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
------------------------------------------------------------
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]
------------------------------------------------------------
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.

Requests From the Audience II

Ricardo Marta, the prince of Lisboa, asked if he could see Robb's decklist from Origins Reportage #3. Robb was kind enough to not only furnish the decklist, but to provide extensive comments as well. Without further ado...

Deck Name : Some Girls: Track 10
Author : Robert Dudock (Robba Yaga)

Crypt [12 vampires] Capacity min: 1 max: 5 average: 3
----------------------------------------------------------
1x Celeste Lamontagne 5 ANI PRO for !Gangrel:4
1x Mowgli 5 FOR PRO ani cel !Gangrel:4
1x Alessandro Garcia 4 pot pre pro !Brujah:4
1x Charlie Tyne 4 obf pro ser !Gangrel:4
1x Scarlet Carson O'T 4 CEL pro !Gangrel:3
1x Bill Butler 3 pot pro !Gangrel:4
1x Calvin Cleaver 3 for pro Gangrel:4
1x Lula Burch 3 for pro !Gangrel:4
1x Leo Washington 2 cel pro !Gangrel:4
3x Anarch Convert 1 Caitiff:0

Library [90 cards]
----------------------------------------------------------
Master [15]
1x Anarch Free Press, The
1x Anarch Railroad
1x Campground Hunting Ground
1x Club Illusion
2x Dummy Corporation
1x Garibaldi-Meucci Museum
1x Hospital Food
6x Path of the Feral Heart, The
1x Twisted Forest

Action [34]
20x Shattering
14x Skullduggery

Action Modifier [13]
10x CrimethInc.
3x Monkey Wrench

Action Modifier/Combat [5]
5x Rapid Change

Combat [7]
3x Form of Mist
4x Leathery Hide

Equipment [8]
6x Anarch Manifesto, An
1x Laptop Computer
1x Palatial Estate

Reaction [6]
6x Friend of Mine

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

Deck Comments: This deck is an attempt to deal with three problems.

The first problem is bounce. Bounce is terribly strong, but usually everyone is packing about the same amount and the person that comes up short becomes the bleed sink.

The second problem is an overly aggressive predator. There is only one thing worse than not even getting a chance to play one's game because one has been mugged from behind almost immediately and that is...

Cross-table interference. This is the third and worst problem. Votes propping up one's prey, Eagle Sight's, etc can make an all but guarenteed VP feel like trying to blow out those "magic candles" on a birthday cake that keep relighting. You just want the damn cake, but everyone is forcing you to keep wasting time blowing out the stupid candles!

So, the idea is simple. Get out small minions and get them to be Anarch quickly. Becoming Anarch used to be an issue, but the Converts generally appear often enough to alleviate that problem. Once the deck has some Anarch minions on the table, some building might occur (getting Manifestos or bleed retainers), some small, stealthed bleeds may occur to move cards (Skullduggery), or some Shatterings may be dropped on important minions that cannot defend themselves.

At Origins, I had the curious situation that almost all my predators (for the entire tournament) were running vote decks. Nevertheless when I played the deck correctly, I got a game win. Shattering bouncers is a must, because with Club Illusion, a retainer and a Monkey Wrench, a 4 cap minion can unload a bleed of 6. Shattering key predator's minions can buy the deck time and Shattering cross-table interference (Maris Streck or Anneke as examples) can simplify life in general.

In this version of the deck, bleed is the oust mechanism and not the Shatterings themselves. I tried a version online with Tension in the Ranks, Dragonbound and Fame with not as much success. Fame tends to backfire and losing a card to Dragonbound is unacceptable. Tension tends to go away when people are sick of it.

Problems/Thoughts: I added some bleed reduction, which seemed good in our local metagame, but almost no one bled me at Origins! These may need to be removed in favor of something else. Stealth was never an issue generally and neither was blood on the vampires, even without the Path. Pool gain is the biggest problem. The only pool gain in this version is an oust and that's obviously not enough. However, taking blood from small minions is not a great choice. I also think there are too many expensive Master cards in this version, draining too much pool. The next version will have some minimal blood gain, less costly Masters and maybe a couple Delaying Tactics.

I welcome any comments, suggestions or feedback. I like this deck a lot and I hope to use it in a revised form in the future.

