Introduction: With all the turmoil about the new Camarilla Expansion I think it's time to give you all a little rest from all these passionate rants, speculations and curses. So here it is - the new issue of the Brujah Newsletter, with next to no reference to the big news. My original plan was to finally write about intercept decks in general and Brujah ways to intercept in this issue. But even without taking your reasonable concerns about the wackiness of such decks into consideration, it will not happen NOW. You could chalk it up to laziness from my side (it is an extensive topic) and would be right usually, but not this time. The fact is: In our local metagame there is simply not a chance to test one of these creations - they would all fail miserably. All decks I present in these newsletters share one thing: They do not win every game. The sometimes so elusive term "metagame" makes sure that every deck has and will meet its nemesis not only in theory, but in practice as well. That's what is happening these days in Munich: After tormenting folks with an unending stream of variations on the classical Brujah themes, some of them have come up with decks/strategies that make it very difficult to stay competitive with Brujah. Potence/Fortitude combat, Tzmisce intercept, you name it. So this issue is dedicated to the metagame and it's impact on deck building. Fiction: Mr. Winthrop had cleared away most of the remnants of the brainstorming session-slash-party of the night before - including the torporous bodies of Yuri and Bianca. The Don sits underneath Rake's piece of graffiti and is busy decyphering and extrapolating some of the possible strategical approaches sketched out on the big map. His elegant handwriting can be seen next to and covering some of the stains on the paper. "Possible regional alliances?" and "Who's the enemy?" are the last notes he penned next to marks for Dre (in Cairo) and Brachah (an arrow pointing from Tunis/Carthage into the Lybian desert). He adds a cryptic "Akram", then sits back and muses over the situation. Mr. Winthrop slides into the basement with a tray: brandy, a tumbler and some ice. The Don nods his appreciation. "The situation seems confusing", Dónal admits, sitting in his Dublin office and connected to the Don, Constanza and Volker in a video conference. "It's not the fact that most of the organizations we have found, like Mausoleum and Al-Muhajabat, have closed their business and disappeared - that was to be expected. It is the enormous ammount of kindred activities surrounding all our activities. To me it seems like there are many other factions involved, that they know what we are doing and - Caine forbid - are using our struggle within the Camarilla to weaken the overall structure of our society..." Suddenly the picture of Dónal turns grainy, distorts and disappears. Instead the Don finds himself confronted with a sinister figure - a hooded apparition wearing a white porcelain mask over his face. It speaks, but only fragments of noise emerge from the speakers. "Turn it off!", someone screams. The Don feels a numb fear creeping down his spine. Someone has pulled the plug, but even after everything turned black he remains seated, trying to grasp the remote sense of knowing haunting his brain. "Getaway's servers have been compromised. Traceroute shows a path into southern Europe, but yields no definite results", comes the brief status report by one of his assistants. The Brujah justicar nods, but doesn't seem to listen. There's a new battle emerging, the Sabbat is challenging the Brujah movements... Three weeks later. Still no sign from Brachah and only sparse news from Dre who is trying to establish a network in Cairo under the suspicous eyes of the local princess, Suhailah. Not that this would matter to the Don. The Sabbat Threat has occupied his mind almost exclusively during the last nights. Finally another piece of the puzzle seems to fall into its place. Again he's down in the Vermont basement, Rake's words still adding ominous meaning to the room's atmosphere. After almost a month of stagnation there's finally a new development. The European princes had gone into full paranoia mode after it was obvious that all the old communication routes were compromised by the new enemy. They had gathered in Rome and turned the domain into a fortress. Which had attracted enough attention that the right persons got curious - and burned their fingers. He scrolls through a set of pictures freshly send by Constanza - a gaunt figure clad in a faded hooded robe. The blood has been wiped off his crushed skull, but the imprint "SPQR" caused by a heavy object is still clearly visible. Could this be The Scavanger? The Don nods, but this time there is a smile on his face. Strategy: Defining a metagame: There has been quite some nastiness flying around in the newsgroup a while ago about metagame issues (the infamous "blah blah blah...our metagame this...our metagame that..." thread). Apart from insults and "My dick