Who's Who in the V:TES Community

Vital Statistics:

Name:
Year of Birth:
Occupation:
Other Games Played:

Number of Cards owned:
Number of Decks ready to play:
Play in:

Joshua Duffin
1975
Economist
In practice, Chez Geek, Munchkin, and sometimes Cheapass Games such as Lord of the Fries, Devilbunny Needs a Ham, and Witch Hunt. In theory, also Shadowfist.
About 15,000? Very rough estimate.
About 10 right now
Washington, DC, USA

Q1: How (and when) did you begin your career as a VTES-player? Who introduced you to the game? Where did you play originally?
I was sucked into the iniquity that is the collectible-card-game world when I went to school at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, probably in the winter of 1994. Peter Bakija and James Hamblin, who I met at the local games club, found me as a player of "traditional" games like Star Fleet Battles and introduced me to the highly-addictive realm of CCGs, starting with VTES (then Jyhad). The first one was free. In fact, I played with their cards for at least a month or two before I started buying them, but it was all downhill from there, and I haven't played SFB for years now. (They taught me Magic too, after Jyhad, but I stopped playing or buying after I graduated and left Ithaca, since I didn't really have a playgroup anymore and wasn't motivated to keep up with it. Also Shadowfist, which I love and wish I still had time to play.)

I am, of course, eternally grateful.

Q2: Which of the Sets and Expansions to VTES is your favorite, and why is it your top choice?
I'd have to say Bloodlines. I like it probably mainly because it's still so new to me, and because it has such a huge amount of new disciplines, clans, and card effects that still haven't really been assimilated into the "VTES scene". That is, it's still very possible to surprise people (and even yourself) with the coolness that is to be found in Bloodlines. Yeah, this is also true of some of the older expansions, just not as much so, for me.

Q3: What is your favorite deck to play, and why?
I don't think I have an "all-time" favorite deck to play. I'll always have a soft spot for potence-based rush decks, probably especially the old Pot/Cel type that I played for a long long time starting in Ithaca, but certainly also including the newer mono-Pot type that I played after seeing Robert Goudie's version from the 2001 North American Championships. I like Potence rush mainly because it gives you a lot of potential for table control, and because for a long time it was a "rogue" decktype that people didn't expect to show up in tournaments (sometimes they didn't even know how the key cards worked). My current favorite deck is probably "1-800-GREATBEAST", a "Huitzilopochtli Calls the Great Beast" deck that's gone through a whole bunch of iterations using various different discipline- choices for the Great Beast. The most recent version is on the DC_VTES website.
www.misanthropology.org/DC_VTES/modules.php?name=Decks&op=show_deck&did=50
That one I like because it has so much openness in terms of the choices you can make in selecting skills for the Great Beast to use and base the deck around - since you can choose literally any three disciplines you want, you can come up with all kinds of crazy card combinations you'd like to play and just like that, you're able to play them.

Q4: If you could add something to the game, what would it be?
Well, my (very possibly not-thought-through-enough) vision for "fixing VTES once and for all" would involve taking things away from the game more than adding them. Namely, weenies, large +bleed modifiers, large-effect vote cards, large-effect strikes, large-effect master cards - generally, any card that, by itself, causes relatively large "swings" in the state of the game.
This is because it seems to me that the game would be more interesting (and hopefully more "balanced") if each individual effect available to players were less strong. It'd play like a whole different game, really, and maybe it wouldn't actually be better. But it seems like an interesting idea to me.

Q5: What do you do to help promote the game / why are you in this list of people?
Heh. I'm VEKN Prince of Washington DC, and I organize and run about one tournament a month because of that. Other than that I don't do too much. I contribute sometimes to the DC_VTES website (http://dc.vekn.org) that Trey Morita hosts and I post somewhat frequently on the rec.games.trading-cards.jyhad newsgroup.
And I go to tournaments a lot.

Q6: What is your favorite deck style for casual play / tournament play?
I like silly trick decks a lot of the time, because I find them funny and entertaining. The only real difference for tournaments is that I usually try to make sure that a deck I'm going to play in a tournament actually works at least somewhat well most of the time.
I rarely make truly "toolboxy" decks in the sense of having all of bleed, vote, and combat in the same deck. I do like "sort of toolboxy" decks that incorporate at least a couple elements though: bruisey bleed plus intercept/defense, that kind of thing.

