Preparations Underway!

Hi there again and PF 2013!

So after this quite long hibernation period I finally woke up (even if a bit prematurely, it's -10 Celsius and 30 cm or 1 ft of snow here). Our prince has arranged a tournament scheduled for 2nd Feb and again I really don't know which deck to choose... Each and every one of them has its pros and cons and I can't think of a better place to summarize them.

So - our metagame is heavily bounce-oriented at the moment and thus a lot of people plays combat or politics to somehow counter that. Even I wouldn't think of a deck without a bounce option if it couldn't bloat for like at least 10 pool per round - aside from Girls that's not so easy to do. Normally our tournament attendance is around 13 people but now we could even have 20 people attending - aside from Prague there are no tournaments being organized here lately and guys from other metagames finally decided to show up. Thus it can be presumed there would be a higher incidence of 5-player tables. But how will this affect the playability of my favourite decks?

These are my options.


1) EuroBrujah heavy bleed/bounce deck

This is the deck I took as my main competitive deck to Budapest EC and even though it (and I) did perform, well, okay, it still has some unfinished aspects. Needs work, does not need practice. Pretty much a "why not" deck. Better maybe on 4-player tables, moderate to high ousting power, good defense, much harder to play without a votelock/crosstable ally with votes.


2) Giovanni powerbleed w/ Shambling Hordes

Originally this was supposed to be a Shambling Hordes deck w/ some bleed but it somehow spinned out of control and now it's a bit too vanilla for me. Maybe if I had one more Unmasking it would work more like a Hordes deck but right now it works as a powerbleed, and a pretty boring one. Better on 4-player tables, can oust very quickly (gee, really??). Aside from Hordes it has combat defense limited to Breath of Thanatos, and yes, I am aware this card is considered to be bad but I don't care, it works for me. Great offense, defense not so much. A political deck with a lot of S:CE will crush me like a bug.


3) Toreador AAAF :-) bleed&vote w/o Grand Balls

Oh, I'm so unsure about this one. Everyone plays AAA with Dominate and Grand Balls, I wanted to take a different approach and concentrate on the +bleed ability on Alexandra, Anneke and Francois. So I took Flurry of Actions and KRC and hoped. So far it is not a catastrophe, but definitely needs more stealth/denial. And maybe the Big Balls too. :-/ Needs testing, optimizing, rebuilding, getting shouted at, more testing, disassembling and rebirth. At least. And then maybe repeating the whole process one more time. On the other hand - now I see I'm not unsure at all. But maybe I'll change my mind in the upcoming weeks. Right now I see this deck's probability around 1.5%. :-D


4) Salubri only!

Yes, this one is my baby. I just got the rest of cards needed some two weeks ago and so far it seems it even works to some extent. There's a lot of interesting ideas in that deck and maybe that's its worst bane. Aside from the standard Heidelberg/Marionette/Minion Tap/Renewed Vigor bloating tech there are some nice things like Daring the Dawn and Force of Will, Robert Carter, Journal of Hrorsch and 10 Freak Drives, Clan Impersonation... :-D and it actually DOES seem to work! But I have a feeling that if I concentrated more on one or two things and left the rest for dead (and maybe combined Salubri with a second clan! but that's precisely what I don't want to do), it could be much better. Anyways - this deck needs testing, but has its potential, especially for 5-player tables.


5) Tzimisce block-deck w/ Malgorzata

My first deck which actually works and one of the most stable decks I know. Great defense but offense limited to the standard block-deck offense + Changeling&Army of Rats only. Smaller tournaments - why not. 4-player tables are OK, the larger tables the worse. Generally sucks the fun out of VTES. BtW - never performed well on a tournament, still unsure why. :-)


And that's it. The rest of my decks are either 4fun only (Blood Brothers multiacting combat/bleed madness!, CEL PRE gun bleed), don't work (Gangrel werewolves, Tariq) or I didn't find time to build them yet (Hermanas - OK I wouldn't take this deck in any circumstance, CEL PRE AUS, Vitel+Italicus+Vauxhall - and this WON'T EVER work).

There's still three weeks to test and modify, so we'll see. At the moment I'm torn between Salubri, Brujah and maybe the Toreadors, if I'll be able to optimize it at least a bit. However the 2 decks I did not mention would perhaps have the biggest chance to actually do something.

Don't hesitate to share your thoughts or ask me in the discussion below.

Carpe noctem.