In this Issue:

A message from the editor.

A timetable of planned Temple meetings.

Deckbuilding 101: Happy Families

A Message From the Editor:

Hello.

Well, everyone seemed to enjoy the sealed deck event over the last two weeks. It's a shame that Colin and Martyn were forced to drop for outside reasons, but I look forward to seeing you guys at the next tourney.

I have decided to introduce a deckbuilding section periodically, to hopefully help us all become better players (myself included) using stuff that I rip of the newsgroup for my own benefit. First of all is James "Legbiter" McClellan's famous Happy Families formula. A good way of creating actually quite good reliable decks, that are tournament worthy.

As we are taking a break from running a tourney for VTES this month, I hope you won't all disappear from view. November should be exciting for the VTES players, and there are other CCG tourneys at the club until then.

Just another quick plea, can some of you send me decklists. We need stuff for this newsletter, if you want me to continue writing it. Anything would be good, as long as it is publishable. You can find back issues to give you ideas on my website:

http://www.oocities.org/setitesuk

May the Night be Yours.

Andy

A timetable of planned Temple meetings.

We meet every Tuesday at The Graduate, Chesterton Road (Mitchum's Corner) Cambridge.

Next Temple meeting: Tuesday 1st October 2002, 6pm.

Tourneys:
Tournament: Eye of Hazimel Storyline: Cambridge
Where: The Graduate, Chesterton Road, Cambridge, UK
When: Rounds 1 and 2 on the 19th November 2002. 6:30pm
Final on the 26th November. 7.30 pm
Judge: Andy Brown
Format: Standard constructed, although at least 75% of your crypt must be of 1 clan (not Caitiff).
Entry fee:£3 (including a booster for all)

This is another Storyline Tourney (like held in February) and has special rules as you are all after The Eye of Hazimel. This card is available in some Toreador starters at the moment (U-R) but all participants will receive a card.

Elsewhere in the Country:

London: Minicon
Where: South Bank University Students Union
When: Saturday 5th October, 11am
Judge: Mike Nudd (mike@vekn.org.uk)
Format: Standard Constructed
Entry Fee: About £4

Watford: Powerbase: Watford
Where: The Flag Public House
When: Sunday 17th November, 12pm
Judge: Dave Hammond (davecrazy@hotmail.com)
Format: Standard Constructed
Entry Fee: £3

For more details, check out My Website.

Deckbuilding 101: Happy Families

I decided that we should maybe concentrate on how to construct decks now that a new base set is out and a lot of basic staple cards for decks are now available again. For our first look into this area, I thought we would start by looking Happy Families or Toolbox decks. These are decks which look at the discipline spread of the vampires you want to play, and how many of each type of card you would like in the deck.

However, James "Legbiter" McLellan would explain it better than me (he invented the formula after all), so I'll pass over to him. (There is no decklist this time, as James includes a worked example).

INTRODUCTION
Perhaps the most difficult and crucial skill for any CCG player is being able to build a playable deck. While there is no single "right" way to do this there are some general principles about deck-building for the VTES game which are generally agreed upon, the most obvious of which is that you should not put in cards that you can't play or won't often get the opportunity to play. Good decks move on from this principle towards the ideal of always being able to play a card that will deal with any given situation - an ideal which is never reached, of course, because of the enormous variety of the decks and strategies against which you may find yourself competing. In practise the best you can usually aim for is to have a deck that "flows" nicely, ie you should usually be able to look at your hand and say to youself, this vampire could play that card and modify it with that one or use that combat card if blocked; and I can/cannot afford to tap out this turn because I do/do not have this and that reaction card to play in response to any hostile actions against me. If instead you look at your hand and think, jeez what a pile of crap, which of the many possibilities should I be discarding THIS turn, then you probably need to think about the principles of deck design a bit harder, and it's that process which this article is intended to facilitate.

