Santaleous gun deck, what to do

So I thought about building a CEL gun deck around Santaleous, the master cancel special is golden in this and you can in theory fuel it with Taste of Vitae. I thought that Asguresh with his good combat special would be good but he can't bounce. Then I suppose some Toreador or something will go in...

The problem is, I won't be able to swarm bleed oust since Santaleous is a 9-cap. How do I oust reliably? I haven't built the deck yet, since I don't know if it'll have a lot of rush and combat, or defense, or what.

Demnogonis wrote:

So I thought about building a CEL gun deck around Santaleous, the master cancel special is golden in this and you can in theory fuel it with Taste of Vitae. I thought that Asguresh with his good combat special would be good but he can't bounce. Then I suppose some Toreador or something will go in...

The problem is, I won't be able to swarm bleed oust since Santaleous is a 9-cap. How do I oust reliably? I haven't built the deck yet, since I don't know if it'll have a lot of rush and combat, or defense, or what.

Flurry of Action and Confusion/Eyes of Chaos spring to mind. Add in some hunting grounds and Sandy's special should come in real handy. You don't really need to worry about Archons either!

The best bet would be walling, I suppose. Add in some flurry of action bleeds and multitasking stealth and you're ready to go. Sandy's very powerful, but 9-cap's always a 9-cap. Good luck with this one.

You can do bleed reduction rather than bounce through AUS and dem, even some Confusion of the Eye. Maybe some anarch revolts, mylan, The Call? Flames of Insurrection is a card I've made good use of in my Janni WWS anarch rush deck. White Lily is a natural side-kick here. I say go rush and reduce with some blocking.

Rushing with a non-multi-acting 9 cap who doesn't deal very well with agg damage and other hazards isn't going to be very easy.

What you could do is just toolbox it to the extreme so people never know what to expect. You could start off looking like you're just a stealth bleed deck but you've got a bad hand or something. Sit around and build the perfect hand for your lunge, then go.

But as for pure rush with this guy, I'm just not seeing it.

I'd go the wallish way with some other Aus/Cel-guys, Blessing of Chaos, some Media locations. So you can defend your low pool and bloat a bit with the help of Powerbases Montreal and Barranquila and the Rack. Smiling Jack, maybe some anarch tech like Constant Revolution. A few rushes like Nose of the Hound outferior or good ole Haven Uncovered.
To be honest I find it hard to build since a 9 cap with some backup plus .44 swallowes huge amounts of pool. Since you want to have blood on Santa for canceling masters Villein doesn't help. Not to forget some Hunting Grounds to get +bleed for Santa.
Maybe the aggressive type of deck would be better. Playing lots of Villeins, rush early some juicy vampires to taste the vitae off. But for that you need influence acceleration to stop bleeders early on. Tough build.

vtesocrates wrote:

But as for pure rush with this guy, I'm just not seeing it.

I have to agree. Any kind of rush or wall deck you can build out of Santa can be built better around some other big cap with an actual combat special. The only reason for choosing him over anybody else would be some kind of Serenna/Santa tag team where you cancel Villeins, untap your prey's minions with Babble and fuel Santa with Marionette+Heidelberg/Renewed Vigor/Lilith's.

If you still decide to go for a rush deck I would try the usual Andre Leroux/Codex of the Edenic Groundskeepers module.