This is a capstone of our series on crypt construction. We'll talk about how these ideas work together and we'll discuss a few tournament-winning deck examples.
Crypt Construction Blog Entries
In Understanding Basic Crypt Construction, we cover simple crypt types, This is the basic foundation for
understanding how to build crypts. Advanced Crypt Construction (and Math!) delves into decks that have star vampires. We discuss why keeping
the crypt size small is more beneficial and why most crypts should use 12 or
13 vampires.
Even knowing the best ways to build crypts is no guarantee of success.
We cover ways to use crypt cards to help us get to the vampires we want
in Crypt Construction: Improving the Draw. We also discuss our library options in Crypt Construction: Help from the Library.
We also had a quick update about having a plan B in Crypt Construction: Accidents Happen.
Putting This All Together
We'll go over some of my tournament-winning decks and discuss what my thought
process was when building the crypt and why I used (or didn't use) any of the
crypt-related library cards. As you'll see I don't always get it
right. Some of these decks were just lucky.
Lions and Tigers and Legionnaires, Oh My!
This is one of my worst crypts and the library offers very little help should
I get in trouble. This deck uses the 5/13 star vampire format. The
design attempts to ensure an opening crypt Erebus that would make recruiting
Legionnaires free.
5x Erebus 2x Neighbor John 2x Solomon Batanea 1x Sennadurek 1x Zygodat 1x Nicomedes 1x Maldavis (ADV)
Babalawo Alafin has all of the same (relevant)
disciplines and a different, but equally good special. There's no reason
to favor Erebus over
Babalawo. In fact, using both is
better. It creates a more varied crypt. Playing this again, I'd
drop Nicomedes and change two
Erebus to
Babalawo.
Nicomedes special does not make up for his lack
of superior disciplines.
The library is equally confusing in this deck. (What was I thinking?).
With the original crypt there are 6 dead draws when decrypting: 4x
Erebus, 1x
Neighbor John, and 1x
Solomon Batanea. This screams for
Wider View to make those duplicates work for
you and not against you. At 90 cards, you'd want to include 2-3 copies
of Wider View to ensure that you get it in a
timely fashion. This is a master heavy deck, so we might only be able to
find room for 1-2 copies. There are some action options available:
Disciple of Lazarus and
Soul Scan. The latter is usable by every
vampire in the crypt. Working in two copies in addition to the
Wider View changes would definitely smooth out
any rough edges that a bad draw might cause.
Soul Scan is also preferable to
Disciple of Lazarus in this deck because the
Harbingers will have better actions to take (Legionnaires).
Propaganda Moves
This is a weenie Obfuscate vote deck. The goal is to flood the table
with as many different vampires as possible. Ideally, this deck will
have 6-8 vampires in play and most of them will be Anarchs. The
non-Anarchs can call
Kine Resources Contested and
Diversity, so there are plenty of actions for
them. Bleeds (regular or Night Moves) are
also fine, but there's no opportunity to cycle
Propaganda of the Deed in that case.
6x Anarch Convert 1x Ali Kar 1x Milo, The Invisible Horror 1x Bloodfeud 1x Denette Stensen 1x Hanna Redmonds 1x Krid 1x Old Neddacka
In an ideal start where the crypt alternates between an o weenie and an
Anarch Convert, you can get 4 vampires in play,
with three of them being Anarch. After that you slow down as you need to
pay for more crypt cards. As a deck that wants to bring a bunch of
weenies into play, you should have a reasonably reliable way to accelerate
beginning in turn 4.
The library offers some help in 2x
Information Highway, but that's not very
reliable. If the deck runs smoothly, you should play 8-14 cards by the
end of turn three. In the best case, you've got a 53% chance to see
Information Highway in time to start turn
four. If you churn fewer cards that number drops quickly. Adding
additional forms of acceleration, like
Effective Management, can bolster your ability
to keep the pressure up with additional vampires in turns 4+. Simply
dropping 2x Ashur Tablets (this deck should
only need one Ashur cycle at most), and replacing them with 2x
Effective Management, increases the odds of
obtaining help to 66% in a the low-cycling case and 81% in an optimal
case. Those are much better numbers.
Also knowing that you need to get some acceleration, you should be discarding
every turn until you have it. The other cards are less useful.
Note that discards were figured into the played card ranges above.
