This newsletter and all previous ones are available via the web at http://whitestar.ddg.com/vtes/newsletterarchive.html This issue has several links, so please read the web version for full utilization. 1/1/2000 Editors Corner - Ethan Burrow, Prince of Austin I'm proud to report that activity in our domain has reached an all time high. We have the most regular group of players we've had in Austin's recent history, we've managed to find AH boxes and we've gobbled them up (more cards for our newer players), and we may actually start playing twice a week due to demand for more playing time. I'm a happy prince. Our next tournament will likely be our biggest yet, and in the near future we'll have expansion cards to drool over. Life is good for VTES players right now, I've never been more optimistic about the future of the game since Sabbat. What a better way to enter the new year and millennium, than on a high note for my favorite game :-) Vampire of the Month - Victor Revell Your average 5 capacity vampire. Either they have 2 superior / inferior in-clan disciplines, or one superior / 2 inferior in-clan and one inferior out of clan discipline. Victor falls into the latter, and the out of clan discipline is none other than Dementation. He's overpriced as filler for the !Malk decks, and tad overpriced for !Tor decks. However he's more useful than he appears. He can Coma, he can add stealth with Mind Tricks, he can pump bleeds, all this in addition to his standard !Toreador abilities. Many times I've seen the Lasombra play Arms of the Abyss at superior and then Entombment at superior to send an opponent to torpor. Victor can do it with superior celerity and inferior dementation (granted it'll cost more) with a combination of celerity cards and coma. He also has access to other cards such as Blessing of Chaos, etc. which may be harder to pull off due to his lack of superior skills. Card of the Month - Goth Band I've had a couple of requests over the year to talk about the Goth Band, and I've finally gotten around to discussing this ally. The obvious use of Goth Band is to take counters from your opponents investments, and move them to your own. If you can afford to, wait to recruit the Goth Band after they have played their investment. They are more likely to put 8 pool on a Secret Horde if they don't perceive the threat of the Goth Band. Ideally you would have your own investment already in play. Cards you should pack into your library for cases like this are Short Term Investment due to it's low cost to bring out, and you can always leave the last counter on it to make sure the Goth Band can always funnel pool to it. Unfortunately, recent errata has hamstrung the ability of the Goth Band to perform as effectively as it used to. You can now only target master cards that you do not control. So using cards like Vicissitude poisoning, Strained Vitae Supply, etc. in your own deck will unfortunately not help you since you control those cards and Goth Band cannot target them. However if other people are playing with Dreams of the Sphinx, Vicissitude Poisoning, etc. you may actually find that they don't mind you stealing the counters since it helps them as well. Note that with another Methuselah playing with Dreams, it may result in a counter per turn if they are amicable with having their Dreams stay in play as well. Other cards which some people don't usually consider playing with are : - Palla Grande. If there are enough counters to steal, you can always keep this card in play. - Tomb of Ramses III. If speed is not as important as pool, the Goth Band can help out a little. - There are also a couple of clan specific masters that use counters as well. Feel free to experiment with multiple clan decks and Goth Band. The downside to Goth Band, is that other than the special ability he's pretty fragile. If you're not using his special ability, then it's a waste of pool and card slot to include him....even for flavor. If you're sitting next to a rush deck, you'd better have plenty of blockers to protect him, and if you're sitting next to an intercept deck I wouldn't even try to bring it into play. This ally is definately not for tournament decks, but combined with a few Art Scams can make a nice pool gain for a !Tor combat deck. Overview of the Monger Utilities Monger Home Page - http://whitestar.ddg.com/vtes/monger/ I've had the Monger Utilites up for quite a while now. In fact, Crypt Monger has been around for over 2 years, although using differing technologies over it's lifespan. I used it quite a bit over the past couple of months, and thought I'd provide more information on how to use it as well as some of it's features that may not quite be documented. POWER SEARCHING One useful tidbit that I personally use all the time that other people might not know about is that the Monger system is built upon a SQL database system. This allows regular expressions to be used in the search fields. For those of you unfamiliar with regular expressions, I'll try and give a useful example. In my Card of the Month I discussed Goth Band, and how useful it can be with certain master cards. To make sure I didn't miss any possible combinations, I did a detailed library search at http://whitestar.ddg.com/vtes/monger/library.html. I selected Master under the "type" menu. Then on the text line I typed '[c-C]ounter'. What this will do is search for both counter and Counter and return the results. You will see a list of all master cards that include counter whether it was uppercase or lowercase or was plural or not (it matches both counter and counters). Another example is finding bleed enhancements. You want to find vampires that have +bleed, but you don't really want to sift through all the vampires that have the word bleed in their text either. You can do this by going to http://whitestar.ddg.com/vtes/monger/crypt.html. In the ability text field, type '+[1-9] [b-B]leed'. This will find all vampires that have a + bleed no matter how it's capitalized or what number of bleed it is increased by. (Unfortunately Vasilis still turns up on this search since he pumps other vampire's bleeds). ERRATA With all the complaints about changing text on cards, and with several new players in our group not knowing the correct text changes, I added another Set type to the Monger system. Right now I only have this integrated for the library cards since most vampires work as printed. The exceptions are already listed in the system (such as Blythe). The errata cards will pull on on regular searches with the other cards, and will be listed as Set : Errata instead of the set the card was published in. To get a near complete list of all cards with errata you can go to the detailed library page at http://whitestar.ddg.com/vtes/monger/library.html and do a search for Set : Errata. While I'm trying to make this a complete list, I continually find new cards. If you discover a card that is errata'ed but not on this list, please contact me so I can add it to the list. I kept the original card text for each errata'ed card so that Monger will still be useful to the MJL and other non-VEKN organizations. LINKING As some of you may have noticed, I link to individual cards from time to time on the web version of my newsletter. Each card in the game has a unique ID number and can be reached directly via a URL. Vampires : http://whitestar.ddg.com/vtes/monger/showvamp.html?ID=[#] Library : http://whitestar.ddg.com/vtes/monger/showcard.html?ID=[#] You can find the ID number for a card by doing a search and viewing the URL in the resultant list. Feel free to link to individual cards if you so choose, this may be useful in the case of errata'ed cards. How the 12/6 Rulings Affect the Toreador Antitribu - The rulings on counters is good to note when your Goth Band is trying to take advantage of another vampire with counters on an associated master card. If I interpret it correctly, those counters are still up for grabs, since it's only their effect which is in question. LSJ? - The ruling on Voter Captivation is how I've always played it. And this is good, as it allows us to cycle through the referendum to the card itself, and play it after we bring our hand size back up. Definately a useful ruling for voting decks. -------- Ethan Burrow - Prince of Austin ethan@ddg.com http://whitestar.ddg.com/vtes/