At Your Disposal : Barrenness

Though Maleficia and Striga are yet to be commonly seen, some of their cards are interestingly powerful and deceptively effective. Granted, they do not yet have anything approaching tournament-dominating level, but if you take a look at Barrenness, you'll see that these 2 semi-disciplines do indeed pack some of the more exotic means of torturing your opponents.

Even by itself this card is fearsome. It may not look like a lot, but imagine a first or second turn Horde standing in the region with Maleficia master card on, and you'll know how deadly this card can immediately be.

Barrenness has several great points, but let's look beyond those "good to have" function and focus on what it does. Sure, reducing 2 capacity and making a vampire sterile, most of the time wouldn't be a big deal against anyone. But against a weenie Maleficia deck your vampires can quickly be decimated with 2 or 3 of these cards on him.

There are only 3 kinds of vampires in every game - Weenies, Mid-cap Vampires and fat Vampires. For weenies, they can quickly be reduced to one-cap fledglings that can barely support his own life, mid-vampires may require 2 of such cards, but once it hits, the mid-cap vampire will be struggling to power up your actions too. Fat vampires are not so susceptible to its effects, but consequently you seldom will have many of those, and every Barrenness will make its effect felt keenly by fat vampires.

What's the big deal of losing 2 cap? First, the immediate result is the loss of 2 blood invested in the vampire. Unless you've already pulled them back or used them, this vampire loses 2 blood PERMANENTLY. Translate that into short term effects - your vampire can now bleed with 1 less Legal Manipulations before restocking his blood supply, loses 5 less vote with Awe if he has superior PRE, takes 2 less damage in a combat, uses 2 less Deflections before restocking etc etc. Once you stack a couple of Barrenness on the same vampire, and poof, this vampire is effectively neutralized the moment he commit a single mistake - he has less blood to power up actions, less blood to heal damage, less blood to use modifiers...

Now, it's time to look at the cards that are normally available to Baali and the Infernals, and combine them with Barrenness. Diabolic Lure? It's now 2 cap easier to make the acting Barren-ed vampire Infernal (about 2 Diabolic Lure can lure 99% of vampires that has been hit by even a single Barrenness); Greater Curse or Condemnation : Betrayed will make your prey/predator's bleed actions grind to a halt after their vampires' blood total is limited; Psychomacia and BloodStorm suddenly become killing engines when the opposing vampires are small enough; not to forget that Barrenness is the BEST defense for your Shatter the Gate if you pick and choose your targets correctly.

In combat you gain a lot of benefit just for reducing the cap and therefore the capacity for healing or acting, and it opens up the use of Scourge of Alecto, making eveybody you fight a weenie for you to hit with this otherwise not very efficient card. (Enough Infernal Vampires can use this, and PRE is an in-clan for Baali anyway, just slap a CEL discipline on them~) Follow up the Barrenness with a Greater Curse and this vampire can barely Majesty.

Now, remember those very dangerous but difficult to use Gehenna Event cards? Time to put them to use since your opponents will be using weenies eventually. Thirst, Nightmares upon Nightmares, Scourge of the Enochians, even Restricted Vitae and Recalled to the Founder could be considered if the deck is ready for them. Fourth Cycle will simply turn the table upside down. (If your prey only has low-cap vampire, imagine what the New Inquisition will do to his vampires.)

There are probably a lot more interesting combos that one can think of, like a Atoned Baali (or Valerius, for that matter) blocking the world.

The superior function of Barrenness is a good bonus, but I don't think you'd really need to use it a lot. Very few 1-cap vampire are of much effectiveness, despite him having the face of Arika, I mean, he can barely Governed the Unaligned.

Now for the goodies of this card. First, it is free. And it has burn option. It's a +1 Stealth, and the basic discipline is good enough. It can be used repeatedly on the enemy, and is an excellent offensive/defensive card. The most powerful aspect of this card is that it is TOTALLY free if you pull it through. The acting vampire untaps after placing this card, freeing him to do something else, like for example, Greater Curse the fella you just Barren-ed.

The big problem of this card is of course the need to put in enough Maleficia master card to make sure you get to use the card at all, since it (justly), doesn't have a DAI outferior for you to use it for another purpose. But in a deck that intends to use this card extensively, I do not expect you burning too many of them before drawing into your Maleficia cards.

(o.o)