Best use of Grooming the Protege?

Anson / grooming : influence out anson, grooming smaller toreador, refiled anson with voter cap. Oust by votes. Quick and dirty.
www.secretlibrary.info/index.php?deck=view&id=4996

There is no bad use. You can always groom MaryAnne, and then govern, freak drive, enchant, freak drive, scouting, freak drive, special, to get 12 beads to vamps ina trun before influence.

But ansons probably better. Ive used it with cock robin and stealthblees for speed and pool management.

Arike, followed by Govern.

Of course you lose the slots for crypt acceleration, but your mid-to-end game is huge.

Here's my take on this. Grooming might be for your deck if most of these apply:

- you plan on getting one vampire of cap 8-10, but other vampires you expect to influence are below 8 cap (this tends to rule out wide use of Villein/Zillah's Valley.)

- the deck is focused more on speed and aggression and less on long term resilience (this is why you're playing Grooming for acceleration instead of playing wholesale Villein).

- you plan (need) to get at least 3 minions of the same clan in play and their capacities tend to cascade downward (this is why it's worth having enough Grooming to draw them in your opening turns.)

- the deck consumes some of its minions blood to play cards (Grooming tends to leave 3-6 blood on its typical targets, so you should use it advantageously)

- the decks actions generate pool while damaging your prey - Kindred Spirits, Social Charm, KRC with Voter Cap are examples - and/or you are using other action-based influence acceleration that pulls counters from the blood bank (generating the additional pool is how you can get away with not recurring all the blood from your minions, but still not get ousted).

- the deck includes at least a few non-contestable cardflow and/or decrypting tools (since Grooming can be very hard to dump as an MPA late game without valid targets).

All in all, it results in a fairly narrow set of archetypes where Grooming is better than Villein.

I regularly use grooming in my assamite decks.
It provides needed acceleration without too much impact on precious blood.