KublaCon 2012

Was going to post something about registering for Gen Con events on May 20th, but I’m losing interest in commenting upon that.  Meanwhile, KublaCon ended yesterday, so while things are relatively fresh in my mind.

Friday

I give Eric a lift and we get to the con a bit before 2PM.  Briefly talk to Brad, who had shown up Thursday and noted the large number of people for an unofficial day of gaming.  I totally don’t get why these cons keep moving things earlier.  It’s almost like there’s rampant unemployment to where people have plenty of time to game on weekdays.  Oh, right.

I don’t bother trying to get into a 2PM game, even though there are more RPG events I’m interested in at that slot then any other during the weekend.  Just not mentally “there”, yet.

I chat with people I know for a while, then get dinner at a Japanese place in Millbrae that I go to for potato croquette curry.  Now, some may wonder at this.  I have asked a number of people who have lived in Japan, and they know nothing about potato croquette being served there.  Yet, I have seen it at other Japanese places.  I could search online to see if it’s a dish found in a particular place due to trade/immigration with/from other nations, but it’s more amusing to be one of life’s mysteries.

I wander about a bit longer and then go home a bit after 7:30PM, when the commuter lanes are open.  Yes, I bleed the con dry of all its precious vitae!  Or, not.

Saturday

I figure there’s a good chance I’m in a 9AM game.  I pick up Andy, who had spent Friday working on his Flames of War army for Sunday’s tournament so hadn’t been to the con yet.

Even though I do plenty of L5R already, there weren’t that many things on the schedule that interested me that weren’t at 2PM Friday.  I’m in the L5R game, the only one on the schedule and my first choice over something I don’t recall.

It was not either of the two things I was mentally prepared for.  I was figuring either that the game would be very rooted in the world with a lot of social challenges or that it would get L5R junkies.  I know that sounds kind of similar.  In other words, either the GM(s) would be junkies or the players would be.  I kind of forgot that I’ve played a number of L5R convention games and that it’s common for there to be people who just aren’t that into the world, if they know anything about it at all.  My immersion in all things Rokugani is showing.

The game was a fairly straightforward fantasy RPG experience.  There was only the lightest touch of the society of L5R.  Honor was the main thing that was specific to the genre, and, you know, that’s actually a pretty good thing for a con game, maybe even a takeaway that can be applied to home play.  It’s so easy to get bogged down in all of the details of L5R’s history to where it detracts from simply playing a game.  One other player and I actually seemed to know L5R much better than the GM.  I played the only shugenja since most of the players were new to the system and/or world, and it was an effort to refrain from abusing the power.

Plotwise, one player was the second son of a Crane daimyo.  The rest of us were retinue or friends.  A village got burned down by mysterious attackers and we were off to investigate.  We stop at a village on the way, where the locals speak of strange lights at night.  We check out the nearby hills.  At one abandoned bandit camp, we find a mysterious brass coin.  At the other bandit camp, there be bandits.  We fight a bit, then we find out that they use maho to teleport away.  I Commune with a strange Air kami.  With some other info, we get the picture that the daimyo’s banished brother has learned gaijin magics and returned for vengeance.  We go to the burned village and find a giant sand/rock mound.  We get closer.  It explodes.  We wake up the next day in the bodies of bandit types.  We figure out the need to get back to the castle and restore our bodies.  We get back, sneak in, get some equipment, get attacked by illusionary wraiths that I Spock to irrelevance.  We are short on time, so we don’t fight out the fights against ourselves and the daimyo’s brother who switched bodies with the daimyo, we bust the mirror ball that enables the body switching.  The end.

The GM had frontloaded the combat, an interesting idea for a con game.  The one combat I wish we had fought was against a sand monster that had attacked the village.  The party duelist didn’t really do anything and had to leave early – other than people who hate a game and are trying to flee from it, I don’t understand why people don’t plan to stay until the end of a game.  Other people have trouble getting into stuff, so leaving the slot open for them makes more sense.

Also, the characters were crazy powerful.  Just another example of how higher rank characters are broken.  In 3e, somewhere in rank 2, the game breaks.  In 4e, I think it’s in rank 3.  I rolled a 60 on my first Divination roll.  I rolled a 63 on a Perception/Investigation roll and only tied the party magistrate.  My Commune with Air roll started at 10k5.  I healed 42 wounds with the only Path to Inner Peace I cast.  Someone commented about a “mere 32″ when rolling for something.  I think our magistrate hit 69 twice on Investigation rolls.  For context, a Target Number of 30 is extremely hard for a lot of rank 1 characters and about a challenging TN for many rank 3′s.  I had like 5 skills at rank 5, Spellcraft at rank 7, and several skills at rank 3.

I have plenty of time to kill before running V:TES at 8PM, so I wander around and talk to folks.  Andrew, Brad, and I go to my favorite Chinese restaurant (in the world).  We get our own stuff, so I get tan tan mian.  We get back.  I park in my parking space (the closest one to the hotel outside of their parking lot).

I set up for V:TES.  Tom and Kat, who show up every year to play in my V:TES event, even though they live in Reno, which is insane by the way, show up first.  Geoff, who I hadn’t seen in maybe 6 years, is the only one signed up on the sheet and I spy him.  Rich, who I played some with ages ago, and Brad fill out a five player table while I wonder whether others are going to show since there’s only at least seven other people I know at the con who have played the game a significant amount.  Jeff is around, in between RPG coordinator duties, and the two of us talk while the five play.

They play for 2 hours with no one being ousted.  Brad was playing Akunanse, Rich borrowed Tzimisce, Geoff some Sabbat Pre/Obf vote deck, Tom 419, Kat Lasombra.  To make things a bit more interesting and because Jeff offers, we set up two four-player games with Jeff playing in each.  I go first in my game playing my “collection” !Toreador deck, Kat plays her Lasombra deck, Geoff plays Jacko throws cars and launches RPGs and other flung crap, Jeff borrows my Blessed Resilience deck.  In the other game, Rich plays some Stanislava bleed deck, Jeff borrows my “dudes with agg hands and Potence” deck, Tom plays weenie something, and Brad his Akunanse deck.

In my game, I’m not terribly threatened, so Loonar comes out, learns Auspex and gets a Sawed Off Shotgun.  She also acquires a members only Leather Jacket.  Redbone comes out.  I Effectively Manage and get Malabranca, so I work on him; later, he goes pool stealing, including when my prey is at 3 pool!  Jeff keeps discarding the combo cards for the Force of Will bleeds that is all the deck does, including Forces of Will.  My prey is somewhat contained because I’m oh so spooky [wiggles fingers].  Jacko tries to beat up folks with varying ability – one of Jeff’s guys gets torped and Jeff diablerizes with his other vampire who gets burned by Kat’s votes!  Geoff’s KRCG gets used a lot and even leads to a block or two.  My hand goes from too much intercept to too little and back.  Kat tries to vote, I generate four intercept, she gets five stealth.  Jacko gets bounced to me and it’s on.  Jacko goes long and dodges I think.  He additional strikes Molotov Cocktail.  Loonar additionals Sawed Off Shotgun.  Jacko presses with Flash, I press with Read Intentions.  Jacko presses with Psyche!.  I press with Nimble Feet.  For the win!

I get Kat down to 1 pool after Pentexing her Antonio, leaving her with no blockers as she only has him and Ambrosio.  I fail to kill her and she ousts Geoff.  Jeff breaks the Pentex.  Kat Villein’s and Giant’s Bloods to go to lots of pool.  Jeff finally kills me with Force of Will.  Kat crushes Jeff in the endgame as he can’t block anything she does at stealth and she has vote lock and this little thing we like to call Dominate.

In the other game, Jeff plays most of it with just Thetmes, somehow outbloating Stanislava bleeding.  Jeff ousts the weenies and Brad and Rich gang up on Jeff, Brad gets 3 VPs.

Geoff shows Jeff and me the game he’s been working on for years, so we play a dungeon crawl themed card game.  It’s good.  Definitely polished like he said.  I don’t like that you can only win on your own turn, though, and we didn’t see the party forming mechanic used virtually at all since it was just a three-player game.  I was surprisingly out of it by this point, slept horribly Friday night even though I was in bed around 10PM.  Drive home.

Sunday

I get in before 9AM, wondering whether I got into a 10AM game.  There was talk of playing some pickup Babylon 5 CCG, so I hung around the area where one of the game’s designers, Edi, was running Diplomacy.  Amusingly, two of the game’s original five designers were present at the con, though I never ran into John (Hart).

For some crazy reason, 10AM (and 11AM) games were in a slot that had event registration close at 9:30AM.  I get into my game and we decide that I should play in it rather than try to get a game of B5 going, maybe after my game ends we can see who is around.  When I get to my room after seeing my name on the posting at 9:50AM, the room is full of people who don’t know whether they got in or not.  One person comes in with a written out list.  One person gives up his seat so that a crasher can play as some people are having good luck getting into games and some people aren’t.

The game is Unhallowed Metropolis.  Obscure game where the small print run of the first edition book and obscurity means that the first edition books are apparently quite valuable.  The genre is post apocalyptic zombie/undead Victorian England in the 22nd century.  I wanted to play the “mourner”, a profession that means guarding a dead body for three nights from bad stuff.  A combat profession.  In fact, all three of the characters I was interested in were combat characters as playing an aristocrat or a doctor would be too much the sort of thing I usually play, and I’m not interested in playing a criminal.  I end up with my second choice, “undertaker”, basically a professional bounty hunter of the undead.  Third choice would have been dhampir.

