Pact with Nephandi starter deck revealed

As someone who has not played with or against the Nephandus, I was wondering why he's considered so powerful. It's the prevent 1 damage from every source the enemy uses in combat, right?

Edit: Six Mirror Walk is also very nice.

It's that you can just crap out a bunch without interaction mostly.

It's mainly because they are very cheap non-unique allies with 1 bleed that also requires some effort to kill.

LivesByProxy wrote:

As someone who has not played with or against the Nephandus, I was wondering why he's considered so powerful. It's the prevent 1 damage from every source the enemy uses in combat, right?

Edit: Six Mirror Walk is also very nice.

Its not prevent. He takes less damage. This includes unpreventable damage.

The main reason is that nephandi are very cheap, grindy, and will automatically spank vampires that have no combat cards to play since they have a press. Unmasking gives them all +1 intercept.

There is no real way to interact with Antonio's ability besides rushing him to torpor. Bringing a mage with his ability is unblockable. Thats also a big issue. And there may be some nephandi in the way to prevent the rush from happening.

He just churns out mages for days with the help of some bloating mechanism or another and theres almost nothing you can do about that. They all bleed for 1. They all hit for 2 and take 1 less damage. (The precons mages bleed for 2 with computer hacking thou. Some people might wanna use mouthpiece to give the mages inf dominate for the bleed..).

I REALLY don't like that devs put this into the precons. The lack of interaction is annoying. When I was starting out, I remember fearing the nephandi excessively. Back then I had no cards to deal with them.

ps. If you want a silver bullet against a nephandus deck, run Ossian. He rushes with stealth and unmasking doesn't help against him since he is not a vampire. Uncoiling to kill unmasking would also be very good..

Nephandi decks were already done before Antonio came around but obviously he is da man when running Nephandi.

Rather broken and very effective a decktype with him.

I would like to see his special getting an errata where the mage Allies he searches didn't come from hand or Library, but instead just from hand. Wouldn't change that much since the deck has a sizeable number of Nephandi, but there would be an occasional turn when he couldn't get a new one out...