A follow up article on votes and titles

Hi folks!

First of all thank you all for the super useful feedback you gave me. I didn’t count on this activity and it feels really great. Since you guys brought up so many good points and I also found some interesting stuff to talk about, it was clear that I had to write this follow up article. In this article I will write about loosing titles and the Black Hand. Originally I wanted to write about cards that provide votes without being or adding a title, like Legendary Vampire or Kduva’s Mask, but I decided against that. I will leave that to the future together with all sort of action modifiers and other stuff that has to do with political actions.

Losing titles

Well if vampires can gain titles, there should be a way they can loose them. The obvious way is to yield contest, but there are some more. The first I want to talk about is the card Blood Siege. I love this card for its flavor. Instead of quoting what the card does let me just say it will make a Prince loose his/her title and will make a chosen Sabbat vampire an Archbishop. 

The anarchs have the card Patsy, which requires a Baron and will strip a non-Anarch vampire of his/her title and make his/her controller loose 2 pool. Cards like these seem extremely fun to play, but you will rarely see these in competitive play as they are too situational to justify the slot.

Excommunication will strip an Archbishop of his/her title, similar to this Command of the Harpies will do the same to a Prince. Wrath of the Inner Circle will make a Justicar loose his/her title as well as reducing his/her capacaity by 1. Inquisition will strip one or more bishops of their title and deal 2 unpreventable damage to them. No Confidence is a funny card, being an action modifier you can play after a successful action requiring an anarch. Two copies of these will make a vampire loose benefit of his/her title. 

Framing an Ancient Grudge could actually be interesting in some hipster Ventrue antitribu vote/bleed deck. It is a mastercard that strips a primogen, Prince, or for 3 pool a Justicar of his/her title. I hardly remember to have played on any tournament without at least one deck /table utilizing Second Tradition and/or Parity Shift. Gustav Mallenhous can remove a bishop’s or archbishop’s title as a D action (interesting that it reads „archbishop’s” instead of „Archbishop’s”).

Black Hand tech

The Black Hand has its own cool cards that need to get mentioned. Remember when I said „Anarchs are the only ones getting their titles through an action and that sets them apart.” Praetorian Backer is an exception to that. Requiring a Seraph is a very strong limitation, but the ability to make a vampire a Cardinal through an action is pretty strong. So strong that the card was made unique. Another action card requiring a Seraph is Emergency Powers. The card is put on the acting Seraph and provides +1 vote for each Gehenna card in play. The third one that needs to get mentioned is Black Hand Emissary. It also requires a Seraph. The card will be put on a ready Black Hand vampire and will provide him/her +1 vote for each ready Black Hand Vampire you control. Census Taker is a really powerful master card than can either give +1 bleed, +2 votes or +1 intercept when locked, making it a must have addition in any Black Hand themed deck.

Let us assume that you have a Seraph, 2 other Black Hand vampires, one non-Black Hand Sabbat vampire with capacity above 6, a Census Taker, as well as 3 Gehenna cards in play. These three cards will add up to 3 (a cardinal) + 3 (for 3x times Black Hand) + 2 (Census Taker) + 3 (for the 3 Gehenna cards) = 11 votes. As there are many weenie Black Hand vampires and plenty of 7 cap Seraph’s (or even a 5 cap) this is not hard to achieve. While this concept is certainly not „Tier 1” it is definitely worth giving it some thought and play. Should you ever find yourself in the situation where you don't know what to play that night, do me the favor and build a Black Hand vote deck. Feedback on results would be appreciated.

Gratiano

This vampire deserves to be mentioned as he is very unique in vtes. Gratiano gets one additional ballot. As it works currently is that if Gratiano becomes a cardinal for example, through Cardinal Benediction he will still have one ballot. Should there be no priscus on the table, he basically has a guaranteed 6 votes as he can still call the prisci sub refrerendum. I personally strongly dislike this ruling. I would prefer and lobby for a change of the rules requiring a priscus to call the prisci sub referendum at all. This would mean that a cardinal Gratiano would still have one ballot if a priscus on the table (or prisci) call their sub referendum, but would not be able to do that himself leaving him with his 3 votes from cardinal. That’s just my 2 cents though. I hope I am not wrong on this...