We are hired to acquire the grandson of a nobleman from an orphanage.  Our first challenge is that the area near the orphanage goes under quarantine where the military comes in and cleanses the area.  We are in London, by the way.  Supposedly, it’s worse in the wastelands, but it seemed rather sketchy in town.  We jump a dumpster and blow away some zombies with our aristocrat fleeing towards destruction.  He gets corralled and we enter a building that seems like the orphanage, which it turns out to be.  We go room by room clearing out zombies.  We find paperwork and other stuff that gives us clues as to what’s going on.  I check out an obvious escape by some of the people who were at the orphanage/asylum/genetics lab/etc. and nothing comes of checking out the sheet rope from the window to the roof of the nearby building.  We go to the basement and come across prometheans – form of Frankenstein monsters.

Should comment upon combat in this game.  It’s crazy deadly.  It’s hard to say that 4e L5R is truly a deadly system like the L5R GM and others say, but the GM for this game was certainly right about it being crazy lethal.  I was in six combats.  I shot six times.  Twice, both times with my shotgun, I missed.  The other four times I blew the heads off my targets.  The dhampir got four attacks a round with his swords and the mourner got four attacks a round with her knives.  With essentially one exception, they killed everything they fought in one round.

The aristocrat nukes the first promethean with a pistol.  The mourner slices up the other two.  We find a tunnel but choose to ignore it as we have a location already.  So, we cross town.  Undead follow us out of sight.  We get to a warehouse.  In the warehouse are a bunch of zombie test subjects that we ignore.  We come across a vampire feasting on some corpses and the criminal and aristocrat flee while the dhampir takes him out in a round of combat.  We open another door and come across the kid as a boy cyborg with a big cyborg companion.  This is where I miss with my shotgun.  The doctor throws an acid grenade and somebody dispatches the cyborg’s head, probably the mourner, as the dhampir takes a wound that was one off killing him.

We leave, even though the doctor wants to use the lab in the warehouse as we are fairly sure the cyborg is going to explode.  We walk right into a bunch of zombies.  What’s funny is that they give us our toughest fight in that they swarm the mourner and give her all sorts of wounds.  I do waste my major ammo – I had switched clips in my pistol for the cyborg – blowing the heads off of zombie children.  We limp to a safehouse.  The aristocrat speaks to our employer about the state of the kid, the employer doesn’t want him, so the aristocrat plans to off the kid, which the doctor objects to.  While they argue, the military shows up and blows the head off the kid and arrests the doctor.  We get paid.

Grab food with Jeff at my favorite Chinese place, more tan tan mian and some xiaolongbao – place is known for dumplings and those two dishes are the standard ones I get there.

I don’t get into my evening game, so I wander, running across Rich, Ray, Tom, and Kat.  We play a game of Smallworld with the Underground mechanics.  I play horribly, not having enough experience, and the game quickly becomes a two-player race, though Ray makes a good showing at the end.  There is pounding on Rich, but unfortunately, no pounding on Kat.  She wins by a lower margin than I thought she would.  We play a pickup game of V:TES.

I lend out my 3-cap Lilith’s Blessing Thaumaturgy bruise deck to Rich and my “collection” !Tremere deck to Ray, so I decide to play one of my non-collection decks and play my Archon/Anathema/random weapons/Potence deck.  Tom, my prey, brings out Beast.  Rich brings out Masika St. John.  Kat is playing a goofy Lasombra deck, not her deck.  Ray brings out Malgorzata.  Tom threatens to rush my Nikolas Vermeulen if I don’t say I won’t bleed him (for one?).  He eventually decides to rush forwards and I retain my hand of multiple Torn Signposts and Undead Strength.  Turns out Tom has a fair amount of ranged strikes to go with Carrion Crows.

Ray quickly has five votes, having brought out Polly Kay.  That makes my game awkward as I need votes from Kat’s Aurora Van Brande who became the Archbishop of Philadelphia to pass votes.  My first Archon fails.  I do bring out some Progeny.  She helps me get an Archon on Selma.  I Bloodhunt Malgorzata, torp her, and Selma eats her.  Meanwhile, Tom keeps torping Masika, but Masika keeps coming back with more stuff – Mr. Winthrop, Zip Gun, Weighted Walking Stick, Blood Doll, Camera Phone.  He had put out Lilith’s Blessing early, so he just kept refilling the dorks who were rescuing Masika.  Rich finally is able to Flames of the Netherworld Beast and eat him.  Kat’s Ignacio gets torped and never comes back out, so she’s ineffectual.  Ray does not kill me with Dominate.

Tom goes to 2 pool for another Beast.  He goes to 1 pool to DI something.  I oust him.  Rich ousts Kat and Ray.  The endgame is completely in question for round after round after hour.  After 3+ hours, with my having 3 cards in hand and five vampires in torpor and Rich having all four of his vampires in torpor, I win.  At one point, Nikolaus had four Grenades and a Deer Rifle, only one of the Grenades being thrown for a simultorp.  Murat had Disguised an Ivory Bow to torp Masika.  Two of Rich’s vampires had been Anathemaed to oblivion.

An interesting game for the first hour or so, but it degenerated and, then, became kind of endless as we were so limited in what we could do to each other in the endgame.

I ran across Andy, Eric, and Jeff playing Die Hanse on my way to the car, figured out when I had to be at the con on Monday, and drove home.

Monday

The question was whether Andy and I were playing in Eric’s game.  Another question was whether Eric was running his game.  Two of the three people signed up had crossed their names out.  The third never showed.  However, a crasher showed, so Andy and I filled out the party and we played Eric’s Hunter: The Reckoning, using Savage Worlds rules, game.

I was born to be a wayward nun, so I played the wayward nun.  Andy played a retired park ranger.  Jay played a burglar.  We had to find a fellow Hunter who had gone into the upper Klamath River area, looking for something.  Hiking.

We talk to a park ranger, who doesn’t help.  We hike a couple of days upriver.  We find some tracks and the river is oddly polluted.  We decide to go for a thinner forested area to get a better view.  We spot a cabin.  In the cabin, the burglar finds a claymore mine.  We find lots of weird stick bundles strewn about.  We go upriver and find uranium barrels corroding in the river.  We find more.  We camp away from them and get attacked by werewolves in the night.  Our ranger does heinous amounts of damage to the brain of one of them without felling the creature.  I fail my fear roll and roll badly on the table, getting a major phobia of wolves, rather inconvenient since everything we fight ends up being werewolves.  True Faith protects me as the other two shoot the enemy.

We head Eastward, going further up into the hills, and find more barrels and more stick bundles.  We find a cave which the burglar’s second sight had said was a likely place for who we were looking for.  By the way, I was Judith, the ranger Jim, the burglar Jennie, and our fellow Hunter John.  We find John and I Rejuvenate away one of his wounds and do the healing thing I do.  A rift starts opening up in the cave while the mine we took blows up a werewolf.  Two more werewolves attack us and I do my usual thing of True Faithing while I tend to Jim.  John and I leave and the others finish off the werewolves and join us.  A great sound can be heard behind us.  I’m the only one not afflicted with radiation poisoning.  We get back to the ranger station, find out that he’s a naughty dude, and we report our findings on Hunter.net so that a larger force can come in and deal with the werewolf nest and extradimensional monster thing, while someone needs to clean up the random radioactive waste.

I thought using Savage Worlds (with mechanics Eric came up with) for Hunter worked well.  I’m much more okay with World of Darkness mechanics when playing a human than when playing a monster as the high variance and tedious failures seem more reasonable to me, but other than playing around with how Powers work, like one of mine was fairly useless though True Faith made up for it, things seemed smooth and appropriate.

All three of the RPGs I did were similar in that they were all solid con games.  By con game, I mean that they were reasonably straightforward, kind of fighty, things moved logically forward.  I’ve told some people recently that I actually find the average con game session better than the average home game session, and they seem shocked.  While I’ve had a full spectrum of con games, from the most painful and disturbing examinations of my fellow humans to awesome games, usually my con games are much brisker and more productive than my average home game sessions.  That’s kind of funny when you think about how strangers tend to work better together than people who know each other, though I think the fact that con games are known to be one-shots and tend to be more linear and/or focused has a lot to do with that.  It’s not just more combat, which is an inherently cooperative activity, either.  In con games where I talk with PCs and NPCs a bunch and fight little or not at all, things go much smoother.  Investigations are much smoother.

*shrug*

Eric needed to get home to run a game online, so I drove him and Andy home fairly soon after Eric’s game ended.  I did finally run into Eric P. right before leaving, so I saw most of the people I usually see at the cons.

Summary:  No B5, no Type P Magic, only two games of V:TES though one was outside of my event which was nice, boardgame and cardgame, three RPGs, all of which were good, food I wanted to eat, conversations with people I pretty much only see at cons, and my parking place was always prepared for me.  I feel like I’m missing something that I did.  Oh well.

Egalitarian Experiment #1 – First Plays

Got a good group of five for some V to the TES earlier today.  First chance for me to bust out the new collection – see this month’s post on May 6th for more info on the experiment.

Game 1:

Ian (!Trem BB) -> Eric (AAA) -> Brandon (borrowed Kiasyd SB) -> Andy (Cavalier Malks) -> Gerentt (Shattering Crescendo/Tourette’s)

I drop Tension turn one.  Eric moves 2 blood to Alexandra.  Kiasyd pop up.  Sean Rycek is joined by Lutz.  Daughters appear.  Daughters get Ossian, which I let go as I find it interesting to see whether it will come back to burn me later.

