V:EKN Official Toreador Clan Newsletter
May 2002

Introduction:

Since my last letter I've had the pleasure of visiting the Brittish
arena. There was a lot of good gaming and beer to be had at the
Watford event. The tournament also turned out to be another victory
for the Toreador in the hands of Rob Treasure.

I had been warned of the high amount of combat in Britain and brought
a lot of Fortitude with me. I spent the first round discarding
preventioncards while being voted to death. The two rounds after that
did feature enough combat to warrant my choise of cards and my wife
and I could travel back to Sweden with a Game Win each in our virtual
luggage. Back in Sweden the deck was thoroughly humiliated at the next
tournament as it relied on large vampires and was unable to handle an
onslaught of small to midcap bleeders.


General observation:

With the new Camarilla release announced we eagerly await what it
will add to the clans. As only the Gangrel were left out there should
be some goodies for the Toreador as well.

The tournaments in Sweden have geared towards Dominate bleed, but
last newsletter I predicted an increase of combatdecks regionally. I
should have read my own newsletter before attending to the tournament
held at Lincon, a gaming-convention. I had put together a nice little
thing with Change of Target, Majesty, breeding, bleeding and voting -
well aware that Potence combat might be difficult to handle. Of course
I had the pleasure of being preyed on by three different decks featuring
Immortal Grapple as a basic means to achive their goals. Needless to
say I got absolutely nowhere. Still, it feels good to see how easy it
is to disarm the dreaded Strike: Combat Ends strategy.
Fun though that the deck swept two and won one more out of five tables
while I was testing it before the tournament...


Tactics section:

So what do we learn from this? Do we all have to feature
damage-prevention and is Strike: Combat Ends a dead end?
Of course not. In a deck where vampires are cannonfodder anyway you
could happily watch half of your force burn or permanently end up in
torpor as long as you benefit one way or another. Benefiting in this
case almost always means damaging your neighbourhood more than
yourself. A weenie-potence deck will try to bring as important a
vampire as possible with it to torpor. Any massive weenie-deck will
happily diablerize and get burned, and a weenie combat-ends deck can
afford walking into Immortal Grapple as long as the numbers are in
favour of the weenies.
Still, I'd done better to place a decent amount of dicsiplineless
maneouver in my own attempt, maybe six or seven cards in a 90 card deck.

I had the pleasure of watching a different strategy during my last
tournament. Albeit slow it was the most awful weenie-auspex deck I have
ever seen - and it eventually won the tournament. Based on my observations
I have created an auspexbased combat core library mean for use with
smallish vampires featuring auspex.

A core auspex combat library:   48 cards

Actions:                        2
Nose of the Hound               2

Action Modifiers:               6
Change of Target                6

Equipment:                      7
Ivory Bow                       1
IR Goggles                      2
Pier 13: Port of Baltimore      1
Flame Thrower                   3

Retainers:                      3
Jackie Therman                  1
Ghoul Retainer                  2

Combat:                         12
Aura Reading                    4
Read Intentions                 2
Primal Instincts                2
Fake Out                        4

Reaction:                       18
Spirits Touch                   2
Precognition                    2
Melange                         2
Wake with Evenings Freshness    2
Forced Awakening                2
Fast Reaction                   6
Eagles Sight                    2


Act, get blocked, act again and hope that you'll get the second
action through. Block and try to get out of harms way. Fast React
and torporize.

Sten During