Blue Bloods - Kiasyd Bruise & Bleed

He has other "not in the face" options
2 Leataher Jackets
Maneuvers from several sources
post-strike Tastes for 5.

It's a reasonable assumption that he'll manage range against most decks as well as [CEL] does and those decks keep their minions healthy enough, right?

I won't pick apart the combat package, it's quirky and diverse enough to look like a lot of fun (and have at least the occasional answer to everything). I'll simply offer some observations.

The Graverobbing angle is solid.

Since you are already running multi-flavored rush actions, add Monster or Mylan to create a multi-rush or rush-n-bleed option.

Your uneven experiences are typical of a deck that tries to have all the right answers to everything. It's easy to see how you could startia critical offensive turn with 3-4 unhelpful reactions. Unfortunately, the Kiasyd discipline mix doesn't lend itself to quick card-flushing.

If I were running this deck, I would try an experiment. For every card in the list with more than 1 copy, I would remove 1 of the instances. Then I would add back 1 Graverobbing and 1 Fame to maintain x=2 for each. After deleting the Sanguine Instruction (not needed here), I would try it a couple of times to see if a better balance of MPA vs actions vs situational combat resulted.

ReverendRevolver wrote:

Kiasyd combat with only 4 arms of the abyss, no prevent or other "not the face!" Cards?

Either you dont deal with combat in yoir meta, or you have brass balls.
Or both

my metagame is full of combat. That's because my first version of this deck had more than 40 combat cards! I kicked some ass in the beginning with this deck, but only in the rare opportunities I had to enter combat, since I had only 4 rushes e less bleed / bounce back then.

This build allowed me to respond well to more situations, because I tried to make perma combat stuff (like black met and tinglerstripe) rather than transient combat (more abyss and earth swords).

I tested this new build only once. First combat, entombment on thetmes. Second combat, earth + vitals and bye war ghoul. It was pretty nice, but I've already took off dragonbound and put at least 1 graverobbing.

TrydeflectingthisGrapple, I'll consider this experience of yours as well, but, could you explain better it? maybe with a decklist of yours?

thanks for the input guys!

Wand wrote:

TrydeflectingthisGrapple, I'll consider this experience of yours as well, but, could you explain better it? maybe with a decklist of yours?

The first part was a balance issue, the suggestion I made for reducing deck side was a statistical argument. I'll cover them separately, but without a decklist since it's more conceptual than easily demonstrable.

Besides, your decklist suggests you're an innovator, not a net-decker. So I'll leave it to you to figure out if the conceptual points I'll offer have enough merit to pursue.

:Card Flow Analogy Follows:

If you think about the act/react card flow like a kids on a teeter-totter, it's pretty easy to paint a pretty picture of two cooperatively working in turn. You act on one side, react on the other and the whole thing is balanced. But if something happens during one half of the cycle, if's easy to envision how it might affect the other.

More concretely, if you have a couple of deflections in hand, but your predator doesn't choose to bleed for some reason, you play your next turn with what amounts to 5 cards in hand. To stretch the analogy, you've put an extra kid on one side of the fulcrum and it's that much harder for the other side to act correctly.

Now think of the teeter-totter as being an equilateral triangle with the pivot in the middle, to represent 3 functions - non-fight action, fight, and react.

It's innately harder to balance. If you're trying to create even more functions, the effect gets even worse, which is why we don't see many bleed-vote-stealth-intercept-rush-bounce decks, some unused piece always accumulates in hand.

Back to your deck in particular, if you have a non-bleed predator (stealth vote or wall), the 10% of the deck that is bounces is really a card with no text and a DNR clause.

It might only take a couple to interfere with offensive function and it's increasingly likely to occur as you play more cards in your turn (like combat decks tend to). The same can be said of the red cards in your hand if you can't catch your predator's actions and don't have a rush card to dump them.

God forbid that the two happen at the same time - you're reduced to bleeding for one, watching your predator do whatever he wants and lamenting your hand of unhelpful cards.

:Deck Optimization Suggestion Follows:

This was part of the reason for suggesting a smaller deck size. It's actually driven by several potential issues.

- you really only have masters planned for 8 turns when it usually takes 10 to complete a game. Unless you're drawing your whole deck in those 10 turns, you're probably missing a few MPA opportunities. My suggestion didn't change your number of Master cards, so you're more likely to actually draw (and use) them.

- making the multiple-copy reduction increases the probability that you hit your single-instance cards, which are presumably extremely valuable. Certainty, hitting each more often decreases variability in the way the deck plays.

- using a smaller deck modestly changes the way the initial draw is presented and the way it can clump, almost always for the better. Taken in the ridiculous limit case, with decks consisting of 10% bounce options, it's impossible to have a full hand of bounce from a 60 card deck.

More and more, I try to design decks that runs out of cards with 3 VP. If I lose a heads-up scenario at that point, so what? And if I get my one-copy cards more often, the deck will play both better and more consistently from game to game.

Hope that hopes explain where I was coming from, and sorry if it didn't

thanks, I got it. Bottom line, reducing the deck would make it less risky to jam.

I did that with my nakthorheb deck. I use today 76 cards with a straightfoward S&B + enticement build and it is nice. Perhaps do the same thing with this kiasyd would be interesting, at least to test the card cycle.

Thank you for the answer and for the compliment (the innovator thing). I really like to build weird decks far from the TWD stuff.

Wand wrote:

thanks, I got it. Bottom line, reducing the deck would make it less risky to jam.

I did that with my nakthorheb deck. I use today 76 cards with a straightfoward S&B + enticement build and it is nice. Perhaps do the same thing with this kiasyd would be interesting, at least to test the card cycle.

Thank you for the answer and for the compliment (the innovator thing). I really like to build weird decks far from the TWD stuff.

The goal is to see yor off the wall stufc as TWD stuff

Thinner always = consistancy. Thats why the fad after KoT was 60 cards, 6 tablets. Man, im glad people stopped doing that.....

Anyway, obviously BnB witb reactions shouldnt be 60, and the hardest part is deciding what you can and cant lose,,and finding how thin you need before reaching critical mass.

Its really hard to get "perfect" but its either try or, after your headache subsides, go back to 90 card walls

reduced the deck to 75 cards. Took 1 copy of each with more than 2 among actions, reactions and combat cards. Gonna try this tonight and send some feedback here later ok?