I block Muse and put out Weather Control and Theft, intimidating Ossian for much of the game.  I block Muse later, who is only a Minor Irritation to Janine(!!), hunting because I could.  What I don’t do is find much in the way of bleed cards, only getting a Threatsed bleed from Frondator through before Alexandra appears.  Very slowly, Anson also appears and ends up being the bane of my existence with his silly Second Tradition nonsense.

Meanwhile, Andy is under the fearsome shadow of Dame, Isanwayen, and Omme.  Gerentt has to worry about either Lutz getting offensive or the Kiasyd ripping through.  Tourette’s Voices get played or threatened.

Eric puts Toreador Grand Ball out to make Alexandra less blockable.  But, Anson is not so free to act.  I do Walk of Flame Alexandra at some point, but she doesn’t suffer much and comes back right away.  Gerentt does finally do actions forward, torping my Frondator and depleting my Paul Cordwood with Crescendoes.  Andy’s fortunes improve dramatically as the Kiasyd keep failing to kill him and Eric’s Ancient Influence succeeds.  Tryphosa makes an appearance, taking Andy to 4 pool.  Gerentt taps out to play Carlton, going to 2 pool.  Andy kills him after one of Eric’s votes takes him to 1 and Andy Restructures away Carlton.  I bounce Lutz bleeding who unhelpfully runs into Anson’s domain.

I lunge at Eric, but it becomes a mess as he has Second Tradition, Eyes of Argus, Telepathic Misdirection to screw up my math.  Actually, it was kind of annoying to draw two Governs in the middle of my lunge as they didn’t help at that point and I would have maybe done better if I knew I would be able to Govern four times in the turn.  Probably wouldn’t have mattered.  Eric got Brandon, somehow finishing things off with a bleed of 2 at one stealth right as 2 hours was up.  I was at 1 pool when we stopped.

My timing was just off.  I kept expecting Majesty from my prey and only recall one, though how that mattered isn’t so clear.  Never drawing a Harass was kind of annoying but would have not been good if Eric did play more Majestys.  I didn’t use Paul’s ability much, which was not a good sign since it’s so good, but then, people didn’t want to fight me.  I did end up taking as much damage from Tension as my prey did.  In many ways, a very normal game.

Game 2:

Eric (fast War Ghoul) -> Gerentt (Lasombra w/ Pre) -> Andy (Cybele Great Beast) -> Ian (!Malk SB) -> Brandon (!Salubri Brothers)

As I had two Blood Dolls in my opening hand, I put Fabrizia in play on turn one, figuring there was a good chance I could hunt farm for a while.  In fact, she spent almost the entire game hunting back to 4 blood.  Persephone was my second vampire only because she was the only one with Auspex.

Brandon was a threat to rush, so I tried to ignore him, which led to amassing a horde of dorks.  Eric got a War Ghoul out but struggled in a lot of other ways, though he did get to Camera Phone bleed a decent number of times.  Gerentt went crazy with voting and Governing early to achieve Moncada, Polonia, and Gratiano with tons of pool.  Even when Brandon crosstable rushed Gratiano and ate him, another just came up and there was still much pool.  Andy bloated lots but didn’t draw The Great Beast.  He did try Entrancement on the War Ghoul and I sadly had to use my Great Beast stopping DI on Entrancement.

Due to a lack of bounce, I got bled a bunch by Cybele but usually had 15+ pool due to Blood Doll farming.  Starting in on using Kindred Spirits didn’t hurt.  Though Isabel de Leon and Adonai both had the power of the big eye in front of me, there was quite the lack of bouncing.  When Brandon went to 4 pool for another guy, I ousted him.  War Ghoul came for Persephone and ran into White Lilly’s Saturday Night Special + Deny(al) of Trap.  I oust Eric with Persephone, Fabrizia, White Lilly, Bloodfeud, and General Perfidio out.    Persephone gets Banished.  I Pentex Polonia because I didn’t expect to get Gerentt and Andy was low on pool and end up ousting Gerentt.  I bleed Andy out.

Does getting 5 VPs in every game I’ve ever played with my experiment’s !Malk SB deck say anything about this experiment?  Nah, I’m always an advocate for questioning results based on insufficient sample sizes; in this case, I had a good seating and things played out well for how I wanted to play the game.  Of course, I did already think this deck, of the three I’ve built out of this card pool of about 750 cards, was the best.  Far more useful to see what can be done with a less efficient archetype to try to get at the issue of whether decks of sufficient viability are possible with such a small card pool to work with.

While this experiment is hardly vigorous in the scientific method, I do feel that it’s unnecessary to take into account how much better I am at playing stealth bleed than other archetypes and how much experience I have with decks like the second deck.  It’s not a question as to whether a newb will be competitive and interested with this card pool but whether a newb could be competitive and interested with this card pool.

Mostly addressed being competitive to this point, talk a bit about being interested.  I have three decks.  The third, which I haven’t played yet, may not be viable.  Still, the decks do largely different things, which should satisfy some desire for variety.  The !Trem deck was more interesting (of course) than the !Malk deck; I will probably get bored with it quickly, but, then, I get bored with almost all of my decks after one or two plays; it doesn’t seem too boring at this point.  What I should try is to see whether I can cobble together most of a fourth deck that isn’t some well known archetype or, at least, doesn’t use the crutch of relying heavily upon one of the Third Edition precons.  This will help give me a better idea on what variety is really possible at this level of cards.

Cardinality

Occasionally, I wander into less philosophical areas to speak about.  I was doing some V:TES deckbuilding searching on Cardinals and got kind of interested in the data.

Clan	Group	Total
Lasombra	2	2
	4	1
Malkavian Antitribu	2	1
	4	1
Nosferatu Antitribu	2	1
	4	1
Toreador Antitribu	2	1
	4	1
Tremere Antitribu	2	1
	4	1
Tzimisce	2	2
	3	1
	4	1
Ventrue Antitribu	2	1
	4	1
Grand Total		17

If we take a look at a table of Cardinals in the game by Clan and group, certain features readily pop out.  Of course, there are two advanced version Cardinals not included in the totals and I did include Sascha Vykos even though it would need to be merged to achieve Cardinaldom.  If that seems wrong, I can understand.

The absence of three clans – !Brujah, !Gangrel, and Pander – means what?  Does it matter?  Pander reasonably don’t have any on thematic grounds.  The other two also have some thematic sense with being either rebels or being flavorfully apolitical.  On the other hand, if we pull in Archbishops and Prisci, there are some interesting numbers as well, like how few (6) !Toreador and !Ventrue have any of these three titles while !Brujah jump ahead in total numbers (7) and !Gangrel don’t (5).

Getting off topic as I wanted to focus on Cardinals.  Why?  Just kind of interesting to examine one minor slice of a CCG and see where it leads.

There are five library cards a Cardinal can play that an Archbishop can’t.  I’m less interested in the ones a Priscus can’t play, but the list is longer for them.  In general, I’ve found that Titled Sabbat cards are a pain to get much use out of.  There’s not nearly as much of a concentration of titles within a given clan and the payoffs are lower to where mixed clan is less interesting.  Sure, Cardinal Benediction is always a way to Cardinal-up!  But, eh.

Auto-da-fé

I’ve put this card in decks.  I may have even passed one.  I just don’t recall all that clearly.  I just can’t get that excited by it, even in theory.  Which is good, since Protect Thine Own was one of the dumbest cards ever.

Chalice of Kinship

Seems simple enough:  put a bunch of Creation Rites in play or otherwise create a horde of dudes, invigorate them.  In practice, even when I put this card in a deck, possibly even when I equip it, I don’t recall ever using it.  With The Hungry Coyote, stimulating a horde is rather easy.  The hoops here are tiresome hoops to jump through for payoff.  Probably need stealth, which you don’t with The Hungry Coyote due to there being no single key action.  Need to get it into play.  Need to have nothing better to do with your Priscus/Cardinal.  Blah.

Gurchon Hall

I do recall having this in play.  It’s far more complicated than it seemed at first.  The lack of control is really annoying.  The unhappy face when having only one ready minion is … unhappy.  It has all of the disadvantages of being a hunting ground:  targetable by anti-HG plays as rare as those may be; not stackable with other HGs.  I probably should try it in a more wallish build – Tzimisce would be obvious.  I see it being a cut above the two cards above.

Harzomatuili

Now, we are talking.  This is one of the most efficient ways to self oust in the game.  Wait …  Doh!  I have actually seen Hazmat in play, if memory serves correctly, though it was out of an Ahrimanes deck.  I may have hired him, right before being ousted, or may not have.

Investiture

I’ve also put this card in one or more decks.  And, I never considered playing it.  What the-?!?  Why are Cardinalistic cards so awful?  Does point out why people aren’t so bothered by the distribution of Cardinals in the game.  Far more want to have Cardinals for their votes than for specific card plays.

Thanks to secretlibrary.info, by the way, for card text.

I didn’t actually intend to get sidetracked on Card-inals (my super awesome, totally not pretentious way to define cards that require Cardinals).  Getting back to the vampires.

