BRUJAH ANTITRIBU NEWSLETTER Volume 2, Issue 4 Mid-February 2001 Author: Andrew 'Wes' Weston ========================================================== TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction General Tactics !Brujah Tactics Vampire Analysis Tournaments Sign Off ========================================================== INTRODUCTION In this issue I will focus on ways to maintain and gain pool. This is not always easy for Brujah Antitribu as we have little in the way of intercept to prevent pool loss from bleed decks. We do however have access to some cards that when played will allow us to slowly gain pool. I have finally participated in my first tournament in Toronto this past weekend, so I would also like to take this opportunity to offer some observations and advice for those who intend to enter one. ========================================================== GENERAL TACTICS Winning a game of V:tES involves reducing your prey's pool to zero. While there are many ways to achieve this, players must always keep in mind that their predator is trying to do the same to them. The ability to gain a small amount of pool each turn can often make the difference in a long game. I will list the common 'income' cards used to gain pool, how effective they are and when they should be used. Powerbase There are many powerbases in the game, and each has a slightly different variation on the pool gain theme. The problem with these cards is that they all require vigilance in defending them. All of them offer the ability for any other Methuselah to steal whatever blood is on them as a direct action and therefore they often become tempting targets. They really are only practical when you have enough ability to intercept or incentive for Methuselah's to NOT try to steal. When playing in a larger game, you may have 4 Methuselahs all trying to steal the 6 pool on your PB Washington DC, so some means of making sure only YOU are able to get that blood is a must. There are situations where allowing a friendly Methuselah to grab blood from your powerbase may be handy however. Minion Tap http://whitestar.ddg.com/vtes/monger/showcard.html?ID=494 Minion Tap is considered one of the best cards in the game. It's utility comes from the fact that if you spend 10 pool bringing out a huge vampire, you can gain back most of your investment by playing this card. The problem is that you now have an almost empty vampire. There are ways of getting blood BACK on your vampire, however this is not always easy. Camarilla princes have 5th Tradition which can fill a vampire back to capacity. All Methuselahs have access to Giant's Blood, however that card can only be played once per game. Of course, all vampires have the inherent ability to hunt, but this is a slow process. Most vampires regardless of size can still be effective with 2 or 3 blood on them, depending on the cards they are likely to play so losing 7 blood from a 10 capacity vampire may not always be inconvenient. Timing can play a factor with Minion Taps as you will often find that you draw them when none of your vampires can afford to lose blood. Of course, if in a pinch, you can still play it to get it out of your hand, declaring that you will take ZERO blood from the vampire. Blood Doll http://whitestar.ddg.com/vtes/monger/showcard.html?ID=109 A personal favourite, it is rare to see a deck that does NOT contain at least one Blood Doll. It's strength comes from its versatility; you can take blood from the vampire to your pool or from your pool to your vampire (more useful than it appears). A low capacity vampire with a Blood Doll can be turned into a cheap pool-making machine by having her constantly hunt each turn to replace the blood lost. If placed on a large capacity vampire, blood can be gradually drained off similar to Minion Tap but at a much slower rate. There is no downside to this card really... even playing it costs nothing. Other Methuselahs are generally more likely to use Sudden Reversals on Minion Taps than on Blood Dolls. Also, Blood Doll is a common card, so most players are likely to have a few lying around. Tribute to the Master http://whitestar.ddg.com/vtes/monger/showcard.html?ID=821 Another variation on the same theme, TttM is less versatile but potentially more profitable to play. If playing with a crypt with primarily small vampires a timely Tribute can net you a lot of pool. A common problem with this card however is timing. What if you draw it at the beginning of the game? What if you can't afford to lose blood from one or two of your vampires? Personally, I'll usually stick with Blood Dolls rather than Tributes most of the time. Tribute just isn't flexible enough. Eco-Terrorists/Gang Territory/Arcane Library/Nosferatu Kingdom These cards are only useful for certain clans obviously, but are worth mentioning nonetheless. Although their purpose at first seems to be to enable you to quickly influence out vampires from your uncontrolled region, don't forget that blood can be influenced OFF your uncontrolled vampires as well (at a cost of 2 transfers per 1 blood). Therefore, if you have the pre-requisite clan to play one of these cards and the pre-requisite vampire in your uncontrolled region, you are basically paying 2 pool for a pool gain of 1 per turn, a very good investment if you can get it. It's downside is that it is expensive at 2 pool and sometimes hard to set up. It is a card that is much better to get in the beginning of the game, at least after you have the right vampire out. Govern the Unaligned/Scouting Mission/4th Tradition/Enchant Kindred At superior level, all of these cards offer the ability to add blood to a younger vampire in your uncontrolled region. Once that blood is there, you can use influence transfers to move it to your pool (or reduce costs to play those vampires). The difficult thing with these cards is that you will often be influencing out younger vampires first in order to keep up with other Methuselahs