Friday, August 24, 2007

Bleed Defense w/o Bounce

Sometimes you would like to build a deck in VtES which should be able to win, but it's not an intercept deck, nor does it have it access to bleed bounce (i.e. no vampires with either "Dominate" or "Auspex"). So the question is how does it defend against power bleed or stealth bleed? A (more or less) well-known bleed defense module is the following combination of 6 master cards.
The defense works in different ways. You need to play the "Major Boons" on a bleed for one, and then let the poor hapless target of the boon take the bleed for, let's say 5 or 6 from your predator. The "Archon Investigation" and the "Retribution" are deterrents for big bleeds, the "Dummy Corporations" for actual bleed reduction.

If you are not planning to bleed by yourself, e.g. you're ousting by means of "Fame"/"Dragonbound"/etc. or voting, you may also want to include one or (better) two "Protected Resources" instead of the "Dummy Corporations" or the "Major Boons".

Another alternative defense against stealth-bleed is the discipline-less "Keep It Simple", but you need at least some minor intercepts cards in order to use it effectively. E.g. you play a couple of "Elder Interventions" or "Pack Tactics" in your deck to be able to reduce any bleed that has more stealth then by 3, which is quite a number, by using "Keep It Simple" as followup.

See also this article from the Storage Annex website on the topic of non-bouncing defense, although this article describes how to build up an decent intercept defense (read: "wall") against Stealth Bleed decks.

No comments: