Taste of Death, August 25, Krakow

Great deck !! Clear candidate to deck of the month at Extrala Vtes blog.

Great deck !! Clear candidate to deck of the month at Extrala Vtes blog.

Why is this such a "great deck"? I mean, it's nice to see Assamites doing good and all, but the deck looks pretty "meh" to me. It's some stick/celerity combat which is fairly common, it has some fairly standard Black Hand cards and some random equipment thrown in.

What's the amazing great trick or strategy I'm missing here? Or how is this deck super original? It's a textbook toolbox with superstandard card modules.

Izaak wrote:

What's the amazing great trick or strategy I'm missing here? Or how is this deck super original? It's a textbook toolbox with superstandard card modules.

No great trick or strategy. Decks don't need to be original to be noteworthy.

I think "superstandard" is an overstatement.

This deck is just an indication of what it takes to make Black Hand Assamites work at a high level. It is focused more in reaction and defense (intercept locations/permanents, many reactions, inclusion of Ministry) than offense (only one +bleed permanent and 2x Loss.

It is clearly built for the "long game." It is toolboxy enough to keep people guessing with aggravated capability at close and long range. Overall, a solid template for people to tweak to their taste.

I think two inclusions may be helpful: 1x Bundi and 1x Sargon Fragment. The Bundi works under a Grapple, is cheaper with Izhim, and can give Nizzam the capability to burn vampires. Sargon Fragment allows recursion so you can tighten the deck down, maybe to 60 cards. With the combat package, players will have to think twice about blocking. Plus, there are so many permanent untaps, it will often be a strong action to take since there will be a follow-up afterward.

In vtes the first part is to have a deck idea. The second, and more difficult part is to find the harmonic structure that makes a deck flow well.
To get a 75 Toolbox black hand that looks that good is something worth to praise, in my humble oppinion.

Jeff wrote:

Izaak wrote:

What's the amazing great trick or strategy I'm missing here? Or how is this deck super original? It's a textbook toolbox with superstandard card modules.

No great trick or strategy. Decks don't need to be original to be noteworthy.

I think "superstandard" is an overstatement.

This deck is just an indication of what it takes to make Black Hand Assamites work at a high level. It is focused more in reaction and defense (intercept locations/permanents, many reactions, inclusion of Ministry) than offense (only one +bleed permanent and 2x Loss.

It is clearly built for the "long game." It is toolboxy enough to keep people guessing with aggravated capability at close and long range. Overall, a solid template for people to tweak to their taste.

I think two inclusions may be helpful: 1x Bundi and 1x Sargon Fragment. The Bundi works under a Grapple, is cheaper with Izhim, and can give Nizzam the capability to burn vampires. Sargon Fragment allows recursion so you can tighten the deck down, maybe to 60 cards. With the combat package, players will have to think twice about blocking. Plus, there are so many permanent untaps, it will often be a strong action to take since there will be a follow-up afterward.

I opted against those two choices as i don't have many actions to spare tooling up. There are only 6 total actions that don't grant additional actions - two +permacept, two transient +bleed, ivory bow to get permanent way to send vampires to combat and permanent +bleed equipment that work as win condition.
Sargon Fragment require action to equip and another action at 0 stealth to get card from ash heap - i don't have as much stealth and combat to make it work.

I was playing against potence combat as my prey during second table, and i was in position to oust him soon, when he had vampires on low blood or in torpor (and he chosen to backrush me out of spite). Bundi is too expensive and take another action, i'd rather get another maneuver than using my scarce actions on winning combats that i don't plan to win all the time (despite 27 combat cards in the deck, ivory bow and two contracts, i don't plan to rush, i'd rather pick my targets and even go into non-violent mode).


Another card that would be good here is codex of edenic groudskeepers. Getting way to bleed for 12 in one turn (or 9/7 in case of guarded rubrics) often get opponents off guard. Two more villeins wouldn't hurt too (one for dreams, second just as additional card)

Main plan when piloting the deck is staying alive and remember how fragile the assamites really are.

No great trick or strategy. Decks don't need to be original to be noteworthy.

I don't think this is really the right place for such a discussion, but I strongly disagree. In my opinion, for decks to be noteworthy and to be considered for Deck of the Month (as was suggested) they need to be somewhat new. It needs to have a "wow" factor or a "WHAT does it do??" factor. Or a "my god that actually works" factor. Or something like that. Of course in the end Ralf is the only judge for what he considers DotM - I'm just sharing my opinion.

In the case of Black Hand Assamites, that's pretty much a done deal now. Ralf already featured two seperate Assamite BH decks as deck of the month and by now we have all realized that having two Tattoo Signals on the table is great. Because, really, that's what the *entire* archtype is about. You sit, build, get 7 actions on the table and strike when the time is right. All you need to figure out afterwards is how to not die and bruise/block neither a new nor very efficient way of doing so. I mean, clearly it worked this tournament and I'm not saying it's a bad deck, but it's hardly surprising nowadays.

This deck is just an indication of what it takes to make Black Hand Assamites work at a high level. It is focused more in reaction and defense (intercept locations/permanents, many reactions, inclusion of Ministry) than offense (only one +bleed permanent and 2x Loss.

On the contrary. The dual Seraph crypt already has multiple TWDA entries and thus it has already been shown that the crypt can work in a more competitive environment. And it certainly doesn't mandate a defense focused strategy.

All that this deck shows is that:

a) Bruise/Block with some minor bleed can work if you hit the right metagame. This isn't new either, as shown by numerous Tremere decks that operate on a fairly similar principle.

b) You can play bruise/block with Assamites too, which people have been doing since Final Nights.

What I'd be looking for in DotM entries are decks where you go like: "oh wow that's a great idea I should try that". This deck might have hit that spot a year ago, but not anymore.

Again, it's by no means a bad deck but for me personally it's totally missing any wow-factors.