Category Archives: Rivals

Vampire Wednesday Morning

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One of the things I like about Renegade Games and what they are trying to do with Vampire the Masquerade: Rivals is establish a community for the game.

Vampire Wednesdays is their attempt at creating their version of Friday Night Magic. To support this they have been running a weekly live stream on twitch on Wednesdays. With the video being shared on YouTube days later.

Ideally because I don’t do twitch I’d love them to push the live stream to YouTube at the same time, or at least put the video up on YouTube within 24 hours. But I can only dream.

At the moment the only other player I know who likes the game is Diego. Luckily the day he is free to play is a Wednesday. Sadly due to timezones and availability we are playing many hours before the Vampire Wednesday live stream. So any fun formats, rule changes introduced for those joining in are missed. I suppose we could use them the following time we play.

This morning Diego and I met up to play a two player game of Rivals.

I played Toreador, whilst Diego played Malkavian. Once again these were the pre-built decks straight out of the core box with no modification.

We were still having to refer to the rulebook to look things up. Like conspiracies, we hadn’t played them before. But for our second game we were getting better!

I have to say I enjoyed playing Toreador.

My experience with the deck was far far different from Gavin last week. The cards were much much more kind to me. I had Search Engine and Influencer in my opening hand. Both Unhosted Actions. So they were both played for my first turn. A great set up turn. Influencer was great as it set up playing a scheme turn two to take a prestige from Diego.

Whilst Search Engine gave me the Rivals version of the scry mechanic in MtG. I love this card. Being able to basically control the top card of your deck with this deck is important. Several of the cards in the deck have you revealing the top card to get some kind of benefit, like extra attack or influence.

It’s also important with the Toreador deck to get a retainer early on to start buffing your vampires and gaining agenda points. Which I was able to do on my second turn. Getting a vagrant also allowed me to mitigate the S.A.D. damage at the end of my turn until a second one appeared in the street. So I was happy leaving it there to chip away at Diego’s Coterie.

Diego had a nice card that exhausted all my vampires so I couldn’t attack his vampire he was going to claim the Prince of the City with. Unlucky for Diego he never got to benefit from it as I claimed it off his vampire on my turn.

In the end I won by TKO or more correctly sending all his vampires to Torpor.

I enjoyed Rivals as a two player game. It was different to last weeks three player game. I like both player counts. But I can see how a deck needs to be built for either a two player or multiplayer game. Multiplayer your deck can be a bit slower to kick in, but in two player you need to be out of the starting block as quick as possible.

There wasn’t enough time to have a three player game with a friend of Diego’s that turned up mid game. So we had a couple of games of Perudo before I had to head back home.

I’m looking forward to our next Vampire Wednesday Morning.

Commanding Rivals

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This morning three people gathered to duke it out on the battlefield with their chosen commanders.

It was a casual smack down using WotC Commander precon decks. I had all the precon decks from 2017 to now with me (except the anthology decks) for us to play with.

Gavin was using his own precon, while Diego and myself chose from the recent D&D ones. My precons were “naked”! I have 3 years worth of precons to sleeve. Which is a lot of decks, and I need to find the funds to purchase the Dragon Shields to do the job.

Here are the commanders we played.

  • Me – Vrondriss, Rage of Ancients (D&D precon)
  • Diego – Galea, Kindler of Hope (D&D precon)
  • Gavin – Adrix and Nev, Twincasters (Strixhaven precon)

Early on Diego established himself as a big threat. His Commander with a couple of nasty bits of equipment that gave it +10/+10 and double strike was scary. One hit death to Commander damage if it landed. Thank god there was no trample added to it.

I was way behind both of them on the land drops. So I was happy for Diego to be the big distraction as I tried to catch up and build up a winning board state (see the photo above). All I needed was to be able to chump block if attacked by him.

Luckily there were very few answers for them both to stop my flyers chipping away at them or stop me using direct damage to control their board state (ie remove potential blockers or sending Diego’s Commander to hell). It was also lucky that Diego wasn’t able to give his equipped Commander hexproof. That would have made life extremely difficult.

But in the end the dragon horde prevailed and won the game.

Next up was a learning game of Vampire the Masquerade: Rivals.

We played using the pre-constructed decks. I gave Gavin and Diego first choice and I played what was left. Below is who played what.

  • Brujah – me (rival was Gavin)
  • Toreador – Gavin (rival was Diego)
  • Ventrue – Diego (rival was me)

After a poor explanation of the rules and picking our rival we started playing.

Our first play was definitely a game of two conflicting experiences.

Gavin didn’t enjoy the game at all. He was polite and put it down to the cards he drew, and there being little he could do to make use of his clans abilities. I don’t think the poor rules explanation helped either.

I’m sure there were more rule misplays than the one we had. Well technically it wasn’t a misplay more missed rule! We missed that you could discard cards during the torpor/mend stage to heal vampires. Which would have kept Gavin in the game instead of seeing me win it. Thanks Diego for spotting that after the fact and casting a shadow over my glorious victory.

The Brujah deck I was playing was probably the simpler deck to play compared to the Toreador deck Gavin was trying to play. It is the Rivals version of a MtG aggro deck. Which is definitely one of the deck archetypes I like to play.

When Diego played Long-Term Investment I got a distinct Netrunner vibe and reminded of cards like Kati Jones.

Like Netrunner there is a lot of jargon to get used to, especially if you are not into the whole Worlds of Darkness thing. Which can add to the confusion and make the learning curve a bit more steeper than it already is.

So while Gavin won’t be playing Rivals again Diego and myself will be. I need to play the other decks. And then want to get into deck building.

But once again it was great to be playing in real life again. Especially when I win. Plus there is more gaming to look forward to at the end of the week.