At Your Disposal : Blood Doll and Pool Retrieval

I read somewhere that in Vtes, no Vampires is ever worth the amount of pool that you invest in them, and it is of the greatest importance and urgency that you should retrieve those pool that you invested in your Vampires, and then use them for other better purposes, be it to influence another minion, purchase random resources, or just for staying alive. There are several ways to do it, but they're primarily Master cards, and as far as I know, these are present in 95% of the decks that I've ever fought against. (ok, Imbueds don't count)

The most common and famous of these cards is definitely the Blood Doll. This card is so important that many decks relied solely on them for pool retrieval. In the past, the Blood Dolls are the most reliable way to transfer blood back into (or vice versa) your pool, with no means of preventing it coming to play or destroying it except the intervention of a Sudden Reversal from somebody. Once a Blood Doll is slapped on a Vampire, you can then start transferring the blood on it back to your pool immediately - meaning that you get 1 pool back from playing the Blood Doll immediately, even if your Vampire goes down after that. It is generally easier to get blood to the Vampire than get pool. Vampires can hunt for blood, they sometimes are able to get blood from combat via Taste of Vitae or THAUMATURGY steal techs, and there are many reliable locations such as Hunting Grounds that can give them blood consistently. The Blood Doll allow you to take these "gains" back into your pool, and in the long run, supply a good stream of "pool income" to fend off attacks, or to improve your relative on-table strength by using that pool to purchase more minions or resources. There are decks who use several weenies to just hunt every round, and use Blood Dolls to get those blood into the pool as the primary, and sometimes, only, means of gaining pool. Remember, regardless of what people say, pool gain, is always good. With the advent of LotN, the appearance of Vessel changed the whole meta-environment for the Blood Doll. Methuselahs now have an alternative to getting blood back from Vampires, and at the same time, use the same card to destroy on table Blood Dolls. This had changed the value of the Blood Dolls significantly. To a certain degree, Vessels became the contender for space in decks, it being a trifle allowed the Methuselah to retain his Master Phase after playing the Vessel, and thus is much more efficient than a Blood Doll in terms of deck space requirement. The problem with Vessel is that it cost 1 pool, and that you cannot start getting blood back till next turn, since the retrieval is during the untap phase instead of the Master phase that was the case with Blood Dolls. (On a side note, the Vessels' retrieval at untap phase is actually more valuable than Blood Doll as many cost and damage effects apply during the Untap Phase, and that 1 blood from a Vessel could help you survive another turn, while Blood Dolls are powerless to help.) The fact that Vessel, at the moment, is only available in LotN starters, didn't help much with it's availability. It is however, definitely going to replace some of the Blood Dolls in every deck once it becomes as accessible as Blood Dolls. We were discussing whether or not it is wise to include a combination of Vessels and Blood Dolls in a deck, since they do each have their advantages. The Blood Dolls are free, and provide immediate benefit, so it is not actually a problem to have them, the Vessel cost 1 pool and sometimes you'd rather have a Blood Doll in hand instead. In my opinion, however, at least at the moment, I don't see why it is necessary to have both. These are just pool retrieval cards, Vessel is obviously superioir, mostly because it is reliable and quite difficult to get rid of once it hits the table. It will take 1 round to just recover it's cost, but if that is your problem I think a Blood Doll is not going to help much most of the time. On the other hand, if you have multiple Vampires to gain blood with Blood Dolls, it is unlikely that there will be enough Vessels to destroy all of them in a game. There are other cards that allow you to retrieve blood. The most common one after Blood Dolls will of course be Minion Tap. The problem with it is that it is one use, and you need to make a call on how much blood to take back there and then. The good side is of course you get them back one shot, and there is no need to wait. Your Vampire will be quite short on blood if you take too much from it, but that's its problem, and with blood recovery abilities or cards you can generally alleviate that problem for it. (Giant's Blood anyone?) In fact, many bloating tech relies on Minion Tap to get those easy blood back into your pool, and it is the key card for that tech to work. Other lesser cards such as Tribute to the Master are less commonly seen, as they are either very tech-specific (many minions required) or have a certain restriction - like clan requirement, speed of transfer, or can only transfer to uncontrolled Vampires and so on. To date, the majority of the decks that I've seen, are still playing with the above 3 cards in getting their investment back. It is generally agreed that 4-6 pieces of pool retrieval cards is good to have if your deck doesn't have any other means of pool gain, or that your Vampires do not need a lot of blood on them to power your deck strategy. (o.o)y