can also be used to increase the value of nations already controlled, which also generates more influence on subsequent turns.

The three kinds of influence aren't inherently any different from each other, though all of the abilities which players can purchase create differentiators between them. Additionally, each ideology has a set of advantages and disadvantages thematically linked to the nature of their philosophies. Facism, for example, is very good at attacking other countries, but finds it very difficult to export its culture. Apparently, aesthetic appreciation of Sturm und Drang is difficult to force on people who didn't grow up with it. This combination of a simple base mechanic which becomes variably more complex during individual plays is an excellent way to create replayability, and Ideology feels like it can create enough distinct iterative sets of these complications to hold up to many plays.

There's another set of limitations on how influence can be used to interact with other players, a matrix of diplomatic stances which are tracked with regard to how each ideology is currently able to interact with each other ideology. Being at Peace, Neutral or at War with another player governs which types of influence you can use to mess with their control of both the countries they own and those they're still vying to take over. This is an interesting experiment in mechanically-induced negotiation that didn't bear any fruit for our group, but that might very well have been due to our inexperience rather than the weakness of the mechanic. As it played out, there seemed to be little reason for anyone to do anything other than simply go to war with everyone else. In games played by a people who have a better handle on the flow of the game, maybe a less hawkish group demeanor emerges.

I played bloody-minded Facism, Kirby polished his monocle and represented tea-sipping Imperialism, Dan prepared to exploit the underclasses as Capitalism and Chris followed in Dan's footsteps (but with fewer pairs of blue jeans) as Communism. At the beginning of the game, everyone mostly spent their influence improving their home countries, with only a few expeditionary feelers being sent out into the initially independent countries.

Chris took an early lead in Russia, building it up to its maximum capacity and also buying quite a few of the abilities granted by progressing up the game's tech tree. Similarly, I concentrated my efforts on improving Germany, but instead of buying tech I invested the rest of my influence in Italy, thinking that drawing extra influence cards would be more helpful than developing tech, most of which is either defensive or allows you to mitigate the extra costs involved in influencing nations which aren't near the ones you control.

My thinking was that getting the extra cards would be just as good as not having extra cards but not needing to spend as many, and that the extra draws would be advantageous in allowing me more flexibility in what I drew rather than locking me into a given type of influence like the tech trees do. In retrospect, that seems like such an obvious choice that I'm not sure why anyone would develop tech early, unless there's some subtle reason to do so that we missed in our headlong rush to misinterpret and sometimes ignore the rules as written.

There wasn't much interaction for the rest of the game, aside from a few feints and headgames that I won't go into in detail here, because we later learned that they weren't legal due to us misunderstanding the rule on how influence is placed on independent countries during the Foreign phase. Oops! Eventually, Dan and I were each at almost twelve points, the number needed to win the game. On the last turn of the game, we each went back and forth buying tech, which is the way that tiebreakers are determined in Ideology, but then Kirby successfully screwed me over by removing one of his influence cards from my controlled Italy, thereby preventing me from being able to maximize its point potential and keeping me at eleven points. That was a hilariously painful blunder on my part, as this was the third time during the game that someone had successfully outwitted me in the exact same manner. Who knew that fascists can't learn from their mistakes?

Kirby didn't mess up my plans out of mere spite, but rather as part of a grand plan concocted with Chris to prevent Dan and I from winning so that Kirby and Chris might be able to make comebacks from behind and snatch victory away from us. Alas, we all know how well the Imperialists and Communists honor their agreements with each other, and almost immediately after Kirby knocked me out of my winning position, he and Chris ran afoul of a massive communications error, the end result of which was that they were unable to free Cuba from the cruel yoke of capitalism. Dan won the day and Capitalism ruled us all; I'm waiting to see how that turns out, but my hopes aren't high.