is longer than yours" arguments it shed a glaring light on the fragmented landscape of V:tES playing in the world. There is no such thing as THE metagame, which led some people to claim that there is no metagame at all. I think the V:tES community is comparable to a tribal society at the moment, therefore the metagame is to be found locally. The big Powwow or Thing that is the newsgroup is just starting to form a more global feeling about the fluctuations while trying to establish the rules for competetivness on a worlwide base. Of course a highly evolved local metagame leads to deck constructs that seem ridiculous by other people's standards (see Noal McDonald's use of Clan Loyality and the reasons behind it), but they show an admirable thing about this game: It can live in a set of environments, and these environments are characterized by what I would like to call the metagame in the strict sense, i.e. the response and counter-response to the decks being played, and through more "metaphysical" elements: Local playing style for once, which can be established through what people like (casual vs. competitve play, interesting/original strategies vs "I play to win" philosophy, social pressure against certain deck types, etc.) and through the evolutionary process of the players (for example many mimmick the style of the successful players to become more competitive without ever fundamentally questioning this style). Also in my experience a local metagame will always find its equilibrium at a certain, sub-optimal level of play. It's not a pure evolutionary process in the end, as the powers that be will always use agition, table deals etc. to keep revolutionary ideas at bay - a deck will never evolve in a particular local metagame if no one reacts to it in terms of deck building and people instead anathemize it in the social context or gang up on it during the game (That is to say: A local metagame will always have its deck equivalents to the QWERTY keyboard I'm sweating over at the moment - completely logical by its inherent thinking, but unfathomable to an outside observer.) In theory the tournament environment should be less infested by these metaphysical elements of the game, but in my experience (albeit limited, I admit) that is not always the case. Simply because most tournaments are held in a particular environment, one that is dominated by one or more local playgroups. A tournament is never a gathering of otherwise completely independent playing entities. The mentioned discussion on the newsgroup therefore showed an inherent problem of the newsgroup itself. People always play within a local metagame, and they thrive to get better within its limits. I look at the newsgroup for new ideas all the time, but many decks presented will not work here without major surgery. This is a metagame issue as well as a question of my playing style, of course. I use the newsgroup as a reservoir of ideas, but I am extremely sure that it will never answer any of those questions whether American players are better than British... (Not that I would know, but I had way more success with copying "American decks" like Peter Bakija's Protean weenie horde than with say Rob Treasure's creations, which sure must be terrific, but not in my humble hands. On the other hand I was looking at some US-tournament winning decks and I had no clue how they were supposed to work, let alone win - and that is about ALL I can say on this issue... So onwards to something more useful.) How the local metagame works, and how to exploit it Most players, due to limited card stock in the beginning, start with playing one clan/deck type more or less exclusively, and this will always have a huge influence on their perception of the game and their style of playing. Especially now that we all hope for new players joining our ranks with the upcoming Camarilla Edition this fact will play a major role in most local metagames. I played mainly Ventrue in my first years of the Jyhad, and even today I can do the tap and vote and bleed dance in my sleep - which influences the way I play other deck types and sometimes even the way I create them. I know what sort of deck everyone in our group feels most comfortable with, and I always try to keep this in mind when I design a new deck. It is all about "Know thy enemy" of course, so basically only usable in a well-established playgroup. "Know thy enemy" means many things: knowing preferences in strategy and style, but also what they hate. In my old Bochum playgroup for example almost everyone was averse to extreme combat, we tended to have nice little bloat and vote and bleed marathon games which fielded shiny ranks of powerful vampires all over the place. It was an important step for me to challenge these aesthetics of the game, to insert something we all hated and profit not only from the unpreparedness of the other decks (which changed quickly, of course), but also from the pressure the mere presence of dedicated blood thirsty combat extended. Apart