Robb Dudock

Origins Reportage #4: I Hear Dominate Is Good

This was the big qualifier event, so I knew that I had to do my best if I wanted to screw with other peoples' chances to qualify. Also, because I hadn't yet gotten into the finals of any of the previous tournaments, I knew it was time to buckle the hell down, flex some steel, and spout some other tough-guy phraseology in order to go home with something more substantial than disgrace in my pocket. Nothing's tougher than a pissed-off lawyer with a gun and some Dominate, so it was time to let the Ventrue off the leash. (Also, I figured I'd have a good time watching peoples' reactions when they figured out that I wasn't playing just another Law Firm deck.)

Round One: Contestation Is a State of Mind
me (Lawyers, Guns and Money II) -> Darby (Jeremy MacNeil and friends) -> Evan (Ventrue Law Firm) -> Bob (Kindred Spirits stealth/bleed) -> Dave (Ventrue)

Before this round began, I related a story that's been floating around the Boston playgroup for years now, about a game in which Dave had a Monocle of Clarity on his vampire, asked a question of his prey during his untap phase, waited for an answer and then followed that up with, "And now for my Monocle of Clarity question..." Good stuff, made even better when the first turn that Dave's Graham Gottesman took was to Govern at superior, Freak Drive, and then equip the Monocle of Clarity.

After Dave got out Graham, I told him that we'd need to have a chat in order to avoid a very embarrassing game, at which point Evan said, "Yeah, about that..." Miraculously, we were able to work out a three-way agreement so that each of us could get out two vampires without any of us contesting. Dave got the slightly shorter end of the stick on that deal, ending up with Juniper while Evan and I got princes and justicars, but at least we were all able to play the game.

Darby decided early on that me having vampires with Dominate wasn't cool, so Jeremy MacNeil swung by Mustafa's place to say hi, drop off some really nice herbed focaccia he'd made, and oh yeah also crush Mustafa's face. I played three damage prevention cards and kept Mustafa out of torpor, which I thought was a pretty good deal for me, given the amount of Potence-hate which had just been thrown my way. The upside was that Darby had worn out Jeremy pretty well by spending a bunch of his blood and getting whacked with a cane a few times, and he seemed to think that the amount of damage prevention I'd just shown off would be par for the course during the entire game. The downside was that I didn't have any prevent left when Mustafa blocked one of Juniper's bleeds, got smacked with a Molotov Cocktail and had his Fangs Pulled. Mustafa recovered quickly enough, and one of Bob's vampires was even nice enough to drive him to the dentist for his first appointment, but those two turns were a good reminder that I'd need to be very careful about picking my combats during this game.

Darby mostly left me alone after that, squeezing a new "I won't bleed you next turn if you don't rush me" deal out of me practically every turn. I know it was cowardice, but I wanted to have ready vampires! History will exonerate me. As a result of those filthy deals, Evan was getting beaten down pretty badly. Evan tried some moves against Bob, but his bleeds were bounced and he didn't seem to be drawing much in the way of votes. Ruth McGinley did get her Ra Kissed for blocking a KRC with Telepathic Misdirection, but she came back to the ready region next turn.

Darby's deck was built to bleed and rush, but he was wise enough not to begin bleeding until both Mary Anne Blaire and Johannes Castelein were in torpor. Once they were, he unleashed a tonne of Presence actions and mods, all at about the same time that Dave apparently ran out of bounce and Bob's bleeds overpowered Dave's Govern-based bloat. Once he was knocked out of the game, Evan revealed that he did have a hand full of bounce, though whether or not Darby would've been better off throwing some bleeds down the pipe to slide leftways is open to debate, since he immediately had to begin bargaining with Bob once Evan was ousted. Darby wanted me ousted, since he knew that my Deflections were doomful for him in our current three-way position, but at the same time he couldn't allow Bob to get too much of a lead on him or else he'd be ousted during the endgame before he could destroy all of Bob's minions. Enter the Haggling Phase.

I just keep my yap shut during this phase, usually, and this time was no exception. This is because what I often see happen during this phase is this: two or more smart people try to convince one another to do a dumb thing. This thing will help the do-ee, but not the do-er. Repeat this attempt at persuasion one or more times for each person in the conversation, and then move to end of line when everyone just goes ahead and does what they were going to do anyway.

Now, I've got no issue with negotiation in this or any other game. I encourage it, completely. But I find that I'm not ever able to convince anyone to do anything that's not in their best interests anyway, and people aren't able to convince anyone else to do stuff that's not in their best interests either. That's why my form of table talk is almost always suggestions about how someone can improve their position, and by the way improve mine, rather than suggestions about how they can screw themselves over to help me. That's why, during the Haggling Phase, I tend to eat that apple I brought along or glance around at what people at other tables are playing or whatever.

