At Your Disposal : Canine Horde

There are some cards in some discipline, that you tend to include one or two in every deck that can take advantage of it, sometimes for defense against certain kind of decks due to a high occurance rate, sometimes as an offense that is useful against a certain deck type, or even against a certain Methuselah. Canine Horde is one such card for ANIMALISM, it is useful, and almost always welcomed into the hand, and rarely will it be a liability for you.

It is a weak Range strike card for ANIMALISM, where it is inferior to Aid From Bats if 1R damage is what you're using it for; its superior function is however, superior to anything ANIMALISM can offer, or for that matter, pretty much the vast majority of Vtes disciplines.

There are a multitude of equipment that you will really want to get rid of in a typical Vtes game, from an annoying .44 Magnum that can shoot down all your expensive Raptors, to those pivotal Soul Gems that means life or death to your prey/predator. The Canine Horde shut them all down, and it shut them down with first strike, at range. How much better can this get?

The CELERITY strike card Fast Hands is one of the other few strike cards that can steal stuff (in a way, remove the function of that thing from the opponent's hands) However, it is limited to only weapons, and it can only be used at short range, not to mention that it costs blood. Just put these 2 cards together you'll realised why every ANIMALISM deck should have a copy of Canine Horde whenever possible.

Will your Canine Horde be redundent and used just as a 1R strike card most of the time? ANIMALISM uses a lot of retainers - Raven Spy, Raptor, even Owl Companion - and these are very susceptible to long range gun shots - Canine Horde will get rid of those guns before they have a chance to shoot. Also remember that equipment is a rather common element of many decks - you will generally see a couple of bleedquipment such as Laptop Computer or Camera Phone, some defensive equipment such as Leather Jacket, some stealth or defense equipment like Ambulance and Bowl of Convergence, that are all stuff that your dogs can go chew on. So, most of the time you should be able to bring your Canine Horde to good use. But one thing you must learn for yourself is when to use it, and when to horde it. If you're still unsure about the value of that equipment to your opponent, and if you can afford it, hold it in your hand a little longer to ascertain the opposing deck's reliance on that equipment - you never know, you just might be facing an even more problematic equipment 2 turns later.

Well, at the very least you can still strike for 1R damage if you run out of equipment to destroy.

It's main problem is that it requires superior ANIMALISM to play, and one usually do not include more than 2 copies of it in a deck, making its apparence quite random most of the time - meaning that, you'll almost always be cycling for it rather than having it right when you want it.

(o.o)y