Showing posts with label Celerity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Celerity. Show all posts

Sunday, August 29, 2010

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
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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]
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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.