Deckbuilding – high-caps, low-caps and mid-caps

Certain cards and disciplines yield advantages for different capacity vampires.

When building with Dominate the most common card to make use of is Govern the Unaligned. This is because the yield of the card is great both early-, mid- and late-game.

The first use of the card for the deck is to cheaply get vampires into play earlier. Because this effect is both on superior Dominate and requires a higher capacity vampire it means that Dominate decks usually influence up their highest capacity vampire first. To use the bleed effect you only need to have basic Dominate, thus the size of the vampires influenced up will usually lie between 3-5 and the occasional 7, which is where you find the most price worthy vampires.

When ousting the difference of a bleed for 6 and a bleed for 5 is not as large as having an extra vampire in play (cap 3 vs cap 7 for example). This is specifically important for tap-n-bleed using Euro-stealth (Pentex Subversion, Anarch Troublemaker and Misdirection).

When building decks using mono-Animalism the thinking is very similar. Deep Song has ousting power in basic Animalism and “blood economy” on superior, this in the way that back-rushing will save you pool and give you leeway to influence up more vampires. While not as powerful as Govern, the capacity of the crypt in groups 3-4 is enough to compensate.

Crypt acceleration has become a staple in many decks these days because of the introduction of Villein. Cards like Zillahs Valley, Information Highway and to a certain extent Dreams of the Sphinx are staples here. Crypt acceleration with Villein has become a way to circumvent the lack of cards such as Govern the Unaligned in the particular discipline played. It grants many quick vampires cheaply and concentrates your actions to ousting type actions instead. This yields many highcap vampires which usually have a lot of votes or other useful abilities, a staple in these decks is also Golconda, a good way to counter getting rushed and losing a high-cap vampire.

This leaves the question as to where mid-caps fit in, i.e. cap 6-7. Certain double discipline decks that require 2 disciplines at superior on all vampires could use mid-caps. Since you can’t use Zillah´s Valley on vampires of capacity below 8 and you can’t Golconda them, the usefulness of having crypt acceleration is lessened in these crypts. If you have access to Dominate your ousting power will probably be increased more using Govern on cap 3-4 vampires rather than 6-7. So basically this leaves a type of deck that is not seen in tournaments much at the moment as decks have become more and more streamlined.