Only one group 3 Cardinal.  Well, group 2 kind of made a mess of things since the grouping rule wasn’t foreseen when group 2 was being published.  Lasombra and Tzimisce do relatively well for Cardinality out of group 2/3 – “well” being kind of a stretch, but oh well.  Makes sense – helps define them as leaders of the Sabbat.

If we look at discipline crossover to get “Friendly Clans”, Ayalea is Lasombra friendly, making for a coherent strategy of putting out fat dudes with titles that aren’t that important.  At least DOM/OBT mitigates the lack of necessity in being a Cardinal (can upgrade fairly easily, could just live life as an Archbishop/Priscus).  There are a few other friendlies.  I’ve certainly seen Velya’s PRE used and I have a tournament winning deck with Melinda, but I never really thought about a group 3/4 AUS/PRE Cardinal deck running all three.  Did have something like that that was Third Edition only, so obviously sans Velya.

Then, there’s unfriendliness (to one own’s clan).  Radu, Radu, Radu.  I can’t say you are the worst of the bunch, but you sure try hard.  I can squint and see some sort of AUS/DOM deck use maybe with !Ventrue if it were a !Ventrue vote deck and not a grinder.  Except, !Ventrue vote seemed to die as a played archetype ages ago, even the stealthy kind.

The worst?  !Nosferatu for the lose!  It’s just such a pain to play these gigantosaurs lacking AUS or Dom.

I don’t know that a lot can be said about the capacity distribution of Cardinals.  For instance, how !Toreador seem to get young-uns just doesn’t seem to really matter, certainly not as much as the general lack of (meaningful Sabbat) titles.

Does any of this matter much?  Wouldn’t say so.  I hardly notice given how much less important Sabbat title breakdowns are to Camarilla title breakdowns.  Nor do I feel much of a thematic sense of how the Sabbat is put together.  I’m still far more likely to build a clan focused deck that has a mishmash of titles when I’m running some Cardinal or another.  Even Radu kind of ends up getting used for reasons that are highly questionable, though when you build Third Edition only decks where you want to run cards you never see, like Gurchon Hall, you kind of lack more exciting choices.

Egalitarian Experiment #1 – First Thoughts

Following up from my last post, I have pulled the cards (or opened unopened precons) for one of each Third Edition precon and my first box of Third Edition boosters.

I suppose I need to clarify the point of these exercises in collection limitation.  Here are the questions I’m looking at:

1. What level of buy-in would a player need to compete at the tournament level?
2. What level of buy-in would a player need to have a reasonable diversity of decks to enjoy the diversity that the game has to offer?
3. What does the game feel like when you have a modest collection?

A goal is to not focus on what is missing but to focus on what is possible.  The CCG model is such that people aren’t supposed to have everything, though I would tend to believe that this isn’t the case when it comes to being able to build top level tournament decks for people deeply invested in CCGs.

That third question is unlikely to be answerable for me, given that I can’t just forget the last 16 years, though I can try to get some insight into what it must be like for others at times.

The obvious starting point on building a deck suitable for tournament play with this level of investment is !Malk stealth bleed.  I have claimed on a number of occasions that a bad stealth bleed deck is still a more formidable deck than the norm – an argument, by the way, for the power level of stealth bleed when debating the best decks in the game.  I continue to claim such.  I think the deck I put together is perfectly functional at winning.  It might not be as forgiving of mistakes in play as other builds, but then, it’s far more forgiving than most all of the decks I have been playing in recent years.  Regardless, success is going to depend primarily on quality play, including table politics, and certain factors that are difficult to control – card draws, seating, player personalities.

After building the first deck, I became discouraged.  Three of the four precons are for clans with Auspex as a clan discipline, yet between them they only have x2 Telepathic Misdirection – the only Auspex card truly needed to compete.  TM is a common in the set, which is far far better than the many years in which the only TMs available were from Jyhad/V:TES.  Still, want a minimum of 12 for two decks.  Yes, this gets into looking at what’s missing rather than what’s available, but again, this is a necessary card – on the level of Blood Doll, WWEF/On the Qui Vive, Deflection, and a few others being an essential part of the game.

Adding to my discouragement was that my sum total of Obtenebration cards consists of …

x1 Oubliette
x1 Shadow Play
x1 Shadow Strike

I was looking forward to some old school Lasombra stealth bleed.  By the way, this points out two rather significant problems with Third Edition:  the precons are moronic not only in their contents but in Lasombra not being one of them; the distribution of cards is insane, which I’ve complained about before, but which rears its head so eloquently in these experiments.  Once I add box #2 into the pool, three more Shadow Plays and two Shrouds of Night will be “unlocked”, but I’m inclined to believe that, when you are trying to support with one set 10 clans and 13 disciplines, that you can cut some terrible cards to make more decks viable.

Good time to talk about the business of CCGs.  There are those who will argue that all this makes sense.  That giving a player a completely functional preconstructed starter deck will undermine additional sales.  I’m not completely dismissive of the point, but the way I view it is that there are plenty of other ways people can spend money, including spending it on CCGs that are more newbie friendly such as … wait for it … Magic.  Magic may be far less friendly when it comes to constructed play, but Magic became more about limited play a long time ago.  Anyway, I believe the amount of effort someone has to go to to get up to a competitive level correlates to the size of the resulting playerbase (though not nearly so much as popularity of the genre/licensed property).  I’d rather have a higher volume of players with less investment than a smaller group with vast collections.  Give people a solid foundation out of the gate, get them playing often, then they will chase the rarest cards because so many CCGers are collectors or do want to do different things or do want to build esoteric decks that rely on obscure rares.

Or, if you are like Bandai (from what I hear) from years ago, think entirely short term and care only about the first few sets before pulling the plug on a game, while hyping the next anime CCG in the works.  Sucker born every minute and whatnot.

I came back to “my” collection, finally opened the !Brujah precon to see if handling the physical cards would get me more inspired for a second functional deck.  While full of all of the usual problems with a deck with no bleed bounce, I wasn’t unhappy with what I goldfished.  It may not rise to the level of viable for competitive play, but it seems nonridiculous given how much !Brujah suck even when you have tens of thousands of cards to work with.

With that, I became a bit more inspired and went to work on the !Tremere deck.  The advantage of the !Tremere deck, especially over a Tzimisce deck, is that Dominate replaces the need for more Telepathic Misdirections.  There are actually quite a few Thaumaturgy cards in the deck and I got some Thefts of Vitae from my box, so it wasn’t hard to fill things out.  The primary weakness is masters.  In fact, the master selections for each of the decks suck.  On the other hand, I got six On the Qui Vives from box #1 (zero will be in box#2), so I’m okay on wakes … for two decks.

I’m not enthralled by the idea of trying to scrape together a Tzimisce deck.  Besides the dearth of TMs, the Third Edition Tzimisce just suck so bad.  Jane Sims is worthless, as evidenced by how I’ve never put her in a deck e-e-ever (accuracy of this statement subject to my memory not failing).  Where, Lolita Houston is one of my original fly girls.  Duality is perfectly positively presentable and completely failed in support, as well as showing up 50% less than he/it should in the precon.  I do have a good number of Sha-Ennus for some superstarish deck or Tzimisce w/ Obfuscate, but as one can see in the Deck Clinic subforum on vekn.net, going the path of Tzimisce with Obfuscate is a sad panda path while superstaring is likely to be quite the challenge with my < 800 card collection.

Then, we get to clans not supported by precons.  Just not looking so viable at this point.  On the other hand, there might be just enough discipline crossover to do some mixed clan decks around disciplines I have enough decent cards for.  As for low discipline decks, the quality of the generic cards is, of course, low.  The weakness in master options is the biggest challenge, with lack of On the Qui Vives being important if I decide not to share cards between decks.

Which brings up some facets of these experiments.  In truth, it would be fair to share cards as I’ve done that for plenty a CCG even when I had sizable collections.  That relieves pressure in the key problem areas of lacking Telepathic Misdirections, Redirections, On the Qui Vives, and Blood Dolls.  Also, a real player would likely look to focus some, not expecting to play everything, and trade or otherwise supplement sealed purchases.  For instance, if I had this collection and truly loved Lasombra, I could just trade for Obtenebration and trade away, say, Protean cards.  So, these experiments may be quite artificial.  Nevertheless, I’m trying to change my perceptions of the game.  I want to run cards I never currently bother with in decks because I can just play something better and feel no shame.

I’m not sure when I should end this first experiment.  It would be nice to have some tournaments handy to play decks from such a modest collection before expanding to a larger card pool.  On the other hand, one box of boosters and half a box of starters is rather skimpy for anyone who actually likes the game and I’m artifically restricting trading and buying singles, so moving to experiment #2, the full box of starters and two boxes of boosters, might be more reasonable.

I am finding this amusing already, however one looks at it.  I’m definitely putting in questionable cards with metagame thinking in mind.

Less Is More

Apparently, continuing a series of … Is …

The subject of availability of V:TES cards came up recently.  Yes, it’s harder to get various packs/boxes/precons then it was.  That has actually been true for ages.  No, I can’t put myself in the shoes of someone trying to get into the game or expand what is possible for them to build.  But, I’d be curious to try.

I enjoy owning all of the cards for a CCG.  I enjoy having tons of chase cards others don’t.  I don’t think it’s a good idea when people can’t compete because it’s prohibitively expensive to get tournament necessary cards.  Of course, what is prohibitively expensive is open to question.

I can’t compete in constructed Magic formats with my current collection, with a few specific deck exceptions.  For instance, I could probably get a couple of sideboard cards and compete in Legacy with a Red Deck Wins deck.  I do own x4 Force of Will, though I read that Force is becoming less useful.