Game Two: Khorne Has a Mid-Eternity Crisis
me (Khorne) -> Kirby (Nurgle) -> Chris (Tzeentch) -> Dan (Slaanesh)

Chaos In the Old World! It's totally my favorite game right now, so if I gush too much, somebody should remind me that if I love it so much then I should marry it already. In CItOW, four players take on the roles of the gods who govern the four most evil things possible in the Warhammer Fantasy world: hurting people, card tricks, sneezing on people and sexing people. Each of these gods is competing with the others to dominate the world, spreading their own gospels of Bad Stuff via their cultistmans and also summoning daemonmans to act as fighting units to kill other players' mans.

Each of the four gods has a very different set of powers and weaknesses, but somehow the playtesters managed to iron out the very real potential for power imbalances between those differing sets of abilities and create play experiences for each of the four gods which are quite asymmetrical but also well-balanced against each other. Each player also has two ways to win, either by gaining points for dominating and ruining the regions on the map or by advancing their experience track via a method particular to each god - Khorne, the blood god, advances his track by killing mans; Nurgle, the disease god, advances his track by spreading disease in highly populated areas, and so on. The end result is a game which is part area control, part political maneuvering and part resource management, with enough randomness thrown into the mix that no strategy can be entirely relied upon in the face of the changing environment. It's about the perfect storm of mechanics which I like in games, and has a great theme to boot, but unfortunately it's only playable with exactly four players, so I agitate to play it whenever a group I'm with has achieved that magic quorum. On this day I was successful in that crusade twice, which isn't uncommon if I can convince people to play it once, since CItOW doesn't take long to play and because people who play it once usually get hooked and want to play it more.

Khorne had been unimpressed with the amount of blood I'd shed in our previous game, to put it politely. (The actual expression of his displeasure was like something out of a Cannibal Corpse song, obviously unfit for reproduction in a polite venue such as this one.) Apparently the big guy saw some hidden promise in me, though, because he arranged to have me champion his cause by having the other three players choose the other gods available. Normally, Khorne plays to win by advancing his experience dial, because he's not particularly suited to winning via points. I'd been thinking about how to get him to win with that alternate victory condition, though, and since the chance came up I decided to take it.

The first Old World card we got was Dark Elf Corsairs, which was nothing but gravy for the newly open-minded Khorne. I promptly plopped down my greater daemonmans in the Empire and all my cultistmans in Kislev, allowing me to scare everyone away from the highest-scoring region on the board and also begin accruing victory points elsewhere. Unfortunately, the next card placed a hero token in the Empire, forcing the Bloodthrister to hop on a BloodGodCall Airways plane with one of his Bloodletter buddies, landing in Tilea where there were a few Tzeentch and Nurgle cultists hanging around. Those few mans quickly scampered away, and the Bloodletter chased after them, but the poor Bloodthirster spent the rest of the game vacationing in Tilea with nothing but his upgrade card to keep him company. Nobody even wrote, in spite of Khorne's insistence that it's a beautiful vacation area this time of year, what with the seaside being there and all. It's a sad tale, so let's turn our focus elsewhere before we get too choked up.

Nurgle was having a difficult time in the west, having his mans killed by the hero there and having his corrupting influence slowly stripped away by their graduation to witch huntery. The dark elves were still hanging around there too, somehow undetected by the Estalian witch-o-meters, making it even more difficult for the green guys to spread their love of the gout. On top of all that, since he kept piling mans in there, everyone else was doing the same in order to try to claim second place once the area was ruined, with the result that there was a lot more bloodshed than there probably should have been.

Everyone wasn't concentrating entirely on Estalia, of course. Tzeentch hunkered down with a nice pile of warpstone in the frigid north, scooping up the cheapie point areas there and accumulating steady dial advancements. Slaanesh hung around the eastern fringe of the board, putting sexy thoughts into the heads of the nobility and occasional witch hunter, hosting a rave when I got too ornery and tried to kill off some of his mans (but tactically! not wantonly) and generally messing with my plans to grab points for dominating some regions and then push east. For some reason we started thinking that The Border Princes was important, and a bunch of Tzeentch cultistmans piled in there accompanied by their Lord of Change, but just as quickly scurried away when the upgraded Keeper of Secrets offered to show them some websites that they decided they really didn't want to see. The two greater daemonmans had a couple of slapfights, as neither Tzeentch nor Slaanesh wanted to bother to pay the points to move them elsewhere, but neither of them had their hearts in it and they weren't able to hurt each other significantly.

