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ORGANIC DECK GROWTH (April 1st, 2006) Article for VTES by Preston Poulter |
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My favorite element of the game of Vampire: the Eternal Struggle (VTES) is the freedom it gives to the deck designer. Your typical CCG has a pool of “competitive” cards that are simply better than their peers; these competitive cards are then assembled into “tournament” decks that are unbeatable except by other tournament decks. That's not to say that VTES doesn't have “tournament decks” and “fun decks”, but it's not nearly the phenomenon. Stories abound in VTES tournament reports of a tournament winning deck being a “fun deck” or one just “thrown together” that the player just decided to play - an unheard of phenomenon in other CCG circles. The freedom to play my own deck, one that was an outgrowth of my own ideas, and still have just as good a chance at winning a tournament as a polished tournament deck that has been floating around in cyberspace, is what I find so liberating about this game.
Don't mistake that I'm saying thatdeck construction doesn't matter in this game, because it does. But the multi-player and political nature of the game means that sometimes your deck will have a chance to show its stuff and sometimes it won't. You need to construct your deck in such a way that, when it does it get the chance to stretch its legs, it won’t choke on its own inefficiencies.
This article is going to detail a concept I favor called “Organic Deck Growth.” This is contrary to most other articles on CCG deck construction that resort to probabilities and mathematical formulas. You won't see any formulas or probabilities in this article because I don't use them. I don't need them, and I think most players just use them to prove how well their deck “should” be doing as opposed to how well it’s actually doing.
Have you ever heard a joke that you later retold? Of course you have. And, if you're like most people, you probably tailored the joke’s elements to fit your own personality and the audience that was to hear it. Decks are just like jokes; they change shape as from one person to another and the deck’s ideal form will differ from one encounter to the next.
Often one will see a deck-list that has certain flex elements built in (e.g. “replace the Deflection's with Obedience's if your play area favors combat over sneak and bleed.”) Deck-lists like that are great because they allow for the player to be interactive with the decks concept, depending on the expected opposition But here's the real kicker: the VTES card pool is so incremental that as you take a deck's concept in a given direction, other cards will begin to suggest themselves. If you rigorously make changes, play test the deck, and take note of the results, you will find that your own player experiences guide how the deck should be composed. Once more, these experiences will be far more potent than any mathematical formula could ever be. So why worry about all that mathematical crap, just embrace the concept that the deck is going to tell you what should go in it instead of the other way around and you're well on your way to a better style of deck construction than most players favor.
Doesn't that excite you? It excites the hell out of me. So, let me continue by showing you this process in action with a deck I just used to qualify for the NAC at the Texas Regional Qualifier on February 4 th of 2006. I'm going to walk you through the nitty-gritty of exactly how I came up with my deck-list using this concept, and I think you'll be fascinated to see just how dynamic a process this can be.
The deck I ended up using at the Texas Regional Qualifier Tournament was the following:
Deck Name: Bonnie & Clyde Crypt 3x Gwendolyn (Bonnie) 3x Hrothulf (Clyde) 1x Jimmy Dunn 1x Tyler 1x Rigby, Crusade Vanguard 1x Pug Jackson 1x Sela 1x Richter, The Templar of Du Mont
Library Masters 1x Powerbase: Montreal 1x Information Highway 1x The Rack 1x Giant's Blood 1x Fame 1x Channel 10 1x Waste Management Operation 1x The Coven 4x Minion Tap
Actions 1x Entrancement 4x Enchant Kindred 1x Grave Robbing 2x Flurry of Action
Votes 1x Protect Thing Own 1x Year of Fortune 1x Ancient Influence 1x Reins of Power 1x Disputed Territory
Combo Cards 2x Scalpel Tongue
Action Modifier 2x Freak Drive 4x Forced March
Reaction 3x Deflection 3x Forced Awakening 2x Wake with Evening's Freshness
Equipment/Retainers 1x Mr. Winthrop 1x Sport Bike 1x Bowl of Convergence 1x The Sargon Fragment 1x Black Gloves
Allies 1x Political Ally
Combat 6x Unflinching Persistence 6x Pursuit 5x Infernal Pursuit 6x Torn Signpost 4x Immortal Grapple 4x Psyche! 3x Thrown Sewer Lid 3x Taste of Vitae 3x Disarm 1x Pushing the Limit 2x Undead Strength
Bonnie & Clyde has a lot of facets to it. It has the traditional bruise and bleed element ofa lot of classic decks (i.e. Gwendolyn bleeds for three and will torpor anyone who blocks her). It also has a rush element to it - if no one blocks your bleed, then you get the ‘Edge’ and Hrouthulf can rush anyone on the table.It also has an intercept element to it that, when coupled with the combat backbone of the deck, can make it hell on decks that aren't prepared for a block and combat deck. To top it off, it has a hand full of votes that, when called at opportune times, can wreck havoc on an opponent's strategy. These multiple facets of the deck add a real richness to its play value because the deck will actually shift what it does to match the cards in hand as well as environment of what's on the table. It is also an entirely original deck; a recent internet search could not find any deck lists containing Gwendolyn and Hrothulf.
