Saturday, September 20, 2008

Lyrics of the Night : Bounce

Well, bouncing bleeds is one annoying method of defending your pool, annoying to your predator that is. Unlike blocks, there is much less ways of getting around this than just bite it and hope your ally is able to take that damage without giving your prey another 6 pool. (eventually) Granted, certain decks have no issues against this, specifically voters and combat decks. Vote decks will just vote the bouncer to death, and combat decks usually leaves a whole bloody mess of the bouncer on the floor (and pretty much everybody else) anyway.
But bouncing is a great defensive asset, and there are a good number of bounce cards that will work miracle for you if your predator is a heavy bleeder without ways to tackle your bounce defense. DOMINATE is the master discipline for bounces - they have the magnificent Deflection, the somewhat less efficient Redirection and the multi-purpose Murmur. AUSPEX is another discipline commonly sprouting bounce tech - My Enemy's enemy and the more direct Telepathic Misdirection. There are other cards and other ways to bounce bleeds, to the extent of exotic means such as Aksinya Daclau's master bounce, but primarily one only expect aggressive bouncing from the above 2 disciplines. There are no bounce cards for the others.
Directional bouncing where you can target any specific Methuselah is a great defense - not only did you prevent a bleed from your predator, you can use it to either deplete your prey's pool or defensive actions, or even bargain with your ally (or anyone else of interest) to block and fight the bleeding vampires, preferably dealing enough damage to him to either remove him from the equation, or at least slow him down a couple of turns. The side effect of bouncing is purely psychological - to enhance the bleed or not? If your predator does that, and you manage to bounce it to a defenseless prey, he's as good as bleeding your prey for you. This will become a problem for him.
Non-directional bounce with My Enemy's Enemy is less focused but cheaper, without restrictions such as blood cost, age or minion type, but you do not get to choose who it bounces to, and cannot use it in a late game without a grand predator. This is seldom a major issue given the power of the card, but one might want to include a range of AUSPEX bounces instead of just including My Enemy's Enemy.
There are some defense against bounces. First of all is simply have enough bleeds that the prey cannot bounce them all. Bouncing is costly, it either costs an action, or costs blood, sometimes both, and it always costs a card. Even a fat Vampire with superior DOM can only bounce so many bleeds. Against many small bleeds, this defense will not be enough to save him for long. On the other hand, one can bleed "responsibly" - by using cards such as Spying Mission or Change of Target to help reduce the damage done to the new target. Spying Mission can then be used to bleed even more against your prey again, and he can't bounce you forever; while Change of Target will keep your ally's (and your bleeding vampire) blocking vampire untap for defense against your prey's action. The event card Narrow Minds will increase of cost of bouncing and should be included whenever possible for decks that rely heavily on bleeding to oust his prey.
There are usually indicators (which also could be a hoax to trick you) that your prey is going to bounce your bleed. Having an untapped Vampire with superior DOM or AUS is one good indicator, in fact, having any Vampires with these 2 disciplines will constitute a possiblity of doing so. Some Vampires scream bouncing - Helena for example. But with Lost in Translation, anyone can bounce, and I find it cool to include one copy in every deck just so to make the deck a little more unpredictable - so one will never know.
(o.o)y

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