Dream a Little Dream and the Cup Edition
These two decks are very similar, the latter being minor tweaks of the
former. The crypt changed slightly between the two versions and the deck
saw small changes, but nothing significant. We can easily talk about
these two decks at the same time.
| Original Version | Cup Edition |
|---|---|
3x Alicia Barrows 2x Stavros 2x Fabrizia Contreraz 1x General Perfidio Díos 1x Blister 1x Bloodfeud 1x Denette Stensen 1x Old Neddacka |
3x Stavros 2x Alicia Barrows 2x Fabrizia Contreraz 1x General Perfidio Díos 1x Blister 1x Bloodfeud 1x Denette Stensen 1x Old Neddacka |
The crypts only differ by flip-flopping the quantities of
Alicia Burrows and
Stavros. This crypt construction is
similar to the Focus and Support designs that we talked about
previously. Ideally, this deck will not only create vampires via
Creation Rites, but it will also put a few into
play from the uncontrolled region. As such, this crypt design for that
is fine, but the library is lacking.
The library used in both versions offers no support for getting extra vampires
into play from the uncontrolled region and no way to speed up decrypting of
vampires either. This is an oversight. There are four dead draws,
which is one-third of the crypt. That's a lot of bad odds when looking
to get one more vampire into play. A few
Wider View would solve the dead draw problem,
turning the duplicates into something useful. It's possible that
Clotho's Gift would make an appearance as well,
but the weenies are usually getting Procurers or farming. So, making
space for Wider View seems like the best
choice. The Master package is tight, so serious cuts will be
required. You can decide what makes sense for your local meta.
Jack's Vigil and Revolution v3
This crypt design pre-dates my philosophical shift on
Anarch Converts. I was still treating
Anarch Convert as a "star" vampire and choosing
5/13 crypt designs instead of focusing on it as an enabler and using 5/12
designs instead.
5x Anarch Convert 2x Owain Evans, The Wanderer 2x Joseph O'Grady 2x Neighbor John 1x Jephta Hester 1x Kyoko Shinsegawa
The easiest thing to do with this crypt is drop
Jephta Hester. She doesn't have Celerity
and Kyoko's special is really solid.
We've got enough other vampires with superior Auspex and superior Dominate
that the drop matters very little to the overall flow of the deck. This
deck would like to get three vampires into play. Given the reliance on
playing Guardian Vigil at all three
disciplines, there's little choice but to run duplicates. So, the crypt
(after dropping Jephta) is probably fine.
Unfortunately, we're looking at 3 dead draws, which isn't bad, but is still
25% of the crypt. The deck can probably survive two manual decrypts,
allowing you to get to that precious third vampire. With the heavy
master package, it's hard to take the easy way out and suggest
Wider View.
I haven't played this in a long time, but I'd probably leave the library as is
(at least in terms of crypt acceleration and support).
Zurich Fellowship
We'll finish off by looking at what I think is the best crypt and library
design that I've put together for the purpose of making more vampires.
We'll talk about the synergies between the deck design, crypt, and crypt
acceleration a bit too.
5x Luke Fellows 1x Morrow the Sage 1x Alex Camille 1x Synner-G 1x Jeffrey Mullins 1x Skulk 1x Lubomira Hradok 1x Denette Stensen 1x Old Neddacka
This deck wants to get a lot of vampires into play, quickly and cheaply.
To that end, the crypt uses on the 5/13 star model, allowing as many possible
unique vampires balanced against solid odds on getting
Luke Fellows. The crypt is also stacked
in a hierarchical fashion as you might see in a deck featuring a "Govern
Chain." We'll be using
Powerbase: Zurich for the same purpose and the
staggered capacities allow us to spend multiple actions to Zurich to smaller
vampires. Free 4-caps are quite possible with this crypt construction.
We do have 4 dead draws and we need to have something useful to do with
Powerbase: Zurich, meaning we need to have
smaller vampires in the uncontrolled region than we have controlled to keep
making free vampires. The library has 1x Wider View to help make those
dead draws more useful. There is also Ennoia's Theatre, allowing an
extra transfer (or an important card cycle). However, since we're making
smaller vampires, we can use those to help ensure that the uncontrolled region
is useful. 5x Clotho's Gift helps decrypt additional vampires.
Between those library cards, we can expect to be bleeding and using Zurich
every turn. Each effect here reinforces the basic concept of the deck.
Wrapping Up
As you can see, even winning decks could be better. It's always worth
the time to evaluate your deck design and determine if your crypt and library
are working for you as you intended. Hopefully, the analysis we did of
my winning decks will help you in evaluating your own decks.
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