Ashur´s War Journal – April 2016

Hello again, a bit late again, but here´s this months ramblings.

My current decks (in no particular order):
1: Ventrue princes with sticks (Classic Hugh style)
2: Ravnos G5-6 stealth-bleed (see below)
3: Gerald Windham sb (Get Ankara and Govern down, Freak Drive, people get ousted)
4: !Nosferatu Black Hand Teresita Inside Dirt toolbox
5: Gangrel Mictlantecuhtli+Talbots chainsaw with ANI-weenies
6: Brujah Appolonius multi-bleed combat toolbox (Fun!)
7: Nosferatu G4-5 vote (Will be tweaked soon)
8: Tremere Blood Fury bruise-bleed (Much like the old Uta Kovacs deck, but worse)
9: Lasombra Black Hand stealth-bleed with Nostoket (Kind of funny)
10: !Tremere anarchs G4-5 with Nephanduses (Didn´t work)

Note: Decks with the Dominate discipline: 6 of 10. Sad.


Ashur rant of the month:

Goddamn I´m tired of Gehenna events. So very, very, very boring. Do anyone think Slow Withering, Veil of Darkness and Blood Weakens makes this game more fun? Terrible, terrible design. Everybody knows I like cards with short text on them - my favorite is Lost in Crowds. That should be an ideal for card design. But then you have Veil of Darkness, a veritable novel that slows down the game ALOT and impacts it totally randomly. Sure, the cards are (as I can judge) thematically correct, but what was LSJ after, design-wise? If he wanted to make the bigcap, superior-discipline-decks weaker, and strenghten deck with weenies that use few or no discipline cards, couldn´t it be done in a funnier, yet strategically interesting way?

From now on I will run two The Fourth Cycle in all decks for a while, because The Uncoiling is too weak. Hope it has some effect on the meta over here.

Ashur deck of the month:

Deck Name: Mayapaya Sewing Circle (Ravnos G5-6 stealth-bleed)
Author: Necross
Description: This deck is it´s earliest, experimental stages. No rocket science though :) I just had to build something with this crypt - six vamps with superior chimerstry below 7 cap. Stealth-bleed seemed obvious, and Sense Dep is to strong to leave out, boring or not.

Crypt (12 cards)
2x  Desiree Narayan, Anarch Historian   6  ani cel for nec CHI  Ravnos:6
2x  Dhita Choudhair                     5  aus ANI CHI          Ravnos:6
2x  Dr. Lawrence Mayhew                 6  ani for AUS CHI      Ravnos:5
2x  Ganesh                              6  CHI DEM FOR          Ravnos:5
2x  Irena                               5  ani for pre CHI      Ravnos:5
2x  Sanjay Chakrabarti                  4  ani CHI              Ravnos:6

Library (71 cards)
Master (13)
1x Anarch Troublemaker
1x Archon Investigation
1x Barrens, The
1x Coven, The
2x Dreams of the Sphinx
1x Fortune Teller Shop
1x Kumpania
2x Path of Paradox, The
1x Pentex(TM) Subversion
2x Two Wrongs

Event (1)
1x Narrow Minds

Action (11)
1x Illusory Resources
4x Sensory Deprivation
6x Suspension of Disbelief

Equipment (4)
1x Heart of Nizchetus
1x Ivory Bow
1x Karavalanisha Vrana
1x Treasured Samadji

Action Modifier (12)
1x False Resonance
8x Fata Morgana
1x Mirror's Visage
1x Red Herring
1x Will-o'-the-Wisp

Combat (9)
2x Apparition
4x Hall of Mirrors
3x Mayaparisatya

Combo (13)
3x Draba
6x Mirror Image
4x Occlusion

Reaction (8)
2x Delaying Tactics
1x Ignis Fatuus
4x On the Qui Vive
1x Wake with Evening's Freshness

My thoughts after playing it three times:
- The deck needs Path of Paradox. Should be 4 or 5.
- I will probably add a couple of Sense Deps, and remove some of the other defensive stuff (Kumpania, Ignis Fatuus).
- The combat module should probably go, even though I like it alot. Maybe I´ll try some deck with more combat, less s-b later on.
- Suspension of Disbelief is not very strong. Might switch them for some permanent bleed tools.
- Karavalanisha Vrana might not work in this deck. I´ll probably remove it, if I don´t decide to add some larger vamps.
- Draba is strong.


Some other ideas I´ve pondered recently:
- What about Sense Deppin everybody with a Eternals-influenced Porphyrion?
- Try some anarch-tech in my Mictlantecuhtli+Talbots chainsaw-deck?
- Is this the strangest TWD ever?
- What cards would be good for Harbingers, Gargoyles, Salubri Antitribu, Blood Brothers and Samedi?
- Still haven´t found any use of Cardinal Benediction.
- Isn´t Barrenness underplayed?
- What would Richard Garfield change if V:TES would be tweaked a bit?

If anyone have any answers to the questions above, feel free to comment below, or at it´s VEKN forum-thread, or by mail to vtes/at/msghsfhi.com. Thanks!