At around the same time that Nurgle dropped the Great Uncle into the Empire, making this the first game in which I've ever seen all four greater daemonmans on the board at the same time, Tzeentch was about ready to end the epic Norse saga that he'd been working on and ruin the lives of the Vikings there. The rest of us wanted in on that action, of course, but it was down to whether or not Slaanesh or I would end up with second place. Tzeentch teleported away one of the cultists I needed to grab second place amidst the trolls, and then Slaanesh totally outwitted me by taking over one of the two cultists I'd placed with sleepytime perfume, thus giving him two cultists in Norsca to my one and the right number of corruption tokens to beat me by one.

As a result of his wiles, Slaanesh carried the day. The end scores were much tighter than I'd expected them to be, though. Tzeentch pulled ahead into second place, but only beat Khorne by a single point, and Nurgle managed to grab some points right at the end of the game as he always does, bringing him in last but not far behind me. I had a really fun time playing Khorne for victory points rather than going for a dial win, as it required a lot more strategic thinking than just, "There's something moving over there KILL IT." The payoff for that extra strategery was a much-enriched tactical game, as using Khorne's powerful offense to prune away threats to my attempts to gain VPs was unlike playing any of the other three gods for VPs, since they normally play so defensively when it comes to combat.

Game Three: Khorne Reads Some Sun Tzu
Chris (Khorne) -> Dan (Nurgle) -> Kirby (Tzeentch) -> me (Slaanesh)

The first Old World card drawn added two Nobles to the board, which Nurgle decided to stack on top of the two already present in the Empire and the Badlands. It's just like the nobility to not want to mix with the lower classes, but Nurgle's plan to screw me out of the chance to gain extra dial advancements backfired when Khorne decided to crash the party in the Empire in force. He moved all four of his cultistmans and a warriorman there and then played Field of Carnage, a one-point card which had no effect on the game except to grant him enough domination value for him to score seven points. Yikes. Nurgle set up shop in Estalia and Tzeentch poured cultists into Brettonia. I stupidly decided to eschew trying to get dial ticks at the moment and instead go for points, putting all my cultists into Kislev to dominate there and hopefully ruin it quickly to grab an early lead. Everyone dominated their chosen region and dumped a bunch of corruption tokens into it as well, leaving Khorne in the lead on points. As a result of our turtling, neither Khorne nor I received any dial advancements, and the other two gods each got one.

On the second turn, Khorne summoned his greater daemonmans to the Empire and played The Skull Throne there, planning on moving his cultists out to nearby regions in order to scoop up some second-place ruiner points. Tzeentch began to play a Changer of Ways on the region to cancel the Throne, but Khorne made it known in extremely explicit terms exactly what the consequences of such a card play would be. The words coming out of Chris's mouth were so foul that he was practically roleplaying. The clean version is that Tzeentch's stock would plummet for the remainder of the game, in a variety of unpleasant ways. Tzeentch was convinced by Khorne's vehemence and put the card back into his hand.

And apparently the awesome power of Khorne's threat blew out my mind. I'm not going to lie to you - I don't remember much of the rest of this game, and I foolishly waited quite a while to get this written up. It's a habit I really need to break! I'm getting my local group together tomorrow night to play, so afterward I'll break out the electrolysis machine and autohypnosis projector so as to not make this mistake again. The thing to take away is that Khorne did win on points this time, and fairly handily at that. It' was good to see that Ol' Killy is more versatile than I'd previously realized.

Game Four: I Still Don't Get It
I had just enough time for one more quick game before I had to get on the road, so Chris ran off to see if he could find his copy of Cthulhu500. Chris moved fairly recently and isn't as unpacked as he thought, so on that day Cthulhu would have to remain not dead but dreaming rather than climbing behind the wheel of an Unspeakable Olds. Our backup plan was to play Dominion, which I hadn't been a fan of when I'd played it in the past, but I decided to give the game one last shot to redeem itself.