THEORY
This article is about the Happy Families formula, which is a mathematical device for helping one to build a nice flowy deck. As originally conceived it was meant to be used to build "fun" decks, ie flexible toolbox affairs for casual play. It has turned out in practise to be quite useful for building fierce competitive decks too, though it is certainly not the only way to build such decks. The basic idea is to choose a crypt and then, based on what disciplines are possessed by the vampires in your crypt, to optimise the chance that your vampires will be able to play good cards without wasting too much of the pool you are paying to activate them [for example, if you are playing with Beast in your crypt of !Nossies you are wasting a bit of the pool you pay for him if you don't have celerity as one of the disciplines in your deck]. This is done by simple proportionality calculations. Basically you choose the vamps you want to play with, and the library size you want to use, and then you determine the cards in the library as follows:

20% or so should be master cards [but see the comments in the worked example which follows]:

The remaining 80% or so should be minion cards, divided up with respect to discipline in the following way:

Count the number of vampires in your crypt: call this number p.

Count the number of vampires with the most common discipline in your deck: call this number q.

Count the number of vampires with the second most common discipline in your deck: call this number r.

Count the number of vampires with the third most common discipline in your deck: call this number s.

Count the number of vampires with the fourth most common discipline in your deck: call this number t.

Now if 80% of your chosen library size is a, then you want

[(p/[p+q+r+s+t]) x a] cards that require no discipline to play
[(q/[p+q+r+s+t]) x a] cards that require the most common discipline to play
[(r/[p+q+r+s+t]) x a] cards that require the second most common discipline to play
[(s/[p+q+r+s+t]) x a] cards that require the third most common discipline to play
[(t/[p+q+r+s+t]) x a] cards that require the fourth most common discipline to play

You can obviously have more or fewer disciplines than 4, in which case you adjust the formula accordingly, and i do so, below.

WORKED EXAMPLE OF HAPPY FAMILIES METHOD
Here is a worked example of building a deck using the Happy Families method.

I wanted to build a "kagemusha" Nosferatu bash/vote deck from Jyhad cards only, to "shadow" my favourite tournament deck. This deck therefore was made from the contents of just under two boxes of Jyhad boosters. CRYPT:
2 Sheldon 9 POT ANI OBF AUS for Justicar
2 Selma 8 POT ani OBF for Prince
2 Chester 7 POT ANI obf for Primogen
2 Sammy 4 pot ani obf
Agrippina 4 pot OBF
Duck 3 pot obf
Koko 2 pot
Dimple 2 obf

There are 12 vampires in this crypt and all 12 can use disciplineless or Nossie-only cards. 11 can use pot cards, and a different 11 can use obf cards. 8 can use ani cards. 6 can use for cards. 2 can use aus cards.

12+11+11+8+6+2 = 50.

Now for the library. 20% or so of your library should be master cards - fewer if you turn over a lot of minion cards in any one turn [eg because you are playing with weenies or freak drives], more if you have Anson, the Parthenon, Death of my Conscience or some other way of unjamming your hand.

For a 90-card library, 20% = 18 masters.

That leaves 72 minion cards.

Happy families tells us that (12/50) x 72 should be cards that require no discipline to play, ie 18 cards.
(11/50) x 72 should be pot cards, and the same number should be obf cards, ie 15 pot cards and 15 obf cards.
(8/50) x 72 should be ani cards, ie 12.
(6/50) x 72 should be for cards, ie 9.
(2/50) x 72 should be aus cards, ie 3.

That's how i decided on the proportions, and here is the deck i actually built:

18 Master
5 Minion Tap [average blood capacity of this crypt is 5 and 7 twelfths, bit big, and bloat is going to be your best defence against a quick bleed deck]
Fame
3 Blood doll
KRCG News Radio
Giant's Blood
Haven Uncovered
Slum HG
Golconda
Temptation of Greater Power [use as a master-phase bleed against your prey, and if you are lucky it will set you up for a Parity shift, too!].
The Rack
2 Spawning Pool [An underrated card, in my view, especially if you have ANI and rat's warning.]
[Actually the surprise value of Temptation/GP and spawning pool was a lot of the reason for their initial inclusion - tends to put people off their game if a really unusual card turns up. Subsequently of course ToGP has become a core strategy in the game].