The point of all this is that I don't remember what Darby and Bob eventually settled on. I do recall that Bob said he had a Spying Mission that he could play on a bleed if I bounced it, which he'd done once already. That seemed okay to Darby, so Bob charged forward with a bleed, leading with the vampire who already had the Spying Mission on him. (You can see why Bob was doing that, though I think he should have spread the Spying Missions out to one of his other minions so that all his bleed-eggs wouldn't be wrapped up in one rushable basket after he'd ousted me.) I tried to block the bleed, and Bob apparently ran out of stealth cards, because he played the Spying Mission, all right...but at basic. Whoops.

I "let" him stealth past me and Deflected, which Bob canceled with Touch of Clarity. I shrugged, played On the Qui Vive with my other vampire and played another Deflection. Darby experienced a instance of red vision and cordially expressed his opinion on the overpoweredness of Dominate. I was worried about him having an aneurysm, but not so worried that I didn't redirect another stealthed bleed into his pool. Shortly thereafter, I ousted him, and since I knew that Bob was out of stealth, it was easy enough to catch his vampires and destroy them. Once he had no vampires, a few bleeds were all it took to take home the game win.

Round Two: The Most Generous Infernalists
me -> Robyn (!Toreador breed/boon) -> Hugh (Nakhthorheb Purge) -> Jeff (!Salubri combat toolbox) -> Cameron (Unnamed bloat)

Years of playing with a certain V:TES superstar have forced me to learn the advanced techniques of AntiPealjitsu, the martial art devoted to shutting down breed/boon decks, so I wasn't terribly worried about having Robyn as my prey. I played smart and blocked the Embrace actions, knowing from long experience that those people who tell you that you should allow the Embrace actions and then block the Embraces when they hunt? Yeah, those people are wrong. Don't make the assumption that the breed/boon deck doesn't have sources of bloodgain other than hunting.

Hugh did an early Purge, but picked small guys for his cross-table buddies to send to naptime, and no one blocked me rescuing Joao, so no harm done. Cameron bled into me many, many times, but his deck seemed to be built to make a lot of pool rather than take a lot of pool away from its prey. Bleeding with the Unnamed, using Greater Curse at the Daimonion level, and then playing I Am Legion gains you a bunch of pool every turn, but not adding Sense the Sin or other bleed mods means your prey can pretty much ignore you.

I ousted Robyn, which I've felt bad about doing on the few occasions that I've done so due to her becoming so despondent when it happens, but this was no time for empathy. This was time for cruelty of the most atavistic kind, the sort of knife-edged ruthlessness that cuts through even the strongest compassion. From that point on, Hugh couldn't achieve any successful Purges, leading to a hilarious turn in which he declared, "I can't do Graverobbing. I mean, I don't have Graverobbing in my hand. Uh. Discard Graverobbing."

The most fantastic play of the game was when Jeff, low on pool, had his Famed Uriel with one blood step in front of a bleed which would have ousted him. Uriel's nosiness showed us all the contents of Hugh's hand, and then Uriel accepted a punch from Hugh's vampire in order to empty himself down to zero blood, so that he could blow himself up and have two pool rain down into Jeff's lap from the resultant explosion of Heaven's Unforgiving Eye at basic. After that bit of climatic action, we all knew that we couldn't live up to Jeff's precedent, and decided to futz around doing nothing until the judge called time.

Round Three: That's What Happens When You Don't Know Your Lines
me -> Mark (Carna wall) -> John (weenie Auspex) -> Jen (Kindred Spirits stealth/bleed) -> Pete (Zombo Combo)

The week before I left for Origins, I'd considered changing up the combat package of my deck in order to work in more guns and get them via Concealed Weapons instead of taking actions to do so. Getting the Shotguns the hard way hadn't ever been a problem for me before, though, and I was wary about changing the ratios of a deck I knew so well without adequate time to test out how the changes would affect the way that the deck played, so I decided against it. Sitting next to Carna, who mocked both my attempt to get a gun and my damage prevention, has made me think that the next iteration of this deck is definitely going for long trenchcoats and concealed weapons permits. At least I got to trigger a look of surprise on Mark's face when he realized that I wasn't playing a vanilla Law Firm deck.

Mark and John and I didn't do a whole lot for the first chunk of the game, other than watch Jen pile into Pete and idly discuss whether or not John would try to save Pete with an Eagle's Sight. We had a lot of discussions about what we would and wouldn't let each other do, with the consensus mostly being that hunts were okay and everything else was out. Mark did manage to use the Magic of Will Smith to craft himself an Ivory Bow, but I was a lot less concerned with that than his ability to Theft my Vitae away.