Staying on the subject of older formats, I’m missing largely two key things – modern creatures which are much more powerful and aggressively costed on average, multilands.  I have hardly any original dual lands and I’ve never tried to acquire sets of more modern multilands.  To me, fixing the land problem, by itself, seems prohibitively expensive.

In terms of more modern formats, though not so much Modern, I could run out and acquire a bunch of Standard legal cards, trade, pick up key singles, and become competitive only sinking a thousand* dollars into the game.  Again, that strikes me as prohibitive.

*  Based on typical value of singles of modern Magic decks adding up to $300-400 a deck, discounting because I’d buy boxes of cards rather than all singles.  Of course, this is a suboptimal way to compete in Magic from a cost standpoint.  Far better to draft against inferior players for rares, buy what is needed for a single tournament and turn around and sell cards that won’t get reprinted, and so forth – these strategies for cost containment, however, don’t sound appealing to me.

Getting back to V:TES, what is a prohibitive level of expenditure in effort and/or $$?

My recommendation to a new player (to an existing group) is to borrow decks until the player is sure that they want to play it for the long haul, then go find someone getting out of the game or putting a collection up on eBay.  That should give somewhere between 5,000 and 50,000 cards to work with at a cost of something along the lines of $50-$300.  Then, can hunt for harder to get cards to build weirder decks.

That’s not how I got into the game.  I did borrow decks before investing.  I decided I was interested in creating my own decks from my collection.  I started buying Jyhad boxes.  Then, I bought some Sabbat.  Then, I bought some Dark Sovereigns and Ancient Hearts.  At some point, I had a case or more of Jyhad – it being so cheap at various points that we played a single game of sealed box Jyhad.  I stupidly didn’t buy a ton of Sabbat when it was cheap.  I bought lots of every White Wolf published expansion.  I virtually never traded in the 16 years I’ve been playing.  I have bought singles on eBay at times but not for years and, obviously, not before eBay was a thing.

On a tangent, speaking of playing for 16 years, it’s kind of interesting to realize that.  I still enjoy the game quite a bit, testament to the value of CCGs I would say.  Why only 16 years?  I was introduced to the game in 1995 and started playing the following year.

I had an epiphany at some point with the Babylon 5 CCG.  I know I’m rambling, but I’m finally getting to the point.  I had all of the cards, for all intents and purposes.  My collection was defined more by how many autographed rares or chase promos I had.  One day, I thought about how much more fun it was to build decks when I had only a couple of boxes of starters and a couple of boxes of boosters, roughly my initial purchases.

Ever since then, I’ve always kept in mind that there are disadvantages to being a Mr. Suitcase.  Mark Rosewater goes on about restrictions breeding creativity, and I can see that with collection sizes.  I felt much more creative and passionate about decks I designed when I had to struggle to figure out how to compete.  I put this down to thinking way more about each card when:  I had less of them to think about; I couldn’t just play a better card all of the time.  Then, the more thought put into a deck, the more I care about a deck, so the more I’m likely to enjoy a deck.

I frequently restrict myself when it comes to deck construction.  It’s not just because of house rules for play groups I might play with or even laziness.  Nor is it something I do just for V:TES.  I built rareless decks for B5.  I wrote a Scrye article on a rareless, promoless deck for Wheel of Time, a game chock full of power rares/promos.  Likely, it has something to do with Ultimate Combat! being my first CCG and how that CCG restricts deck construction by rarity.  I built iceless corp decks for Netrunner.  Minionless V:TES tournament deck … that got the edge twice in one round.  An all ax kick deck for UC!.  And, so on and so forth.

There’s just something stimulating about limitations.  When I look at V:TES, B5, WoT, or UC!, I can almost build any deck possible.  That tends to inflict me with an ennui.  Why?  Too many options.  Lack of focus.  I can easily put together 20 decks; how am I ever going to be as emotionally invested in 20 decks as I would have been for the 1-2 I had to put real effort into?

Anyway, it’s all great to talk about my own interests, but how does this relate to someone trying to compete in V:TES?

Unlike most CCGs, I don’t see where someone needs much to compete with a reasonable variety of decks in V:TES.  This isn’t Magic, where multilands are essential to multicolor decks.  This isn’t WoT, where even Light decks wanted ultrarare recruitable Forsaken cards for their discard effects.  This isn’t Dragonball Z, Star Wars, or a multitude of other CCGs with similar ultrarare issues.

The more cards you have, obviously, the more options you have.  But, not having every option is supposed to be a feature of CCGs.  It would suck if the only deck someone with under 5,000 cards could build for V:TES that could compete is Malk SB.  But, that’s also not the case.

What is the case?  Again, I can’t really put myself into other people’s shoes.  This most commonly comes up when trying to think of how to recruit new players to games that I’ve been invested in for years.  But, that’s another topic.

If I were limited to around a thousand cards, which is like some starters and two booster boxes, what could I do?  I’d imagine there would be a lot of problems with V:TES at that level, mostly because of the need for wake effects, pool gain (blood conversion if you are reading Darby’s latest offerings over at Inferior Babble), and certain staples that might not come in the particular precons I started with (or I was using starters from the pre-precon sets).

By the way, the starter box + x2 booster box level is the level of investment that I think of when I think of the concept of when I enjoy a CCG most.

V:TES is hard on new players due to no card limits – a primary reason why I would always have card limits, in fact prefer 3cl in my CCGs.  At the same time, it’s a game where a lot of decks can win.

How many?

I’m curious.  There’s probably a tool out there to do simulated booster packs for this game, but I don’t have it.  Precons are easy, I even have a bunch unopened, nevermind how easy it is to rebuild them.  However, precons have largely been missing far too many essential cards, being light on the most important things of quality masters and wakes, while also often having bizarrely unplayable crypts.

In reality, I have enough unopened product or unorganized product (never sorted boosters I opened) that I can run a number of experiments on what it’s like to have a modest collection.

So, I guess I should.

Ignorance Is Bliss

This may seem like a strange topic to write about.

CDGs (collectible dice games) and CMGs (collectible miniatures games) differ from CCGs in fundamental ways.  Which are?  CCGs have hidden information – the hand.  Because of the hidden information, it’s not necessary, though some have it, to have a randomization mechanic.  CDGs obviously use the dice themselves to provide a random game mechanic to make resolution nonpredictable.  CMGs, at least all that I can recall, use dice to accomplish the same thing.

If you know what is in someone’s hand at all times in most CCGs, the CCG has failed.  Perfect information can result in perfect play.  Sure, chess has perfect information and rarely has perfect play, same with tons of other games – games I don’t see the point in playing when you can play CCGs.

Why am I writing about this?  I think people don’t realize the importance of hidden information.  Some quite enjoy knowing what is in others’ hands.  I hate it as I hate perfect play (or, alternatively, paralysis by analysis).  That CDGs/CMGs have everything in play is likely why I never embraced them like I do CCGs.

Not that a game ceases to matter the instant someone peeks at someone else’s hand.  Or, like can happen in a CCG like Magic, the game should be stopped as soon as someone’s hand is empty.  The need is for mystery, not mystery at all times.

So, Le Dinh Tho rips a card.  Okay.  I probably find it less annoying then a lot of players based on the reactions they give when it happens.  On the other hand, superior Revelations strips the game of an essentially valuable element.

Not to say anything about how useful revealing hands is.  Someone with a known hand is clearly at a disadvantage, with the level of disadvantage varying immensely on the situation and how fluid the situation is.  Whether it’s worth investing resources to put someone at that disadvantage depends highly on the cost in resources.  Tortured Confession has far more costs associated with it than Prophecies of Gehenna, while Prophecies is taking up a precious master slot.

Not much more than that.  Just thinking about how much of a bad idea it is from a design standpoint to make knowing people’s hands easy.  And, another reason Magic should have had a different draw mechanic, so that playing off the top wasn’t so common.

Mind of Chaos

I got to thinking about what disciplines I’ve won tournament wins and which I haven’t, again.  But, that’s really a better topic for after some more tournaments since it wasn’t that long ago (in “tournament time”) … well, actually, it was over three years ago I posted this.  The main problem with doing another look is that I don’t think anything has changed.

So, as unexciting as that is as a topic, I got to thinking about Dementation.  I feel bad about not doing more things with Dementation.  Unfortunately, the game doesn’t want people to do interesting things with Dementation.  Where Dominate’s “other” cards include things like Graverobbing (free), Obedience (free), Mind Rape (not free but not bad), Chain of Command (possibly free), Hall of Hades’ Court (kind of silly), Mesmerize (free), Dementation’s “other” cards include the likes of:  Mind of a Child (3 blood), Mind of a Killer (incredibly confusing), Prison of the Mind (3 blood), Sleep of Reason (2 blood), and some pretty weak effects.

Some like Blessing of Chaos, so I’ll give it a pass, even though every time I’ve tried to run it in a deck, I just ended up discarding it or getting ousted before I could discard it.  Lunatic Eruption is something I’ve had success with.  And, Dementation has far fewer cards than Dominate, as well as being a far less common discipline.

Still, Dementation is a perfect example of the tyranny of good great cards.  Kindred Spirits, Madman’s Quill, cardless bleed with mods, or, to a lesser extent, The Call all drive out inferior plays.  Being of an economics background, where you get Gresham’s Law, the “bad money drives out good” theory, I always enjoyed using the phrase “good cards squeeze out bad” to explain why so many CCG cards never see play or only see play in the most limited (and often poorly conceived) cases.

