Harbinger Tap and Bleed help?

I have 5 HoB decks (my favorite clan) and plenty more failed ones over the years. Like BrandonCruz and Ankha said.. drop the dominate. Total failure if two sudden reversals drop on your dominate skill card. You have Egothha and Agaitas for dropping their cards. You can also use Slaughter Houses to drop prey's cards as well and use trochomancy to bleed. Deck is way too big and too many masters (need only 15-16 for a 90 card deck). You need more spiritual intervention like 6 copies. Relying on fortitude for combat is bad idea as people will wear you down eventually. Try weighted walking sticks and pulled fangs for damage to scare people off. Jar the Soul is stupid card and takes up your action for 1 blood damge considering you're not small cap vampires. Much better use Breath of Thanatos, Dead Hand, Mercy for Seth (OP against stupid imbued decks). You want about 24 combat cards in a 90 card deck with only 10 at most fortitude cards. I personally love pulled fangs with a fortitude based clan. Don't forget to throw in 2-3 Unflinching Persistence for maneuvers to close range.

You have seduction.. get rid of that, use call the hungry dead, kiss of ra, spectral divination.

You have conditioning.. get rid of that, use 5-6 trochomancy

laptop computer is fine, but go for camera phone..

reaction cards should be only wake with evening freshness, eyes of argus (expensive), telepathic misdirection (bounce), and other auspex interrupt cards if you desire/have space for.

There are other suggestions but I don't wanna give you a headache.

Every single thing you addressed was already suggested on the second page of the thread and implemented to the deck

Do you have any deck lists for other Harbinger deck architypes? I'd like to take a look at what others have got.

Sure. They are on my secretlibrary decklist.. dunno how I can list them to you

xXLazarusXx wrote:

Elysium has to go then, but you didn't really suggest anything to give me the combat ends mechanic with Sabbat vampires. Anything you can suggest to fill that would be great.

Purchase Pact exists, but is slightly harder to play (requiring a non-bishop Sabbat title) to play. However, it has the same problem as Elysium: the Arboretum - you don't control the sect of your opponents, so if you find yourself with a Tzimisce bruise-bleed prey and an Ahrimane predator, things are okay - but if you find yourself with a Toreador gun wall prey and an Imbued predator, you're not doing so well with it.

If you want combat defence as a master card, you might want to consider Secure Haven , as it stops you being rushed - but won't help you if you get blocked. Mostly, combat defence is best from minion cards (with one or two exceptions).

xXLazarusXx wrote:

There's a limitation on this deck that Im using the group 2 harbingers. It's one of the first things addressed in the rest of the post.
Which block oriented harbingers were you referencing? No matter the group I'll take a look at them.

It's not the vampires, so much as the deck construction. You could - were you so minded - have a clutch of intercept in the deck using your Auspex, maybe get hold of a Bowl of Convergence, toss in Mr Winthrop and maybe a couple of Eagle Sight. Perhaps go for a Weighted Walking Stick style grinder deck, maybe mix in some Aus/For !Ventrue to help out, use Crematorium to capitalize on vampire death. (Briefly, the 'grinder' style of deck tends to use Auspex to defend itself, Fortitude and Walking Sticks to kill its opponents with a relatively small outlay while doing reasonably well toe-to-toe with a 'proper' combat deck because of the Fortitude, and outlasts its opponents.)

Your main strands of intercept in the current build are two copies of an intercept location, Spectral Divination and 4 Telepathic Misdirections - which you will mostly want to use for bleed bounce, most likely. Spectral Divination costs you a blood, and without a Radio you may be finding yourself maxing out at +1 intercept. And you may also be thinking that if you use this Divination for the intercept, you can't use it next turn to help you equip your Camera Phone or whatever you want to do with the stealth. Compared with other intercept options - like Auspex, like Second Tradition, like Spiritus, and to some extent like some parts of Animalism - Necromancy isn't so hot. It's great as a way of helping yourself mix things up with other decks - that deck over there has to think about whether it can call that political action, or you can take someone by surprise etc. - but it's not super reliable.

So you have a reasonably limited ability to defend cards that another deck might want to take from you - and Fragment and The Rack. Now, it's certainly true that some decks won't bother to steal those cards because it's an inefficient use of resources for them - if your opponent has a couple of big bruising vampires, they might just prefer to Bum's Rush you and eat your face, rather than steal the Rack. But, take the aforementioned grinder style of deck, it can use a mix of weenie and midbie vampires, is probably trying to outlast you (rather than win through rapid aggression) and would probably quite like to take your Rack - and with reasonable Auspex options in its deck, you're probably not getting it back.

xXLazarusXx wrote:

I've cut it down to one of the codex and no pulse, but Trochomancy is the bread and butter of this deck, though I think 6 might do it.. How would you suggest I "mill" more to make this more effective? (Other than slaughterhouses)

That's more or less the problem - unless you're actively playing a Slaughterhouse-based strategy, you don't control what cards the bleed target has played, or whether they're permanents or transients. If your prey is an Una deck, it might have 47 copies of Freak Drive in its ash heap by your fourth turn (though you probably have other issues to watch out for then). If your prey tools up with a lot of permanent cards, from Vessels, VIlleins, Blood Dolls, equipment, allies or whatever, it might have very few cards in its ash heap. Which is why it's hard to make Trochomancy the real centre-piece of a deck (as a Dominate deck might with Threats or Conditioning or whatever), because while it's more or less inevitable that your prey will end up with some cards in their ash heap over the game, you don't know when or how many.

(And you largely don't want to be playing Slaughterhouse - it's not good, other master cards give you more bang for buck, and assuming you oust your prey, you need time to discard some more from your grand-prey.)

xXLazarusXx wrote:

Do you think this deck needs more intercept generation? I know harbingers make a good wall deck.

Not necessarily, but putting out well-regarded cards like The Rack and Fragment makes them a tempting target.

xXLazarusXx wrote:

So, what other options are we going to get the tap part of tap and bleed? I've got 2 trouble makers and jar the soul, anything else?

There aren't many really solid ones. Tap and Bleed got a significant downgrade with the changes to Misdirection, partly in order to make weenie swarm bleed less desirable and packing 8-10 Wakes less necessary. (There's nothing inherently wrong with packing 8-10 Wakes in a deck - just that should probably be a strategic choice, rather than a necessity to survive.)

Jar the Soul is potentially useful, but you face the issue that if your prey has a mild minion advantage, you're slightly screwed - that weenie Dominate deck that can frequently flip out a new vampire ready to bounce you might be annoying, if you're trying to tap everything before swooping in. And even once you've tapped them out, it can wake to bounce that Codex + Trochomancy bleed. Weenie Auspex (and some of the weenier grinders) will potentially upset you.

And quite a few significant defensive strategies work when a vampire is tapped anyway. Second Tradition is both popular and excellent, because Princes are (in general) excellent. Eternal Vigilance and No Secrets from the Magaji can both be very strong indeed. On the Qui Vive is very popular, because it is - in small quantities - slightly less annoying than Wake with Evening's Freshness's Do Not Replace clause, and certainly a deck could pack a few of each.

And some very aggressive strategies just won't care. They're already tapped out, from having - say - called four copies of Kine Resources Contested with their bunch of pre/PRE weenies, done 12 pool damage to their prey, got a little pool back via Voter Captivation (or possibly Consanguineous Boon, in breed-boon variants), and are planning on frantically outpacing you, so the fact that they're tapped with some cards in their ash heap is neither here nor there to them.

I really appreciate everyone's input. I've taken everything into consideration and I wonder if a Bleed/Wall is more the direction I should go?
Does anyone have any suggestions for some key cards for this?