In Dominion, everyone builds a deck. You start with a small deck containing cards that allow you to buy more cards to put into your deck, which are used to buy more cards to put into that deck, or which occasionally mess with other players' decks. Some of the cards that you buy are worth victory points, which are added up once three of the card types available for purchase run out. And...well, no, that's the whole game, actually.

Every time I've played Dominion, there really didn't feel like there was anything happening. Everyone plays their turn with no interaction with anyone else, aside from sometimes playing a card which affects the other players but which they can't interact with except to be hopelessly victimized by. People who like the game often tout its speed of play as a feather in its cap, but playing fast doesn't mean much if that play doesn't involve actually doing anything with the people around you.

The most disheartening example of this that I saw was that Kirby, whose set we played, who owns every expansion for it, and who likes the game enough to have played it in sanctioned tournaments, was playing a game of Civilization Lite on his iPad during the other players' turns. I don't blame him for doing so, since there wasn't anything happening during those turns that he ought to have had any interest in paying attention to, but it strikes me as a pretty harsh indictment of a game if nothing is lost in the play experience even when you spend 75% of it doing something else. I'm not sure why people like a game that's so uninvolving as much as they clearly like this one, but I'm aware that I'm in a small minority here, so I'll turn my gripe engine to its "cooldown" setting.

I don't feel like there's anything to write a report of, based on our session. Chris played some cards, got some more cards, and then shuffled his deck. Then Dan played some cards, got some more cards, and then shuffled his deck. Repeat for Kirby and I, and then repeat for the table again. Sometimes people weren't able to do much of anything on their turns. Then the game was over and we counted points. That seemed to be all of it. Chris at least had a good time, playing a bunch of copies of a card called Wishing Well that opened up the option of a guessing minigame that he really liked playing, and the game finished quickly. That's too short a list of virtues for me to think that the game is worth my time, though, so I'm going to mark this as my Last Game of Dominion and never speak of it again (unless someone actually wants to hear my thoughts on it, which I recognize is entirely unlikely.)

Origins Reportage #5: Faster, Presencecat! Oust! Oust!

(Sorry for the delay in getting this report up on the blog. I just moved to a new apartment, and wasn't able to find my notes from this tournament until yesterday.)

Experience has taught me that by the time the last day of Origins rolls around, my brain will be the consistency of a poached egg and I won't be capable of maintaining the coherence of any long-term game plans required by an even moderately complicated deck. I don't find weenie bleed (or stealth/bleed, for that matter) to be as simple to play as a lot of people claim they are, but weenie Presence certainly burns a lower-octane brain fuel than something like Brujah bruise/vote or Assamite toolbox. I've also been curious to play it in a tournament, as it's not the kind of deck I normally play in a competitive environment. On top of all that, I had a fairly early flight to catch after the tournament was over, and figured that even if I did make it to the finals, the finals would probably end quickly for me, because I'd either win quickly or been ousted early.

Round One: Love Conquers All
me (weenie Presence) -> Pete (Chaundice) -> John (Blood Brothers) -> Will (Tremere with Presence) -> Bob (Setite toolbox)

For years, Pete had lamented the fact that he and I had never gotten to play a tournament game of V:TES with each other. (I assume he'd been laboring under the woefully incorrect belief that I'm fun to be around?) This year we got to play in not one but two games together, but in both of them, he got squashed before he had a chance to play much. There's probably in lesson in there somewhere, a lesson about how trying to be friendly with other humans inevitably leads to crushing defeat, and it would seem that I'm just the kind of heartless jerk to teach it.

Which is to say that I was extremely worried when Pete's first minion was a Tupdog, assuming that I'd sat down upwind of a deck which would effectively auto-trump my own, and which he would sensibly have to oust upstream once he saw what I was playing. After a few turns of no !Tremere appearing and landing some vicious bleeds in Pete's lap, I became less worried. After Chaundice appeared, it was too late for Pete to be able to fend me off, and he was ousted soon after.

