Report: Papkeszi Play Test Weekend

Hi folks!

So here us my report. Despite my original plan, it will be rather brief. We played quite a lot of games but also played a couple of rounds of Smallworld Underground and Chaos in the Old world. Overall it was a great weekend and I am looking forward to the next one!

All 8 cap stealth bleed

I've made an all 8 cap DEM/OBF bleed deck with 4 different vampires, all of them having the +1 bleed ability (well Jason has to burn a blood for it). The basic idea is to play many Zillah's Valleys and few Villein/Golconda combos. This is a hyper-aggressive deck where you don't waste any time on actions like The Call. All your vampires will only bleed and hopefully for 5 only, with Kindred Spirits and Eyes of Chaos. I played only two games with it and since we had a combat heavy environment those were not really successful. However I think this deck has potential, though it is clearly less effective then the old school weenie Dementation archetype.

Khazar's Diary with Cry Wolves

A 60 card version. Played it only once since I didn't drew a single copy of Khazar's Diary (8) in the first 5 turns and when I finally drew the first one my Akunanse prey was well prepared. Also the deck is "dry" or boring if you wish.

Shambling Hordes 

I made a mid cap version with Andrea and Isabel Giovanni + Le Dinh Tho. No Parthenon and additional master tech. The idea was to put 18 Shambling Hordes in a 75 card deck and try to continuously hit the 2 hordes/turn ratio. This deck was far the most fun to play. It needs some more tweaking. I always made my vp and almost always played for the Game win in the heads-up, but always lost it. Again: the environment was combat heavy and I either lost to Fortitude/Potence or Fortitude/Animalism. Despite this, I like playing with this deck. It is just funny to play and fun is the goal of v:tes. Isn't it?

Sheldon + support

I don't really like Turbo Parity, but I like Sheldon and Parity. So I made it slower. The idea here is to use Sheldon as your star and use Gilbert Duane, Greger Andersson and Korah as support vampires. An Auspex/Obfuscate stealth vote basically with minor Freak Drive support. Bleed bounce came in handy and the Warsaw Station + Fourth Tradition combo worked well. Telepathic Vote Counting is underrated imo. This is fun deck to play and I will take it to a tourney once.

Smallworld Underground 

I am definitely more successful in Smallworld than in v:tes. I started with Shield + Shadow Mimes and scored less points early on then the other players. However I could avoid combat and set up for a scenario when my declined race will be save. My second pick was Mining Iron Dwarves and I started in an uninteresting part of the board. While everybody else was fighting over artifacts and locations I continued to avoid combat and forged my hammers. I started scoring the same points than the others and expanded with my Dwarves, who now equipped with 7 hammers where quite frightening. I started scoring good points and maximized this in the last three turns with and awesome 19-19-25!!! With 121 points total I won the game.

Chaos in the Old World

This was a very good and balances session. I got Khorne a god I am not really good with, but well I tried. My goal was to establish myself in the Empire and dominate it any maybe the one or another region by military. I wanted to attack only to get my 1 dial/turn or to get rid of a threat (another player becoming too strong). In the first half of the game this strategy did just fine, there were turns when I was second with vps being real close to the first one. Unfortunately a stupid event put new hero tokens on the board and since my threat was too high I literally got eradicated from the board by all those nasty heroes. After this I was forced to change strategy and go for the dial victory. One turn before I could win with the dial Nurgle hit the 50 vp mark and won the game.

by: Mephistopheles