Believe it or not, the seed deck/idea that grew into this deck was my Barbed Wire Project: Brujah deck; it was designed using common cards that I could give out to new players.
Here was the starting deck list: Crypt 1x Don Cruez the Idealist 1x Yuri the Talon 3x (Helena Casimir/Tura Vaughn) 2x Anvil 1x Bianca Hector Sosa 1x Uma Hatch 1x Dre – Leader of the Cold Dawn 1x Lupo
Library 2x Arson 2x (Bum’s Rush/Harass/Ambush) 4x (Legal Manipulations/Enchant Kindred/Social Charm) 2x Conditioning 5x Thrown Gate 5x Thrown Sewer Lids 5x Flash 3x Sideslip 1x Fast Hands 1x Taste of Vitae 6x (Nimble Feet/Acrobatics/Blur) 3x Loyal Street Gang 3x Celerity 3x Minion Tap 2x Haven Uncovered 2x Protracted Investment 1x War Zone Hunting Ground 1x Major Boon 3x Wake with Evening’s Freshness 4x Deflection 2x Poison Pill
At first glance these decks have absolutely nothing in common. They don't share a single crypt card, and with the exception of Deflection, Thrown Sewer Lid, Taste of Vitae, Enchant Kindred, and Wake with Evening's Freshness, they don't share any library cards. This is an excellent example of what I find most exciting: if you love and nurture your seed deck idea, you really don't know what it's going to become.
After extensively play testing this deck, I became really impressed with Helena Casimir. With a built in +1 bleed and number of combat disciplines, she seemed to excellently fit the concept of bruise and bleed. In addition, her non-combat disciplines of Presence and Dominate allowed for some excellent utility cards which included cards like Deflection that help the traditional bruise/bleed deck deal with one of it's major weaknesses: a sneak and bleed predator. In addition, Kindred Most Wanted had just come out and I was fascinated to try to make use of her Primogen title by including cards such as Red List and Trumped-Up Charges that would add another element of the deck. This concept of this new deck (a combat deck featuring Helena Casimir) was a radical change from the concept of the Barbed Wire deck that spawned it (which was a deck to introduce beginners to the Brujah Clan which happened to use Helena). I call these points where you have a radical shift in the deck’s purpose “jumping off points” to differentiate them from just fine-tuning a deck to make it more effective.
The resulting deck list that I put together went something like this: Name: Helena wants a Trophy
Crypt 2x Helena Casimir 2x Crusher 2x Natasha Wolfchek 2x Gwendolyn 2x Jimmy Dunn 2x Richter, the Templar of Du Mont
Library
Master Cards 19 1x Powerbase: Montreal 3x Dreams of the Sphinx 1x Information Highway 2x Zillah's Valley 2x Tomb of Ramses III 3x Minion Tap 1x Trophy: Hunting Ground 1x Trophy: Domain 1x Trophy: Diablerie 1x Depravity 1x Ventrue Headquarters 1x Celerity 1x Fortitude
Actions 10 3x Red List 4x Enchant Kindred 2x Big Game 1x Will of the Council
Political Actions 10 1x Reins of Power 1x Ancient Influence 1x Political Stranglehold 3x Trumped-Up Charges 1x Ancilla Empowerment 1x Anarchist Uprising 1x Year of Fortune 1x Rumors of Gehenna
Action Modifier 8 2x Iron Glare 6x Forced March
Combo Cards 3 1x Ritual of the Bitter Rose 2x Scalpel Tongue
Combat 28 5x Stutter-Step 5x Disarm 5x Decapitate 3x Psyche! 2x Skin of Steel 2x Sideslip 4x Thrown Gate 2x Acrobatics
Reaction 12 8x Wake with Evening's Freshness 4x Deflection
I enjoyed playing this deck; I really loved having Helena rip the heads off of other people's vamps, but it tended to choke quite a bit. It was relying on a three to four card combo in combat (extra damage/prevent + disarm + decapitate) and if it didn't get at least three elements, the combat results were less than impressive. Furthermore, the deck needed time to cycle its non-combat components after each fight in order for its next combat to be at all effective. Like so many deck concepts, it played a lot better in my head than it did in real life.
