Bleed left, rush right 2
Been playing and designing decks for VTES a lot lately, largely thanks to the upcoming European Championships Qualifier tournament, to be played this weekend in Turku. The top 25% of the players there get EC qualifications, we’ll see how it goes. I’m going to the EC in Gothenburg in any case, if I don’t manage to qualify now there’s a second chance in Tampere this summer, and of course the last-chance qualifier at the EC itself.
The EC will be full of quality playtime even if I don’t qualify at all, the side tournaments should be pretty fun too. Perhaps even more fun that the EC itself, where people tend to play very, very seriously. So, I’m not too bothered by the qualification or lack thereof. Would be nice, of course.
Still haven’t decided on a deck, at the moment I have three candidates:
One is a fun Serpentis/Temporis toolbox, with a lot of multifunction cards and a pretty solid core strategy (which I’m not revealing here :). A bit slow, but it should be able to keep others guessing since it uses some fairly nonstandard strategies. Won’t instantly die to any one deck type, but a good rush deck would probably kill it dead, as would a fast power-bleeder. Doesn’t look too intimidating until it gets rolling, which can be good. Not sure if it has enough forward pressure – I’ve added some after my last playtest, but…
The second is an aggravated damage -oriented affair that makes heavy use of Sebastian Goulet in both of his incarnations. Dominate bleeds + bounce, with aggro-poke for defense and intimidation. Vulnerable to votes, and to anything that can kill off Sebastian of course – losing him would put a major dent in my plans. Needs a bit of setup, but I’ve tweaked this to hopefully get off to a faster start thanks to ideas I got from the other players after my previous game with this (thanks, guys!).
The third one is the latest incarnation of my anarch Daughters of Cacophony vote deck (“Anarchy at the Opera”), which I also played last EC. This version features better card and vote flow (one hopes) but otherwise keeps the same idea – lots of actions, lots of votes, some amount of toolbox. Dangerous if it gets going, but can have a hard time establishing vote dominance and a good intercept deck can seriously hurt this one… I have some amount of stealth, but it’s not a true stealth voter deck.
Your Serpentis/Temporis toolbox deck worked today. In end game, you had everything under your temptations. Adding few bleed cards might help ousting your prey and making the deck faster. I recommend Entrancements because they fit to the stealing minions theme :)
Yeah, a few Entrancements might be good (already have one I think), and/or some more of that nice Temporis action modifier that gives +2 bleed or bleed reduce of 2. Need to do some more tweaking before I leave for Turku :)