from knowing the players of course you have to know their decks. Watch closely what they actually do, and don't let yourself be fouled by only thinking in archetypes: Tzimisce intercept is not a monolithic strategy, it can be implemented in many ways. Does he use Drawing Out The Beast to keep you at close range in combat? How does he untap? Does he try to beat S:CE, or is he ignoring it? Etc. Every deck can be countered, every deck has one or more weak spots. But V:tES is not a duel, so you even in a perfect world where you know what everybody else will play you have a minimum of three decks to handle. Make that six if everyone has at least two decks ready all the time. Typically I try to react to the dominant two decks that are around at any given time. They win, so they will be played, and I will have to beat them to win myself. (If one of my decks is dominating, I usually continue playing it. I could try to anticipate metagame shifts caused by it, but I find it more entertaining to find the answers to new challenges as a player first - not as a deck designer.) Metagame decisions about decks have two possible outcomes: I can tune a deck that lost the other day, or I can create a brand new one. Whereas some very focused deck types are worth spending a long time for tuning (see Peter Bakija's Potence weenies and the by now fabled last "prayer card" to include - Hellhound last time I checked. That one has been going for years now), the search for new interesting concepts and the desire for variation results in a typical life cycle somehwere between 2 weeks (hopeless crap) and 6 months (tried and tested) for my decks (we play weekly) - but most major adjustments are done within the first eight weeks. My aim is to have a deck that is good at what it is supposed to do, not one that wins every game. (And your aim should never be to create a deck that is supposed to win every game.) So generally my reaction to a changing metagame will eventually result in me changing my deck. But to go full circle to the start of this discussion: Not every player owns 3000+ cards and is able to follow all his whims with whipping out an all-new deck every other week. Many clans offer a variety of strategies that let you compete in an evolving metagame by tuning and redesigning, and while V:tES is sometimes like rock, paper, scissors in strategical terms, by no way is it always the Tzmisce that win against the Lasombra. The tournament situation: I usually take at least two decks to every tournament and decide by gut feeling and in the last second which one to play. But that is basically an "ignore the metagame, do the stuff that feels right" thinking which I adopted after I miserably failed with a power weenie deck once and had no fun whatsoever. The decks I bring are all adjusted according to some of my ideas about tournament metagames though. But even before you start digging out those old tournament reports to learn about what sort of stuff people that might show up usually play, mind the most important, and as far as that is concerned only rule: Do us all a favor and bring a good deck! Something you know how to play and something that does the stuff it's supposed to do. What that stuff is is a different question. There are some good theories about what to expect at any given major tournament: certain percentages of weenies, stealth bleed, princely bloat, ours truly Euro-Brujah etc. You will encounter a wide variety of players and many proven-to-be-good deck strategies. Try to get information about who will attend and study their decks on the internet if possible. Try to find answers to the common (and proven-to-be-good) strategies. If your deck has no chance against weenie bleed and can't handle a moderately bloating prey, think about leaving it at home. Don't try to find answers to everything though. There is no deck that has them. I see two promising ways to enter a tournament: Either play something that is proven-to-be-good, or bring something that is the rock to the scissors of what you perceive to be the most common type of deck on that tournament. The surprise factor of some trick deck you have developed can be big enough to see you through to the final, but bear in mind that as a general rule of thumb the playing level is higher in a tournament metagame, and you are not only competing against the players you face in the preliminary rounds, but against everyone present. "Surprise factor" is to a huge extent a psychological effect, and these don't work that well in the bigger frame of a tournament. If you are not entering a local tournament, be aware that your local metagame might differ a lot from the one you will encounter. Try to evaluate your local metagame in terms of strategies, counter strategies and how it came to this point. Have the proven-to-be-good decks had an influence on this? If not, try to envision how they will fare in your current environment. And never be so foolish to assume that your local metagame is superior - strong