Way back in 2001, I was fed up with bleed bounce, as I felt it was making a basic element of the game - bleeding - into a joke. In my efforts to find a way to defeat bounce, I ended up building Short Leash Bleed - a stealth-bleed deck that uses Change of Target and intercept locations to minimize the effects of bounce. The deck carried me to victory in four tournaments, including the 2001 North American Championship. Between Change of Target and Spying Mission, the problem of bleed bounce in terms of offense is largely mitigated. Defensively, however, bleed bounce still poses a problem. It's easily the most card-efficient form of defense in the game. With one card, you stop a bleed action against you. What's more, you gain another action by having that minion bleed someone else. With Deflection at superior, you gain yet another action (in a manner of speaking) by remaining untapped to block or react again. Bleeding is also far and away the most common form of offense (actions taken that directly eliminate your prey's pool), mainly because bleeding is a cardless action and meaning that the opportunity cost is therefore extremely low. As a result, you can put together most of your defensive package simply by including eight copies of Deflection in your deck. However, you can only use bleed bounce if you have access to those disciplines, so where does that leave clans without access to bounce? Conventional wisdom says that clans that don't have bounce available through in-clan disciplines typically don't have access to enough intercept to viably defend against archetypes that use stealth as a delivery system (that which gets your offensive payload to succeed). This is one of the main reasons why clans such as Gangrel, Gangrel-antitribu, Assamites, Brujah-antitribu, Nosferatu-antitribu, and Followers of Set aren't particularly feared in the tournament scene. Another reason is that they often lack other viable defensive alternatives, apart from bolting on Dominate. Some deck archetypes have alternate defensive options, such as upstream rush by weenie combat or bloat by the Consanguineous Boons of a Legacy of Pander deck or the Tributes to the Master of a Ravnos Clown Car deck. However, the question still remains: how does one defend themself without bounce? A couple of years ago I decided to explore this question, mainly to satisfy my own curiosity, but also in part because I felt I'd been using a bolt-on Deflection module as a crutch. This endeavor happened to coincide with the playtesting of Anarchs, and for that I had built a deck that attempted to exploit Nosferatu Bestial, which in playtest was non-unique. The deck I had built involved a bunch of Bestials and a ton of Raven Spies and Murders of Crows, and proved to be obnoxiously effective. When Anarchs was released, however, Nosferatu Bestial became unique. I was still intrigued by how effective it was to get lots of Raven Spies in play quickly, and set about modifying the deck. The defensive requirements for the deck were to be able to shut down stealth-bleed decks, weenie bleed decks, and weenie vote decks. Stopping stealth-vote decks would be a big plus. The result was a group 2-3 Obf-Ani weenie deck with 18 Raven Spies, as well as intercept locations, Dummy Corporations, .44 Magnums, 6 Blood Dolls, and a lot of Obfuscate stealth...oh, and 9 Wake with Evening's Freshness and 9 Forced Awakening. A key defensive theory of the deck, largely based on my own experiences using stealth-bleed decks, was that getting 2 or 3 permament intercept on one or more minions could greatly slow down the offensive rate of a stealth-bleed predator. Hopefully the offensive rate would be slowed such that a predator would have to wait to stockpile stealth in his or her hand before taking a bleed action, allowing time to recoup the pool lost in the early to middle parts of the game via Blood Doll farming (you can't expect to stop everything, especially early on). In the late game, the efforts from the Blood Doll farming are to shift from defense to offense, spending the pool gained on more vampires. A few explanations about some design decisions are probably in order. I opted for the .44 Magnums instead of Murders of Crows because I wanted the maneuver to protect the vampire and because the vampires would already be spending a fair amount of blood on Raven Spies. I also included some IR Goggles and some Leather Jackets for protective reasons. The hope was that they could avoid a lot of close range damage, and if they ended up in torpor anyway, another weenie could rescue them. In addition, I felt I'd want the offensive benefits of .44's instead of the much more solid defensive ability of Sniper Rifles. As for the 9/9 split of Wake and Forced Awakening, I initially wasn't quite sure which I wanted more, but felt that it was a reasonable compromise between card cycling and blood loss avoidance. In practice, I've ended up liking the mix for this deck. For about a year and a half, I tried out the deck in casual games and tournaments wherever I went. In practice, the deck proved to be rather effective, though very slow offensively. It made the final rounds of tournaments at Origins and DragonCon, though it couldn't quite get the job done in the finals. However, I was heartened by the fact that the defensive strategy was working, and that the deck was showing a lot of promise in tournaments, and with the 2005 Qualifier season coming up, I figured I should give the deck a shot in a Qualifier. After getting wrecked in the finals by the maneuvers of a Cel-Pot close range fight deck of Eric Chiang, and seeing that the stealth was doing its job offensively, I decided that it was time to switch from .44 Magnums to Sniper Rifles. I also added the new Carlton Van Wyk and a few Instinctive Reactions. The result was winning the East