John didn't do much all game, taking a while to bring out his first Brother, presumably because he was also wary of the 'dog horde. That didn't work out too well for him, because the end result of this don't-smash-my-guys strategy was that my minions completely outnumbered his by the time I was his predator, and he was quickly overwhelmed. Will and Bob had been playing their games, with Will building up a bit and Bob bleeding into me. I pretended that if I didn't look at Bob, he couldn't oust me, and that seemed to work out pretty well. He removed a bunch of my pool, but my cardflow was impeccable due to an early-game Bitter and Sweet Story, and it didn't take too much longer for me to clean up the table. A filthmonger is me!

With our game over so early, I had plenty of time to scout around to see what other people were playing, and saw both Una and Cesewayo wearing, as Jay put it, "hats bigger than Abe Lincoln's." Both of the decks looked pretty fragile at a glance, and I had plenty of ways to deal with just a single vampire who thinks he's buff enough to take on a whole table, so I didn't think that I'd see either of those decks in the finals and was confident that I could handle them on the off chance that one of them made it. I failed to remember how Aye interacts with Cesewayo, which might have been important, but I got a chance to see it close-up during my next round as a reminder.

Round Two: PTW Isn't Enforced In the Deckbuilding Phase
me -> Brad (Dmitra the Alastor) -> Matt (Cesewayo wall) -> Corey (Ferox multirush) -> David (Revenge of the G1 Primogen)

David's deck was awesome because it featured Appolonius as its star, with Helena Casimir and Natasha Volfchek as backups. This is why Villein is such a great card: it can make any deck good. Brad got out Dmitra and made her an Assault Rifle-toting Alastor, then proceeded to help me by playing four Psyches in a row so that I could alchemically transmute all the S:CE clogging my hand into bleed cards. Matt tooled up and prepared to weather my assault, and Corey bled for one a lot and discarded a combat card every turn. David beat on my pool pretty well with a bunch of bleeds (and I think a vote or two?), but I assumed that as soon as Corey drew into the rush he obviously needed, David would cease to be as much of a problem.

I ousted Brad around the time that Corey drew into some rush actions, simultaneously coming to a set of realizations which had me wondering if one game win would be enough to get me into the finals. The first realization was that Corey had no actual plan for how to win the game, instead relying on the hope that entering combat with vampires and burning them with a combination of Raking Talons and huge Potence strikes would somehow oust his prey. I had thought that everyone had realized at this late hour in the game's history that combat isn't an end in and of itself, but apparently I was wrong. I feel a analytical article about combat decks in V:TES beginning to coalesce in the basement of my mind, but I'll keep those thoughts tamped down until I've had time to sort them out more completely. Stay tuned for it.

The second realization, that Corey had decided that I should be ousted, came to me in a thunderclap of insight when Corey tapped Ferox and announced that he was Rushing the Bum of one of my vampires. This would have been a completely reasonable course of action for him to pursue, had my prey not been playing a deck specifically designed to block every action ever directed at it. When I pointed out to Corey how unlikely it was that I would be able to oust Matt, he shrugged and said that he didn't want to see my deck in the game. That struck me as a...let's be polite and say "questionable" motivation if Corey was actually playing to try to win, but I really wasn't up for the back-and-forth that would surely ensue if I bothered to call over a judge, so I shrugged it off. I'm not sure why anyone would enter a competitive event if they aren't interested in competing, but I decided to file that in the Inexplicable Primate Behavior folder and not investigate it too closely.

Corey crushed all my vampires and David ousted me shortly thereafter with the power of Group One vampires. Every last one of them had +1 bleed, proving yet again just how totally overpowered those guys are. Matt then wisely waited for Corey to finish vaporizing David's vampires before doing the only rational thing possible when facing down a ravening lunatic with a face like a character in a Ralph Bakshi film seen in the depths of an acid frenzy, putting him down from a great distance with a ridiculously overpowered whale-hunting rifle. Corey exited the stage shortly thereafter, and Matt then deployed Smiling Jack to put David into a chokehold which he wasn't ever able to squrim out of.

