Best use of Grooming the Protege?

Ariadne abactor can use it ok, but that deck is just "ok", and is less good at winning when made mono-gangrel.

Ive ran 13 ish variants of that deck, and the trick is staying alive awhile with medium bleed and minion dunkng pressure, and then eat lots of people in lategame while bleeding and rats getz vps.

So, Gangrel not having Janie, Mowgli, and Celeste hurt the deck alot, since you pay half yoir pool total on Ariadne and Ryder then getting Lise orGunnat become whatever. Big animalism is important, and thatsxlaxking in g4-5 gangrel.

Ariadne bloats fine with vessels and dolls most of the time.

Now, Aksynia is still awesome with grooming....

Grooming is almost always better replaced by a Villein or Minion Tap. use Info Hwy or Zillah's Valley instead if you're looking for acceleration.

Grooming the Protege ties up your master phase, which is bad enough, but also creates a heavy strain on your influence phase. you need to spend transfers like crazy, pulling pool back while also fishing for new legal targets*. maybe you draw a copy in your opening hand and use it to full effect, but once the game gets moving it often becomes a bureaucratic nightmare to jump through all the hoops to make it work.

however....

in my opinion, the one exception is clan Nosferatu. Grooming has an unexpected synergy with Kindred Intelligence, that action to draw a crypt card. KI frees up that bottleneck, since you can spend minion actions to draw new vampires. transfers can then be focused on moving pool around, nice and flexible. I tried this a few times in "casual" decks and was surprised by how smoothly it all flowed.

I guess this has more to do with KI being an amazing underrated card, making up for Grooming's badness. maybe it's just me, but if I can avoid drawing crypt cards the default way, I'll go for it. 4 transfers + 1 pool for a random vampire is more expensive than most people realize.


* One might think Wider View fixes the problem of fishing for targets, but it actually makes the strain on the influence phase even worse. It doesn't really increase the size of your uncontrolled region. You'll want 4 transfers to get your pool back, but how are you gonna manage that when you're constantly Grooming?

Haze...
I am successfully using Grooming the Protege in another deck as well. A !Ven vote deck running Public Vilification for minion refill. Grooming works in that deck because it doesn't deplete the minion heavily and does reduce the Transfers required for the next minion.

If you're trying to use Grooming the Protege in the same way as Villein/Minion Tap, then I think you're trying to do the wrong things with that card.