I do have some tech I want to try at some point, but we have such a limited tournament schedule that getting around to everything takes so darn long.  In the meantime, there are ideas that should be pursued just in the name of variety and discovery, no matter how discouraging they seem in the face of “Why don’t I just bleed?”

For one thing Dive into Madness is a bleed play, for another, the sort of decks I can think of where I’d want to try something effective are not the sort of decks I’m all that enthralled with playing, so while I’ve not done much with Dive, I doubt I’ll try very hard.

With more ways to untap, such as Danse Macabre, The Haunting and Total Insanity might suck less, but I tried multiple times to do something with these, and they … sucked.  Even worse, they sucked in a really tedious, let’s all hate this game, kind of way.

How many Tremere have Dementation?

I see.  I see.  I see nothing.

This is important.  For most, I figure they will realize why, but who knows what others think?  Obviously, paying 3 blood for a card is rather exorbitant.  Sometimes, like The Kiss of Ra, you understand the cost.  Sometimes, like Burning Wrath, you are probably playing a bad card that seems worth it.  Sometimes, you can easily recoup the cost, like Awe for 3 into Voter Cap.  Dementators are not a bunch known for great blood gain, though if you try hard enough and make your deck suck enough at winning, any deck can gain copious amounts of blood.

A common fix to costly cards is to play a Tremere.  Only need one to Magic of the Smith out The Ankara Citadel.  I did have a rather ridiculous Dragos deck that ran Dementation and Ankara.  It had nutpuncheritis.

Now, we do have Winchester Mansion to Magic out to prevent some really sketchy plays, like skill cards or Clan Impersonation.  Anyway, why so much focus on Ankara?  Mind of a Child and Prison of the Mind are two cards that beg to be played for half, rounded down, cost.

Mind of a Child has been around forever.  It’s awful.  It’s annoying, but what does it have to do with winning?  Again, there are more ways to untap in the game, even if we just look at more vampires with Fortitude.  Cardano has been around forever, but Gerald Windham is way cooler.  Either way, could also do things like run Restoration or Aaron’s Feeding Razor to recoup blood, nevermind Perfectionist.  Una is, of course, a natural untapping machine, so the focus here would be to gain blood to avoid the dreaded Clan Impersonation plan.  Then, Zillah’s Tears, Danse Macabre, Black Hand, etc. can all help !Malks with untapping to not waste actions on losing plays, with The Hungry Coyote helping with costs.

Same could be said for any expensive card, like the next one I’ll talk about, so why care about Mind of a Child?  Because if you can get enough of them out fast enough, you can murder decks.  What sort of decks?  Not really sure, but I’d be inclined to believe that high cap decks would be the best victims since you can only turn so many vampires into children.  Even then, is this worthwhile?  Isn’t this still a make someone lose but not win play?  Probably.  A lot of setup to justify the cost with a matchup based result that may just mess up a table, where Dementation already has plays to counter other decks, like Touch of Clarity and Wrong and Crosswise.

Prison of the Mind has not been around forever.  Besides being a way to nuke Imbued, if an unreliable one as React with Conviction kills it, the superior is never going away, unlike Mind of a Child being something that also requires defending.  At 1 blood, the inferior is hot.  The superior is always mean, if also not something that helps with winning the same way Kindred Spirits helps with winning, maybe not helping at all.  Even at 2 blood (Perfectionist?), the inferior is akin to Set’s Curse, which I think is entirely playable, though Serpentis is was actually far more of a control discipline than Dementation.

Giving -Stealth and -Intercept isn’t what we would call synergistic, but it does mean that it’s likely to annoy every victim.  But, to what end?  Why play defensive Dementation?  Minus intercept is an offensive play against Bowl-ers and whoever, but so is another stealth card.  Many a Dementation deck is happy to have stealth bleed at the table, so the -Stealth is more of an … antiannoying play?  Not like vote decks are necessarily going to be stopped that hard – stealth vote won’t care much unless you are a wall and nonstealth vote should have enough dudes without the card to do their thing.  Stops casual hunting, which is so totally worth an action and 3 blood that isn’t “bleed for 2 and gain a pool”.  Just not sure how much it will matter, but allies are annoying enough to run some odd plays.

Mind of a Killer may be confusing, but confusing cards have been known to be far better than people think.  This is, at least, free, so why not?  I wouldn’t be inclined to play it on my own guys, even though that’s an option, but like Lunatic Eruption, it might just be a nice disruptive effect that actually helps with winning, if not as much as bleeding would.  The two could be combined, but that’s not actually a combo, since the way the card reads, the burn clause from combat would not trigger the damage.  Sure, that makes it more of an “I play on my dudes” play, but how often do I want to go to so much effort just to get +1 Strength for an action?  Better seemingly is just to Lunatic one dude and Killer a different dude to encourage excessive amounts of combat, though that can also be achieved with just more Lunatic Eruptions.  Though(!), I’ve found that casual Eruptions are better than dedicated Eruptions.

Sleep of Reason is one of those things that I think sounds far better than it is at first blush.  Sleep of Reason is also one of those things that I think takes far too much effort to build around.  Yet, it’s really not that hard a card to play and has a powerful effect.  It’s one of those toolbox plays I can see, even in a nontoolboxy deck, just because it will be more likely to be relevant than casual Graverobbing is.  Play a couple of Storage Annexes and a couple of these and randomly torp people out of nowhere.  Gee, that sounds a lot like Coma.  Except, everyone knows about Coma, Coma costs more, Coma often means you are sending yourself to torpor, Coma is far less likely to land (dodge, combat ends, Immortal Grapple, maneuver), and I’ve just explained why Coma sucks (outside of Dragos, The Eye of Hazimel decks, yeah).

While the play of Sleep can be critical, the threat of it, like say ditching The Kiss of Ra or Walk of Flame or Hidden Lurker early, might be worth enough to justify it when it is a dead draw.  Discard Sleep, bleed like a Dementator, watch someone not Villein/Blood Doll down to 1.

Of course, when playing questionable tactics/strategies, one must be disciplined.  A deck full of Killers, Eruptions, Sleeps, et al is going to cripple someone in all likelihood and lose like crazy.  I’ve seen a Mind of a Child deck, and it performed vastly better when all it did was discard them and bleed.  Four to six slots is more along the lines of what I can see for a deck even built with some of these cards in mind.  Otherwise, sacrificing too many slots on good stuff plays and plays that do something VPwise.

Hosers Or Poseurs

Why don’t people play Scourge of the Enochians?

Is that the sum of my thinking?  No, but it is the most frequent question I have when I see Embrace decks win.

To be fair, I have seen winnie decks run Not to Be in addition to The Uncoiling more recently.  Still, I see people run 1 or 2 cap support vampires like it’s not a thing.  Let’s take a look at some winning decks.

2012

http://thelasombra.com/decks/twd.htm#2012secqggs

38 players.  Five 1 or 2 caps with no ability to olden.  No counter for Scourge.  Does the deck need the dorks to function?  Hardly.  However, in a world full of Enochians, that same lack of need for the support staff means a reasonable decision to go to 3.  That slows the deck some.  Maybe enough that it doesn’t win, in Enoch World.  In “oh, right Scourge exists” world, picking off the chumps might also have led to defeatitis.

http://thelasombra.com/decks/twd.htm#2012eotdhf

20 players.  Only five 1 caps, but five crypt slots were spent on Shalmath, so a deck much more dependent upon dork support.  Even an Inceptor.

http://thelasombra.com/decks/twd.htm#2012ecqfcqlf

23 players.  Three 2 caps and 19 babies.  Does run The Uncoiling but not Not to Be.

Don’t feel inclined to pull out the decks from smaller tournaments.  Yes, limiting to 20+ tournaments runs into sample size issues, but it also focuses on results of tournaments of significant size.

Of course, since we don’t know the lists of every deck or the results of every game, it’s entirely possible that Scourge did see meaningful play in these events.  Much of my surprise is from local play, including when the LA players make it up.  Sure, The Barrenness deck running around uses it, but that’s a special case.  I’m more wondering why I don’t see it in 75% of the decks people play.

Besides people hating winnies and besides crimping babymaker decks, who doesn’t want to grief Tupdogs?  Who doesn’t want to pick off first turn Anarch Converts?  Who doesn’t despise Chandler Hungerford playing Dual Form … uh, yeah, who?

Do I always play it?  Nah.  Ignoring decks that actually put out dorks, I may make a judgment call that my deck already griefs Tupdogs or whatever.  Then, hardly any of my decks get played in tournaments – I’m willing to not try to win in casual play to preserve slots for funner plays.  Actually, this philosophy applies to tournament play just as much.

Does it hit often?  Nah.  I rarely see Scourge impact.  This is one of the primary reasons hoser cards are insipid.  They rarely hose anything.  Yet, the reason one plays it is that when it does hose something, it obliterates the deck.  (Another problem with hosers is that most hosers don’t obliterate hard enough, so might as well play good cards.)

As much as I love me casual Tupdogs, Tupdog decks must be hosed out of existence.  It’s just righteous and pure.  Speaking of Tupdogs, Tension in the Ranks and Gran Madre, people?  Gran Madre is offensive in how annoying it is in any deck, and it was relatively scarce for a long time in these parts, but now that folks have them, it’s an odd choice that people don’t play such an annoying card that does more than devastate Tupdogs.  Tension is a more limited play, but where Fame drops all of the time, Tension should be dropping out of more decks, obviously especially combat decks, for the “I hate Tupdogs” and “I hate Nocturns” impact.