Final Round: The Gun Pointed at the Head of the Unaverse
me -> Dave (Una) -> Bob (Setite toolbox) -> Merlin (Nehemiah vote) -> Matt (Cesewayo wall)

I was coming back from refilling my water bottle when I heard from across the room that seating was being chosen. I hadn't seen where anyone had chosen to sit or if it was my turn to pick my seat, but I yelled, "I'm preying on Litwin (ie, Dave)!" and headed for the bathroom. Apparently people thought that I was being my usual goofy self and making a little joke, because when I got back from the bathroom, they were all still waiting for me to pick my seat.

No, really, I wanted to prey on Dave. Thanks to a quick sweep and a quickish instance of being ousted, I'd seen what everyone at the final table was playing, and I didn't think any deck other than mine had the fast ousting power necessary to take down Una before she became insanely annoying. Also, I wanted to oust Dave before he had a chance to take a 45-minute turn with his deck, because I had a plane to catch.

Dave went first, which meant that we had two turns before Una hit the table and one more before she acted. I drew a Pentex in my opening hand, so I was confident that we could knock Dave off the table and then proceed with a normal game of V:TES. Unfortunately, Matt played his copy of Pentex on Merlin's Nehemiah, and I had to go into verbal overdrive to convince Bob to remove it, since I was spending all my actions hammering on Dave's pool as hard as I could. Happily, I was able to convince Bob that this was the right thing to do, and Una found that there was a van outside her apartment before she was able to take any actions.

Bob and Merlin and Matt all played their games while I was busy making mistakes that would prevent me from ousting Dave with the speed that I should have. Bob stole Merlin's Shawnda Dorrit with a Form of Corruption, which was bad because it took votelock away from Merlin. He was having enough trouble getting past the wall of Cesewayo as it was, and now he had to also come up with vote push in order to actually pass the votes that didn't get blocked. Bob stripped away most of Merlin's pool, but a timely pair of Villeins put Merlin back in the game with a fat pile of beads.

Dave had brought out three Pander, one of whom was Feo Ramos, which was just enough blockers to keep me from being able to oust him. I got Dave down to one pool, but then failed to remember that I could tap Feo using his card text and so played a Mind Numb on him instead. By the time the Mind Numbs had worn off, I remembered that I had access to a much easier way to tap Feo, but thought that I had to do so during my untap phase, so I missed another opportunity to oust Dave. Dave then convinced someone to remove the Pentex from Una, pointing out that being on one pool meant that he wouldn't be able to get the Ivory Bow and thereby oust the table. He did get a Shadow of the Beast and a Wolf Companion, which were enough to erase all of the vampires from my ready region except Dirk. Eventually I managed to land a bleed with Dirk and oust Dave.

Bob hadn't thought that I was the kind of person to play with two copies of Pentex in my deck, so I Pentexed his only untapped vampire and ousted him. Merlin then called a Reckless Agitation, and in spite of Matt being at five pool, chose to make me lose five pool and Matt one. I assumed that Merlin was attempting to backoust me and then take his chances with Matt, fearing my much-reduced horde of bleeders more than Matt's Cesewayo. I later emailed Merlin and asked him if that had been the case, and he admitted that what had actually happened was that he hadn't drawn the vote push to pass the vote without Matt's help. Damn you and your inconstant ways, Shawnda Dorrit!

The boys in my mental Planning & Strategery Department had already gone ahead to the airport to clear the way for me, but being top seed, I figured I'd try for a tactical self-oust to see if I could wrangle a tournament win from a 2-2-1 VP split. I told Matt that I wanted him to oust me, and he obligingly bled me down to one pool. I then proceeded to entirely screw up my next turn. I had a hand full of bleed cards, one Mind Numb, and some S:CE. Merlin had an untapped Melinda Galbraith, and neither of Matt's vampires was untapped. I should have bled Merlin and cycled as many cards as I could, hoping to draw a superior Majesty out of him so that I could repeat the process, all in the hopes of drawing my one Daring the Dawn for Aimee Laroux to burn Matt's Smiling Jack with, so that Merlin had the best chance of ousting Matt in the endgame. Failing that, I should have tapped all my vampires to attempt to take out Smiling Jack anyway, to at least tap as many of the Aye on Cesewayo as I could.