Pete struggled mightily to get The Baron's bloat mechanism running, but he couldn't keep up with Jen's relentless attacks on his pool. He sent Shambling Hordes over to wreck some Spirited Kindred, but they were too slow with their rushes to take Jen's vampires down in time to save him, and even with the existence of vampires Unmasked on national television they only helped Jen cycle to more bleed mods when they tried to block, so Pete was ousted fairly quickly. Suddenly I had a stealth/bleed predator behind me, and suddenly I was in the game again. Oh, stealth/bleed decks, how I love you when I'm prepared for you.

A couple of Jen's bleeds went flying around the table, and a few of them landed in Mark's pool, which was totally okay with me. Around this time I had a bunch of Governs and Conditionings in my hand, and I couldn't Govern at superior because the only vampire I had in my uncontrolled region was Lodin, who was also in my ready region. In order to get those useless cards out of my hand to get to more of that sweet, life-affirming bleed bounce, I cycled them by using them to bleed into Mark. He apparently hadn't studied his script for this scene, though, because even though he had out Neighbor John and Carna (who, as we all know, do nothing but block and redirect bleeds all day long), he just accepted my bleeds and was ousted. I was so shocked that I didn't even realize he was ousted until he reached out to shake my hand, because I hadn't been paying any attention to his pool up until that point. Go me.

I played as smartly as I could against John, not taking any actions at stealth and using maneuvers and presses to put his vampire with a Deer Rifle into torpor. From that point on, I took actions to diablerize that vampire until he'd lost about half of his ready region, and then I was able to bleed him out. Jen ran into the exact same issue that Bob had in round one, where my permanent intercept and Second Traditions ran her out of stealth in hand and library soon thereafter, so I cleaned up this game and wandered off to find something to eat before the final.

Final Round: A World of Teflon
me -> Connor (Giovanni powerbleed) -> Bob (Kindred Spirits stealth/bleed) -> Karl (Black Hand Coolers) -> Rodd (Tremere vote toolbox)

I was top seed going into the final, which didn't help because I didn't know what anyone was playing. Oh, sure, Karl had told me his deck choice before the tournament had begun, and I'd actually played my first round with Bob, but I somehow managed to totally forget both of those facts. I had seen that Rodd was playing Tremere when I'd walked around a bit earlier, so I figured that sitting in front of him was probably a relatively safe place to be. While it's totally possible to make a very speedy Tremere deck, in theory, in practice I've never seen anyone try it. This turned out to be the perfect choice, so apparently my mojo is strongest when I'm tired, having a good time, and not worrying too much about winning. Make a note of that, self.

The final was over quite quickly. We were all playing with bleed bounce, so there was a point when Connor admonished Bob to be more responsible with his bleeds, to which I replied, "That's not usually something you need to say to your prey at a five-player table." Unfortunately, Rodd didn't really get to play. He got out Troius, who attempted to call a Kine Resources Contested but got blocked by my Carlton Van Wyk. On Bob's next turn, two bleeds were Deflected to Rodd, and he only blocked the first one. Sensing weakness, Karl uncorked a bottle of unblended 16-year Dominate bleed, shredding through something like 14 pool in four actions, thereby leaving Rodd with nothing but a peaty aftertaste.

I didn't do much except get a Shotgun and bleed Connor for one a lot, largely because my hand was full of Second Traditions and Deflections, which was a pretty good hand to have with all the oust-power behind me. Bob was ousted next, but in order to do so, Connor's vampires had to get pretty low on blood. Karl held out for a while but with consistently less and less pool, and just as it occurred to me that I should tell him to bleed into me with everything he had so that I could at least unload the Deflections I'd been hoarding before the game ended up with only two players, Connor ousted him. At this point, his vampires had almost no blood, and one of them was in torpor from when I'd blocked a hunt. At this point the game got dull quickly, as I simply bled for one with all my vampires each turn and blocked everything Connor tried to do. He wasn't ever able to make a recovery in the face of my implacable barrier of Second Traditions and Carlton, and eventually I torporized all his vampires and bled him out, winning the tournament due to my seeding. Most importantly, as Matt Morgan pointed out, I'd trampled the dreams of a child underfoot, and the opportunity to pull that off is the number one reason I play V:TES. (The number two reason being to have chances to spend time with Hugh so I can make fun of him, of course.)

