Advice on creating ravnos and tzimisce decks

As others have mentioned, the obvious Ravnos option is mid-caps, bleed, breed, masters mostly focused on Svardharma, Life in the City, Tribute to the Master, Fortune Teller Shop, and of course Week of Nightmares. Some light combat defense can be had from either ani or for, depending on how you choose your crypt, and CHI is usually worth it but not strictly needed.

But then again...

LunaSlave wrote:

Never be afraid to try something a little strange or off the beaten path as well. My Ravnos Week of Nightmares/Tumnimos deck has Protean discipline cards, not just Chimerstry - along with Group 2 Ravnos with Protean. It's sort of like the standard Week of Nightmares deck, but with an agg-poke twist and some other cool Protean tricks. I threw it together for a laugh but thus far it has worked surprisingly well.

Ravnos can do a lot of other things. You can go toolbox, obviously.

In group 4/5 you can go with if you like. I have a fun but not particularly effective multi-act (10-12 freak drive) deck that harasses with The Haunting and Edged Illusion (supported by Society of Leopold, Hunger Moon, Bureaucratic Overload and the like) and if allowed can build to strong bleeds with Descent Into Madness, Treasured Samadji, dementation bleed, and of course Week of Nightmares. Not consistent enough at the moment but I feel like there's the seed of a good deck in there.

There's attacking your prey's uncontrolled region with Trick of Danya, you can also use Brainwash and Cairo Int'l if you like, and several Ravnos have built-ins that work in a similar way. It'd be fun to think of ways to get more than 1-2 VP with this kind of deck, perhaps there's a crypt that could push through Banishment. Or perhaps the midgame strategy is all breed and bloat, and hope to last long enough for a late game Week of Nightmares. Haven't tried it much. There was a recent Faerie Wards TWD that might be useful to study to see if there are some similar possibilities for Ravnos.

You mentioned something earlier about how to support lots of Sensory Deprivations when running only medium caps, and I think the answer is that you're better off not trying. Use bigger cap guys if that's what you want, you can also use some freak drives to boost the advantage you'll have in the number of actions, and better be prepared for some table hate.

You can use Ravnos Carnival and Fatuus Mastery to support Sensory Dep, but you quickly start to run out of room in your deck list (at least in my experience). An alternative to Sens Dep that can be fun is using big nasty weapons (flamethrower, rpg, ak-47) plus Horrid Reality and maybe also Ravnos Cache, even Jack of Both Sides in case you decide to actually pay for one.

The problem for me with most of these deck types is that the main strategy (whether it's Haunting, or Sens Dep, or Horrid Reality) takes up a big percentage of your library to support it reliably, and the main strategy doesn't directly lead to winning.

Doesn't stop me from playing Ravnos though, they're one of my favorites.

Wow! That's quite a lot of posts here. I will surely take in mind everything posted here when I do my first decklist for the two decks. Hopefully I get more feedback once I post the lists in the deck clinic part of the forum.

Thanks to all of you

Klaital wrote:

I think personally that wall deck is waste of potential with Tzimisce, with ANI/AUS they have lot of very cost effective ways to block people, leaving lot of deck space for stuff to go forward, and are thus much more effective as a toolboxy deck.

Basically this is true, the Tzimisce are one of the best toolbox clans, though you can build an effective combat wall out of them. It's just that combat walls seem pretty much like a deck of the past, and an AUS weenie is probably a much more effective wall deck anyway. You can be successful with a wall deck but you can so easily build a toolbox that is roughly as survivable but much more flexible (and that's what the Tzimisce are about - flexibility). You could do :

ANI AUS Tzimisce, Anton, Dragos, Omaya, Caliban, Devin Bisley. Crow/Bats combat (also possible to use Starvation/Bats combat which deals more damage but needs a lot of tastes), a bunch of Deep Songs, Mind of the Wilds, Sense the Savage way, Cat's Guidance, Read the Winds, some ~10 Bounce, 2-3 Abbot... You could always have some Revenants/Owl Companions/whatever and splash in 1-2 War Ghouls, which in my opinion are at their best when splashed in to an ordinary Tzimisce deck which doesn't entirely rely on them.

VIC AUS Tzimisce, Meshenka, Little Tailor of Prague, Kazimir Savostin, Caliban, Corine Marcón, The Rose, Ana Rita Montana, Lolita Houston... Changeling, Chiropteran Marauder, Plasmic Form are all flexible, solid cards. Can still use a lot of Animalism stuff depending on crypt composition, and nothing goes as well with Mind of the Wilds as Breath of the Dragon. Chiropteran/Breath/Crows is a pretty solid combat, it torpors easily and can deal with almost anything, you can also throw in some Target : Vitals, that goes with anything. Fiendish Tongue is still a good bleed card, but Deep Song adds more options. Asanbonsam Ghouls, if you have them, are superior allies. You could also do a Horrid Form/Kraken's Kiss combat, that's tricky but pretty fun.

VIC ANI Tzimisce, I don't recommend this as you have to block so much without bounce but some G4 guys have this combination and some good specials (Aisata Sawou, Darvag the Butcher of Rus, Adhiambo, Demdemeh) and can use some Laibon stuff.

Weenie VIC, with guys such as Hugo, Ramiro, Enid Blount, some Panders, generally weird non-Tzimisce vampires. While it's an aggressive deck, it can defend effectively either with using auspex or just media locations, abbot, revenant/corpse balloon, Asanbosam Ghoul and the out-of-clan Dominate. Benefits greatly of Lilith's Blessing as that allows you to fix the inferior Vicissitudes. This style is my most successful toolbox experiment and I got a lot of flak for it, it's pretty awful to block or be blocked by the deck and it gets up a lot of good permanents.

A Tzimisce vote deck, with the good Cardinals, Meshenka, advanced Sascha... you can fit in a good defense module, solid ousting power with KRC, stealth and some small amount of aggravated damage based combat, possibly with Amaranth. I find this deck works very well but the downside is that the only way to bypass a vote lock is to transfer out more large Tzimisce.