Official V:EKN Newsletter for Anarchs – May, 2004
Contents:
I – Fiction (Last Plane Out)
II – Vampire of the Month (Bindusara)
III – Card of the Month (Mob Rule)
IV – Deck Ideas (Big Anarchs)
V – Conclusion
Note – Some of you may be wondering where the April newsletter went –
sorry, the premise was completely an April Fool's joke. Hrothulf does
indeed make a fine Anarch (see the deck section of this month's
newsletter), but Improvised Tactics remains "The Suck". I actually
built a CEL/pot deck that used it (as an April Fool to the Chicago
playgroup), and it really doesn't work. A .44 is vastly better than
trying to play Imp Tac every combat at the pot (with the possible
exception of when you're facing ani/pot/agg), and the aus and pro
versions are exceedingly lame when you can only play ONE per combat.
Without that restriction, or if the restriction didn't apply to the
pro power, it might be usable. As it is – blech. Anyway, hope you
enjoy this month's newsletter!
I – Fiction – "Last Plane Out"
Dozens of candles crowded the solitary table in the center of the
small, heavily book-shelved room, all of them meticulously placed so
as to give the greatest light with the smallest chance of dripping
onto the fragile documents in the center of the table. Hunched over
the parchments was a tall man with long, dark hair. He traced each
line very lightly with his fingertip, mouthing some words of the
cryptic script but being careful never to give them voice.
A bat flew in and hung from the empty candle-bearing chandelier. The
man at the table gave no sign that he had noticed. After several more
minutes of reading, he came to the end of a page and placed the
parchments carefully in a folder. He looked up.
"All right," he said, "I'm finished for the moment. What's so
important that you must interrupt my work?"
The bat flew down near the floor and transformed into a grinning man
in a faded fedora.
"I have something that may interest you, Bindusara."
The man at the table nodded. "Yes, Beckett, I expect you might. You
more than most have been quite active in exploring the signs that are
so prominent in our minds."
Beckett grinned a little more broadly, showing just the hint of fang.
He sometimes seemed to Bindusara to enjoy accentuating his feral side.
"It has a price," Beckett told him.
Bindusara nodded. "Of course it does. So, you tell me what you have
and then you tell me the price, and I will tell you if it's fair."
Beckett reached into his jacket and carefully pulled out a parchment,
similar to many of the ones that had recently been on the table.
Bindusara stared at it, struggling to maintain his usual cool
exterior.
"I'm sure you've never seen it before," said Beckett, "and don't
bother asking where I got it. But I can definitely say that its
original home was Mount Erciyes." Beckett sat down casually in the
only other chair in the room, against the far bookshelf. "And now you
want to know the price."
"Name it," Bindusara heard himself say, his attention was completely
focused on the parchment.
"Join us."
Bindusara finally snapped his gaze around to meet Beckett's. "You're
not serious," he said.
"Oh, but I am," Beckett answered. "You'd be surprised how many are
coming over to the Movement. Face it, Bindusara, the Camarilla is in
chaos. All anyone can talk about are the Prophets and the End Times.
Gehenna is coming, and the Traditions can't protect you and your
books" - he gestured to indicate the room - "any longer. Hell, you've
already got a decent rep because of your accurate and unbiased
accounting of the Treaty of Thorn."
Bindusara looked again at the parchment. It clearly was the Erciyes
Fragment – so powerful, so important, and a sure sign that Gehenna was
indeed nigh.
Beckett, seeing the turmoil in the normally stoic Ventrue's face,
continued his pitch. "Look at it this way, Bindusara, Casablanca is
falling. The Anarchs – we're the last plane out. Are you getting
on?"
II – Vampire of the Month (Bindusara, Historian of the Kindred)
This month we're looking at big Anarchs. Really big. In the past
I've focused on the idea that Anarch decks tend to want a lot of
minions to truly exploit their flexibility, but that's only part of
the picture. There is an ever-growing pile of large (8-10 cap)
vampires with good specials and very diverse discipline spreads. One
of the big issues with using these vampires in many conventional decks
is the problem of actually getting the most out of those disciplines.
3-ways seem to be a pretty good answer to this problem, but as many
people have pointed out – if you're building a cel/for deck, you could
probably do better than Diversion in your card choices. Therefore the
answer is to build the large-vamp synergy in much the same way I have
advocated approaching small-vamp synergy. In other words – the key is
not to worry about EXACT discipline matches, but to use 3-ways to fill
in the gaps in the discipline matching. My first deck this month is
an example of this.
