Compendium of Resources Extraordinary : Keepers of Tradition Brujah

Keepers of Tradition Brujah Pre-Constructed Starters

The Brujah starter, in my opinion, is a good choice to go forth after one is familiar with the Malkavian starter's basic function. It moves along the learning path of Vtes into the more "interactive" aspect in the fields of Combat. With the Malkavians, there's usually not much to talk about to your opponents, but with the Burjah's mighty fists, you do have more say in negotiating for whatever you might need. The Brujah starters also truly exhibit the basics of melee combat - dodge, press, strike, taste, enter combat, strength changes, restart combat etc, this starter has it all.

How to Kill

Well, combat may be something this deck can do pretty ok, but it has only a single Tension in the Ranks to actually make your prey suffer for losing Vampires. On the other hand, the Brujahs do have access to some bleed cards this time, so they can do quite a bit of bleed damage once the blockers are either out of the way or too afraid to stand in the way.

Bruise bleed is the closest this deck comes to be archtyped. It has several means of entering combat and their combat cards are deadly enough to deal with light combat defenses. The 3 Public Trusts and the 2 high-cap Vampire's in-built bleed enhances should be enough to give your prey a little scare. So basically your Vampires need only to bleed and hope that the defender picks someone to die by your hands. If they are consistently bouncing your bleeds or reducing them to nothing, you can then use your Harass or Enrage to enter combat with them and end their misery. Like the traditional Brujahs, only a single KRCG provides Intercept in this deck so blocking is not exactly an option, and this deck is certainly not really able to block anything with Stealth, such as rescues. Well, just like a boxing match, when he stands up, beat him down again~

Combat and Defense

Combat is what this deck is all about, and this deck is specialized on close combat - meaning that your Vampires need to get close and personal, and make sure that the opponent's minions are not running away. This deck is not really well geared to fight opponents with manouever abilities, the only card capable of sending your Vampire screaming into close combat again is Slam, and it commits your strike plus costs a blood. It is a reasonably good strike though, causing 3 damage without any enhancement. You can use Resist Earth's Grasp too, and it also costs a blood, but if you look closely you'd notice that half of your Vampires cannot do one or the other. The lower cap Vampires are strangely, very charismatic people with good PRESENCE discipline but lack the necessary "punch" to use the combat cards efficiently, especially CELERITY cards. You only have 1 of each Master discipline card to enhance these little ones, so be careful with how you use them. The lower-cap Vampires are not as good fighters as you may think they are.

But before that, let's look at how your Vampires fight.

Generally, what gets you into combat are usually some random goons blocking your bleeds, or you enter combat with the card Harass or you commit 2 Vampires with Enrage (gives a +1 Strength, but generally not worth the effort unless you're sure of getting rid of the opposing minion). Once you get into combat, you play "Before-Range" cards, which are things you either do at home before any actions, or preperation done to enhance your chances, or stuff you can still do before coming face to face with an opponent. The key cards here is Torn Signpost. This card set your strength to either 2 or 3, depending on your level of POTENCE, and it is a key card in POTENCE combat as it increase your Vampires' potential damage tremendously - so if Adana is Enraged and holds a Torn Signpost, she will hit for 4 damage with her hand strikes. Note that Torn Signpost is NOT a WEAPON, and you can't Brute Force with it as a melee weapon. (Yes, I know it sounds stupid) The only other "Before Range" card is Weighted Walking Stick. This will place a Stick in the hands of your Vampires, and this IS a weapon until it's 5 counters run out. Do note that these counters are not limits to your damage capacity with this card - which means if you somehow hit for 6 damage the stick will still cause 6 damage and then runs out, it is NOT constrained by the 5 counters.

Once Before Range is decided, you go to range step. Unless somebody "Set" the range to short or long, you'll get to decide whether your Vampire will be fighting at close range (which is what you want) or throwing things at each other from far away (which is what you don't want). Setting range usually requires a card ability, the most famous one in this set is the Sniper Rifle, which will set range to long if the owner manage to block your Vampires. There is very little you can do at range, so please avoid getting into that situation. Otherwise, the default range is always short, and if the opposing minion use a card or ability to manouever to long, you can then use Slam or Resist Earth's Grasp to move back to close.

Once the range is decided, you can then choose your strikes. For your case, unless you've committed to Slam, you can now decide how you wanna pound your opponent if you're at close range. If you're at long, the only thing that makes any sense to you might be Stutter-Step. If you are at close, before choosing any strikes, you will need to consider whether or not to use one of the most prominant card in POTENCE - Immortal Grapple. By declaring Immortal Grapple, you're restricting both yours and the opponent's Vampires to use only hand strikes. And since your Vampire is probably full of damage enhancements that increase your hand strike damage, it is usually good for you. There are many dangerous non-hand strikes strikes that can cause you hours of headaches, the least of all are all the combat end cards, so you might want to use Immortal Grapple offensively to make sure that these Vampires are not going anywhere. On the other hand, certain disciplines have deadly strikes such as Coma and Entombment, which will send your Vampire to torpor directly, and in this case you'd need to use your Immortal Grapple defensively. The key issue here is that most decks who uses powerful strikes like these have no "plan B" which involves hand strikes so Immortal Grapple remains a key card that will appear in most POTENCE combat decks.