Decklist
Deck Name : Lawyers, Guns and Money II
Author : John Eno
Description : Second iteration of the Ventrue prince Patience deck. More bleed, less combat.

Crypt [12 vampires] Capacity min: 3 max: 10 average: 6.91667
------------------------------------------------------------
3x Lodin (Olaf Holte) 8 DOM FOR PRE aus pro prince Ventrue:5
2x Mary Anne Blaire 10 AUS DOM FOR PRE ani pot justicar Ventrue:5
2x Graham Gottesman 7 DOM FOR obf pre tha prince Ventrue:5
2x Mustafa, The Heir 6 FOR PRE cel dom prince Ventrue:4
1x Jephta Hester 5 DOM FOR aus !Ventrue:4
1x Joao Bile 5 DOM FOR pre Ventrue:4
1x Ulrike Rothbart 3 dom for !Ventrue:4

Library [80 cards]
------------------------------------------------------------
Master [15]
2x Anarch Troublemaker
5x Blood Doll
1x Ephor
1x Giant's Blood
1x KRCG News Radio
1x Papillon
1x Pentex(TM) Subversion
1x Smiling Jack, The Anarch
1x Ventrue Headquarters
1x WMRH Talk Radio

Action [9]
1x Aranthebes, The Immortal
8x Govern the Unaligned

Action Modifier [8]
2x Conditioning
2x Foreshadowing Destruction
4x Freak Drive

Ally [1]
1x Carlton Van Wyk (Hunter)

Combat [23]
3x Hidden Strength
3x Indomitability
4x Resilience
4x Rolling with the Punches
2x Taste of Vitae
2x Unflinching Persistence
5x Weighted Walking Stick

Equipment [4]
1x Bowl of Convergence
2x Sawed-Off Shotgun

Political Action [2]
1x Anarchist Uprising
1x Banishment

Reaction [18]
8x Deflection
2x On the Qui Vive
8x Second Tradition: Domain

Retainer [1]
1x Mr. Winthrop

I think this deck is actually slightly better than the !Ventrue deck which it's based on. The titles and Headquarters mean that you don't need to worry as much about cross-table voters taking you down or even getting pinged with the tail end of damage from KRC votes, and being able to pass votes of your own adds a bit of needed variety to the offense. Being able to diablerize without fear of a blood hunt is very handy, too. I think that all these benefits outweigh the fact that this deck doesn't block quite as well as the !Ventrue do, since the only Auspex here is that used to power the Bowl of Convergence (and that usually just as a free Sport Bike, since Mary Anne doesn't often come into play).

I'm going to try another iteration of this, minus the Sticks and plus more guns and Concealed Weapons, as I mentioned above. Just to keep experimenting with what can be done with this crypt, which I love, I'll also reduce the permanent intercept in favor of more multiacting and offensive votes.

Bonus Round One: Like Son, Like Father
me (Apollo) -> Scott (Tyrol) -> Dave (Boomer) -> Hugh (Ellen) -> Karl (Adama) -> Darby (Zarek)

Ah, Battlestar Galactica. Not only the best translation of pop culture to boardgame ever designed, but a wholly wonderful game in itself. Its nearly limitless replay value is an especially strong selling point for me, given how many times I've played it. It's also probably the most immersive boardgame I've ever played, consistently giving me the feeling that I'm actually playing through a season of the show.

Battlestar Galactica is based on the most recent version of the television show of the same name, a show about the apocalyptic conflict between humankind and the robots they've created. In this new take on the show, the cylons have created a new breed of robots who are human in everything but name, and it's this concept that the boardgame centers around. Each player takes on the role of one of the characters from the show and is given a loyalty card that determines whether the player is a human or a cylon secretly posing as a human. The humans try survive the frequent cylon attacks and deal with logistical and political issues within their fleet, all handled by the game itself rather than being controlled by any of the players, while the hidden cylons try to sabotage the human efforts to avoid destruction. To complicate matters further, a second set of loyalty cards are handed out at the midpoint of the game, meaning that it's entirely possible for one or more players who had thought they were human to be activated as sleeper agents and switch sides to the cylon team. The result is that gameplay is very tense and paranoid, as everyone tries to suss out who's human and who isn't.

I made sure I got to play in this game, fearing that otherwise my life would have been worth nothing in Darby's eyes. At one point he had mentioned that the whole reason he was attending Origins at all was to play Galactica with me, and I still don't know if he was joking or not. What can I say? He's fierce, and I'm easily cowed. Scott, whose tidy DIY travel set we were using, was pleased to finally be playing the game with people who had some experience with it, and wanted to try out the New Caprica expansion, an alternate endgame scenario that comes with the expansion to the base game. I'd played the expansion a bunch of times, but never with the New Caprica module, so I was more than happy to see how the game would play out after the humans made planetfall.

