One Clan to Rule them all : Daughters of Cacophony : HttB

I find my tendency to salivate...I mean, predisposed towards nice charming female art a key ingredient in my fascination with this very interesting clan to play with in Vtes. (And no, I refuse to use Harlan Graves - he should stay IN the grave). The Daughters of Cacophony, besides being one of the very few clans that (was supposed to) was to be a single gender clan of vampires (they even announced it in their name of the clan!). As far as I know, only the Ahrimanes are supposed to be a single gender clan. (Curses! HttB spoiled all that!)

Nevertheless, the Daughters is quite a "romantic" clan to play, using their voice as their main weapon against their opponents. Melpominee is a very interesting discipline to play, and while they were quite effective in the past, with HttB the Daughters are now among the deadliest of clans to look out for.

Let's look at the traditional kill path of the Daughters. With PRE and MEL, the Daughters had always been viable at voting. In the past, they relied on Conductor as well as their Opera House, and the occasional PRE vote push to get their votes through, since no Daughters have any titles on them. To do that they often need quite some time to set up, getting enough Daughters onto the table, with or without breed cards, and then get the Opera House and/or Conductor into play and hope for the best. The new Daughter's route for vote superiority did not change a lot with HttB, though they did get their first titled vampire - Scout Youngwood. (But of course, her problem is that she's group 6)

The Daughter's main issue had always been stealth. With PRE, they could (technically) use "Majesty" stealth, or capitalize on their FOR to take multi-actions in a single round. MEL stealth is actually pretty effective if you can get enough of the key cards (I'm talking about Siren's Lure here of course, Missing Voice is a dozen a dime), but now with Virtuosa, the Daughter's stealth had suddenly hit the roof.

Virtuosa is probably one of the strongest cards given to the Daughters. With PRE, the Daughters can afford to use Virtuosa to push through votes and Voter Cap back the high blood cost if they can secure vote superiority. Since PRE is in-clan with the Daughters, and now with Lilith's Blessing to get the necessary Master discipline cards, this seems like a reasonably easy way to do it. On the other hand, FOR offers Restoration to quickly return blood to the depleted Daughers, not to mention they have the highest yield blood-gain action card in the world -Concert Tour.

That said, the Daughters is one of the most effective clan when combined with Anarch tech. Not only do they now have access to Baron titles, they also become a deadly combat threat with the addition of Ground Fighting. With a maneuver and the ability to cancel Immortal Grapples, the Target Vital + Catotonic Fear combo is deadly in the hands of these Daughters, who can in the first place, FOR or PRE their way out of almost any combat. The interesting vote push with Madrigal plus Rant! is also quite interesting, potentially giving the Conductor and/or Opera House aided Daughters a deadly +3 votes per Daughter.

The Daughters were also given another deadly weapon in HttB - Shattering Crescendo. This card is both effective defensively or offensively. A Crescendo deck itself is a viable deck type, and it now gives the Daughters a all over the table threat when combined with Virtuosa.

Several referendum cards had been given to the Daughters to make their vote deck unique - you can easily find how useful and effective they can become by facing one of these vote ladies. Let me assure you that they are a lot more effective than the normal KRCs and Consanguinous Boons that you're used to.

The Daughters aren't very good defensively though. Almost every one of them has some issues when it comes to blocking, and anyone with ANY stealth will probably have a reasonably good time bleeding the Daughters. Their main defense will remain bloating their pool, but nowadays they can sing their predators to death as needed.

The Daughter's very own toy - the Choir, has unfortunately not seen much effective use yet, even with the addition of Harmony to increase it's effectiveness. To some degree I think it is due to the power that these ladies wield in so many other fields. Who needs choir-bleeding when you can do so much more?

(o.o)