I was also stuck as to where to take the deck from here. One step was to increase the combat, but that couldn't be done without decreasing either the master cards or the political component in the deck. I didn't really feel I could do either and still stay true to its original concept: a political trophy deck that used Potence Celerity vampires to affect it's combat. At times like this, outside input can save you invaluable time and frustration. So I turned to the person whose opinion regarding VTES decks I hold in the highest esteem: Paul Johnson of the Los Angeles VTES community.
Paul is someone whose company I enjoyed back when I lived in Los Angles. He's warm and funny in a geeky way, and the VTES games that he plays in always seem lively. Furthermore, he has the ability to look at a deck and try to see where it's going to have problems and suggest solutions to combat those problems. That's pretty special in the world of CCG's, because it seems that most people will tend to assume that the few deck archetypes that they know are the only ones that will work and their advice tends to suggest that you adopt whatever classic deck archetype is closest to your current deck-list.
What I find particularly galling is when I have invested a good deal of time in a deck, and I’m treated like I don't know a damn thing about it. The time and expertise that you spend building and playing a deck gives you an expertise with how it will perform that other people aren't going to possess, so keep that it mind. You should be looking for suggestions in terms of concept, solving common problems, or adding a new dimension through a card that you perhaps haven't thought of rather than look for an entirely new deck-list suggested by someone else. My experience suggests that these “gifts” will tend to play even worse than the one you're already playing. The take home message here is to be careful whose advice you seek, because misguided advice can cause both you and the person making suggestions no end of frustration.
When I asked Paul to look at the deck, it was after he had just finished seeing it being played. I laid it out for him and he started taking cards out. “I'm going to take out elements of the deck that just aren't working right now,” he said as he reduced my deck to one third of its size. “When you get the deck working like it should, then you can add these elements back in.”
Looking back, that was pretty sound advice, and I would recommend it to anyone who's frustrated with how their deck is performing. I took the resulting skeleton of a deck and fleshed it out to be:
Wrath of the Primogen
Crypt 3x Helena Casimir x3 3x Natasha Wolfcheck x3 1x Nakova, Advocate of Golconda 1x Jan Pieterzoon 2x Luccia Pacoila x2 1x Rufina Soledad 1x Roland Loussarian
Master Cards 16 1x Guardian Angel 2x Tomb of Ramses III 1x Information Highway 2x Blood Doll 1x The Rack 1x Powerbase: Montreal 1x Elder Library 1x Ventrue Headquarters 1x Island of Yiaros 1x Depravity 1x KRCG News Radio 1x Channel 10 1x London Evening Star, Tabloid Newspaper 1x The Rumor Mill, Tabloid Newspaper
Actions 10 4x Sanguine Instruction 1x Of Noble Blood 1x Will of the Council 2x Entrancement 2x Graverobbing
Political Actions 7 3x Consanguineous Boon 1x Ancilla Empowerment 1x Anarchist Uprising 1x Disputed Territory 1x Ventrue Justicar
Action Modifier 10 2x The Kiss of Ra 5x Forced March 3x Freak Drive
Ally 1 1x Political Ally
Combat 27 5x Disarm 5x Immortal Grapple 7x Unflinching Persistence 2x Undead Persistence 4x Indominability 2x Resilience 2x Amaranth
Combo Cards 3 1x Ritual of the Bitter Rose 2x Scalpel Tongue
Equipment/Retainers 4 1x Sargon Fragment 1x Sport Bike 1x Hand of Conrad 1x Mr. Winthrop
Reaction Cards 12 7x Wake with Evening's Freshness 5x Deflection
The concept here was that the vamps would teach each other combat disciplines at superior using Sanguine Instruction, block using intercept locations, and fight to Disarm people. This concept ran into some problems, however. Often times I would intercept a minion on their turn and disarm them in combat, only to have them untap with a freak drive and bring themselves out of torpor with most of their blood intact. This would prove most troublesome for my deck because it had a difficult time torporizing a vampire that already had a Disarm, as it prevented me from playing a second one.
I gave some thought to increasing the number of Amaranths, but really, I wasn't assured of not having my own vampire die in the resulting blood hunt. Instead I looked towards having the vamps inflict more damage in the resulting combats, rather than rely on Disarm-ing the opposing minion after inflicting a single point of hand damage. For me, this meant going to minions that had more levels of Potence, and that meant abandoning the Ventrue only crypt. And that is when I put together the deck that would become what I would play at the qualifiers.
