"Lords of the Night": Review of the Preview

As several other players already pointed out, the VtES expansion "Lords of the Nights" will have a huge impact on the metagame and the game itself. I dare to say: "This is the biggest expansion in terms of novelty and fresh blood for the game since the "Bloodlines" expansion".

There are several factors that contributing to this:

• Each discipline has 3 to 5 new(!) cards, instead of just 1 to 2 as in most of the previous releases. Each of the disciplines get more versatile. If this is a good thing, I don't know right now. It's definitely more difficult to predict what a certain vampire can pull off at a given time. The previous expansions (like "Sword of Caine") had many new master cards & many new (often unique) equipment cards. This now has an end (or at least a break), the disciplines are back.

In detail the update highlights for the disciplines look like this:

• Animalism (3 new cards) gets a "Strike: combat ends" ("Flesh Bond") & and a combined untap & intercept ("Sense the Savage Ways").
• Auspex (0+3 multi-discipline cards) only gets multi-discipline cards - interesting!
• Celerity (3+1) gets cheap stealth ("Resist the Earth's Grasp") & a new ousting method ("Precision").
• Dominate (3) gets a zero-cost-burn-ally card ("Automatic Mastery") & a combined bleed & bounce card ("Murmur of the False Will").
• Fortitude (4+1) gets at very good damage prevention card at inferior ("Armor of Vitality") and also a combat cancel card ("Hard Case") when blocking.
• Obfuscate (5) gets "Strike: combat ends" ("Mental Maze") & permanent stealth ("Blight Appearance").
• Potence (4) gets a Maneuver ("Slam") & Bloat ("Street Cred") & Perma-Strength ("Preternatural Strength")
• Presence (4) gets a Mass Bleed card ("Dream World") & Mass Combat(!!) card ("Bloodlust") as well as "Strike: combat ends" which results in semi-permanent +1 bleed ("Unholy Penance").
• No "Protean" nor "Thaumthurgy" nor "Obtenebration" nor "Vicissitude" cards, since none of the Indepenent clans has these as in-clan-disciplines.

I haven't done a whole breakdown of the rest of the Disciplines and Clans, so here's the rest of my first impressions:

• The independent clans & their in-clan-only-disciplines get a lot of goodies, especially the Setite clan cards are amazingly strong IMHO.
• Blood Doll is nerfed(?) by Vessel. The old Blood Management is dead, long live the new Blood Management!
• There is significant support for Big Cap vampires. A couple of new (and sometimes power cards) are only usuable against Allies or younger vampires. So good for the fatties. Example cards are "Lost in Translation" and "Murmur of the False Will"
• There are a lot of "Imbued-hate"-cards in this expansion like "Permanent Vacation" or "Set's Curse".

When looking at the cards, especially the Library cards, I see a huge potential and a great number of new deck ideas in this expansion. Can't wait to play with some of the new toys at the local Launch Event on Sunday.

Please feel free to enter a comment, what you think about the new expansion!