So, in tackling larger vamps, we need to start considering who makes a
good Anarch. One of the things I enjoy about Anarchs is the ability
to get good use out of long-ignored minions, so the May vampire of the
month is Bindusara. First, the stats:
Bindusara, Historian of the Kindred
Ventrue
Group: 2
Capacity: 9
AUS DOM FOR PRE tha
Bindusara can take an action to allow you to search your library for
an Elder Library, Arcane Library, or Fragment of the Book of Nod; put
that card in play. (Pay cost as normal.) Shuffle your library
afterwards. +1 bleed.
All in all, Bindusara is a pretty solid-looking vampire, but he
generally gets ignored for one critical flaw – 9 pool is too much to
pay for a Ventrue with no title. For our purposes, though, he's
perfect. He's part of the very small group of untitled vampires (9,
to be precise) that have MY favorite Diversion combo – for/tha. His
DOM makes him a particularly good match with Marlene, Vincent Day,
Iliana, and Muaziz, and in a deck built around that concept, he can
Govern all the rest of them out. However, he also has PRE, which
makes him a potential match with an Anarch Daughters deck (combined
with Ventrue for the VHQ), where the AUS allows him to play the
outferior of Tourette's Voice.
His special is generally a good match for any Anarch deck – I
recommend the Fragment – but of course my FAVORITE use for him is the
one I've found for the first of this month's decks – Free States
Rant/Mob Rule/Smiling Jack.
III. Card of the Month (Mob Rule)
Okay, okay, so it's not actually an Anarch card per se, but it meets
many of my criteria for being the focus of this newsletter: it came
out in the Anarch set, it rarely gets played, and it helps the Anarchs
out a fair bit (if you know how). Here's the text:
Mob Rule
Action Modifier/Reaction
This card can be played as an action modifier card or a reaction card.
Only usable during a referendum
Each vampire with a capacity above 4 can burn blood to gain votes. A
vampire gains 1 vote for each blood he or she burns. A vampire with a
capacity above 7 gains an additional vote for each blood he or she
burns.
Let's talk about the strengths of this card:
It helps large vamps in favor of weenies (and even mid-caps), it can
be played as an action mod OR a reaction, it's disciplineless, it
spreads votes among vampires in a way that BO and Awe do not (making
them less susceptible to Demonstration, Quentin, etc.), it doesn't
have the drawback of Rant, it doesn't limit how much blood can be
burnt, nor how many times during the referendum you can burn blood
(does not have "during X do Y" wording), and most of all – it brings
almost EVERYBODY into the voting discussion. Vote lock is forgotten
when you play with this card.
But many people will certainly be wondering – what good does this card
do me? Am I really going to be able to get votes passed with it? The
simple answer is – no, not all the time. But so what? You're getting
a massive secondary effect here – you automatically empower your
cross-table allies to help you in your damaging or mutually beneficial
votes, and even if the vote fails it's because other vampires on the
table have burned blood. In addition, because it can be played as a
reaction, it's easier to cycle, and you can really hurt other vote
decks with it. ("Yeah, sure you can pass this vote, but it'll COST
you.") All of this does mean that Mob Rule is a finesse card,
however. You really should only be using it if you're fairly good at
table talk. Bribes and/or Madrigal can help, but you still need to be
a pretty good talker.
The key to Mob Rule, of course, is that you really need to be focused
on bigger vampires. You should probably also be considering building
the deck around getting blood off of other vamps. So, without further
ado, let's move onto the decks.
IV – Deck Ideas (Big Anarchs)
The first deck this month is one that I designed specifically to tap
into the power of Mob Rule. It's not for the impatient, and it does
have its weaknesses, but the concept is quite fun when it gets going.