Central Regional Qualifer in 2005. Its predator was an Obf-Dem stealth-bleed deck. Here's the deck: Deck Name: Nevermore CRYPT (12 cards) [avg=3.92] 1 x Christianus Lionel (6): OBF ANI pot 1 x Nigel the Shunned (5): ANI POT obf 1 x Cicatriz (5): obf ani pot 1 x Josef (4): obf ani obt 1 x Shannon Price, the Whisperer (3): obf ani 1 x Calebros, The Martyr (5): ANI obf pot 1 x Gemini (5): OBF ani pot obt 1 x Laurent de Valois (4): obf ani dom 1 x Clarissa Steinburgen (3): obf ani 1 x Krid (2): obf 1 x Panagos Levidis (3): obf ani 1 x Hanna Redmonds (2): obf tha LIBRARY (90 cards) 1 x Shanty Town Hunting Ground 1 x Information Network 1 x The Labyrinth 1 x Nosferatu Bestial 1 x The Barrens 1 x KRCG News Radio 1 x The Rumor Mill, Tabloid Newspaper 1 x Dummy Corporation 6 x Blood Doll 6 x Life in the City 1 x Carlton Van Wyk (Hunter) 1 x J.S. Simmons Esq. 1 x Tasha Morgan 3 x Sniper Rifle 2 x .44 Magnum 2 x Leather Jacket 2 x IR Goggles 9 x Wake with Evening's Freshness 9 x Forced Awakening 1 x Forgotten Labyrinth 1 x Elder Impersonation 3 x Spying Mission 4 x Swallowed by the Night 2 x Lost in Crowds 4 x Cloak the Gathering 3 x Faceless Night 3 x Domain of Evernight 15 x Raven Spy 4 x Instinctive Reaction The Nevermore deck wasn't the only deck I was working on at the time. Another one was something I simply called The Ecstasy Deck, which was a Settite stealth-bleed deck that had 25 or so copies of Ecstasy for defense, built under the "I seem to own a whole lot of this card" design strategy. ;) While it obviously banks on having a bleeding predator, it's pretty savage to such decks, causing them to periodically pause to hunt, giving you some extra time to recoup lost pool. It can be frustrating for your prey, as well, since they can't take advantage of bleeds bounced to them that they could bounce as well. It hasn't shown itself to be super amazing, mainly because of the opportunity cost of its defense (though it did make the finals of the DC qualifier in 2004), but maybe with some tweaking it could make the leap. Here's the deck: [INSERT THE ECSTASY DECK HERE] Another deck I put together was a Gangrel-antitribu deck that attempted to take advantage of the local metagame in Boston. At the time, Ben Swainbank was terrorizing us with his latest assortment of toolboxy decks, but I noticed that he was taking advantage of the fact that we weren't seeing much stealth-bleed or Grapple combat. I guessed that Ben (and the rest of our group) was ripe for getting abused by Earth Meld and some stealth-bleed action in an upcoming local tournament, and I was keen to try out Neighborhood Watch Commanders, which were recently released with Gehenna. I went with a somewhat similar defensive package, using Sport Bikes, Mr. Winthrop, Aranthebes, intercept locations, and 12 Forced Awakening. Instead of the weapons, I chose to rely on Earth Meld and Form of Mist, with the Neighborhood Watch Commanders exacting their toll on incoming minions. Ironically, I never faced Ben Swainbank in a predator-prey situation, but I had guessed the metagame right, as other opponents fared poorly. In the finals, it came down to a climactic showdown between this deck and a Scott Gomes' Toreador-antitribu Embrace weenie deck, with my Gangrel-antitribu having just enough untap to shut down Scott for the win. Here's the deck: Deck Name: Your Friendly Neighborhood City Gangrel CRYPT [avg=4.33] 1 x Zachary (7): PRO OBF CEL pre for 1 x Pieter (6): PRO OBF tha for 1 x Darrell Boyce, Consul (6): PRO OBF CEL 1 x Harry Reese (6): PRO FOR obf cel 1 x Skryta Zyleta (5): CEL pro obf pot 1 x Maria Stone (5): FOR pro obf cel 1 x Wren (4): pro obf cel 1 x Max Lowell (3): obf cel 1 x Sadie (2): pro 1 x Daliyah (4): PRO obf 1 x Chandler Hungerford (3): PRO 1 x Huang, Blood Cultist (1): pro LIBRARY 1 x Campground Hunting Ground 1 x Twisted Forest 2 x Shadow Court Satyr (Changeling) 1 x The Barrens 1 x KRCG News Radio 1 x The Rumor Mill, Tabloid Newspaper 1 x Pentex (tm) Loves You! 5 x Blood Doll 1 x Direct Intervention 2 x Sudden Reversal 4 x Protean 1 x Creep Show 1 x Rebel 1 x Curmudgeon 4 x Neighborhood Watch Commander 1 x J.S. Simmons, Esq. 1 x Mr. Winthrop 3 x Sport Bike 1 x Laptop Computer 2 x Atonement 1 x Aranthebes, The Immortal 12 x Forced Awakening 2 x Poison Pill 12 x Earth Meld 10 x Form of Mist 3 x Lost in Crowds 3 x Cloak the Gathering 3 x Swallowed by the Night 2 x Spying Mission 2 x Faceless Night 1 x Forgotten Labyrinth 2 x Flash 2 x Rooftop Shadow Yeah, I know, I know, it obviously needs The Unmasking. :) I'm also not fully confident in its ability to handle a dedicated stealth-bleed deck, as its intercept, while good, is fairly light. However, I'm very confident in its ability to handle weenie and breeder decks, between the 12 Forced Awakening, 12 Earth Meld, and Aranthebes. Also, the archetypes in there were a cute experiment to see how they'd work out, and they can easily be replaced with just about anything else - maybe Elder Intervention or Phased Motion Detector. After winning the tournament in Boston and the qualifier in New Jersey with no-bounce decks, I felt that my mission was accomplished and it was time to move on to other decks - namely the Burn Option tech I wrote about earlier for this site. However, when Kindred Most Wanted was released, I was intrigued by Phased Motion Detector, as it was another intercept equipment option to go along with Sport Bike and Bowl of Convergence. I had also taken a shine to Magic of the Smith, and eventually the light bulb in my head went on and got me thinking about a weenie Thaumaturgy version of the Nevermore deck. Cool skateboard trick for you kids: try to use 5 vampires of one clan, and 5 vampires from another clan. That way if you win a tournament with it, you get credit for both clans in The Lasombra's Tournament Winning Deck Archive. ;)