and you can't use those younger ones to add blood to the older ones. Often, if you use these cards it is better to play at a slower pace in the beginning, influencing out the 8 cap with DOM (for GtU/SM) and then using that one vampire to help bring out the youngsters. Later on when your controlled region looks a bit more stable, you can then use these cards to either gain pool or alternatively bleed (4th Tradition being the exception). Short-Term Investment/Secret Horde/Ascendance If you are comfortable exchanging Master Phases for a slight pool gain, these cards can be useful. Generally, master phases should be used in better ways than just to gain 1 pool however. I can almost always find better master cards to play than these. There are times when you may not have a master card in hand, and a STI in play would be an ideal way to do 'something', but more often than not you will find yourself playing this card at the most inopportune time and never being able to use it. Ascendance offers an immediate return with no strings attached, but for a measly one pool it rarely seems worth the bother... Ousting your prey Not a card of course, but a viable means of gaining pool. Gaining 6 pool is a considerable incentive for ousting your prey. It is also the means of winning a game, so it should definitely not be ignored. There are many times when a good offense is the best form of defense. By gaining that 6 pool you are not only pushing towards becoming the winner of the game, but you are making yourself harder to oust by your predator. This is easier said than done, but if you are not trying to oust your prey, ask yourself what exactly it is you ARE trying to do? ========================================================== !BRUJAH TACTICS The Brujah Antitribu have access to more ways to gain pool than most clans. We have Gang Territory (discussed above) a type of card that only three other clans have access to. We also have access to Enchant Kindred, a Presence card that allows us to add blood to a vampire in our uncontrolled region. A card that !Brujah will find very effective for pool gain (when combined with other cards) is Taste of Vitae. Since we will often be whacking other vampires for hideous amounts of damage, we may as well use this card to fill ourselves back up to capacity. Then, on our next Master Phase we can use Blood Dolls to remove some blood and repeat the cycle. Since many of the most effective combat cards for us do not cost a lot of blood (Disarm, Torn Signpost, Immortal Grapple) we are less likely to need a lot of blood on our vampires than most, so keeping them at 2 or 3 blood each is not as dangerous as one might think. If you find a vampire is empty for whatever reason at the beginning of your turn, rather than hunt, you can add a blood from your pool with the Blood Doll and then rush with that minion to gain back some of its blood. I find that Blood Dolls are particularly effective in a !Brujah deck because of the Taste of Vitae card. Gang Territory is a nice card to have out, but one thing to consider when playing it is the composition of your crypt. Since most !Brujah decks will typically contain a lot of non-!Brujah (mostly Camarilla Brujah, Jimmy Dunn and Beast) it is likely that you may find yourself with an uncontrolled region that does not have a !Brujah in it, making this card useless. Generally, in this case it is not worth paying pool in the hopes of getting a !Brujah, unless you are reasonably sure you will get one. You can see how the timing of this card is so important. Still, I find it is worth it to throw one into a deck because if the gods of timing do favour you, this card can be a super investment. Powerbases are generally never worth playing in a !Brujah deck as we have no means of intercepting the minions who try to take the blood from it. Powerbase Montreal may be an exception to this rule. Although it would be fairly easy to steal this powerbase from us, it would also be very easy to steal it back (and usable in the turn in which it is stolen!). Most Methuselahs, given the choice between losing Powerbase Montreal or getting in a fight with a !Brujah are going to LET you have it. Enchant Kindred is useful in that it can be used in several ways. Bleeding for an extra pool at no cost to the bleeder is always nice, but adding 2 blood to an uncontrolled vampire may help us too. Most !Brujah decks however will rely on Potence and Celerity more than Presence, and will generally focus on smaller vampires many of whom will not have superior Presence. Since Sela is a common vampire to use in a !Brujah deck (she has PRE) this card may find some use. (NOTE: This card has been errata'ed. The superior ability of the card is now at +1 stealth. I believe this was always meant to be the case but was an error when the cards were originally printed) Minion Taps will generally be less useful to us than Blood Dolls as our average capacity will typically be too low to benefit. A deck that uses high capacity !Brujah may find this card useful, but such decks are fairly rare and of questionable viability (A later newsletter will discuss why). ========================================================== VAMPIRE ANALYSIS Name: Evangeline http://whitestar.ddg.com/vtes/monger/showvamp.html?ID=357 Clan: Brujah Antitribu Capacity: 4 cel pot pre Evangeline seems quite plain at first. The beauty of this vampire is that she has access to all three clan disciplines, albeit at inferior level. This means she is likely to be able to use all of the discipline cards we have in our deck. At 4 capacity, she is able to be influenced out on a regular turn which is always nice. Do not overlook the utility of Potence or Celerity at the inferior levels. With inferior Potence by itself, we can play Torn Signpost, Immortal Grapple, Undead Strength and Disarm doing 3 damage, sending most vampires to torpor and costing us nothing. Add in a Blur and you can hit them for 6. Sure, she would be nicer if