OFFICIAL VEKN CLAN VENTRUE NEWSLETTER Vol.II No.12 Sep.2001 INTRODUCTION GENCON UK - An introspective. TALKING POINT - Metagames DECK OF THE MONTH #1 - Mr Barny Baker's Gencon UK deck DECK OF THE MONTH #2 - Weenie Anarch Revolt wooden spoon. _________________________________________________ INTRODUCTION Apologies for the brevity of this September issue but I have had one or two thousand things to sort out for going away and I thought I'd best leave a few topics for Mr Cooper and Mr Baker to cover :o) This edition features Barn's Gencon 2001 deck and my latest weenie sleaze offering as well as a bodged together report of sorts on my views of Gencon this year. I am extremely peed off that I couldn't go to the EC. this Weekend but whaddya do ?? It will be _very_ interesting indeed to see the full report on the EC, I wonder how the dealmaking aspect of the game will pan out at the tourney ? Hmmm. I see Barn made it to the final, not the best to get Deranged up the pipe with a deck like that though - sounds interesting. ________________________________________________ GENCON UK - An introspective Another Gencon come and gone. A lot more superb events this year but sadly, due to events way beyond my control I was only able to attend the main open on Saturday. I arrived on Friday night in time to watch the 'Clan War' final and catch up on my beer deficiency. Mmmm beer. From the little I saw, the Clan War looked like a whole lot of fun. The clans in the final were, in table order - Tremere - Followers of Set - Malkavian - Nosferatu - Tzimisce Simplified greatly, the semi-weenie Malk deck came screaming out of the gates and ousted the Nosferatu whilst Jon built up 'the perfect hand' TM to take out the weenie bleeder. The endgame was really great. I walked round and had a peek at everyone's hand... oh man, house of cards sprung to mind. Barn, (semi-Fortitude Tremere) had Govern, Conditioning, Deflection and Daring the Dawn, preying on - Mike Nudd (FoS toolbox) with an Archon Investigation, Giant's Blood, Minion Tap and a Deflection preying on Jon Cooper (Tzimisce block/kill/+1 Hand damage) with a bag load of intercept/wake including Eagles Sight, Crows, Femur of Toomler etc. In short, it kicked off. Mike burned Barn's Sarah Cobbler with the AI but folded from Muaziz's heavy Daring the Dawned bleed. By this time Jon had Corine (ANI, Femur of Toomler), Lambach and a couple ? of other badass heavy hitters and Barn gave up the game. Great to see the game pan out knowing the cards in each players hands. Friday night - Much beer, crap underground trains and more cards. Saturday came around FAR too quick for me. Arriving on Friday night I only had time for a drunk 7 player half-a-game before I crashed out to get some all-important beauty sleep, so no practice for me then. Saturday 12.15 (late), a lot of new and old faces 34 players all told. Up until 2/3 minutes before I still hadn't decided what to play. I realistically had a choice of my Eurobrujah 2001 deck, an Anarch Revolt/Life Boon/Dramatic Upheaval Weenie abomination (see later in letter), my Ventrue Force of Will/Vote/Daring the Dawn or my evolved Tzimisce combat deck. Ventrue was out as I had (foolishly:o) leant it to Martin Cubberley and the Anarch Revolt deck was potentially lethal but largely untested. I had a thought that I wanted to play some sort of combat and always knew I would give the Eurobrujah 2001 another outing after the Euroqualifiers in Watford and so I did. In hindsight it was the best choice of the lot as the metagame suited the deck very well. First round, stock Gangrel predator with no IG access and !Ventrue prey. Next prey, Protean/Malkavian I trod carefully expecting poke/Rotscreck but none came out. I accepted a deal with James Mc for a VP to him or he would oust himself and give James Hamblin a VP and 6 pool. Next prey James McLellan (ANI weenie wall) he got his VP as agreed and transferred himself out. 4 VP's. Second round was a nightmare, started to feel really tired and made a stupid early error - miscounted the fact that no one was on more pool than me *after* I had played the Parity Shift. Bugger, a bloody masterstroke there. Being bled by Niki Semi with Beast and Pals, we had a rough truce after I took out naughty Beast early on but Niki played a good game and bled me out in the endgame with a Legal Manipulation (2 in deck, aghhhhh) but had overstretched himself and got ousted. Will took out everyone else on the table as he graverobbed Niki's Beast ! 