The Time of the Top Hats

This is my newest Samedi deck, I will succeed with them yet! This one is a bleed deck with a mix of swarm, bruise, and stealth as strategies to deliver, depending on what it is facing. It is mainly FOR/THN with a sprinkling of necromancy for trochomancies.

I have a bit of a problem with this deck, which is that I can't decide whether to use group 2-3, or 4-5 crypt. Both have their pros and cons which are listed below.

Group 4-5
+ One more with superior Fortitude
+ Black Hand for Guarded Rubrics
+ Built-in Rush for flushing combat if nobody is blocking me
+ Better capacity spread for Little Mountain Cemetery
+ Able to play Trochomancy at superior
- Two vamipres with no Fortitude at all
- Troglodytia takes one turn longer to bring out with Coroner than Baron
- One less vampire with superior Thanatosis
- Only one vampire with inherent +bleed
- Less generally useful specials

Group 2-3
+ One more with superior Thanatosis
+ Everyone has Fortitude
+ Baron can always be brought out in two turns with Coroner
+ Three vampires with built-in +bleed (one of them conditional)
+ Several generally useful specials
- Loss of Guarded Rubrics and superior Trochomancy
- One less vampire with superior Fortitude
- Two 8 caps, thus must get Baron to be able to use Little Mountain Cemetery efficiently

Here is the deck list with group 4-5 crypt.

Crypt:
2x Abebe
2x Macoute
2x Tanginé
2x Baroque
3x Morlock
1x Troglodytia

Library: 90

Master: 17 (5 trifle)
5x Coroner's Contact
1x Giant's Blood
1x Houngan
2x Lilith's Blessing
3x Perfectionist
5x Villein

Action: 19
7x Little Mountain Cemetery
7x Off Kilter
5x Restoration

Action Modifier: 22
11x Freak Drive
2x Trochomancy
9x Under My Skin

Ally: 8
1x Mylan Horseed
7x Reanimated Corpse

Combat: 17
4x Dust to Dust
7x Groaning Corpse
4x Hidden Strength
2x Soak

Equipment: 4
2x Camera Phone
1x Guarded Rubrics
1x Seal of Veddartha

Retainer: 3
1x J. S. Simmons, Esq
1x Robert Carter
1x Tasha Morgan

The alternate group 2-3 crypt would be...

2x Lithrac
2x George Frederick
2x Jorge de la Muerte, the Agent
2x Genina, the Red Poet
2x Reg Driscoll
2x The Baron

With this crypt would have to remove Guarded Rubrics, and likely also Trochomancies, not sure yet what to replace them with. But well, suggestions and comments in general welcome.

I personally prefer the 2-3 crypt for reanimated/little mountain decks. Having THN really makes a huge difference for the corpses.

I also like to keep the deck size down a little, say 75-80 cards since you're less likely to hand jam, but that's personal preference. Since you're having a lot of allies, have you considered unmasking/fortschritt library and FBI? Also, do you find under my skin to be worth it? Generally if you have OBF people try to block very little to hand jam you anyway so the extra +1 stealth you get compared to for example lost in crowds doesn't give such a noticeable effect. It just costs more and with corpses/freak drives it's already rather costly. Granted you have restorations but that's precious card slots! I'd rather see some more diversified pure OBF stealth (even some cloaks/veil for the corpses).

Edit: Regarding having a better spread for little mountain in group 4-5. It's negligible since you don't need a ladder like govern the unaligned since it's much more of a bloat card than a crypt acceleration card (although it does that to an extent as well. It's usually just the biggest cap and possibly the second biggest that do the mountains anyway, expecting more each turn is just wishful thinking. Because of that I find having a few extra lithrac in the 2-3 crypt just to have a bottom to be great, once you have the vamps you want you coroner out lithracs to bloat from. Which is also why information highway (and even kaymakli nightmares) is a beauty in this deck.

I love this Samedi archetype and have played a rather similar deck, hence all the opinion.

If using Off Kilters, you should consider adding Powerbase Zürich.

Powerbase: Zürich [LotN:R]
Cardtype: Master
Master: unique location.
While you have the Edge, any vampire you control may add 2 blood from the blood bank to a younger vampire in your uncontrolled region as a +1 stealth action. If that action is blocked, burn the Edge (before combat, if any). Any Methuselah may burn the Edge during his or her master phase to steal this card.
Artist: Peter Bergting

For the group 2-3 crypt I changed rubrics and trochomancies to spying missions. I don't think unmasking or fbi would really do much to this deck though, as corpses are more for going forward than blocking. Switching to obf stealth would be an option, though what I like from Under my Skin is that it saves card slots, since each one of them is basically two stealth cards in one, and also in more cornercase benefit, they let you get past anti obf things like Valerius Maior. Couple Cloaks for surprise stealth to the corpses might be worthwhile thing to add though.

Zurich doesn't really combo with off kilters well, since I am specifically wanting to use off kilters for the burn edge to gain 2 pool version, and I already have cemeteries for moving blood down.

Klaital wrote:

Zurich doesn't really combo with off kilters well, since I am specifically wanting to use off kilters for the burn edge to gain 2 pool version, and I already have cemeteries for moving blood down.

I think the idea is to 1. get edge, 2. use PB Zurich a few times, 3. play Off Kilter to burn edge
the real question is if that's too many actions for your deck to handle

Haze wrote:

Klaital wrote:

Zurich doesn't really combo with off kilters well, since I am specifically wanting to use off kilters for the burn edge to gain 2 pool version, and I already have cemeteries for moving blood down.

I think the idea is to 1. get edge, 2. use PB Zurich a few times, 3. play Off Kilter to burn edge
the real question is if that's too many actions for your deck to handle

Yeah its probably too much since I already have the off kilters and little mountain cemeteries for effectively the same thing as what Zurich does.