Political Struggle

This card gets an honorable mention. I chatted with Orpheus and he mentioned this card. I remember that I spent quite some time trying to build a deck around this, but always gave up when I realized I can't fit all I want into 90 cards. Maybe one day I'll get something done with this. It requires you to successfully place this card on a ready vampire as a +1 stealth D action, then you need to attack it with another action and if you manage to burn or send the vampire to torpor you finally get x votes, where x is equal to that vampires votes. Unreliable, but so tempting. 

Thank you for reading and as always comments and feedback is much appreciated. I don't have anything carved in stone yet for my next article, but I would like to explore the world of the anarchs a bit, so don't be surprised to read something about them in the future. Although the next post might be of something entirely else.

by: Mephistopheles

Game Night Wednesday

Hi folks!

This is really just a quick and dirty style post I wrote in a few minutes. I just arrived back home from playing v:tes. Seems like Wednesday has become the regular game night again like in the good old days. We had 9 players tonight so we could play two tables. Appreciate the small milestones of a game waking up with the evenings freshness.

I played a '94 style deck with Lucian, but unlike the majority of players played it, I don't use Madness Network nor do I have a malkavian only crypt. My concept is based on playing 4x Lucian and 2 copies of the following princes: Gilbert Duane, Greger Anderssen, Murat and Nikolaus Vermeulen. My deck is a bit less bleed focused and has a bit more vote cards. The main idea is that once Lucian is out each Govern superior means a new Prince in play. I don't want to tell more about it for now, let's just say it worked fine, but requires a bit fine tuning here and there. 

We will have a tournament on next week's Saturday so hype, hype, hype. I hope this one game night / week will be carved in stone and we will have three tables full of players soon. Here are some pictures of tonight:

Stay tuned for more as I will post the follow up article regarding titles this week!

Have a great time!

by: Mephistopheles

(Almost) All there is to know about titles

Hi folks!

I am working on something that I hopefully will be able to ever finish. While doing so, I had to go through the titles that vampires can have in vtes and I noticed many things I basically always knew, but never really saw the whole picture. With hopefully many new players being embraced and methuselahs waking from torpor who might want to refresh their knowledge before entering the eternal struggle again, I thought this would make a really good article!

What are titles?

I would say titles represent the role a vampire takes within its sect. It represents social status and influence. Here we have the first important note: titles are affiliated with sects. Each sect (Anarch, Camarilla, Independent (I know, I know…), Anarchs, Laibon and Sabbat) has its own set of titles. How these titles actually work, what restrictions there are, etc, can be very different and we are going to look at these in detail soon. The main use of titles is to cast votes during the referendum of a political action, but some cards require a specific title to be played, or sometimes titles serve as a condition to trigger stuff like +bleed or what not on cards. Let’s go through these by sects in alphabetic order.

Capitalization

Note that unique titles are written starting with a capital letter and non unique titles start with small letter. This way you can know if a title is unique just by the spelling. For example: primogen, bishop, magaji, cardinal or priscus are not unique, Prince of Brussels, Archbishop of Montreal, Liaison, Guruhi Kholo, Ventrue Justicar or Malkavian Inner Circle are unique. Fun fact: there is only one exception to this rule: regent. Regent is a unique Sabbat title, but is still written „regent”. I honestly believe this is a mistake and it should be spelled „Regent”.

Anarch

Anarchs are special in a way as they only have one kind of title: Baron. Baron is a city title. This means, that while the title of Baron is not unique (you can have several Barons) a Baron can still contest its title. Any given city can only have one title associated to it. So for example Baron of Seattle and Prince of Seattle would contest for the city’s title. The cost for an anarch to contest a city title with a Prince or Archbishop is increased by 1. Anarch vampires either get the title of Baron by merging with their advanced version, like Danielle Diron or Jeremy MacNeil for example or they can acquire the title through Fee Stake actions, like FeeStake: Boston for example. Alternatively any vampire with a city title can become anarch Baron of the same city using Anarch Secession. Typically vampires can acquire titles through a political referendum, like the Crusade, Praxis, Cardinal Benediction or Justicar cards. Anarchs are the only ones getting their titles through an action and that sets them apart.

While it might be easier to get a title this way it comes with the drawback that Baron titles acquired through Fee Stake actions can be removed.  Also note the capacity requirement: only Anarchs above 4 can play a Fee Stake. This (sadly) prevents Daughters of Cacophony or Valkyrie Anarch vote decks.

Since a recent change, Anarchs are now a sect. All existing Independant cards have been errated to be also played by Anarchs, but that might not be the case on future cards.

