Evaluating a limited card pool for optimal selection

This short article was originally posted on the White Wolf Forum in response to Atomweaver's Deck Mashup Challenge. This is intended to be a primer on how to review a pair of starter decks to see if you can, and how you should, combine them to make the best deck that you can from them.

In this example, we will consider the Toreador and Brujah starters from Keepers of Tradition.

This is the complete list of cards that we can choose from, after which we'll review each section and type of cards.

    The Two Decks Together:

    Crypt [24 vampires] Capacity min: 2 max: 11 average: 6.58333
    ------------------------------------------------------------
    2x Adana de Sforza       11 CEL OBF POT PRE PRO aus  inner circle Brujah:4
    2x Rafael de Corazon     11 AUS CEL DOM OBF PRE      inner circle Toreador:4
    2x Jann Berger           10 CEL POT PRE dem for      prince       Brujah:4
    2x Epikasta Rigatos      8  AUS DOM PRE cel          prince       Toreador:4
    2x Eugene                8  AUS CEL FOR PRE          primogen     Toreador:4
    2x Kateline Nadasdy      7  AUS CEL PRE                           Toreador:4
    2x Tomaine               6  CEL POT PRE              primogen     Brujah:4
    2x Herbert Westin        5  OBF PRE pot                           Brujah:4
    2x Reginald Moore        4  PRE                      primogen     Brujah:4
    2x Thomas De Lutrius     4  aus cel pre              primogen     Toreador:4
    2x Garret                3  pot pre                               Brujah:4
    2x Sean Andrews          2  cel                                   Toreador:4

    Library [154 cards]
    ------------------------------------------------------------
    Action [21]
      4x Enrage
      1x Entrancement
      2x Entrenching
      5x Harass
      9x Public Trust

    Action Modifier [11]
      4x Approximation of Loyalty
      4x Crocodile's Tongue
      3x Suppressing Fire

    Action Modifier/Combat [5]
      5x Resist Earth's Grasp

    Combat [46]
      6x Brute Force
      2x Concealed Weapon
      3x Immortal Grapple
      6x Psyche!
      6x Pursuit
      3x Relentless Pursuit
      4x Slam
      4x Stutter-Step
      6x Taste of Vitae
      3x Torn Signpost
      3x Weighted Walking Stick

    Equipment [25]
      4x Bang Nakh -- Tiger's Claws
      5x Beretta 9mm
      1x Bowl of Convergence
      2x Bundi
      3x Desert Eagle
      1x Drum of Xipe Totec
      2x IR Goggles
      1x Ivory Bow
      1x Mark V
      1x Phased Motion Detector
      1x Sengir Dagger
      3x Sniper Rifle

    Master [20]
      1x Auspex
      2x Celerity
      2x Contingency Planning
      2x Fame
      1x KRCG News Radio
      2x Major Boon
      1x Nod
      1x Potence
      2x Presence
      1x Rack, The
      1x Tension in the Ranks
      4x Vessel

    Political Action [10]
      2x Finding the Path
      4x Kine Resources Contested
      1x Praxis Seizure: Houston
      1x Praxis Seizure: Washington, D.C.
      2x Year of Fortune

    Reaction [16]
      3x Eagle's Sight
      4x Minor Irritation
      5x On the Qui Vive
      4x Telepathic Misdirection

We will start with the crypt. If you are combining two crypts, you want to be able to ensure that you get the best vampires in your opening crypt in as many games as possible. With the Keepers of Tradition starters, this is eased by having all of the vampires duplicated. If we wanted to be able to do some voting, we would keep duplicate copies of Princes/Justicars and might even consider including an Inner Circle member, if the pool regaining abilities of the starters will support it. Unfortunately, these two starters cannot support 11 capacity vampires, so we will drop all of the vampires that are above 8 capacity. We'll duplicate the 3 vampires that can play bleed bounce (Telepathic Misdirection) to ensure that we have some effective defense against large bleeds sent towards us at stealth. This leaves us room for 6 more minions, and we'll choose the 6 that are best able to help us overload our prey after a bounced bleed (i.e. the cheapest ones with Presence).

These are the 12 vampires we'll use for this deck.

    Crypt:

    Crypt [12 vampires] Capacity min: 3 max: 8 average: 6.08333
    ------------------------------------------------------------
    2x Epikasta Rigatos      8  AUS DOM PRE cel  prince   Toreador:4
    2x Eugene                8  AUS CEL FOR PRE  primogen Toreador:4
    2x Kateline Nadasdy      7  AUS CEL PRE               Toreador:4
    2x Herbert Westin        5  OBF PRE pot               Brujah:4
    1x Tomaine               6  CEL POT PRE      primogen Brujah:4
    1x Reginald Moore        4  PRE              primogen Brujah:4
    1x Thomas De Lutrius     4  aus cel pre      primogen Toreador:4
    1x Garret                3  pot pre                   Brujah:4

Having decided our crypt, our next simplest choice is the master cards selection. In most 5 player games, there are ~8 turns before the first player is ousted and rarely more than 14 turns in the entire game. With that in mind, we will want to keep our master selection to 12-18 cards, as we aren't likely to see the entire deck but we would like to be able to play a master card on every turn. Ones that gain us pool or that recover pool spent on our vampires are our top priority. The second priority is to use our master phase to protect our pool or our minions, so anything that can help with that is next. Cards which are situational or require too much cooperation from the rest of the table will be bypassed. We are not likely to have more than three vampires in play, so the actions we choose later will be critical to ensure that we get the most bang for our buck.