Instead of either of those correct choices, I played Mind Numb on Melinda at superior, thus ensuring that Merlin couldn't block, I wouldn't cycle more than one card, and Merlin would have an even harder time in the endgame than if I had done nothing at all. I also didn't bother to take any other actions before spending my last pool to look at another vampire and oust myself. That was extremely poor play on my part, so bad that Robb Dudock understandably wondered later if I was even playing to win.

I scrambled out of the convention hall and was given a ride to the airport by a disconcertingly polite team of Canadian men. While waiting for my flight, I bumped into Matt Morgan and Pete Oh in the airport, and both of those fine gentlemen were kind enough to keep their mockery of my ineptness friendly and gentle. I later found out that Matt won the tournament, surprise surprise, though I haven't yet heard a detailed enough account to know if not making my blunders would have turned the tide in Merlin's favor. I'd like to take this opportunity to apologize for my lack of skill, but also to blame Dave for playing an Una deck that he didn't even want to play, and Kevin Mergen for building it for him to borrow. Kevin gets a pass, because he goes to the trouble of making sure that the Origins tournaments are awesome every year, but shame on you, Dave! Next time I see you, you're going out an airlock.

Decklist
Deck Name : Pretty Vacant
Author : John Eno
Description : Weenie Presence bleed, with a very few tricks.

Crypt [12 vampires] Capacity min: 1 max: 5 average: 3.25
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1x Shasa Abu Badr 5 PRE cel for Ishtarri:4
1x Antoinette Dubois 4 PRE for mel Daughter :4
1x Bethany Ray 4 PRE aus Toreador:5
1x Loonar 4 PRE cel !Toreador:4
1x Lumumba 4 PRE ani Guruhi:4
1x Marla Kenyon 4 PRE ser Follower :4
1x Reginald Moore 4 PRE primogen Brujah:4
1x Reverend Adams 3 PRE aus Caitiff:4
1x Aimee Laroux 2 for pre Daughter :4
1x Jayne Jonestown 2 PRE !Brujah:4
1x Justine Chen, Inno 2 pre !Toreador:4
1x Dirk 1 pre Caitiff:4

Library [75 cards]
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Master [12]
2x Anarch Troublemaker
2x Antediluvian Awakening
1x Coven, The
2x Jake Washington (Hunter)
3x Life in the City
2x Pentex(TM) Subversion

Action [35]
1x Aranthebes, The Immortal
8x Enchant Kindred
6x Entrancement
5x Legal Manipulations
7x Mind Numb
2x Public Trust
6x Social Charm

Action Modifier [10]
6x Aire of Elation
3x Change of Target
1x Daring the Dawn

Action Modifier / Combat [3]
3x Force of Personality

Combat [14]
5x Majesty
9x Staredown

Event [1]
1x Bitter and Sweet Story, The

Pretty basic stuff.

The Antediluvian Awakenings are great tech for keeping pool totals around the table low and for encouraging people who aren't my prey to go forward, both of which are exactly what this deck wants to see happen. If a vampire happens to get burned in order to kill the Awakening, that's great too.

The Legal Manipulations and maybe Social Charms should all be Public Trusts, as that way I can spend my transfers digging for new vampires rather than having to spending transfers to bring them out.

I would totally put a second copy of Bitter and Sweet Story in here if I owned one. It's a very powerful card for any kind of deck that intends on pressing the gas pedal to the floor for the entire game.

I think I'll throw a copy of Leverage into the deck, just to mess with peoples' maths. Also, Leverage allows Jake Washington to oust someone every once in a while, and that's really the key to winning with any deck.