Camarilla

The Camarilla titles are as follows (votes in brackets): primogen (1), Prince (2), Justicar (3), Imperator (3) and Inner Circle (4). The title primogen can be aquired through the card Of Noble Blood. The other three titles are not unique by themselves, but they are unique in combination with a city or clan. You can have several Justicars or Inner Circles, but only one Gangrel Justicar or Toreador Inner Circle. The title Prince can be acquired through Praxis Seizure cards, some of these can increase the vampires’s  capacity by 1 if the vampire belongs to a specific clan. The title Justicar can also be aquired through a political action and is clan specific, like Brujah Justicar for example, in such a referendum all vampires belonging to the named clan get +1 vote. This title is therefore quite easy to get in weenie/breed decks, but it comes with the disadvantage of being unique to each clan, unlike Sabbat’s cardinal title, that is also worth 3 votes, but is not unique. Inner Circle can not be aquired. Imperator is a unique title obtainable by the Imperator card or by merging Karsh. The title itself comes only with 3 votes, but both options providing this title will add an additional 3 votes in a blood hunt referendum and will also allow this vampire to play Blood Hunt cards from your hand or ash heap as a Prince.

Independent

The independent titles come with either one or two votes, are not unique and as far as I know can not be obtained through any library card. The one special exception being the unique title Liaison which can only be obtained through the card Rise of the Nephtali and is worth four votes.

Laibon

Laibons have two different titles, the non unique magaji (2) and Kholo (2), a unique title for each clan. Kholo is very strong in my opinion as it can be acquired through a card that you can play either as an action modifier or a reaction card (like Guruhi Kholo). It does not take you an extra action to get this title. The title magaji is quite frequent on vampires, but can also be acquired through the card Overseer. It is pretty much designed for Guruhi decks only and I don’t recall to have ever seen one played.

Sabbat

The Sabbat titles are as follows (votes in brackets): bishop (1), Archbishop (2), cardinal (3), priscus (~3), regent (4). The title bishop can not be aquired except through special card text like Tobias Smith`s. Archbishop titles are very similar to Prince titles. They are acquired through Crusade cards, which sometimes come with the ability to unlock the acting vampire in the discard phase if it is of a given clan (Crusade: London for example). The title cardinal is really strong as it is the only non unique title worth more than 2 votes and Cardinal benediction, the political action card that can make a vampire Cardinal, is one of the easiest to pass. The capacity requirement of 7 or more is not too high and Camarilla vampires cannot vote during this referendum, so if you build around it you can easily have several cardinals in play. The priscus title is a very special one. All prisci hold a sub referendum, in which each priscus has a default 1 ballot (basically a vote usable in this sub referendum). After the prisci decided if they support or oppose the original referendum they together have 3 votes. A vampire can become priscus through Investiture. Cardinals gain one additional vote and Camarilla vampires can not vote during this referendum and there is no capacity requirement. In terms of how the titles work I personally consider Sabbat to be by far the strongest sect. Regent is a unique title that can be acquired through the master card Regent, comes with quite some drawbacks, but the advantage of getting 4 votes through a master card is worth considering it. Currently the only vampires that are regent are Sha-Ennu and merged Melinda Galbraith.

Thank you for reading, I hope you found this article useful. As always comments and feedback is much appreciated and will motivate me to write more articles. Also I want to thank Orpheus for his help and amazing support!

by: Mephistopheles

Vampires with built in actions: my new obsession!

Hi folks!

Since I announced my return to v:tes and the revival of my blog quite some time passed. While not much happened on this blog at least part of that announcement became true. I did play several times. Not only with friends just for fun, but I also attended another tournament (sorry, I was too lazy to write a report). So far all the decks I played where some kind of reworks, or even exactly the same, than what I played in the good old days.

Some of you already know that my biggest (and eternal) struggle (yes, this terrible pun was intended, I rate 5/7) is deck building. First of all I hate net decking. In the few occasions I do so, I mostly heavily regret it afterwards. My goal is not to create something the world has never seen before, nor to be some stylish hipster or what not. I often ended up with decks you could find a lot of on online sources. I rather feel like I have more fun when I actually build my own from scratch, because I end up with something I actually want to play. Also for me building a deck involves playing it alone over and over again. Shuffle, draw, simulate scenarios. Test the "flow" of the deck. Adjust. Remove 1-2 her, add 1-2 there. Rinse and repeat. Over and over again. Doing this gives me a feel for the deck. I find this very important.

