At Your Disposal : Ex Nihilo

Well, if Vtes doesn't come up with new expansion(s) soon, I will have to write about Ascendance eventually. But meanwhile let's look at a very special (and requires pretty much a special deck for it) card - Ex Nihilo.

The first time I saw this card I didn't realize how powerful it can be (it happens a lot to me, you need to write "+10 bleed" on a card to make me realize a card is good) During then I have yet to understand the value of an on-table +1 Stealth. And that's only part of the cool stuff that Ex-Nihilo gives your vampire.

So basically you have this card on a vampire and you pay 1 blood for +1 Stealth every round or you can burn the card, or burn the vampire during your master phase.

But the +1 Stealth is only the icing for what this card truly offers you - it gives you the ability to ignore aggravated damage! On the other hand, it reduced the damage that you do to zero - which means that you can't really rely on the vampire to damage the enemy. This may sounds like a completely defensive package, and it does work very well as a defensive measure - but have no doubt that this card can allow the vampire with it to become a killing machine, if you know how to prepare it.

One of the most common means of doing this is with the Zombie retainer, where it still does its own damage by itself without asking for the Ex Nihilo-ed vampire's help - and as a bonus you could burn the zombie for 2 blood when you feel the pain of maintaining the Ex Nihilo for too long. And with this methodology you have a full range of options - Ghoul Retainer, Murder of Crows, Elephants, or even just Lady Thunder. (Why you'd have Lady Thunder in such a deck is open for discussion -though she does have DOM and THA, so probably useable in a Nihilo bleed deck) Well, it all sounds cool on paper but I assure you that in practice this will not do much more than being another defensive enhancement for your vampire.

THA-abled vampires play with Trap and Weather Control with Ex Nihilo. (Please remember not to play Zombie AND Weather Control at the same time, the zombies will be blown away too) The Weather Control damage dealt to your own vampire is neutralized by Ex Nihilo, while the enemy will have a great time suffering in the storm. This is a much more effective killing engine, but it however, suffers from the issue of a thin selection of vampires without playing Master Discipline cards, and most of them are 7-cap and up. (Ambrogino Giovanni seems to be the most popular vampire for this, since he has +Stealth +Bleed as his base and merged ability, and he has a great ability to recover some blood). Remember to use Theft too, not only does it help your vampire to regain some blood after the Nihilo is burnt, it also effectively deals 2 "damage" to your opponent while the Nihilo in on. (You don't the blood of course, but who cares?)

But I personally think that using Ex Nihilo as a combat package is quite a waste for the effort it required to maintain this card. In the best case scenario, in my opinion, this card should be maximized in a deck where vampires can either take multi-actions in a round, and/or able to recover the blood spent on maintaining the Ex Nihilo. And all the NEC bloodlines have some benefits in this area. (The Giovannis already have DOM...)

First, many Samedis and Harbingers have FOR. With FOR we all know that Freak Drives will help them in taking multiple actions in a round, maximizing the +1 Stealth given by Ex Nihilo, and we also know that Samedis have lots of things to do in a round - Bleed, Off Kilter, Cemetery, Reanimated Corpse, Decompose etc etc. And once the vampire ran out of blood (and they do run out of those really fast), use Restoration to get those blood back. On the other hand, the FOR allows you to handle the occasional aggravated damage that comes along to prevent the vampire from going into torpor in those rare occasions that it is actually blocked.

The Nagaraja has even better blood recovery abilities - Emergency Rations, Consume the dead etc etc. The deadliest thing about this is that many of them has DOM, and that makes them excellent bleeding minions. The extra +1 Stealth is deadly in this case.

The one issue about Ex Nihilo is the maintainence. Eventually your vampire will run out of blood, since it cannot gain any while Ex is Nihiloing it. The way around is therefore to burn the Ex Nihilo when your vampire ran out of blood, and then quickly regain enough blood and slap a new Nihilo on it.

There are some vampires that will do very well with Ex Nihilo too, for example, Eze, since he gets a free extra action with his special ability, and he can use voter cap to regain a good number of blood after the Nihilo is burnt; and Oliver Thrace will just Weather Control away anyone who dared to block him without ability to generate aggravated damage.

Nevertheless, using Ex-Nihilo in a deck is unlikely to be a coincidence, since the maintainance cost is pretty high, though it'd be interesting to just include a copy or 2, just in case, since it can actually remove a lot of combat threat. The good thing is that Ex Nihilo works pretty well even at basic NEC, so it is not hard to use it in any deck with the relevant discipline.

You know what? I'm surprised that I've yet to see one of Keith's deck doing this - tweaked to a ridiculously effective and surprising level of course.

(o.o)