What was the game like for you when you started?

Sabbat War was still on sale, so was Jyhad and CE. Originally we started playing with a few friends, not realizing there was a VTES community of some ~15 people in the city. Everybody had 2 starters, camarilla and antitribu, and made decks out of them. I had Tremere, which seemed pretty good at the time, Dominate was powerful and Thaumaturgy combat seemed like pretty good even while we thought you could only use ranged strikes from long range We also thought if you couldn't pay the card's cost, you could still play it... Coma seemed like a pretty powerful card. A friend had the malkavians, he had thought they would be something fun and was disappointed that it was only bleed, bleed, bleed...

Later we started playing with the locals. Weenie potence and potence in general seemed pretty powerful, likewise weenie KRC and any of the S&B decks seemed good. I remember hearing some talk that Parity Shift wasn't so good because you could only play it if your prey had more pool than you and exactly how was that going to happen? A friend had a Ventrue prince deck that was pretty successful, it had 12x Skin of Steel and 12x Majesty, 8-12 Second Tradition (don't remember anymore). Also a Gangrel deck with 20x Flesh of Marble. Just think about that kind of a metagame. I had 15x Bum's Rush in my Tremere because I thought that's how the game is played. Rötschreck seemed like broken OP, so did Sensory Deprivation. While Entombment looked like pretty good, it didn't compare to Coma, after all it did nothing at all at inferior. I started playing Tzimisce and they seemed to pretty much suck since they didn't have Fortitude, until I discovered Rötschreck (which wasn't a common card). Somebody had some crazy tremere burst of sunlight/eagle's sight/Rötschreck deck that everybody hated...

I didn't see the point of Deflection, after all it doesn't give you intercept. Potence/Fortitude seemed like a holy grail of discipline combinations (just think about how OP that is, undefeatable in combat), then after that, Dominate/Potence (hit you for 7 with TS/IS/US or bleed you for 7 with GtU/C/CotB). The Brujah also seemed like very good, with Torn Signpost/Blur. I don't remember when Enkidu was released but he seemed like an entirely broken OP minion, and one of my friends had an Enkidu deck with 9x Enkidu (you absolutely have to draw him!). I also remember that Baali seemed like some incredible bleed deck at the time, the Giovanni too (but they actually are). Ezmerelda was so cheesy, PTO was super cheese and the first time I saw somebody have 50+ pool was with some IC Minion Tap deck... The Assamites sucked then (anybody remember those CEL OBF GUN shirts?) and somebody built a dementation Assamite (yes, with discipline masters) that was possibly the most successful Assamite deck around. Setites seemed like one of the best S&B decks, after all Legal Manipulations was better than Govern - it gave you pool where Govern doesn't (obf toreador would have been pretty good too I suppose) and they had Majesty whereas Malkavians had nothing.

Crazy times, and I sort of miss them because of that, though what's good today is that everybody plays a lot better.

Demnogonis wrote:

Sabbat War was still on sale, so was Jyhad and CE. Originally we started playing with a few friends, not realizing there was a VTES community of some ~15 people in the city.

What city?

KevinM wrote:

Demnogonis wrote:

Sabbat War was still on sale, so was Jyhad and CE. Originally we started playing with a few friends, not realizing there was a VTES community of some ~15 people in the city.

What city?

Helsinki probably.

I first started playing Jyhad in August of 1994. I bought four starter decks at GenCon, and persuaded some friends to play a couple of games the following week. We all had some experience playing Magic, but Jyhad was much more complicated. The starter decks back then were untuned random assortments of cards, so the games were so very slow. I was immediately hooked by the pretty cards and the WoD setting, but those friends didn't like the game.

A few months later, I joined a group that played on Sundays at a local comic/game shop. That was a great group with some skilled and ruthless players. It was months before I won my first victory point. and I didn't win any games until I started playing the Giovanni when Dark Sovereigns came out.

So I picked up this copy of The Duelist in, like, late '94 or early '95 that came with a Jyhad booster pack and an oversized Jyhad rulebook from the local comic shop in Ithaca NY. I was intrigued, picked up a handful of boosters, and taught some of my gaming buddies how to play (we played Magic and SFB and Titan mostly at that point in time). Not too long after that, we put together a play group of regular Jyhad players of, like, Josh Duffin and James Hamblin among others (Cornell students, of which I was not, but that was where we played). VTES came out, someone online was selling Jyhad boosters for literally $5.00 a box. We ordered 13 pounds of Jyhad cards, and went nuts.

At Origins that year (Philly?), there was a Jyhad tournament that me a Dave played in, which was unsurprisingly won by one of those decks that was all Caitiff and the deck was, like, 90 Kine Resources Contested or something (as there was no limit to vote pushing--a one cap calls KRC, plays enough votes to pass the vote, repeat until the game is over). There was confusion as to whether there was a card limit or not (the next year, there was an official 4 card limit).

We spent a lot of time messing with combat strategies. One day, I was like "Huh. Immortal Grapple is pretty good. Everyone trade me theirs..." And they did.

KevinM wrote:

Demnogonis wrote:

Sabbat War was still on sale, so was Jyhad and CE. Originally we started playing with a few friends, not realizing there was a VTES community of some ~15 people in the city.

What city?

Pori, Finland

bakija wrote:

We spent a lot of time messing with combat strategies. One day, I was like "Huh. Immortal Grapple is pretty good. Everyone trade me theirs..." And they did.

I traded my Immortal Grapples for a few shots of vodka, and as a consequence, didn't play Potence until after Lords of the Night was released.