Now you can finally choose your strikes, and it is quite a no-brainer. Most of the time you'll be hitting with Brute Force, hopefully with a Weighted Walking Stick, or even better, a Sengir Dagger. After that, if the enemy is still standing, press for a second round of combat. You need to learn to decide when it is good to press, and when you're not in a good position to do so - it generally concerns the blood on your Vampire, as in whether or not your Vampire can survive a second round of combat with the enemy. Pressing is usually good for you since your Torn Signpost remains in place. Your key pressing card is either the ability granted by Harss (which will not be there if your Harass is blocked) or Relentless Pursuit which will give you 2 more cards, generally to help you alleviate the problem created by Brute Force. You can Psyche! if you want, but that is usually used to start a new combat where everything is reset - meaning, no Torn Signpost. This card is generally used to deal with Combat Ends. Do note that if you played Immortal Grapple at superior you do get a press, and it skips the determine range step, and your battle start straight at close - very handy.

The other card to take note of is Taste of Vitae. This card allows your Vampire to gain back blood loss in combat during combat. Basically you drain every point of damage that you deal to the enemy (provided he has blood) and turn them into your own. Do note that if the enemy did not have enough blood to heal all the damage you caused, then you only taste back what he had, ie. if Gem only has 2 blood and you caused 3 points of damage to her, she goes to torpor and you can only taste 2 blood back. Taste of Vitae are to be declared at the end of every round before pressing, so do remember to do so.

Combat is your defense. Just go pound your predator's troublesome Vampire into torpor.

Equipment

This deck has a few melee weapons. They're quite self-explanatory. Use Nod to transfer the equipment around your Vampires as needed, but generally they're just icing on the cake, you don't really need them to make your prey suffer. The 2 exceptions are Drum of Xipe Totec and Sengir Dagger. The Drum will allow your lower end Vampire to get Superior CELERITY and a free manouever - very handy; and the Sengir Dagger is your only source of aggravated damage.

If you really need that equipment you can use Resist Earth's Grasp to increase the stealth, though I think that is usually better reserved for bleeds or even enter combat cards.

Vampires

This deck works with the fat ones. Your younger ones are probably just out early to create some distraction. The good thing is Adana and Jann both have the perfect spread of disciplines for this deck, comes with bleed enhancement, and doesn't need to spend blood for combat cards (Jann will need to pay for Resist Earth's Grasp, but that's the only one)

The younger Vampires are lacking in CELERITY, and sometimes even POTENCE, so they're not really good at combat until you put a weapon on them. So for this deck, you target to bring out Tomaine first, any of the high-cap Vampires second, and then go on to the weenies. Of course, alter this as you need, since the table mechanics will and do cause disruptions to your plans.

Handy Trick

Enrage at superior is pretty annoying to your predator's bleeding Vampires. Do try it once in a while.

Where you go from here

This is a combat deck. Case closed.

For most POTENCE/CELERITY combat decks, this deck lacks in CELERITY strike cards. If you want to go that way, remove most of the low cap Vampires in this deck and exchange them with Vampires that have a better spread of disciplines - for example, Lynn Thompson and Paul Calderone. Throw in a few more Master discipline cards to enhance your lower end Vampires. Some of the equipment in the deck is not efficient, in fact, I'll probably remove most of them since they takes up space and slow down decks - even Weighted Walking Stick is not really that needed. Move in more Torn Signpost and Immortal Grapple, maybe a few Undead Strength to replace Brute Force if you don't like the hand size restriction. Add in CELERITY movement and additional Strike cards such as Pursuit, Flash, Nimble Feet and Blur. With these combinations the Brujahs can fight close or long, they're pretty good at both, decide what you like and then go get those cards that do well there.

If you like high-cap Vampires and their combat capabilities, you might want to look at combat monsters like Hector or Gratius, and then add in cards to help them survive - such as Sideslip or even Leather Armour or the new Kelvar Vest.

You can also go vote heavy with the Brujah. Throw in the new princes, add in vote cards, utilized the Second Tradition for defense. This is called the Euro-Prince archtype. KoT added the New Carthage and it makes the Brujah Princes even deadlier.

Value for Money

The Brujah starter is quite a bit more valuable than the Malkavians, especially to players who fancy a combat approach. It has many of the staple but slightly costly cards - Immortal Grapple, Torn Signpost, Taste of Vitae etc. But it lacks truly expensive cards that the Toreador and Ventrue starters provide. But for anyone who wants to start a POTENCE combat deck, just grab a couple of these and you're more than halfway there.

(o.o)y