Well, generally the creation of any deck comes with either the construction of the library, or the crypt. (yap, I realized that I've just stated an obvious fact~); so obviously the crypt selection is one of the most important aspect of deck construction. But curiously, if you ask around and look around, very seldom do you see people talk about the crypt construction process as vigorously or enthusiastically about how they put their library together. Granted, 90 cards is a lot more complicated than a crypt of 12, and selecting vampires with the appropriate ability and disciplines for any deck shouldn't be that much of an issue, right?
Not at all, if I may say.
The composition of any crypt, despite being only 12 of them in most cases, is very much as crucial as library construction.
If you draw a bad hand from your library, you have multiple ways of getting rid of them and quickly change them into something useful - not so easy for the crypt, for most cases you can only get one, at most 2, new vampires from your crypt onto your uncontrolled region, and that will usually cost you your influence transfers, making getting those vampires onto the table even later - not to mention that a bad hand is usually due to the fact that you don't have the right vampires to work with from your opening crypt - see how important your crypt composition is now?
Barring some unique and thematic funky decks such as all the Soul Gem decks, a typical crypt consist of the following -
4-6 mid-cap vampires with all required disciplines, most at superior
0-2 high-cap vampires with all required disciplines at superior, rarely at inferior.
4-6 low-cap weenies with some or all required disciplines, mostly at inferior.
If you're lucky, the above composition will be able to give you a reasonable opening crypt to exploit the deck-type and card range that you're working on. However, this is a dream that only the most rudimentary deck type, such as dedicated stealth bleed or single discipline decks, can achieve. Most of the time, optimum vampires are not so easy to come by, and the crypt composition requires compromising in order to make it work better.
Therefore to start with, one should first consider what discipline(s) is needed for the deck to work - this usually comprise of at last 2 disciplines, sometimes more. The first step of choosing the crypt composition is therefore choosing the key vampires that you want. Most decks will work well when a vampire can use all the cards at superior, this magic situation is usually achieved with a 6-cap vampire for most clans, that usually comes with all 3 superior in-clan disciplines, but sometimes you can get it with a 5-cap, or even a 4-cap if you're using only 2 disciplines. This (or these) vampire is most of the time the one you want to have t your opening crypt everytime you play a game.
In order to make that happen, a minimum of 3 copies of that vampire is needed in your crypt in order to have a good chance of getting it. After you've done that, insert other relevant vampires of the same caliber (if any), or fill it up with other vampires of the relevant cap-size.
Now this is an over-simplification of the crypt construction process, but it is pretty much the basics I take to create any deck -
Step 1 - Star vampire x 3
Step 2 - vampires with most required disciplines at superior x 3 that is below 7 cap
Step 3 - weenies x 4
Step 4 - super vampire with all required disciplines at superior x 2
The numbers will change a little here or there depending on the deck type, as well as the collection of vampire cards that I have, but that's pretty much there. Of course, the grouping of the vampires will affect who one can use with whom.
There are numerous instances where the above guidelines is not applicable, mostly due to necessity or thematic concerns. For example, almost all title-based vote decks requires high-cap titled vampires in large numbers. For those decks, especially those who work with Inner Circles and Justicars, mid-caps are rarely that common, and are mostly replaced with higher cap titled vampires. For those crypt, the library will have to make compensation by putting in pool recovery cards as well as accelerators - without those the crypt will simply be too slow and unwieldy for competitive play.
There are also superstar vampires where the one single vampire is crucial for the deck to start. For those decks it's common to see that same vampire taking up 4-6 slots in the crypt to ensure it always appears in the opening hand. Nowadays with Wider View it is easier to get the relevant vampires into play without choking up the crypt completely, but even so it is rare to see less than 4 copies of the star vampire in the crypt.
Weenies (even pretty irrelevant ones) in a crypt is important - they add security to your deck, and provides actions that are sometimes needed to either fend off your predator or increase your bleed capability. Even superstar vampires will need help if they go into torpor, so including a good number (up to 6) is always a good thing in almost every deck (not so much for Settites Life decks, but that is a pretty unique deck type)
One thing is for sure, never underestimate the necessity of creating a crypt properly, it is every bit as difficult and important to have an efficient and consistent crypt.
(o.o)
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