Now let's finally jump to what I wanted this post to actually be about. Since I currently have no interest in playing wall decks, well guess what, I want to build active decks. Dang. What do all active decks have in common? Yep. They make actions. Never saw that coming, huh? Maybe it is because I am a poor deck builder or just RNJesus is not on my side, but when building and playing active decks I used to find myself quite often in the situation where I couldn't really take meaningful actions, because my hand got stuck with action modifiers or combat cards or what not.

That's how I came to appreciate having a crypt with a star vampire or even better with vampires, that have built in actions. So that even with a bad draw you still have at least one meaningful action to do, to maybe force a block attempt so you can cycle some action modifiers or combat cards (if that built in action is a rush), helping your deck to get the flow going, or just for the result of the action itself, helping you out while you discard and hope for something useful to pop up. 

In the last couple of days I have been thinking about many deck concepts, even made some in a deck building tool and managed to build one physically. I caught myself with a totally new approach on how I build my decks. I now start with the crypt. The first thing is, that I look for vampires that really complement each other and at least one of them should have a built in action. Here are some I really value a lot and you will most likely see me playing them:

Dmitra Ilyanova

I get it. Nothing new. Still she has to be on this list, because of the endless variety you can build around her. From Alastor control to Stealth vote to multi action vote/bleed to bloat/breed Brujahs with boon, to "only" being a strong support besides a star like Lutz von Hohenzollern, she can do it all. You can cycle tons of action modifiers on her, like any vote increases, freak drives, forced marches and voters and she provides a great engine for your deck, while also being able to bribe some players.

Mary Anne Blaire

Being a Ventrue you really want to build around the classic Majesty + Freak Drive engine and just overwhelm your enemies with the sheer amount of actions you take. Having a built in bloat mechanic is maybe the best you could ask for. Bloat means more vampires means more actions, but getting this action blocked means you just forced an intercept and/or wake card that could have blocked your Govern or Parity or Mind Numb or... you get it. 

Nangila Were

On of my favorites. Hand size and built in rush make this vampire super reliable. Cycle your combat to draw your next action like a Founder or Deep Song. How many times did I have the problem with a rush deck, that I had all the cards to kill that pesky Giovanni, or Malkavian behind me, but I didn't have the rush. Obviously this is true for all vampire with d-rush built into them, but Nangila stands out for me, as she can be played together with Nana for 9 hand size, 2 master phase actions and a rush. Pretty strong for 2 vampires. I admit this isn't new from me either, as I played this deck this year already, but it fits the theme so well.

Kamiri wa Itherero advanced

This one is maybe my number one wish to build a deck around. Being able to one-shot Nephandi from the board is always nice, but basically what you are looking at is a wall deck that is able to remove 4 blood from the table / round with the help of Enkil's Cog. I haven't found the balance to fit all I want into a deck within 90 cards (maybe less), but what I am aiming for is to deteriorate the table with stuff like Narrow Minds, Young Blood, Ossian, Kamiri's ability as fast as possible and throw a Smiling Jack. 

Ghede

This vampire came out a long time after I stopped playing, so I didn't have the chance to do so, yet. Ages ago I had a deck where I played way too many Vast Wealth cards to have one in my opening hand to put on Nakthorheb so I can fetch my Eye of Hazimel... well just play Ghede and I can finally put my Typhonic Beasts to work. Also note to myself: never ever play a rush deck again with no built in rush. I love reliability.  

Without further explanation (and without the need for completion):

Annazir, Beckett, Benjamin Rose, Drozodny, Gabrielle di Righetti, Malgorzata, Mistress Fanchon, Nostoket, Undele, Victoria Ash

That's it for today. I need to spend more time studying crypt cards and thinking of concepts I want to play. I hope you enjoyed this article. I will try my best to waste less time on online games and invest more time into v:tes so I can up with some quality articles for this blog. If you used to enjoy this blog when it was updated regularly or you are a new follower and wish to read new content regularly then please kindly leave a comment or just check one of those boxes below (funny, interesting, cool). Feedback like this is a huge driving force for me and will help me a lot to keep writing regularly which I really need as writing such articles is pretty time consuming (this one took 2 hours + the time and energy to even come up with an idea). 

yours truly: Mephistopheles