3/1/2000 Editors Corner - Ethan Burrow, Prince of Austin Well, if you're reading this chances are you've heard about White Wolf reclaiming the V:TES property for themselves. The community has exploded with response, mostly enthusiastic... and it looks like this great game of ours has a future more bright than we anticipated. Granted I'm looking at this optimistically. But then again I'm a V:EKN Prince so what did you expect...apathy? ;-) If you wish to follow everything, check either the newsgroup at rec.games.trading-cards.jyhad or http://clubs.yahoo.com/clubs/vtes. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Card of the Month - Business Pressure An underrated card. It's often overlooked until you realize it's usefulness. In vote/pool gain decks it allows you the ability to beat vote lock on the table. Timing is key, as you want to play it after everyone else has usually thrown their votes, in case you feel you might still lose the vote. However, as long as you have more pool than your prey, you can usually get the vote to pass. Why Prey? Most of your votes will typically target your prey, those that aren't can usually pass via bribes (or surprise) and don't need business pressure. Most players on the table will not pay a pool unless it prevents them from directly being harmed. You'll find most if not all of the business pressures you play, only your prey will actually pay pool to counter your votes provided you focus your votes on your prey. If you play the card at superior, chances are you will win the pool battle. And get extra pool loss on your prey to boot if they try to counter your votes :-) This card is also useful to get Praxis Seizures or Crusades in play when you don't have vote lock. Again, your prey stands to lose the most from your vote dominance, and others will usually leave you alone unless you are the "target of the table". Superior really helps if you have the table against your votes, and you *need* them to pass. Cryptic Rider is a good secondary card, to reduce your pool loss on the second vote - since it will pass automatically. Combat disciplines and how they compare Combat while usually harder to master than the other aspects of the game, is also the most fun to play. I'll be dedicating several articles of the next few newsletters to focus more on combat and hopefully give some of you out there more insight into how you can be more effective at it. Please note that while I will help you win more combats, winning the combat does not win the game. But it'll make you feel good and have some fun while doing it. Combat is all about having more options than your opponent. For the purposes of our initial discussion, we'll only talk about combat cards. Later we can discuss how vampires, reactions, action modifiers, etc. can help you out in combat. All cards that modify hand damage and other grab-bag effects are considered 'other' and not strikes since you really strike with "hands". Strikes include all strike cards that are not Dodge or S:CE. Cards like Catatonic Fear and Riposte that do damage and S:CE are listed as Strikes as well as S:CE - to indicate they do damage. All cards are represented once if inf/sup do the same thing. We're looking at options, and having a card that produces differing effects are good, since they give you more options. Disclaimer : I may be off a couple of values here and there as I wasn't as thorough as I'd like when compiling this info. It's really only meant intially as a generalization, so you have been warned ;-) [table snipped - not text reproducible, see web link to Toreador Antitribu newsletter archive to get the table] A quick glance at the table will give you good indications on how well a skill (and later discussion : clans) can be in combat. Celerity and Protean have cards for each category, thus I feel are the most versatile skills in combat. Dominate and Dementate only have 1 card each, not good combat skills. Try playing a Protean vs. Celerity combat sometime. Deliberately sit a Gangrel combat deck next to any clan playing with combat Celerity. Both players will likely have a lot of fun, and those can be the most strategically pitted foes. One mistake or hand jam will cost you the battle. If Protean were a more generally available skill it would probably be more widely used. Until then, IMHO Celerity is the top dog. I mean, how can you compete with 8 additional strike cards ;-) Potence and Thaumaturgy are the power hitters, as they have double digit amounts of strike cards to choose from. And it comes as no surprise that the most S:CE is Presence tied with Protean. One overlooked discipline that actually has some worth as a supporting combat discipline is obfuscate. It has maneuvers, dodges, and presses - enough to actually ensure surviving combat on it's own. Also very useful when combined with another combat skill (e.g. Animalism - they fill each others gaps nicely). Other assumptions can be gleaned from the table as well. Animalism and Potence have several "Other" category cards, and utilize Trap more effectively than other skills do. Thanks to Sabbat, Animalism trap decks have seen many a victory. Obviously Fortitude works just as well, but this table is meant more as guide than a definitive reference. Don't forget that any clan has access to the No Skill category, and aside from additional strikes and damage prevention, don't be afraid to use these cards to fill gaps if your skills don't provide the options you need. Remember though, these cards usually won't let you replace, cost blood, or have some other disadvantage. The more cards you have access to, and the more versatile those cards are, the more control you will have over how the combat is played out. Try to be aware of which disciplines you have as opposed to which ones your opponents do. Potence only decks will not fare well against Celerity or Protean due to the maneuvers and dodge/S:CE. Hand jam and seeing your opponents decks play out are obviously going to give better indicators, but hopefully the generalizations has exposed you to the strength of some skills over others, and the usefulness of unexpected skills in combat. Next month we'll use this table to compare the combat effectiveness of all the Clans, and look at some of the basic combat deck principles.