Decks I Have Played

The first deck I ever used was a deck I borrowed from C. It was a Tremere Cryptic Mission deck, a mosquito deck which would harry opponents by burning their minions' blood one by one. It was fun, although I got sandwiched between two strong opponents and got stomped pretty early.

The first deck I actually owned was a Gangrel starter deck from the Anarchs set. It was quickly retooled by my friend T in preparations for last year's storyline tournament, Lambach's Legions. It was a toolbox deck, which meant that it could do quite a number of actions, and react relatively well to either predator or prey. It was pretty good, since with it, I reached the finals table of the tournament. Not bad for a beginner.

I then decided to switch to Gangrel bruise-bleed. This way, I could oust my prey with modified bleeding, and I could control my predator by blocking and fighting his minions.

When the Black Hand expansion came out last October 2003, I was lucky to draw a
!Nosferatu starter during the prerelease tournament. With it, I would still be able to bruise and bleed, and the !Nossies would still be relatively close to my original clan, the Gangrel.

However, due to the !Nossie lack of Fortitude, my vampires would go down in a fight. I decided to go long range with them, using Thrown Gates and Sewer Lids. It worked quite well, as long as no one had a Drawing Out the Beast in his or her hand, which would automatically set the range to close.

Still, the lack of !Nossie maneuvering often frustrated me. So, I picked up a !Brujah starter deck and built my Baseball Pitchers. The nice thing about the !Brujah is that they have both Celerity, for the maneuvers, and Potence, for really damaging strikes. One more card, then was added to the mix: the Well-Aimed Car. While really difficult to play, I'd been enchanted with the card ever since I watched the Disney movie, "Lilo & Stitch." So I put it in, and, while I don't always get to throw it, when I do get to make someone "catch the buggy," that minion usually goes down.

Since then, I've experimented with a few deck types:

1. Samedi bruise-bleed: The Samedi are difficult to use, because of their lack of maneuver, and their average size. Still, I like challenges, so I tried it out. The resulting deck was clunky, and I'm still tinkering with it to see if I can actually make it tick.

2. Protean stealth-bleed: My one and only attempt at stealth-bleeding, the protean weenie deck is fun, but difficult to win with, because of the lack of bleed modifiers.

3. Animalism weenie: This is the most recent deck I've worked with, and I'm have quite a bit of fun with it. It won't always win, but when the swarm works, it's pretty painful.

My VTES Family Tree

When a player convinces a person to play VTES, that player becomes what is known as a Sire, and the person he or she convinced is that player's Childe. And thus, the lineage of players begins.

My sire in the game is H, who predominantly plays Gangrel, and my grandsire is C, who commands the Ventrue antitribu. Both are dangerous players, and, while I've gotten over my dread of playing against them, I'd rather not be their prey (in H's case) or predator (in C's case).

I became a sire last December, when I influenced T, one of my co-teachers to play. I quickly became a grandsire when he convinced two high school students to take up the game.

First Post

It's been more than a year now since I started playing Vampire: the Eternal Struggle (VTES), a multi-player CCG. Through this wonderful game, I have encountered many interesting individuals and have experienced many hours of enjoyable fun.

Originally, I would've liked to have posted my thoughts on the game on my original blog, but it didn't seem to fit in, so I thought I would post my thoughts on the game on this new blog. So, what can you expect from this blog in the future? I'll be posting my deck listings, with comments about how they performed. I'll probably also be posting useful links to various VTES sites, and comment on VTES activities. We'll see how well I'll be able to add to this. Wish me luck!