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.