White Wolf Publishing

This short article is intended to be a primer on how to review a pair of starter decks to see if you can, and how you should, combine them to make the best deck that you can from them.  (See also: Atomweaver's Deck Mashup Challenge)



In this example, we will consider the Toreador and Brujah starters from Keepers of Tradition.



This is the complete list of cards that we can choose from, after which we'll review each section and type of cards.





We will start with the crypt.  If you are combining two crypts, you want to be able to ensure that you get the best vampires in your opening crypt in as many games as possible.  With the Keepers of Tradition starters, this is eased by having all of the vampires duplicated.  If we wanted to be able to do some voting, we would keep duplicate copies of Princes/Justicars and might even consider including an Inner Circle member, if the pool regaining abilities of the starters will support it.  Unfortunately, these two starters cannot support 11 capacity vampires, so we will drop all of the vampires that are above 8 capacity.  We'll duplicate the 3 vampires that can play bleed bounce (Telepathic Misdirection) to ensure that we have some effective defense against large bleeds sent towards us at stealth.  This leaves us room for 6 more minions, and we'll choose the 6 that are best able to help us overload our prey after a bounced bleed (i.e. the cheapest ones with Presence).



These are the 12 vampires we'll use for this deck.





Having decided our crypt, our next simplest choice is the master cards selection.  In most 5 player games, there are ~8 turns before the first player is ousted and rarely more than 14 turns in the entire game.  With that in mind, we will want to keep our master selection to 12-18 cards, as we aren't likely to see the entire deck but we would like to be able to play a master card on every turn.  Ones that gain us pool or that recover pool spent on our vampires are our top priority.  The second priority is to use our master phase to protect our pool or our minions, so anything that can help with that is next.  Cards which are situational or require too much cooperation from the rest of the table will be bypassed.  We are not likely to have more than three vampires in play, so the actions we choose later will be critical to ensure that we get the most bang for our buck.







Normally we would not expect to have enough untap in two starters to be able to defend The Rack, but our opponents don't have to know that this is what we are playing, so careful play can keep them from attempting the steal action to begin with.  If our predator does take an action to steal The Rack, we aren't out any pool, and that was an action that could have been an attempt to bleed us or remove our pool with a vote.  The Rack will be our Red Herring to distract our opponents from the non-wall nature of our deck whose offense will be strong bleeds.  The Major Boons will allow us to pre-emptively take a bleed that will be for 1 so that we have defense against larger bleeds from our predator.  Getting a Major Boon on your predator is a very strong defense, particularly as they get to be closer to being ousted themselves.  The Auspex master will allow us to upgrade Thomas de Lutria into a bleed bounce defender, so we will keep it.  If we had a wider selection of vampires, we'd choose a better minion that already had superior Auspex and play another pool gaining master instead.



Now that we know what our minions will look like and the options we have to regain pool, we will next consider how best to defend our pool.  We will take as much untap as we can as well as all of the bleed bounce.  As there are some pieces of equipment that will help us a lot when blocking, we can safely splurge here on reaction cards.  We'll actually take all of them, from both decks.







The Minor Irritations are only useful to us when we start defending against the action while we are untapped and are only useful to us against younger vampires, so we know that we'll need to equip Epikasta or Eugene with a defensive weapon and plan for them to stay untapped when we have Minor Irritations in hand.  If we don't have opponents minions that are less than 8 cap coming against us, we'll discard these as soon as we can.



Now that we know a bit of our plan for defense (large minion with superior Auspex untapped at the end of our turn with a weapon), we can consider how we will oust our prey.  Suppressing Fire and Resist Earth's Grap are our only options for stealth (but they do mesh well with our plan to have a gun and with the amount of superior Celerity we plan to have in play), and our minions won't reliably be old enough to play the others, so we will keep all of the Suppressing Fire and Resist Earth's Grasp cards.







We have 25 pieces of equipment to choose from to optimize our defensive and offensive combat abilities.  As we know we will need to be defensive, we'll keep the Sniper Rifles and Desert Eagles as they are our cheapest options.  We'll throw in the Bowl of Convergence and Ivory Bow as they are simply too good to leave out.







As we now know our defense and our ability to force our actions to succeed, the next thing to decide with what other actions we should include.  The strongest actions that we can take are those that do 3 points of damage to our prey.  We'll include the Kine Resources Contested and the Public Trusts.  The Entrancement is also very strong, so we'll include it as well.  Harass will be good for us once a copy of Fame is in play, so a few copies of it will go in.







With the amount of stealth available to us, and the amount of blocking we know that we will have to do, the choices for combat are made last, but they are not the least important.  Only 3 of our final minions have Potence, so all of those cards will be removed.  We'll keep all of the Celerity and disciplineless cards to ensure that our combats are as effective as they can be.







Now we have our finished deck, made only from the contents of two starters.







What thoughts and feedback do you have on this process?

I could have used this process, when I did the exact same thing with my decks.