My initial loyalty card told me that I was a cylon, which meant that at least I wouldn't get any nasty surprises regarding my heritage in the middle of the game. In order to keep me from feeling like I was getting short shrift in the nasty surprise department, the game was kind enough to give us a turn-two Legendary Discovery, the only way that the humans can get closer to their goal by actively trying. (Excepting this one particular event, the speed of the humans' progress is effectively random.) I hoped that the skill check would fail and the humans wouldn't gain any distance, given that almost no one had a full hand of skillcards yet, but Hugh was smart enough to play an Investigative Committee on the check. This forced everyone to bid on the check openly, meaning that I couldn't even provide a gentle nudge in the direction of failure, and the humans managed to pass the check. Insolent little hoo-man cockroaches!

I flew off toward the small pack of cylon raiders in space, and got shot down out of my viper. Fine by me: a show of bravery immediately followed by failure seemed like a useful way to begin implementation of The Plan, even if I had no idea what the overall shape of The Plan might turn out to be. (I still don't, even after having watched the entirety of the television show.) I also convinced Karl to play an Executive Order on me so that I could get out of Sickbay before my turn began, but someone pointed out that it would be much more resource-efficient to launch two vipers and have me jump into one of them using Apollo's special ability. I couldn't hang out with Doc Cottle all day without raising suspicion, so back out into the void I went, this time hanging out back by the civilian ships in order to "guard" them. At least being in space prevented that hag Ellen from trying to get into my pants in order to give me a card and try to use her discount cylon detector on me.

Not long thereafter, we made a hyperspace jump. Our admiral informed us that we'd jumped three distance, thereby already moving us to the sleeper phase. Great Holy Ones and Zeroes, these humans were quick. Something was going to need to be done to stop their little romp, and in a hurry. Scott outed himself as the sympathetic cylon and gave his loyalty card to Karl, which I guessed meant that Scott had probably gotten a pro-cylon objective. Putting extra suspicion on the admiral or president by giving them an extra loyalty card, particularly when both cylons are still undercover, isn't something that generally helps the hoo-mans win.

I drew the second You Are a Cylon card. That meant that I'd have to reveal myself as soon as possible, because otherwise I didn't have a teammate. I spent some time thinking about who to recruit to my cause during the other players' turns, knowing that I couldn't hesitate to give my loyalty card away once I took the action to reveal or else everyone would figure out that it was a team-switching card. Just before my turn began, I decided on Karl, whom I was hesitant to pick because he already had a bonus loyalty card, and having yet another card would generate a lot of suspicion. However, Dave was in the brig for having chosen to play Boomer, Ellen was too busy cozying up to the boys in power to be much use to me, population wasn't low enough for Zarek's ability to be useful to a cylon, and I needed to slow down the humans to prevent them from getting another three-distance hyperspace jump.

Once my turn came around, I revealed that I wanted nothing to do with the talking monkeys and shot their president in the chest just to show how serious I was about my scorn. Darby wasn't a great choice of target in terms of the turn order, because I knew he'd get back out of Sickbay via an Executive Order before his turn came around, but he also had the most skillcards in hand at the moment and I figured that making him discard five of them was a pretty good deal.

Karl kept his head down, which was good, since I was more than happy to draw attention with my antics. Probably because Darby wasn't letting Dave get out of the brig, Dave decided that Darby must be the other hidden cylon and suggesting airlocking him. Karl was smart enough not to have suggested this himself, but immediately backed Dave's play and pointed out the many ways in which the president had not conducted himself in a manner befitting a hoo-man. Remember this, fellow cylons: people who suggest radical courses of action always draw suspicion, but those who support those causes of action appear loyal.

Apparently Karl and Dave had Hugh convinced that Darby was a no-good toaster, so out the airlock he went. Well, dang! Turned out that he'd been born of a woman and not a milkbath after all. Zarek was replaced by Baltar, despite the fact that post-sleeper Baltar can't use his once-per-game special ability even if his previous incarnation hadn't used it, because Darby knew that Roslin is a crappy president and didn't want Hugh to be in charge of the government, for some reason that I didn't catch.

