Gateway 2012 #1

This deck is a good reminder that a lot of cards that are neglected are no less effective. Good job!

Oh, my god ! How could you win with this deck. You truly have to be the hell-of-a-player; tougher than coffin´s nails.

Congratulations !

Since it's not my metagame, I suppose I could comment upon what I imagine the Southern California metagame to be like based on the styles of the players who travel to our region, but that doesn't account for those players I haven't played against significantly.

Then, there was no effort to metagame for a particular environment. The deck does metagame specifically against Animalism combat, but that's about it. Since mono-Animalism was my prey in both prelim rounds, that turned out to be a reasonably rewarding decision.

None of the four decks I played in the SoCal tournaments were designed with the intention of playing them in tournaments. I just happened to procrastinate on putting together decks and pulled the cards for which decks interested me Friday morning. I've increasingly lost interest in establishing a queue of decks to be played in tournaments since they are so spread out and unpredictable.

I find it funny how much comment this deck got relative to the Kiasyd deck. When I was writing up that decklist for the tournament organizer, I was amazed at what I left out (not remembering what the contents were). One omission was particularly offensive, though, that particular deck was thrown together just to get some experience playing group 5/6 Kiasyd. At least this intercept combat deck actually has nontrivial amounts of intercept in it.

I don't know why people are suprised that this deck could win. Intercept combat is a competitive, at least around here. It's not going to win every tournament, but it certainly is competitive. This is not a Toreador gun deck or a Tzimisce grinder deck, but it uses the same principles. Instead of Auspex and Animalism intercept, it uses Celerity, Protean, and generic intercept. Kudos to Ian for thinking of it.

We don't always see a lot of decks with deep stealth, meaning that medium intercept is often all you need. If I remember correctly, the first tournament had a lot of bigger-cap vampires in wall decks, light steatlh bleed and vote, and multi-acting bleed/bloat. Pretty low combat, pretty low stealth overall. Ian's final opponent in the final had a Ventrue multi-act bloat and vote deck that Ian's deck would have had an advantage over (I didn't actually watch that game). Heck, even the fact that Ian never bled for more than 3 thwarted all the bounce. I saw at least two decks in the tournament he (or anyone) would have had a real problem with as a predator, but I guess he didn't have to sit close to them.

The vampires in the crypt all have useful abilities, starting with Adana's 3 bleed/4 votes. The Minion Tap/Taste of Vitae module is effective as bloat protection. The offense is varied but effective and constant: Adana, Fleetness, Flurry of Action, Fame, Tension. As Ian said, it is effective against mono-Animalism. It should dunk every Animalism guy it encounters on the first round, and he had Animalism preys in two games. (Oh, you wanna send your bats to me at long? Okay. Mercury's Arrow for 3, additional strike, Mercury's Arrow for 3. I'm Adana/Mitru so that didn't cost me anything. You're only a 4-cap? Buh-bye. Taste of Vitae to get back the three damage you dealt me.)

The only thing I question is the apparent lack of manuevers to get the best use out of Mercury's Arrow, but I guess there are 8 showing (4 Fleetness & 4 Eyes of the Beast) plus the Arrows themselves with the 8 additional strikes cards.