Home Atheism/Secular Humanism G.U.R.P.S. Vampire: The Eternal Struggle Miscellaneous Personal E-Mail |
Home Atheism/Secular Humanism G.U.R.P.S. Vampire: The Eternal Struggle Miscellaneous Personal E-Mail |
| The Decks Brujah/Nosferatu Rush Combat: This is called a �rush� deck after the �Bum�s Rush� card, which is essential to the strategy. Combat serves as both offense and defense with this deck. Beat up your predator�s vampires to hold him/her off, and beat up your prey�s vampires so they can�t block your bleeds. This is probably the trickiest deck in the set to play. You�ll need a bit of experience to accurately gauge how much pressure to apply to predator and prey and which vampires to gun for, and playing your combat cards to best effect takes skill as well. Keep in mind that the card �Fame� has been errata�d. Now it is the controller of the famous vampire who loses the 3 pool. So the way to use this card is to play it on one of your prey�s vampires, then use a �Bum�s Rush� or (even better) a �Haven Uncovered� and send the vamp to torpor. You can even send one of your vampires to try to rescue the famous vamp from torpor, so you can do it again! Malkavian/Tremere Intercept Combat: This deck is not as good at fighting as the rush combat deck, but it has the advantage of being able to block actions that are performed with stealth. This makes you more secure from your predator. To put pressure on your prey you have domination to boost your bleeds, as well as �Pulse of the Canaille�, which should usually be played at superior to give one of your vamps a permanent +2 bleed. Malkavian/Ventrue Politics: With this deck your primary goal is to accumulate votes and use political actions to deplete your prey�s pool. Rather than trying to beat other vampires into torpor, your vampires will usually just try to survive fights by ending combat or preventing damage. Mixed Clan Bleed: Your goal with this deck is to deplete your prey�s pool with unblockable bleed actions. Your minions can simply try to survive fights, or they can use aggravated damage to send opposing vampires into torpor. Balance Between the Decks I�ve tried to make the decks well balanced with each other, but I may not have been entirely successful. If you are a beginner, however, I suggest that you play several games before altering the decks. There is a lot of strategy to the game, and you won�t figure out the subtleties of each deck the first time you use it. I�ve limited the number of cards in the political and bleed decks that can deal aggravated damage, end/prevent combat, or prevent all damage dealt in a round of combat, to a total of 9 per deck. This is because these cards are a big problem for the two combat decks in this kit. If you find that the fighters are still having too tough a time, simply pull more of these cards out of the decks and replace with weaker combat cards. Improving the Decks The political deck is probably the easiest of the four decks to upgrade to tournament quality. Putting in more effective combat defense and more heavy-hitting pool depletion cards like �Kine Resources Contested� will make it considerably more competitive. Also, you should add multiple copies of �Minion Tap� and �The 5th Tradition: Hospitality�. These will allow you to gain large amounts of pool, making you hard to oust. The rush deck can also be upgraded to tournament level, but you�ll need to get hold of a number of uncommon or rare cards to do it. You�ll need to remove the weapons and add several each of �Immortal Grapple�, �Taste of Vitae�, and �Torn Signpost�. (The Sabbat War Brujah Antitribu preconstructed deck contains one of each of these, by the way.) You�ll want to use small vampires, with few or none of capacity greater than 4, and you�ll want to go down to one or two disciplines: potence & celerity, potence & obfuscate, or just potence. The bleed deck will need to be weeded down to two disciplines. Dominate and obfuscate are good candidates, with �Obedience� and �Disguised Weapon� (especially with �White Phosphorous Grenade�) for combat defense. The intercept deck will require a change of focus. Combat should be de-emphasized and the deck should be shifted more toward bleed and/or politics. Intercept will still be useful; it just won�t be profitable to devote a lot of deck space to torporizing vampires. If you want to play straight intercept combat in a tournament then you should buy a Tsimisce preconstructed deck and refine it. The Tsimisce clan are the true masters of intercept combat. Rebuilding the Decks If you don�t like the decks I�ve built, you can always break them down and build new ones! Some ideas for fun decks based around the Gangrel, Toreador, Tremere, and Ventrue clans can be found at the Lasombra's site. For more ideas, see the Happy Families site. |
| About My V:TES/Jyhad Kit By Charles Rose |