18 No Discipline cards:
2 Parity Shift
Archon
4 WWEF
Kindred Restructure
2 Nosferatu Justicar
Fifth Tradition
2 Bum's Rush
2 Taste of Vitae
Second Tradition
Bloodhunt
Saturday Night Special

I'm playing fast and loose with the formula here, obviously, because a lot of these cards require that you have a Prince or Justicar. So i'm trusting the deck to deliver that, to some extent.

15 Potence
7 Mighty Grapple
3 Thrown Gate
2 Rampage
3 Undead Strength

15 Obfuscate
5 Cloak the Gathering
2 Mask 1K Faces
3 Faceless Night
2 Spying mission
3 Lost in Crowds

12 Animalism
5 Rat's Warning
Army of Rats
2 Raven Spy
4 Cat's Guidance

9 Fortitude
3 Skin of Rock
5 Skin of Steel
Freak Drive

3 Auspex
2 Telepathic Misdirection
Pulse of the Canaille

That's 8 actions, 6 votes, 2 Retainers, 1 Equip
[17 card-based reasons to tap a vampire, if you like]:
16 Action modifiers:
16 Reactions:
23 combat cards.

Experience shows this is roughly the right proportion of different card types for a nice flowy kind of deck that is always up to stuff; but this statement has to be qualified with the observation that for a deck with a smaller crypt you would want rather more actions and fewer modifiers and combat cards, probably. Equally, as mentioned above, such a deck would need to have fewer master cards in it, or risk hand-jamming on master cards.

A lot of the Art of Happy Families deck-building lies in choosing the non-discipline and fourth or fifth iscipline cards. Essentially there are two approaches: you either pick the additional cards to strengthen what your deck already does well, or you pick them to compensate for whatever it does poorly if it just relies on its three commonest disciplines. I tend to go for the latter approach but this is a matter of taste and really this is a question about whether you go for focus or flexibility in your decks. One approach that DOESN'T seem to work is going across-clans for the "ideal" happy families deck. I tried this once with a deck that used Rake, Donatien, Adrianne and Sigrid Becker, who all have EXACTLY the same 4 disciplines, and no "wasted" discipline slots. I thought it would be the ultimate flexible and economical ruise/bleed deck but it turned out to be just dreadful, clunky and unfocussed and too many big vampires. It really seems to help to choose a bunch of vampires who have a predominant discipline or disciplines backed up by subordinate ones - a clan, for example.

TWEAKING
Once you have a basic happy families deck you can improve it based on your experience of playing it. I find a good way to do this is to note, in casual play, which cards I actually PLAY, and which other cards I end up discarding because I can't use them, in games I actually WIN [or at least do well in]. Then it's a simple matter to rebuild the deck from the cards that go into your ash-heap or onto the table because they were useful, leaving out the cards that went there because they were useless. This principle applies as much to the crypt as to the library, of course. Ideally you do this in a dynamic playgroup, ie one where people play a range of different decks, because otherwise you run the risk of tweaking your deck so that it's fabulously good in your local environment and completely useless elsewhere. If you have a good memory you can also do this in tournaments, but there you cannot actually take notes because that's illegal under VEKN rules.

I emphasise once again that this technique only works reliably if you do the tweaks based on when you are doing well. If you try to tweak when you are doing badly you really don't have ANY positive information upon which to base your tweak. If you ALWAYS do badly with a Happy Families or indeed any other kind of deck then probably it is time to rebuild the deck completely from scratch, and/or to try a different deck-type.

CONCLUSION
The Great and Good James Coupe has automated the Happy Families formula at his site http://legbiter.tripod.com so if you want to try this technique you don't even have to do the really rather simple math - just point and click. At the time of writing I don't think all the new vampires are up there and there is a teensy little bug which is that if there are two equal candidates for the last discipline [the nth out of n] then it will return the one that comes first in the alphabet. It's still a great piece of work and thank-you, james for covering the gaping hole in my computer literacy with this one! Anyway, do try the technique if your deck-building is running into the sand - it is quick and pretty good, and it can build you at least a framework deck from which to progress. Good Bleeding, and may all your victims be winsome members of the individually-preferred but usually opposite gender!

Final Word:

As many of you may have guessed, this mewsletter will give you homework. This time, quite simply, use the Happy Families formula to create 2 decks, and give them a try. You might find they work well.

That's all folks

Andy