The untimely demise of Zarek made the fleet sad, and morale was starting to look a bit worn out, so I moved on over to Caprica in order to camp there and try to manipulate crises so that morale would continue to be hit. Karl came home to the cylon fleet around this time, and we worked together to kick puppies, broadcast The Swans over the human fleet radio, do snarky standup comedy routines to mock the humans' chances of success and otherwise lower morale. Our efforts to sad-make paid off big dividends, as the humans got too depressed to bother trying to continue and ran out of morale before they even made it to New Caprica. Scott revealed that his agenda had been to help the cylons win but salvage all the human equipment - apparently Tyrol continued loving his machines even after he found out that he was also a machine - but I seem to recall there there were still some holes in the hull from the bomb which Karl had thoughtfully armed and hidden before resigning as admiral.

Bonus Round Two: Who Thought Colonizing This Planet Was a Good Idea, Again?
me (Six) -> Darby (Tyrol) -> Dave (Boomer) -> Scott (Baltar) -> Karl (Helo) -> Hugh (Cain)

Once more unto the breach, dear friends! Given the poor hoo-mans' inability to even make it as far as their new colony during the last go-round, I decided to take pity on them and play a Cylon Leader, who would most likely be sympathetic to the meatbags' cause. Also, since I was choosing my character last in the order, and since no one else had picked a Cylon Leader and I'm not a big fan of the sympathetic cylon mechanic, choosing a Leader was the most painless way of sidestepping that mechanic.

Scott uses an ingenious houserule which makes sure that a six-player game featuring a cylon leader doesn't end up with three cylons versus three humans, which is almost always a nightmarish loss for the humans. My agenda was pro-human, so that meant there would be two cylons hidden amongst the humans. My goal was to help the humans win, but be infiltrating among them and not in the brig once the game ended. In the past, when I've played without the New Caprica board, this agenda has been trivially easy to complete, so I was disappointed that I'd received a goal that wasn't at all challenging.

Initially, this round was much easier on the humans than the first one had been. I infiltrated the fleet almost immediately and did what I could to help them, knowing that I'd need to earn their trust early to keep them from throwing me in the brig or out an airlock. It quickly became clear that if there was a hidden cylon, he wasn't doing a particularly good job at undermining the humans, which meant that everyone probably still thought that they were human. Good use of the Pegasus guns meant that our lack of ace pilots didn't matter much, and none of our resources were running particularly low, though morale had taken a few hits.

By the time we reached the sleeper phase, I was in full Jane Goodall mode and had been accepted amongst them. Boomer marched off to the brig, as she always does, and no one wanted to let her out until we knew whose loyalty she now espoused. Scott helped pass a critical check by using a combination of Investigative Committee and his special ability, so we knew he was human, and on his next turn he fired up Ol' Baltar's Cylon Detection and Fruit Juicer and informed us that Hugh was also human.

Human president and admiral? Check. Smooth sailing for the most part, with a few bumps in the road probably thrown up by a hidden but not particularly effective cylon? Check. Blind Jump at distance six to make sure that we didn't get screwed on the last leg of the trip to New Caprica? Check. We moved everyone to the new board and prepared for the showdown.

Karl had revealed shortly before we made planetfall, and he moved amongst the occupation forces, quickly throwing me into Detention. Crap. Somebody had forgotten to lock the door on the brig when we landed on the colony, so Boomer was hanging out with the other humans in the Resistance HQ. She decided that now was as good a time as any to show why we'd been smart not to let her out of the brig, and set up Hugh to be executed. He was obviously human at that point, so we got hit with a morale loss and Hugh lost a bunch of skillcards. We retaliated by executing Boomer, to prevent her from using her auto-scout ability more than anything else, since Dave had played so many skillcards on Cain's execution that he didn't lose many for being executed. Hugh picked Adama so that we'd have some slight help passing skill checks drawn on his turn, but got thrown into Detention with me shortly thereafter. All the other humans camped out in the Shipyard and started sawing spaceship keys out of blocks of soap, which seemed like the only useful action to take at that time.

I had been feverishly scheming to get myself out of the pokey. I was so close to victory that I could taste it, and I did not want to be left behind on New Caprica to be executed when the humans jumped away from the planet, as that would violate my win condition. I saved up my hand, making sure that I had a Declare Emergency since the colors on the check to escape Detention didn't include green, but unfortunately I didn't draw either yellow or purple, so I was at the mercy of the humans as to whether or not I escaped. I assumed that they wouldn't help me much, if at all. Even though I'd proven myself useful, they could just as easily leave me behind during the endgame and suffer nothing for it.

