VTES Tournament Report

On Saturday another tournament took place at the Jugged Hare in London. I'd consider the turn out fairly reasonable for early January with 16 players attending — 4x4 player tables. I can only offer my limited perspective as once again I was drawn into the event and failed to keep tabs elsewhere.

This time round I played a deck which had been tested and tweaked substantially over the previous weeks on Lackey CCG — a Ur-Shulgi based Alamut vote and bleed deck. The deck was originally based around a tap and bleed concept involving Condemn the Sins of the Father although after play testing this was reduced to a minor attack / defence mechanism.

VTES Online — Lackey CCG vs JOL + ARDB

How many acronyms can you fit in a title? Over the last few days I've been trying out the various forms of VTES online and thought I'd report back on the results...

The Joy of Ebay

Had an ebay auction arrive today, a random collection of Jyhad cards — pretty much perfectly new. They arrived in a cassette holder which I suspect had held treasured musical tapes not long before the cards were placed and entombed within it for almost a decade. It was a decent buy and contained a number of rares from the time including The Embrace, Ghoul Retainer, Freak drive, Rumours of Gehenna.

My coverage of the Jyhad base set is fairly complete, although I find it useful to grab a collection like this every now and then. It enables me to keep more decks assembled and hopefully to distribute some cards as required — it's also novel and provides all sorts of nostalgic goodness...

Immortal Grapple — VTES Artwork

Here's another take on a popular card — Immortal Grapple

This one was a struggle from the offset, I had a clear image in my head about how I wanted to to portray the shot (a much smaller minion being mangled by a much larger one viewed from the larger minion's perspective) — although this posed problems in terms of scale. The other difficulty was getting the balance right between the image reducing well and looking too cartoony...

VTES Tournament — London 7th January

There's another VTES Tournament happening early January at the Jugged Hare.

This time round I'm going to play a tried and tested deck — not an untested experimental one built the night beforehand. Anarch Free Press post: Tournament 7th January 2012 London

Hopefully it'll be possible to get a few 4 - 5 player games in before then (numbers were low last night) — if you've got easy access to Victoria Station (train / tube) come and join us! It's a relaxed atmosphere. We meet at 7PM and manage to fit in two 2 hour games in and finish up normally by 11PM — leaving plenty of time to
catch the tube / train home...

Last big VTES order — Thanks www.vtes.de

I received a large delivery from vtes.de this week and spent part of the weekend sorting out the cards. As usual, the service from Walch & Nusser was great. If you're based in Europe, you've only got the next few weeks to place an order with them — so make the most of it.

This will likely be the last large VTES order I place (asides from a few singles here and there). I grabbed a few extra starters to keep sealed for any friends that I may be able to introduce to the game. Would love to pick up a Keepers of Tradition booster — but have reconciled that I'll need to simply be patient and buy the key cards individually (Ashur Tablets, Deep Song, Enkil Cog etc)

Without Walch & Nusser or other European suppliers it's going to be quite hard for new players to pick up the game (especially at a competitive level) — they provided a valued service and will be missed.

Villein Errata — Updated 2012 tournament rules

The official tournament rules for 2012 have been released. The most topical aspect is a tweak to Villein designed to bring minion taps back into play:

Villein:
Master: trifle. Put this card on a vampire you control and move 2 or more blood from that vampire to your pool. Minion Tap cards cost { you } an additional pool. Villein costs an additional pool to play on this vampire.

Another notable change is support for the upcoming fan set:

Section 4.1 Cards allowed:
Cards allowed All cards in a player's deck must be genuine Vampire: The Eternal Struggle or Jyhad cards or official V:EKN issued cards from the only authoritative source www.vekn.net. When using V:EKN issued cards they must be color printed on standard paper and inserted into opaque sleeves before another Vampire: The Eternal Struggle or Jyhad card, this requires opaque sleeves for the whole crypt and/or library. 

The complete rulings for 2012 are available here: Rules Team Rulings 02-DEC-11

UK Nationals — Final Results and Match Report.

The results of the UK nationals has been posted over at the Anarch Free Press — including a brief match report on the final: www.anarchfreepress.com — results and final match report

Burst of Sunlight — more VTES artwork.

I decided to have a go at some more VTES artwork and taking into account the lessons I learnt from the last card. I spent quite a bit more time on this one, but I'm very happy with the results:

Although I got caught up in the detail (like the last card) this time I was able to ensure that the image was striking and would scale well by using plenty of contrast (including colours). Again I used Sketchbook Pro on the iPad — I'm happy with the process, it has quite a natural feel to it (you don't really get more hands on) and I doubt I'm going to bother with a tablet. For those interested here's an overview of the process:

Basic VTES set buying guide.

Just came across a useful breakdown of the various VTES sets, what to buy and what you should expect to pay — it's a useful guide if slightly dated:

VTES Newbie — Guide to Collecting VTES

The most obvious change is the availability of the more recent sets (Keepers of Tradition etc) but a lot of the information seems to hold true and it contains a useful overview for new buyers. The site also has some good pointers for teaching the game to new players — definitely worth a quick scan.