Deck Name: Jack's Rant
Created by: Eric Simon
Description: Smiling Jack/FSR/Mob Rule
Crypt: (12 Cards, Min: 33, Max: 40, Avg: 9.25)
----------------------------------------------
Bindusara AUS DOM FOR PRE tha – Ven 9
2x Christopher Houghton AUS CEL DOM pot PRE PRO – Tor 10
2x Helena AUS CEL DOM obf pre tha – Tor 10
Hrothulf CEL dom FOR pot PRE pro – Ven 8
Kemintiri aus dom OBF PRE SER THA – FoS 10
Khay'tall aus DOM PRE OBF SER – FoS 9
Makarios, the Seducer AUS dom PRE SER – Tor 8
Melisande AUS CEL DOM PRE tha - !Tor 9
Menele aus CEL dom POT PRE THA – Bru 10
Owain Evans AUS cel DOM FOR pre - !Ven 8
Library: (90 cards)
-------------------
Master (19)
Anarch Free Press
Anarch Railroad
5x Galaric's Legacy
Hospital Food
Information Highway
5x Minion Tap
Seattle Committee
3x Smiling Jack, the Anarch
Strained Vitae Supply
Action (2)
2x Charming Lobby
Political Action (13)
7x Free States Rant
2x Firebrand
4x Honor the Elders
Action Modifier (10)
4x Bewitching Oration
6x Voter Captivation
Reaction (23)
7x Enhanced Senses
3x The Mole
5x Obedience
7x Wake with Evening's Freshness
Combat (17)
7x Diversion
10x Majesty
Combo (7)
7x Mob Rule
Comments:
Primary ousting mechanism is Smiling Jack, though nearly half the
library has +bleed to assist. FSR/Mob Rule help get blood off of
vampires so that Jack is doing pool damage to your prey (which helps
keep Jack from accidentally cross-table ousting). The tha power of
Diversion is also a nasty surprise that helps get blood off of other
vamps. One of the really great abilities of Mob Rule is that my
vampires can support each other in their Voter Caps – Helena can burn
blood when Bindusara calls a vote to make his Cap more effective.
Possible adjustments might include adding in a couple of Temptations
or Form of Corruptions, since I do have three vamps that can use them.
Temptation combined with Mob Rule could be quite effective. The one
problem with this idea is lack of stealth.
Deck number two is a deck by Ankur Gupta, Prince of Lafayette, IN. He
uses big vamps primarily for the bloat and the Diversion
functionality. The main blood-gain mechanism is kind of amusing.
Deck Name: Touring Trannies Make a Great Diversion
Created By: Ankur Gupta
Description: Going Anarch with huge vampires for diversion? And with
Assamites? Sheer genius.
Crypt: (13 cards, Min: 25, Max: 37, Avg: 7.92)
----------------------------------------------
4 Qadir ul-Ghani CEL nec OBF QUI tha 9, Assamite
1 Helena AUS CEL DOM obf pre tha 10, Toreador
2 Tariq AUS cel FOR OBF QUI 7, Assamite
2 Bajazet al-Nasir cel for OBF pre QUI 8, Assamite
1 Yazid Tamari ani dom obf CEL QUI 8, Assamite
1 Dylan aus cel dom for pro 6, !Ventrue
1 Vincent Day aus dom for pot tha 5, !Ventrue
1 Ian Forestal AUS DOM THA 8, !Tremere
Library: (90 cards)
-------------------
Master (25 cards)
1 Anarch Free Press, The
1 Anarch Railroad
1 Blood Doll
2 Fortitude
4 Galaric's Legacy
1 KRCG News Radio
8 Minion Tap
1 Path of Death and the Soul
1 Rumor Mill, Tabloid Newspaper, The
2 Seattle Committee
1 Secure Haven
2 Thaumaturgy
Action (13 cards)
8 Concert Tour
1 Fee Stake: Boston
1 Fee Stake: Corte
1 Fee Stake: Los Angeles
1 Fee Stake: New York
1 Fee Stake: Perth
Action Modifier (10 cards)
2 Cloak the Gathering
2 Elder Impersonation
1 Faceless Night
4 Forgotten Labyrinth
1 Lost in Crowds
Political Action (11 cards)
2 Dramatic Upheaval
3 Firebrand
6 Kine Resources Contested
Reaction (5 cards)
2 Mole, The
3 Telepathic Misdirection
Combat (22 cards)
15 Diversion
4 Gemini's Mirror
3 Taste of Death
Combo (4 cards)
4 Swallowed by the Night
Comments:
So, obviously Qadir becomes a Daughter (which, conveniently enough,
doesn't get rid of his Anarchness) and does Concert Tour/Minion Tap.
Everybody else bleeds a little and votes a little, then does the VP
sniping thing if necessary. Again, this deck should be played
patiently. Get your bloat on before you start going too heavily
forward. And I just love the Diversion(tha)/Diversion(cel)/Taste of
Death progression when you can pull it off.
V – Conclusion
Hopefully the strategies presented this month offer some thoughts as
to what big Anarchs can do. I will caution the reader that I don't
think these ideas are good for those just starting to explore the
Anarch concept. Some of the basic player skills of Anarchy need to be
well-ingrained before you attempt these tricks. But, hopefully you
have seen that they can be amusing and possibly even successful.
Next month – Our first examination of Gehenna. Can't tell you what'll
be in the newsletter, because I would have to know what's in the
expansion, and I am intentionally posting this the day before the
pre-release.
Eric Simon
Prince of Chicago
Anarch Newsletter Writer