Q7: Is there a difference between your casual play and tournament play?
Probably, but I'm not sure I could point it out myself, being a very subjective observer in this case.
Certainly I don't take winning as seriously in casual games, but that's probably reflected more in what decks I play in the two situations than in how I play them. I probably pay more attention to table-balancing and trying to get it all to "fall my way" in tournaments, but even there I'll take a single VP if it's all I seem likely to get.

Back to the index of Who's Who in V:TES.

Q1: How (and when) did you begin your career as a VTES-player? Who introduced you to the game? Where did you play originally? I was sucked into the iniquity that is the collectible-card-game world when I went to school at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, probably in the winter of 1994. Peter Bakija and James Hamblin, who I met at the local games club, found me as a player of "traditional" games like Star Fleet Battles and introduced me to the highly-addictive realm of CCGs, starting with VTES (then Jyhad). The first one was free. In fact, I played with their cards for at least a month or two before I started buying them, but it was all downhill from there, and I haven't played SFB for years now. (They taught me Magic too, after Jyhad, but I stopped playing or buying after I graduated and left Ithaca, since I didn't really have a playgroup anymore and wasn't motivated to keep up with it. Also Shadowfist, which I love and wish I still had time to play.) I am, of course, eternally grateful.	Q2: Which of the Sets and Expansions to VTES is your favorite, and why is it your top choice? I'd have to say Bloodlines. I like it probably mainly because it's still so new to me, and because it has such a huge amount of new disciplines, clans, and card effects that still haven't really been assimilated into the "VTES scene". That is, it's still very possible to surprise people (and even yourself) with the coolness that is to be found in Bloodlines. Yeah, this is also true of some of the older expansions, just not as much so, for me.
Q3: What is your favorite deck to play, and why? I don't think I have an "all-time" favorite deck to play. I'll always have a soft spot for potence-based rush decks, probably especially the old Pot/Cel type that I played for a long long time starting in Ithaca, but certainly also including the newer mono-Pot type that I played after seeing Robert Goudie's version from the 2001 North American Championships. I like Potence rush mainly because it gives you a lot of potential for table control, and because for a long time it was a "rogue" decktype that people didn't expect to show up in tournaments (sometimes they didn't even know how the key cards worked). My current favorite deck is probably "1-800-GREATBEAST", a "Huitzilopochtli Calls the Great Beast" deck that's gone through a whole bunch of iterations using various different discipline- choices for the Great Beast. The most recent version is on the DC_VTES website. www.misanthropology.org/DC_VTES/modules.php?name=Decks&op=show_deck&did=50 That one I like because it has so much openness in terms of the choices you can make in selecting skills for the Great Beast to use and base the deck around - since you can choose literally any three disciplines you want, you can come up with all kinds of crazy card combinations you'd like to play and just like that, you're able to play them.	Q4: If you could add something to the game, what would it be? Well, my (very possibly not-thought-through-enough) vision for "fixing VTES once and for all" would involve taking things away from the game more than adding them. Namely, weenies, large +bleed modifiers, large-effect vote cards, large-effect strikes, large-effect master cards - generally, any card that, by itself, causes relatively large "swings" in the state of the game. This is because it seems to me that the game would be more interesting (and hopefully more "balanced") if each individual effect available to players were less strong. It'd play like a whole different game, really, and maybe it wouldn't actually be better. But it seems like an interesting idea to me.
Q5: What do you do to help promote the game / why are you in this list of people? Heh. I'm VEKN Prince of Washington DC, and I organize and run about one tournament a month because of that. Other than that I don't do too much. I contribute sometimes to the DC_VTES website (http://dc.vekn.org) that Trey Morita hosts and I post somewhat frequently on the rec.games.trading-cards.jyhad newsgroup. And I go to tournaments a lot.	Q6: What is your favorite deck style for casual play / tournament play? I like silly trick decks a lot of the time, because I find them funny and entertaining. The only real difference for tournaments is that I usually try to make sure that a deck I'm going to play in a tournament actually works at least somewhat well most of the time. I rarely make truly "toolboxy" decks in the sense of having all of bleed, vote, and combat in the same deck. I do like "sort of toolboxy" decks that incorporate at least a couple elements though: bruisey bleed plus intercept/defense, that kind of thing.
Q7: Is there a difference between your casual play and tournament play? Probably, but I'm not sure I could point it out myself, being a very subjective observer in this case. Certainly I don't take winning as seriously in casual games, but that's probably reflected more in what decks I play in the two situations than in how I play them. I probably pay more attention to table-balancing and trying to get it all to "fall my way" in tournaments, but even there I'll take a single VP if it's all I seem likely to get.