What is a hoser?

This comes up often, but I made a comment recently about my changing argument on the subject.  Defining a hoser is a pain.  Isn’t a Blood Doll a hoser against pool loss?  Isn’t Life in the City a hoser against blood denial?

The first thing, which I think all right-thinking people can agree on, is that a hoser is an answer.  Though, even that’s a bit of a problem.  Let’s say card ABC wins you the game if your opponent (assume two-player for simplicity) plays deck MNO.  That seems kind of hoserish in that the card is narrow and is dependent upon the play of something else, but if you win just by playing it, it’s kind of a threat more than an answer.  For instance, Magic has Karma.  Karma does damage based on number of Swamps you control.  That doesn’t stop the player playing Black, that just causes him to lose (eventually, normally).

In the above paragraph, we do get more that a hoser is a card that depends upon the opponent(s) playing some card or type of card.  What about some type of strategy?  Well, conveniently, this helps differentiate hosers from other effects.  Bringing out lots of 1 caps and Computer Hacking is based on specific cards, so Ancilla Empowerment or Scourge of the Enochians are hosers.  Bleeding is not dependent upon particular card play, so Deflection, Telepathic Counter, pool gain are not hosers.  Rather, they are defenses.

There is some spectrum of defense to hoser or, if you buy the argument that hosers can also be threats and not just answers like Karma or Anarchist Uprising, offense to hoser.  Protected Resources is more of a defense to Archon Investigation’s hoserness.  Telepathic Counter may get slotted into a deck because you hate Night Moves/Spying Mission decks or Night Moves/Enticement decks, in which case it’s acting more like a hoser, but it’s so general in its defensive properties, I don’t know how it would be claimed a hoser.  Archon Investigation, meanwhile, ends up serving a metagame role as a defense against the fact that bleeding for a lot is way too easy in the game, but it’s function is hoserish as decks can normally avoid it, making it a poor defense outside of Anu decks.

Those, Too

The point wasn’t just to talk about Scourge.  Scourge was just the most blatant example of people not running the tools available to mess with decks they hate.  Another startling example is how little Imbued hate people run.

After Imbued came out and dominated the tournament scene until cards got banned, a ridiculous number of Imbued/ally hosers got made.  My list for most relevant in the close aftermath, obviously, more got made later, like Invoke Poison Glands:

Autonomic Mastery
Chair of Hades
Cobra Fangs
Hard Case [how many non-Imbued allies would lose stuff?]
Liquefy the Mortal Coil
Permanent Vacation
Prison of the Mind
Set’s Curse

How often do these see play?  Maybe in your metagame, you expect them.  I don’t expect any, though I’m quite fond of Set’s Curse as it also hoses winnies.  I’m more inclined to run Chair of Hades these days, requirements permitting, and I think about Cobra Fangs, maybe even slot them for decks I haven’t gotten around to pulling the cards for.

Then, during the Summer of Imbued dominance, in the first tournament I played at Week of Nightmares, I ran Mercy for Seth in my Harbinger vote deck.  And, yes, I’ve played in a tournament game where it went “Play Break the Code.  Discard Break the Code.  Discard Break the Code.” with three players in succession.  And, Theft of Vitae was all the rage before Memories of Mortality got banned.

On the other hand, what about Tenebrous Form and Entombment?  I’m not surprised by Entombment out of a deck that can play it.  I’m surprised by how rare it is.  Obtenebration just owns Imbued, even if Veil of Darkness is a counterownage for the Imbued.  Not that I see that anymore.

People whine about Imbued constantly, but if they aren’t playing the cards to hose them, why whine about it?  It’s like hating being bled for 5 at stealth and not running any bleed bounce or Archon Investigations.  Who’s to blame?

Sure, Prison of the Mind is a pretty ridiculous choice just to hate on Imbued.  It’s not like Dementation decks don’t already have an answer in the form of the “I bleed you with Kindred Spirits at a bunch of stealth and you can only Champion one of these bleeds before you die” strategy.  But, if your deck is screwed by Imbued, maybe try playing cards that eviscerate them.

Yet, I sympathize with the idea that loading a deck full of hosers to counter every annoying thing possible is not only counterproductive but unfun.  I don’t want to run Tranquility just to not get ‘schrecked and run The Diamond Thunderbolt to deal with Form of Corruption.  Nor do I have any appreciation of the Event war involving The Uncoiling and The Fourth Cycle versus all of the annoying Events in the game.

And, it’s also possible to metagame without hosers.  Carna + Theft was a common answer to Imbued and somehow doesn’t suck otherwise.  Anarchist Uprising, Ancilla Empowerment, and sort of Domain Challenge are ways to take counters out of the game in bunches, which is not just an anti-winnie play.

But, some things are a pain without a sweet, sweet hoser.  Like being inundated with 1 caps, even worse when the 1 caps have two superior disciplines, built in rush, replace themselves, and effortlessly hit for 3 agg that can’t be dodged or combat ended.

Scourge, my friends.  It’s not just a stain remover.  It’s a way of life.

Salmagundi

No theme, just some observations and thoughts.

CCG

Played V:TES in Pleasanton recently.  One game, about four hours, 20 minutes.  At the four mark, I was winning, even though my grandprey in the five-player had self-ousted right after rescuing one of my prey’s vampires (they were all in torpor).  It was an interesting game.  At times, some players didn’t have much to do, but everyone was highly involved some of the time.

It took me a few tries, but I nuked Jost with Anathema + Archon rush.  I was amused by my deck as I brought out Greger, gave him Potence, got blocked bleeding, so Disguised out a Deer Rifle!  If not for the Deer Rifle, I would have been toast as my predator had Basilia, who got both the Blade of Enoch and a Weighted Walking Stick, and my prey was Celerity/Protean aggpoke.  When my prey did get Desert Eagles, my guys started exploding.  I did end up using a couple of the Grenades I Concealed out as well as tried to punch a few times for five with Torn Signpost + Undead Strength.  Speaking of too many weapons, my grandpredator was playing a Pier 13, Ghoul Retainer deck.  Of my four Sabbat Threats, three were blocked and the other did a mighty one pool damage.

RPG

I am constantly amazed by groups that have had various campaigns that don’t make a concerted effort for party PC design.  I don’t mean the sort of “force you to storytell” mechanics of a game like FATE but just making sure that the party will have a reason to adventure together.  Nor do I mean mechanically fitting in a party, since GMs can adjust to party strengths and weaknesses.  Wargames, like D&D, might require that you have party balance to play “normal” adventures, but most RPGs handle unbalanced parties.  I mean in character reasons that my character would adventure with other characters I don’t like or have no respect for.  Same issue when introducing a new character to an existing party.

I’ve already designed a new character for one of my campaigns because I have yet to see how my current character would work with one of the other players.  Yes, I mean player, not PC.  His PC is an extension of his interests, like my character is the extension of mine.  The two PCs are polar opposites.  As I have an extremely collaborative personality and prioritize the plot and the party over individual goals/interests, it makes sense for me to create a better fit.  This was actually something I worried about as soon as I saw the other players’ concepts.  Now, I haven’t decided to switch characters yet as the campaign hasn’t progressed that far, but unless I see some real change in the party dynamic, I should pull the trigger soon.

I have frequently praised L5R.  I have noticed something, however, that is a weakness of the roll and keep system.  I quite enjoy the openended rolls possible when faced with a static target number.  I kind of ignore that the Raise system doesn’t work like it’s presented.  I have decided that I’m not much of a fan of contested/opposed rolls, however.  The random “I rolled 50 on 3k2″ is cool when it, 1., is better than rolling 25 and, 2., isn’t rolled against another PC to determine who wins something.  I’m not even that thrilled when a NPC rolls some crazy number to beat a superior dice pool of a PC, but it’s especially unpleasant when two PCs are contending (in a contest, say) and the inferior competitor so often defeats the superior.

Boardgames

Was a busy weekend.

I’m fairly bored with most of Scepter of Zavandor at this point.  The parts I’m not bored with are the endgame manipulation of VPs and certain subtleties of play.  Not that these mean much when I play a better game than the people I typically play this with.  While others pointlessly pick up Crystal Balls, I get Crystals of Protection and far outproduce.  I’m the only one who ever seems to get the Tomcat Sentinel and convert my gems into Opals.  I’m happy to believe that there are better players than I, but I don’t need to be clever in how I buy Sentinels, be clever in when to buy inactive gems, or need to figure out how to ever get any use out of Crystal Ball.

I could report on our Seafarers of Catan game, which nobody seemed to enjoy, and our Dominion games, but I don’t like either game.  I at least like Scepter, even if I’ve grown tired of it.  It’s normal for me to tire of boardgames since they are so limited, so no big deal.  I still consider Puerto Rico the best Euroboardgame I’ve played and I grew tired of that years ago.  I did comment to someone in the group that I should look around for a new boardgame.

Weak 2 – Ghoul Retainer

 

One would think Card of the Weak posts would be easy.  Pick a card, talk about it.  After all, when I build decks, I frequently pick a card and then think about all of the different things I can do with the card.