0 VP's. Last round was VERY odd. Crappy seating with myself being bled by Matt Green (Lasombra Free States Rant/bleed) and Barny Baker (Ventrue and friends unblockable/Hostile see Deck of the Month) on the same table, never going to be a nice game. Green's deck had given me serious grief in the Watford tourney so I got as many early votes out as I could and let Green know what would happen if I so much as sniffed any votes. The game panned out, I ousted my Setite prey and Barn took out his stock Gangrel prey. After about 20 minutes of getting nowhere fast someone (I think it was Green) proposed a joint withdraw giving me 2, Barn 2 and Green 1. We all though about this a lot (an hours worth of a lot!) and settled on the deal. We all stood to benefit from it and individually thought we all had a place in the final. Little did we know the outcome of the other rounds. IIRC (in the absence of any tourney report or return email from Mr Coupe :o) the points going into the final were - Oliver 8 Martin 7 Barn 7 John 6.5 Me 6 Last going in I was pretty worried points wise but checking out the decks on the table I was fairly confident that I could establish a foothold early on using good ol' bully tactics. Oliver who sat down last then chose to be bled by me, a move that I didn't quite understand as I took him out pretty damn quickly in round 3. Ah well, I'm sure he had his reasons. A bit of pre-transfer banter to ensure no contesting (Jon/I had Volker and Barn/Martin had Sir Walter IIRC) and everyone opened strong, walloping their respective preys for the first half hour. I managed to get Oliver down to 4 pool and 0-1 (can't remember?) minions and a Khobar Towers and was looking good for the 1st VP on the table, when Martin (my soon to be prey) called a Dramatic Upheaval (sorry suggested he may call a Dramatic Upheaval). As I wrote elsewhere, the table talk went into overdrive. After a bloody age of banter the swap went ahead with me trading places with Martin. As it turns out this gave me the game but anyway. The decks on the table I was most concerned with were the two Ventrue creations as they both had Kiss of Ra and Hostile Takeover nasties. Martin playing my Ventrue deck was a bit battered and was having a real hard time getting through Oliver AKA 'captain pool gain' so I concentrated on Jon and Barn. Barn was the fulcrum in the game from my point of view and I thought I could take the table IF Barn was out of the way. As if by magic Jon tentatively offered a table split, I pushed a bit and offered Jon 2nd place (he was likely to be ousted next before anyone asks if he was playing to win). I had about 30 minutes to build up the perfect 'anti Jon' hand if he decided to go back on our deal so I then helped Jon oust Barn (which took a bloody long time) and I took the table. I saw that the German players viewed the tourney as 'heavy combat'. I would say it was average for a UK tourney. I only saw two other combat decks that gave me cause for concern, Jon Cooper's Brujah Debaters and Niki Semi's age old Beast rush deck. I After the tourney (which didn't wrap up until about 10.30pm), we spent about 2 hours going the wrong way out of London on the wrong train and clearly had only one course of action available to us... roll an 8 sided dice to decide who took gulps of a whole bottle of Aftershock (wickedly strong blue, sickly spirit). So that messed us up nicely. All in all this years Gencon was pretty cool but IMO suffered from being in London in terms of accessibility and a feeling of community. _____________________________________________ TALKING POINT - Metagame trend analysis. There has been a move away from weenie decks, the whole game has shifted toward mid-high point vampires and the game is IMO the better for it. The errata of existing cards like Misdirection and the creation of some of the superb new cards such as Powerbase: Montreal, Theo Bell etc. etc. has given combat a huge vitamin shot in the arm. Tables of sneak / bleed, Deflection and vote just don't happen as often as previous. Is this a good thing ? Discuss... _____________________________________________ DECK OF THE MONTH #1 - Barn's Gencon 2001 deck. Mr Baker kindly sent me a list of his Ventrue based Gencon