Combat Defense For Combat Decks

Okay, it is widely known that there are basically three main offensive strategies - combat, vote and bleed - that decks need to be able to defend against to be competitive. However, if you extend this theory to combat you can start to build a deck that will be able to fight exceptionally well.

If you get down to the bare bones of it there are four basic combat strategies: Avoidance, Additional Strikes, Damage Prevention and Ranged combat. So therefore if a combat deck is going to work well in both combat offence and combat defence it needs to be able to cope with all three forms of combat.

In terms of combat defences, most of the above options are pretty much self explanatory: Dodge, maneouvre or S:CE; Dodge with additional strikes; prevent damage; maneouvre to range. But this will mean that most decks will have a weakness against their own style of combat deck (ranged combat will "shoot" each other, etc) Therefore it becomes nessesary to work out a combat defence and offence for against all combat types.

Below is a list of a lot of standard combat types and how you can get around many problems:

In the below descriptions avoidance combat will be termed only as S:CE, as the defences against dodge/additional and ranged combat cover the other aspects of avoidance.

Gangrel (Damage Prevention):

Additional strike combat poses little problem for the Gangrel; Scorpion Sting, damage retainers and Carrion Crows take care of the offence, whilst the vast amounts of damage prevention take care of the defence.

Damage Prevention combat is difficult to be offensive against but at least it doesn't bugger you up as well, as your defensive capabilities will not be stretched as far as many other combat decks might be able to take them. To offence, its probably best to hit big and aggro, and draw out the fortitude. You may get a few nasty aggro points in here and there...

Ranged Combat: Gangrel's best bet against ranged combat is to either destroy the guns (if gun combat) or to maneouvre up to close, as they can get quite a few maneouvres from protean. They also have a couple of dubious ranged strikes that are debatable whether they are worth using or not.

Note: unpreventable damage of the Assamites and Tremere can be pretty deadly to you so you need to make sure you can get up to close range fairly easily.

Gangrel have the dog pack for use against S:CE, also the good potence crossovers means that Immortal Grapple becomes fairly playable too.

Brujah (Additional Strike)

A standard Brujah close range potence celerity deck is suseptable to damage prevention combat. The best bet is to draw out the Skin of steels; I've found that the threat of Increased strength when you play a blur can be enough to bring them out, even if you don't have the puch to back it up properly. Brujah are weakest in offence against Damage Prevention, so possibly try and avoid combat with these decks.

Additional strike: Offensively you have very little to worry about, you are likely to be able to hit someone fairly easily: if you are blocking you can see whether something is nasty goinmg to hit you and dodge it. If you are acting and have plenty of big hits you can force out the dodges and the hit them for more additionals with quickness or lightning refelexes.

Ranged combat: you have two options: either catch and immortal grapple or chuck something nasty (ie Sewer lid) at them. This is probably the brujah's strong point.

S:CE can be stopped by Immortal Grapple and psyche (although this allows cycling of S:CE's).

Tremere: (ranged combat) [Note: I will assume that thoughts betrayed is banned as it should be]

Additional Strike: Dodging can cause you problems, but Blood to water and fast reaction get around this. if a brujah maneouvre's up close it can mean that you're dead, so a few dodges for defense and an intensive amount of maneouvring is required.

Damage Prevention: provide you can out maneouvre them you are pretty safe - stealing blood and unpreventable ranged damage is the best way to go against these guys.

Ranged combat: the only problems you will have are against celeritous ranged combat who can hit you bigger than you can hit back, a shotgun ritual/walk of flames for the early aggro can be fairly effective in stopping those additionals getting you too badly panned.

S:CE Fast reaction is the best thing available for the tremere.

You probably all know this already, but for anyone who doesn't then I hope its been of help.

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