The deck-lists presented so far represent different variations on a Potence Celerity Fortitude theme. As such, they are a bit like snapshots of someone running a race; it should be understood that there were a good number of steps in between. Now I'd like to leave the deck-lists behind and focus more on the method of play testing decks, because good solid feedback is the engine that makes this process run.
Obviously, the best kind of play testing is done with a group of similarly skilled players who are playing decks that don't trip over themselves too much. That is to say, if you play against players or decks that can't seem to pull off a win even under the best of circumstances, you're probably going to get play test results that are misleadingly positive. Also, I almost never throw together a deck and play it in a live game without first doing some play testing on my own because I never want to be the player whose deck just failed and caused a bizarre VTES game for two hours.
The preliminary play testing I do just sitting at home and watching old movies. I take the deck I want to play, and put it with a S&B predator and a KRC style vote deck as my prey. These decks tend to play themselves, so I feel comfortable just dealing them out and seeing how it goes. If you don't have any of these decks thrown together, I recommend you try the Barbed Wire Project Malkavian and Ventrue decks (which are archived at www.ashheap.com). They are a good enough approximation of these style of decks and are generic enough that they make a good gauge of how your deck really performs as a whole, rather than one time factors that can dramatically shift a game. What I mean is, that if you decide that you want to try your voter deck instead of the Barbed Wire Ventrue deck, and the voter deck does something spectacular like PTO one of your star vamps, then your play test results aren't going to be indicative of the actual play value of your test deck.
I've always found that just sitting down and grinding out a couple of games against these decks is very helpful in telling me how my test deck is doing. After each game I sit down and try to figure out where my deck is succeeding or failing, what cards just tended to sit in my hand, and what just isn't working. Then I tweak and repeat. After I get my deck tuned to where it does pretty well with a S&B predator, I switch so that the vote deck is my predator and the S&B deck is the prey. I really feel that the hour or two that it takes you to go through the process gives you a much better understanding of your deck's strengths and weaknesses. In my experience, it never fails to change the decks texture to where it contains fewer copies of more cards than I originally started; for example, I’d start with a deck’s concept a put one together that contains 5 copies of Decapitate but end up with 1 Decapitate, 1 Amaranth, 1 Graverobbing, and 2 card slots dedicated to shoring up a perceived weakness in the decks performance. When I see someone posting a decklist to the internet that reads “7 copies of card A, 7 copies of card B, 7 copies of card C, etc.” I know that they haven’t invested much time in tuning the deck after putting it together.
The next step is to see how your deck performs in a live game. Most of the time, this will show you a whole new level of strengths and weaknesses. At some point, you reach a decision about where the deck should go. Sometimes there are obvious improvements that should be made without too much deliberation, but other times there are forks in the road. For example, with the “Bonnie and Clyde” deck, I had to decide if I wanted to work Beast – the Leatherface of Detroit or Theo Bell into the deck. Both have a built in rush that would greatly compliment the decks effort to try to use Hrothulf's rush ability.
I considered it, but my main problem was that the deck couldn't really utilize either to their fullest extent. Theo Bell is best in a deck where he has a Prince or Justicar as support for plenty of Amaranths; while Beast lacks superior Celerity, which the deck needs to use Infernal Pursuit and Psyche! at superior. Lastly, neither Beast nor Theo Bell have Fortitude, which also seemed a waste of all the cards requiring Fortitude in the deck. It seemed to me that if I was going to put a fairly large investment or 7 pool into a vamp, I wanted to be able to really use that minion to its fullest capacity, which I couldn't do it with Theo Bell or Beast without making significant changes to the deck.
It's a common phenomenon in deck construction and testing that you start with one concept (in my example a CEL-POT-for combat deck) and then start to see another concept that shows promise (a Theo Bell/Beast/ POT cel minion burning deck). Both concepts show promise, but those are different decks and the new concept actually represents a new “jumping off point” rather than just a way to tune the existing deck. If you try to blend the two, you'll get a mediocre performer. It's far better to chose one concept and be true to that vision up until you decide to abandon it for something better (as I did in my example when I finally abandoned Helena Casimir and the all Ventrue crypt). When you come across new ”jumping off points” that push you in a different direction, make note of them for later use; they usually turn out to be pretty good too.
The last thing I want to leave you with is that the time you invest in gaining experience with a given deck concept is valuable time. There is just no substitute for experience in this game. Often I make the mistake of gaining experience with a deck concept that allows me to see its failings and I am tempted to abandon the whole thing when a major tournament is coming up in favor of some tried and true tournament concept, such as weenie bleed or something. Fight this tendency. Every deck has its problems, and if you chicken out and go for what seems safe when the heat is on you, then you will surely regret it later when you are discovering first hand the problems of your new concept in the middle of a big tournament.
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