    Master Cards:

    Master [13]
      1x Auspex
      2x Fame
      1x KRCG News Radio
      2x Major Boon
      1x Nod
      1x Rack, The
      1x Tension in the Ranks
      4x Vessel

Normally we would not expect to have enough untap in two starters to be able to defend The Rack, but our opponents don't have to know that this is what we are playing, so careful play can keep them from attempting the steal action to begin with. If our predator does take an action to steal The Rack, we aren't out any pool, and that was an action that could have been an attempt to bleed us or remove our pool with a vote. The Rack will be our Red Herring to distract our opponents from the non-wall nature of our deck whose offense will be strong bleeds. The Major Boons will allow us to pre-emptively take a bleed that will be for 1 so that we have defense against larger bleeds from our predator. Getting a Major Boon on your predator is a very strong defense, particularly as they get to be closer to being ousted themselves. The Auspex master will allow us to upgrade Thomas de Lutria into a bleed bounce defender, so we will keep it. If we had a wider selection of vampires, we'd choose a better minion that already had superior Auspex and play another pool gaining master instead.

Now that we know what our minions will look like and the options we have to regain pool, we will next consider how best to defend our pool. We will take as much untap as we can as well as all of the bleed bounce. As there are some pieces of equipment that will help us a lot when blocking, we can safely splurge here on reaction cards. We'll actually take all of them, from both decks.

    Reaction Cards:

    Reaction [16]
      3x Eagle's Sight
      4x Minor Irritation
      5x On the Qui Vive
      4x Telepathic Misdirection

The Minor Irritations are only useful to us when we start defending against the action while we are untapped and are only useful to us against younger vampires, so we know that we'll need to equip Epikasta or Eugene with a defensive weapon and plan for them to stay untapped when we have Minor Irritations in hand. If we don't have opponents minions that are less than 8 cap coming against us, we'll discard these as soon as we can.

Now that we know a bit of our plan for defense (large minion with superior Auspex untapped at the end of our turn with a weapon), we can consider how we will oust our prey. Suppressing Fire and Resist Earth's Grap are our only options for stealth (but they do mesh well with our plan to have a gun and with the amount of superior Celerity we plan to have in play), and our minions won't reliably be old enough to play the others, so we will keep all of the Suppressing Fire and Resist Earth's Grasp cards.

    Action Modifiers:

    Action Modifier [3]
      3x Suppressing Fire

    Action Modifier/Combat [5]
      5x Resist Earth's Grasp

We have 25 pieces of equipment to choose from to optimize our defensive and offensive combat abilities. As we know we will need to be defensive, we'll keep the Sniper Rifles and Desert Eagles as they are our cheapest options. We'll throw in the Bowl of Convergence and Ivory Bow as they are simply too good to leave out.

    Equipment:

    Equipment [8]
      1x Bowl of Convergence
      3x Desert Eagle
      1x Ivory Bow
      3x Sniper Rifle

As we now know our defense and our ability to force our actions to succeed, the next thing to decide with what other actions we should include. The strongest actions that we can take are those that do 3 points of damage to our prey. We'll include the Kine Resources Contested and the Public Trusts. The Entrancement is also very strong, so we'll include it as well. Harass will be good for us once a copy of Fame is in play, so a few copies of it will go in.

    Actions:

    Action [14]
      1x Entrancement
      4x Harass
      9x Public Trust

    Political Action [4]
      4x Kine Resources Contested

With the amount of stealth available to us, and the amount of blocking we know that we will have to do, the choices for combat are made last, but they are not the least important. Only 3 of our final minions have Potence, so all of those cards will be removed. We'll keep all of the Celerity and disciplineless cards to ensure that our combats are as effective as they can be.

    Combat:

    Combat [27]
      2x Concealed Weapon
      6x Psyche!
      6x Pursuit
      4x Stutter-Step
      6x Taste of Vitae
      3x Weighted Walking Stick

Now we have our finished deck, made only from the contents of two starters.

    Final Deck Mashup:

    Crypt [12 vampires] Capacity min: 3 max: 8 average: 6.08333
    ------------------------------------------------------------
    2x Epikasta Rigatos      8  AUS DOM PRE cel  prince   Toreador:4
    2x Eugene                8  AUS CEL FOR PRE  primogen Toreador:4
    2x Kateline Nadasdy      7  AUS CEL PRE               Toreador:4
    2x Herbert Westin        5  OBF PRE pot               Brujah:4
    1x Tomaine               6  CEL POT PRE      primogen Brujah:4
    1x Reginald Moore        4  PRE              primogen Brujah:4
    1x Thomas De Lutrius     4  aus cel pre      primogen Toreador:4
    1x Garret                3  pot pre                   Brujah:4

    Library [90 cards]
    ------------------------------------------------------------
    Action [14]
      1x Entrancement
      4x Harass
      9x Public Trust

    Action Modifier [3]
      3x Suppressing Fire

    Action Modifier/Combat [5]
      5x Resist Earth's Grasp

    Combat [27]
      2x Concealed Weapon
      6x Psyche!
      6x Pursuit
      4x Stutter-Step
      6x Taste of Vitae
      3x Weighted Walking Stick

    Equipment [8]
      1x Bowl of Convergence
      3x Desert Eagle
      1x Ivory Bow
      3x Sniper Rifle

    Master [13]
      1x Auspex
      2x Fame
      1x KRCG News Radio
      2x Major Boon
      1x Nod
      1x Rack, The
      1x Tension in the Ranks
      4x Vessel

    Political Action [4]
      4x Kine Resources Contested

    Reaction [16]
      3x Eagle's Sight
      4x Minor Irritation
      5x On the Qui Vive
      4x Telepathic Misdirection

What thoughts and feedback do you have on this process?