she had CEL POT PRE, but the closest available !Brujah with that combination is Amelia at 7. In most !Brujah decks, 7 is a bit too much to pay for this, especially as we generally don't NEED all three at superior (though it would be nice). Also notable is Christopher Shy's artwork. I like that Evangeline looks like she is about 12. Somehow a 12 year old girl vampire losing control to the Beast and frenzying seems kind of cool to me. Personally, I really like Shy's artwork. He was responsible for much of the imagery in Montreal By Night (a fantastic sourcebook for the RPG). His portraits all seem hazy and indistinct but in a way that makes the vampires appear deliberately inhuman and detached. Unfortunately, some of this quality manages to be lost on the card artwork he has done, perhaps due to the colour. Black and white seems a more appropriate venue for his style. ========================================================== TOURNAMENTS This past weekend I was fortunate enough to participate in my first sanctioned V:tES tournament in Toronto. I was not sure what to expect in terms of players, deck styles and intensity of play. From what I have heard of other tournaments, this one was quite atypical. Most tournaments (from what I have been told) tend to feature a lot of derivative sneak and bleed and political decks. The Toronto tourney did see a few of these but the majority of decks were a lot more 'toolboxy' than I had expected. I myself prepared a Lasombra sneak and bleed deck which won me 3 VP's in the first preliminary game but 0 VP's in the second and third. I did however make it to the final, which was a pleasant surprise. I think this was due to the way the VPs were spread out. There were four players who had something like an average of 6 or 7 VPs each, and then a lot of people with 0 or 1, so I was able to sneak into the final with my measly 3. The winner was Packer, the prince of Montreal (other players came from as far as Quebec City and myself from Windsor) with a Malkavian Sneak and Bleed deck. His deck was probably the most focused deck of the tourney and few people were prepared to deal with the heavy bleeds he was able to give. Ironically, I was probably the best equipped to handle his deck with quite a few Deflections, but the gods saw fit to not give me ANY when he was my predator in the final. Another notable deck which impressed me was a Gangrel/Setite combo which was truly unique. It made it to the finals, even though it seems like such a fragile concept. The deck uses Temptation to temporarily steal other Methuselahs' vampires, play Protean cards on those vampires and then to rush other vampires (often a Meth would find himself fighting his own minions). He would then use Wolf Claws, Amaranth and then call a Blood Hunt on the vampire he just diablerized with. Alternatively, he had some Protean stealth which he would use to diablerize vampires for the same effect. Often a Methuselah would lose two vampires in a turn. The deck did not seem to have enough of an offense to it, but somehow it seemed to pull together in the most interesting ways. The main vampires in this deck were Amisa and Mirembe. I'm hoping that I can get ahold of the deck composition to show it to whoever is interested. I'm still scratching my head thinking about this one. I would say that more than half of the decks that I saw were based around combat, though not exclusively so. I did not get a chance to play every other Methuselah unfortunately, but of the 10 or so players I played against, at least 8 seemed to have combat-oriented decks. Sabbat War cards were not as heavily featured as I had expected either... I think because none of the players were new to the game. I expected at least a few new players who had cards limited only to the Sabbat War set but most of them seemed to be old-timers using more of the original Jyhad set than anything else. The other thing I noticed about this tournament was that nobody took it particularly seriously, to their credit. It was a very friendly affair with nobody being overly concerned about cheating or mistakes. The 'multi-judge' format was used, but generally judgements were decided by players in a friendly fashion. Judges were called more for confirmation than for dispute resolution. I was very impressed by this. Ironically, everyone thought I left in a tiff after being ousted from the final, but nobody heard me when I said I was going to go call my friend... so everyone thought I had stormed off or something until I got back. I thought that was really funny. ========================================================== SIGN OFF A small retraction/clarification on the last newsletter. My predecessor James Hamblin questioned my using Sport Bikes and Leather Jackets in EVERY deck I use. I really meant only to emphasize how much I like those particular cards. He made the good point that Sport Bikes are really only useful if you are prepared to leave that one minion available for blocks; quite true. The truth is that I don't ALWAYS use these cards, though I often do. Blood Dolls ALWAYS get added to my decks, Sport Bikes and Leather Jackets only usually. You will note that in four newsletters I have not posted one deck of my own construction. There is a reason for this. I would much rather use the space to focus on HOW to build decks and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of certain cards/combos than post decks that are built with cards that new players probably don't even have. I don't know if anyone really builds decks based on decks they see in newsletters; I certainly don't. Half the fun of this game is creating your own decks and even a badly constructed one is at least YOURS and not someone else's. If decks are a feature that people would like to see I will happily post and dissect one (not necessarily mine) but as things stand I am more comfortable with the format I have been using. Comments are welcome. You can contact me at ghost@mnsi.net