deck. In the absence of any other title I think I'll go with the one he wrote on the mail header :o) Dirt 4 Rob. Crypt: (12 cards) [Min: 12, Max: 40, Avg: 6.58] 1 Arika (Ventrue, 11, au ce DO FO OB PR, IC) 1 Emerson Bridges (Ventrue, 8, DO FO po PR, Prince) 1 Gilbert Duane (Malkavian, 7, AU DO OB, Prince) 1 Ingrid Russo (Ventrue Antitribu, 4, DO fo) 1 Ohanna (Malkavian, 2, do) 2 Queen Anne (Ventrue, 10, au DO FO PR ob, Prince) 1 Ranjan Rishi (Ventrue, 5, DO fo PR) 1 Rufina Soledad (Ventrue, 2, fo) 1 Sir Walter Nash (Ventrue, 7, DO FO PR, Prince) 1 Suhailah (Ventrue, 9, FO OB po se, Prince) 1 Violette Prentiss (Ventrue, 4, do PR) Library: 90 cards (20 masters) 2 Blood Doll 3 Bonding 3 Cloak the Gathering 3 Conditioning 3 Day Operation [only 3 Barn ? seemed like many more. Ed] 6 Deflection 1 Disputed Territory 1 Dreams of the Sphinx 1 Faceless Night 3 Fifth Tradition: Hospitality, The 3 Forced Awakening 2 Forgotten Labyrinth 2 Freak Drive 1 Golconda: Inner Peace 3 Govern the Unaligned 1 Hidden Strength 5 Hostile Takeover 1 Indomitability 3 Kine Dominance 4 Kine Resources Contested 1 KRCG News Radio 2 Legal Manipulations 2 Lost in Crowds 5 Majesty 4 Minion Tap 2 Obedience 3 Obfuscate 1 Parity Shift 1 Psychic Veil 1 Resilience 1 Rolling with the Punches 1 Rumors of Gehenna 5 Second Tradition: Domain 1 Skin of Night 1 Skin of Rock 1 Skin of Steel 1 Sudden Reversal 1 Superior Mettle 2 Swallowed by the Night 1 Uptown Hunting Ground 1 Ventrue Headquarters 1 Ventrue Justicar A semi-toolbox blend of two deck types with a solid central 'engine' of pool gain / Hostile Takeover, played (as ever) well by Barn. _____________________________________________ DECK OF THE MONTH #2 - Weenie Anarch Revolt Another variation on the Weenie Ventrue theme. This one is very destabilising and works on speeding the game up and changing places with Dramatic Upheaval to soak up as many VP's as you can lay your filthy mitts on. Deck name: Weenie Ventrue / Anarch Revolt Crypt: (12 cards) [Min: 7, Max: 21, Avg: 3.42] 1 Antoinette DuChamp (Caitiff, 1, ce pr) 1 Courtland Leighton (Ventrue, 4, do fo pr) 1 Gideon Fontaine (Ventrue, 3, PR) 1 Igo the Hungry (Caitiff, 1, pr pt) 1 Itzahk Levine (Ventrue, 3, ce pr) 1 Jazz Wentworth (Ventrue, 5, do fo PR) 1 Ranjan Rishi (Ventrue, 5, DO fo PR) 2 Roland Loussarian (Ventrue, 3, fo pr) 1 Rufina Soledad (Ventrue, 2, fo) 1 Sir Walter Nash (Ventrue, 7, DO FO PR, Prince) 1 Violette Prentiss (Ventrue, 4, do PR) Library: 85 cards (19 master cards) 7 Anarch Revolt 1 Antediluvian Awakening 2 Awe 4 Bewitching Oration 2 Business Pressure 2 Change of Target 2 Closed Session 6 Consanguineous Boon 1 Conservative Agitation 2 Cryptic Rider 3 Deflection 1 Direct Intervention 4 Dramatic Upheaval 1 Dreams of the Sphinx 1 Elysium: The Arboretum 2 Hostile Takeover 1 Humanitas 2 Information Highway 4 Kine Resources Contested 2 Legal Manipulations 8 Majesty 1 Parity Shift 8 Praxis Seizure: Assorted 3 Rumors of Gehenna 4 Skin of Steel 1 Sudden Reversal 1 Tribute to the Master 1 Ventrue Headquarters 2 Ventrue Justicar 6 Wake with Evening's Freshness Pretty standard weenie deck construction with a nasty Dramatic Upheaval / Anarch Revolt element. I have just taken out 2 Life Boons, not sure if they are worth while in the deck ? Might go for a Succubus Club and a Parthenon instead ? The Club can do pretty much the same thing and the Parthenon would be useful if the Rumours couldn't be pushed through. Might take this bad boy to Aus and see how she fares ? Got 4 interchangeable decks to take with me covering a lot of different metagames so I'll report back.. _____________________________________________ That's me for a couple months, I'll try and catch up with the group whilst I'm on my travels. You can all look forward too absolutely groundbreaking, brilliant, witty and informative newsletters from Jon and Barn in October and November. Any mud, dog dirt, soiled garments, submissions, lint, decks, stilton, scum, articles and abuse (they LOVE abuse everyone) etc. mail to Jon.Cooper@etl.ericsson.se for October 'combat' issue and to Barny.Baker@SynergyGroup.co.uk for the November issue. I'll be home at the end of November so I'll be back for the Dec. Newsletter. Whoo Hoo. Until December then, when I'll report on the playstyles of our Australian and New Zealand brothers and sisters... farewell and happy dealbreaking. Rob.