In practice, I find choosing a good card to talk about challenging for several reasons.  Before listing them, what is the point of highlighting these cards?  The point is to examine uses for rarely seen cards.  That’s not the same as identifying underrated cards, which is what I’ve said at least once was kind of what I was going for.  I don’t consider Laecanus underrated, for instance.  He’s bad.  But …

1. The card can’t be generally considered to be good.
2. The card has to have interesting features.  Eyes of the Dead may be weak, and you might come up with some convoluted idea for why to put it in a deck, e.g. it stacks with The Deadliest Sin for your Faithful Servant deck or crosstable stop diablerie deck, but I want something I can drone on and on about.
3. I have to be interested in droning on … em … talking about the card.

I justify #1 with Ghoul Retainer only having appeared in six tournament winning decks:  three Tariq decks; Tsunda No Secrets; weenie Auspex; Una.  As for #2 and #3, well, I did choose this for only the second entry in this “series”.

Here’s something I did with this card:

Deck Name:   Stuttering Bangs
Created By:  Samantha
Description: Burn opposing vampires with environmental Bombs and aggpoke.

Crypt: (12 cards, Min: 21, Max: 34, Avg: 7.08)
———————————————-
1  Steve Booth             CEL pot pre pro      5,  Brujah:3
2  Darrel Boyce            CEL OBF PRO          6,  Gangrel antitribu:2
2  Ellen Fence             aus CEL OBF PRO      8,  Gangrel antitribu:2, Bishop
1  Samantha                ani CEL OBF PRO tha  10, Gangrel antitribu:2, Bishop
1  Scarlet Carson O’Toole  pro CEL              4,  Gangrel antitribu:3
2  Zachary                 CEL for OBF PRO pre  7,  Gangrel antitribu:2
2  Miller Delmardigan      aus CEL PRE pro      8,  Toreador antitribu:2, Bishop
1  Marcellus               AUS CEL pro          8,  Toreador:2, Prince

Library: (90 cards)
——————-
Master (13 cards)
2  Blood Doll
1  Campground Hunting Ground
2  Fame
2  Gangrel Conspiracy
1  Hungry Coyote, The
5  Minion Tap

Action (9 cards)
7  Bum’s Rush
2  Sacrificial Lamb

Action Modifier (4 cards)
4  Cloak the Gathering

Combat (48 cards)
2  Amaranth
3  Bone Spur
3  Claws of the Dead
6  Disguised Weapon
6  Flash
9  Flesh of Marble
6  Pursuit
10 Stutter-Step
3  Wolf Claws

Retainer (4 cards)
4  Ghoul Retainer

Equipment (12 cards)
10 Bomb
2  Improvised Flamethrower

This deck is so old I had to find it in ELDB 3.1.  This deck is so old it doesn’t use my naming convention of beginning with the date …

This deck is so awful it’s, well, awful.  Not as awful as other decks.  More awful than many.  As an example, it’s kind of interesting in that it wasn’t Ghoul Retainer that was the reason for the deck.  The impetus for building the deck was trying to find a reason to play with Stutter-Step.  May wonder why that’s so hard.  Another possible Card of the Weak entry.  Way back in the long, long ago, before Bats and Crows came to rule the magic land of The Kingdom of Kombat, there were decks that played a card known as Immortal Grapple.  Immortal Grapple, by unnecessary rule, stopped Stutter-Step.

But, but.  Stutter-Step is so aggpokey or Torn Signposty and acts as defense when IG isn’t played.  Well, yes, it is just that amazing, amazing enough to show up in eight decks in the TWDA.  The greater issue is how many close substitutes we get, nevermind that the Torn Signposty deck may like playing IG itself.  Sideslip for defense against pokeyness.  Additional strikes that came with maneuver, press, dodge, another additional strike.

I seem to have gotten completely off track in talking about Ghoul Retainer.  So, there I was, less than an hour ago or so, looking at retainers.  I started looking at vampires with retainer cost reduction.  I did a search for Jibade decks.  I found one.  And, it was a Ghoul Retainer deck.

There are many, many cards in CCGs that are “only good in play” cards.  What does that mean?  It means that the card seems perfectly respectable, perhaps even strong, when someone has gotten it into play, but the card is actually quite bad because the likelihood of seeing it in play (or seeing it in play without the player getting ousted because of it) is so low.  Cards in this camp tend to be ones with high costs.  If the high cost doesn’t cripple you or the game goes long past the point you played the card or whatever, you’re gold.

Ghoul Retainer has a high cost, a very high cost.  Would the card be too good at 1 pool?  Can’t see how.  Why the card even costs pool is less than clear.  At 2 blood, would it be costed better?  Probably.  It is interesting that a pool cost on a retainer means that an ally can employ it.

Then, there are the other costs.  The action to get a retainer may not be all that great a cost, otherwise people would never bother with retainers at all outside of plays like Pack Alpha.  Still, 2 pool and an action.  Then, what does the card really do for you?  Somewhat better in combat by itself, only shining when you have weapons to hand off to it.  Weapons tend to cost more pool, making the combo quite expensive, though each of the cards, at least, is probably playable on its own, so it isn’t combo-dependent.  However, we are still talking about a combat support play.  There’s a reason I play J.S. and Tasha a lot and combat support plays not so much.

Yet, the point is to find uses.  I see a decent amount of deck design space with Ghoul Retainer in mind.  While I have little interest in Tariq decks or Una decks, we can see a couple of other uses that people have gone with.  In some cases, I see Ghoul Retainer being tech.  Environmental damage, especially environmental aggro, may be very hard to deal with, though given the prevalence of Carrion Crows these days, one assumes a certain level of metagaming against environmental damage.  Outside the Hourglass annoyance would be another reason.

Note that Ghoul Retainers can be smited.  In fact, Aid from Bats, Aid from Bats is a real threat for removing the overcosted retainer.  This is why we meta against Animalism or wish we could meta against Animalism with DIs and Botched Moves and not having room for such.

Take this deck:

Deck Name:   120310  Jibade Retainer
Created By:  Jibade
Description:

Crypt: (12 cards, Min: 29, Max: 36, Avg: 8.08)
———————————————-
2  Eugene                             AUS CEL FOR PRE8  Toreador
4  Jibade el-Bahrawi                  aus PRE FOR DEM CEL9  Ishtarri
2  Joshua Tarnopolski                 CEL obf pot PRE7  Brujah
1  Kateline Nadasdy                   AUS CEL PRE    7  Toreador
2  Klaus Konrecht                     for pot AUS CEL PRE8  Toreador Antitribu
1  Muhandis                           for qui AUS CEL PRE8  Toreador

Library: (80 cards)
——————-
Master (15 cards)
2  Dreams of the Sphinx
1  Giant`s Blood
1  Heidelberg Castle, Germany
2  Life in the City
1  Lilith`s Blessing
1  Rack, The
7  Villein

Action (6 cards)
5  Enchant Kindred
1  Entrancement

Action Modifier (10 cards)
3  Aire of Elation
3  Forced March
3  Freak Drive
1  Perfect Paragon

Reaction (16 cards)
4  Eyes of Argus
6  On the Qui Vive
6  Telepathic Misdirection

Combat (13 cards)
3  Concealed Weapon
8  Sideslip
2  Taste of Vitae

Ally (2 cards)
1  Carlton Van Wyk (Hunter)
1  Mylan Horseed (Goblin)

Retainer (7 cards)
4  Ghoul Retainer
1  Malajit Chandramouli
1  Mr. Winthrop
1  Robert Carter

Equipment (7 cards)
1  Bowl of Convergence
4  Desert Eagle
1  Ivory Bow
1  Spike-Thrower

Combo (4 cards)
4  Resist Earth`s Grasp

I put this together while writing this post.  It was not fun to cut it down to 80 cards.  What I like a lot about this deck is that there are plenty of card choice changes I could make, even changing the basic nature of the deck by, say, ripping out Auspex.  (Auspex was not an original plan for a Jibade and Joshua retainer deck.)

Is anything about this deck reliable?  Not so much.  I chose not to be a slave to my theme by ensuring the Ghoul Retainer beatdown.  Nor did I run a bunch of other random retainers or, since they both discount on allies as well, a bunch of random allies for support as the deck would get too far afield from its plan.  I could cut good stuff to make room for theme, but there is always the idea of trying to build a serious deck, if not a powerful one.  Direct Intervention to mess with Carrion Crows … the idea that the game has gone to the point where this would be the primary reason to run DI is amusing I suppose … and other plays would require some annoying cut.  I’d rather the deck were 75 cards, but then, I might be getting too focused.  Though, switching fatties with disciplines for smaller minions could see freeing up slots used on discipline-requiring cards, while also likely killing my defensive abilities.

This is derivative of the deck I found while searching for Jibade decks.  Certainly, there are plenty of other possibilities with Ghoul Retainers, if not trying to recreate Stuttering Bangs.  A range control deck could easily see Gas-Powered Chainsaw for close range beatings without a big cost.  Improvised Flamethrower is a favorite as environmental agg is kind of a pain to deal with and burning vampires becomes so much easier.  Ivory Bow, by itself, becomes much more of a threat with Ghoul Retainer.  Decks with substantial pool gain or defenses can ignore trying to use cost reducing plays like the vampires I went with.

I went with my vampires dodging, but a perfectly reasonable way to go is with agghandsors with the Ghoul Retainer acting much like Carrion Crows.  Now, Carrion Crows is so much better, but Ghoul Retainer can be a smaller card slot investment and can support all of those useless vampires that lack ANI.