archetypes might have problems within the complex interaction of your group, but you will not play within the ecosphere of your group at a tournament. It's going to be you and your deck in a hostile country ;-) One final thing, related to tournament play and more general to becoming a better player: Have a look at successful decks. There is a ton of stuff on the net, grab those that did well on major tournaments (Gencon, Origins, the EC). Try to understand why they did well, try to get a feeling for them. If one suits you (i.e. you intuitively understand what it does and how it works), build something similar and play it locally. Don't be disappointed if it doesn't work too well in the local metagame, learn how it handles different (and difficult) situations. If you have fun playing it you have the core to your own potentially successful tournament deck. The gist: Don't force yourself to reinvent the wheel. Deck: SPQR This months deck doesn't offer anything dramatically new, it's more an illustration to what I said above. I took the challenge of our current metagame which is very unfriendly towards typical Brujah decks: combat heavy, more than casual intercept to be expected, with Gangrel hordes, pot/for rush and aggro-poking Tzmisce. Playing political without massive stealth means inviting doom, as the Tzimisce are happy for every action they can block. S:CE helps against them, but not against immortal grappling Gargoyles or Blood Brothers. The prospect of combat is grim, as mutual destruction seems to be the common result. Still, after my Carthage Remembered decks (see the May newsletter) have grounded to a halt, combat it will be again. I decided to insert a "Thrown Junk" Euro-Brujah bruise deck in the middle of this turmoil, which, by almost guaranteeing long range, keeps me unharmed by everything apart from the occasional Breath Of The Dragon, eats Tzmisce for breakfast and gives the Blood Brothers and Gangrel a run for their money. It will probably not work very well in a tournament due to the marginal bleed power and the vulnerability to S:CE in combat. It is a specialized deck, custom made for a specific metagame situation, and as soon as Fortitude becomes even more dominant than it is now, it's time to move on. (The deck's name is the inscription on the eagle standard of the Roman legion under which the soldiers gathered when they were pressed hard in battle. The abbreviation stands for "SENATVS POPVLESQVE ROMANVS", the senate and the people of Rome, and is incidentally engraved on many sewer lids in the Italian capital.) Crypt: 2 Anvil 2 Constanza Vinti 2 Dónal O'Conor 1 Dre 1 Jimmy Dunn 2 Theo Bell 2 Volker Library: 2 .44 Magnum 1 Al's Army Aparatus 5 Blood Doll 5 Blur 8 Conditioning 5 Deflection 2 Dominate 1 Dreams Of The Sphinx 1 KRCG Newsradio 7 Pursuit 7 Psyche! 7 Second Tradition: Domain 3 Sideslip 1 Sudden Reversal 5 Taste of Vitae 9 Thrown Gate 10 Thrown Sewer Lid 4 Wake With Evening's Freshness Final words: The first preview for the new Camarilla edition is up at www.white-wolf.com/vtes/Preview_Camarilla.html, and lo and behold: The first vampire shown is a Brujah: Sir Ralph Hamilton Brujah 6 cel POT PRE ser Camarilla: Ralph gets +1 strength in combat with a younger Camarilla vampire. Followers Of Set get +1 bleed when bleeding Ralph's controller. He fits into what I was expecting (more cel/POT as opposed to CEL/pot) and also into the latest trend of vampires that all seem to have at least four lines of card text. Conditional advantage, conditional disadvantage - seems balanced. He's not overpowered compared to Bianca, who has unconditional +1 strength and superior Celerity to make that count more than once per round, but POT/PRE is something that we didn't get cheaper than 8 so far. Serpentis offers some interesting new possibilities as well. Don't like the picture though... The other previewed card is the (long-expected, by some) disciplineless Concealed Weapon - no weapons dealing aggravated damage or being unique allowed, but nevertheless good news for Brujah "blurred .44" decks. There are a lot of card changes coming our way judging from the heavily grinding rumor mill on this newsgroup, but I will abstain from commenting before I have the full picture. Finally I have moved and improved my Cold Dawn webpage, which was unreachable (and outdated) for a while now. You can find it at www.8ung.at/colddawn. All comments and suggestions welcome at skaffen_amtiskaw@mail.ru. Thanks for reading Skaffen Archon of The Cold Dawn www.8ung.at/colddawn "Quod populi Priscorum Latinorum hominesque Prisci Latini aduersus populum Romanum Quiritium fecerunt deliquerunt, quod populus Romanus Quiritium bellum cum Priscis Latinis iussit esse senatusque populi Romani Quiritium censuit consensit consciuit ut bellum cum Priscis Latinis fieret, ob eam rem ego populusque Romanus populis Priscorum Latinorum hominibusque Priscis Latinis bellum indico facioque." (The Roman way of declaring war, according to Titus Livius, in 'Ab urbe condita')