While Adama and I were in Detention, our morale was suffering critical losses. It seemed like every other crisis card had a tough skill check with a morale loss as the penalty for failure, and we just weren't able to play enough cards to pass all of them. It was like some bright light in the Colonial administration had thought it would be a great idea to loop Come and See on a movie screen big enough to be seen by everyone in town, and everyone was getting increasingly depressed as a result.

Galactica returned to orbit, and I made a huge mistake. I forgot that I now had a very simple way to get out of Detention and walk amongst the humans again. I could have simply bashed my head into a wall until I stopped moving and then woken up on the Resurrection Ship, using my next turn to head over to the Human Fleet to begin infiltrating again. Instead I made the check to try to escape from Detention, and to my initial delight all the humans helped chip in to free me. That delight turned to horror when I saw that we'd overshot the amount needed to pass the check by nearly twice as much as necessary.

That was a lot of wasted skillcards for my mistake, and though we were able to continue stealing ship keys and evacuating civilian ships, we didn't have any pilots to fight off the cylon raiders in space. A bad roll on one of the nuke launches meant that one of the two basestars was still floating near the Galactica, and a Broadcast Location played on a reckless skill check meant that another basestar showed up not long after the first one had been destroyed. We sent Tyrol up to the battlestar to launch unmanned vipers to try to defend the civilians. The vipers made a valiant effort, but the huge swarm of raiders eventually punched through their defenses and destroyed our vacation ship, fatally dropping our morale down to zero. I thought it was fitting that the humans had lost because of their noble sacrifice in order to save someone who wasn't even a member of their species, but then, it was easy for me to be philosophical about it, since my race wasn't the one which had just been erased from the cosmos. Sorry, guys.

Requests From the Audience

Ishvalan over at the Ishvalan V:TES blog asked if I had any decks featuring Shattering Crescendo, and it just so happens that I do.

Deck Name : Louder Than a Bomb (Trophy Variant)
Author : John Eno
Description : Hit the high notes and earn some trophies for it.

Crypt [12 vampires] Capacity min: 3 max: 8 average: 6
------------------------------------------------------------
3x Scout Youngwood 8 MEL OBF PRE for qui 2 votes Daughter :6
3x Hillanvale 5 FOR MEL obf Daughter :6
2x Benjamin Rose 7 AUS OBF ani pot prince Nosferatu:5
1x Bloody Mary 8 AUS DEM OBF pre primogen Malkavian:5
1x Arthur Denholm 5 AUS DEM obf Malkavian:5
1x Janet Langer 3 MEL pre Daughter :5
1x Veejay Vinod 3 AUS Nagaraja:6

Library [75 cards]
------------------------------------------------------------
Master [15]
4x Blood Doll
1x Charisma
1x Command Performance
1x Elder Library
1x Fame
1x Giant's Blood
1x Jake Washington (Hunter)
1x Paris Opera House
1x Trophy: Diablerie
1x Trophy: Hunting Ground
1x Trophy: Library
1x Trophy: Revered

Action [20]
4x Red List
16x Shattering Crescendo

Action Modifier [16]
3x Cloak the Gathering
3x Faceless Night
3x Lost in Crowds
4x Siren's Lure
3x Spying Mission

Action Modifier/Combat [3]
3x Swallowed by the Night

Ally [6]
4x Caiaphas Smith
1x Impundulu
1x Ossian

Event [1]
1x Dragonbound

Reaction [14]
2x Eyes of Argus
3x On the Qui Vive
7x Telepathic Misdirection
2x Wake with Evening's Freshness

There's a lot of theoretical goodness here that didn't actually work out very well the one time that I played the deck. Using Caiaphas Smith seems like a great idea, since he can either block stuff or else travel right, at which point you've got a guaranteed target for a Red List. If Ossian gets stolen, as he inevitably will, that's another guaranteed target for some trophy-hunting.

There were some issues that came up during play that I hadn't foreseen when building it. The Siren's Lures were pretty worthless, because I usually didn't have a second Daughter out, and the non-Daughter actions aren't generally the ones that I care about definitively making happen successfully.

The main problem is that the deck is actually too focused. There were a number of times during play when I had enough stealth and Crescendos in hand to torporize two of my prey's minions, but iddn't want to because it would prevent him from going forward. It was the classic rush deck dilemma, but given how much more card-efficient Crescendos are than rush, I think just dialing back the number of Crescendos will solve that issue. And those card slots can then be used to add more ousting power to the deck, which was its other issue.

I don't plan on playing this again - trophies are still too much work for how much they pay off - but hopefully this might serve as a useful blueprint for a decklist.