Giving Credit

There were a lot of interesting deck ideas that I witnessed over this past weekend. I'll try to give credit where it is due, but my memory isn't always that great. Here goes:

Dennis Lien made an Inner Circle deck featuring some pretty cool combos. I would normally shy away from IC decks, but this one doesn't have to pay for too many of it's minions.

Key minions:

Mistress Fanchion

Amenophobis

Supporting crew:

IC members with OBF PRE

What does it do?

Mistress Fanchion digs for the parts of the combo you need and can play many of them herself. She calls Might of the Camarilla to burn vampires from each player's uncontrolled region. Amenophobis plays Eternal Mask at SER to put Dennis' burned IC member into play with a couple blood. Now you have two IC members.

Eternal Mask? But that means Amenophobis can't do anything, right? Not so! Martinelli's Ring comes to the rescue and, with the help of Heidelberg Castle, Amenophobis sheds Eternal Mask.

IC members play their usual trick with Alastor + Helicopter, then that gets moved around by the castle. When they are low on blood, they call a Banishment and voter cap (and untap via helicopter), then another one calls Might of the Camarilla to burn the banished vampire.

OBF gives the IC two good things: No Trace and loads of stealth.

Had it not been for Eric's two Determines to stop Dennis from banishing my last guy who could deflect, Dennis would have swept the table when he was my pred. By far the coolest deck at the tournaments. Kudos, Dennis!

Eric won with the imbued, but I was more interested in his War Ghoul deck. We don't get too many ally decks around here, other than Nocturns, so watching him play the ~75 card War Ghoul + S&B deck was refreshing. Unfortunately for him, the War Ghoul I saw him bring out was stolen. I wasn't too concerned about them because of all of the S:CE I was playing, so I was content to play his game as long as he wasn't going backwards too much or gaining pool. He got mugged in game one by weenie computer hacking, so that was it for him in the second tournament.

Jeff Yin had an Enkidu rush deck with some interesting tricks up his sleeve. Most notably, he was playing Well-Aimed Car + Target: Vitals. He got an impressive win on one table, but was shut down in the finals due to weenie/nocturn blockers.

James Lin had a D'Habi Revenant + Corrupt Construction deck that as pretty cool. He got out two or three uber strong constructions, one at a time and played Lunatic Eruption to give them a somewhat permanent rush. I was playing enough stealth to burn his Lunatic Eruptions and some of his important actions were at zero stealth. He bled himself a lot by failing to block with WMRH and Andy Fernandez finished the job with Blood Brothers.

In a preliminary game, Andy Fernandez played a deck based around Deploy the Hand:

Deploy the Hand

Political Action

Requires a ready archbishop, cardinal or regent.
Choose one or more Methuselahs who do not have a target counter. Successful referendum means each chosen Methuselah gets a target counter. During his or her untap phase, a Methuselah with a target counter chooses one of his or her ready minions, who takes 2 unpreventable damage. A Methuselah may burn the Edge to burn his or her target counter.

If it was a matter of burning a pool every turn like Sabbat Threat, why not just KRC? With Deploy the Hand, you can ding everyone at the table. With something like Horseshoes, you can finish them off. Andy had a bunch of used Target gift cards, which was the gimmick, but the political action was interesting enough.

Now that I'm at the end of my post, I guess I'll rant a little. All of the ideas above are good material for building decks. For the most part, I feel like people get credit for inspiring decks, or at least tournament winning decks. That said, there is little discussion of where particular ideas come from on the VEKN forum. I'm as guilty of this as the next guy. I'm not a big fan of nit-picking regarding citing sources or the way intellectual property works in general, but it would be good to at least give an honorable mention when it seems appropriate.

There are so many players out there with good ideas who don't post them. There are also a lot of very good players who don't discuss VTES at all. That's a shame when the game is already so hard to promote. I hope that said players will become more vocal in an effort to promote the game that they love. If it is a matter of getting credit the ideas that they would talk about, that can be dealt with. In my experience, the more people talk about their deck ideas the more deck ideas are generated. As Martha Stewart says, "it's a good thing."