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Recently, lots of winning decks are playing a large number of master cards. It goes from animalism rush Erik Torstensson with 23 master cards on 79 to Antonio Cobo Cuenca’s Cybele/Aksinia Daclau 45 masters decks. When it used to be the unique specialty of Anson and Huitzilopochtli to allow players building huge masters module, now is a time when anybody can run them in nearly every deck.

 

As a consequence, it is logical to wonder what the reasons for this evolution are and to analyse how masters do impact the game.

 

I would attribute to two different factors the growth of masters played. First, there are new vampires that allow you to gain one master phase (Cybele, Nana Buruku), to use dead masters (Aksinia), second there are masters that allow you to play big modules without deck jamming/ hand jamming too much: wash, villain, liquidation, ashur tablets.

Playing 20 triffle cards indeed looks as good as playing 15/16 regular master cards which has been the norm in regular decks in the past. It will generally not disturb your cards flow too much (although obviously as an aggressive player I would remind you that rush and stealth bleed decks don’t like playing too many masters generally) and it can give you huge possibilities.

 

To understand, let’s focus on Eduardo Mateus build (TWD 26^th September 2009) in his !Malkavian S/B deck :

 

Master [21]

1x The Coven

2x Wash

3x Vessel

2x Dreams of the Sphinx

1x The Barrens

1x The Admonitions

6x Ashur Tablets

1x Jake Washington

1x Secure Haven

1x Anarch Troublemaker

1x Archon Investigation

1x Direct Intervention

 

Compared to the classical S/B module we could build close to:

 

Master [12]

2x Pentex subversion

1x Misdirection

4x Dreams of the sphinx

3x Wash

1x Coven

1x Giant’s blood

 

Well, I do not like several things about Eduardo module, mainly the lack of Pentex lol, but let’s admit that. What do we see with his deck? By playing 6 ashur tablets, he is achieving several goals at the same time: he allows himself to be more flexible to what he might encounter in terms of library cards (reduce proportions for example), he has got a way to get important masters back again, he’s getting bloat cards.

That allows him to play more 1x one shot masters such as Jake Washington, the out of turn masters, for example. Note the presence of adminitions and Barrens that help him dig through the deck faster. Good call, I would say. Vessels are trifle so it does that give too much weight to the module.

 

When you are building a deck, you now have two different ways to build it: work with or work without ashur tablets. It will probably depend on the deck you are playing but also strongly on the way you like to play. An ashur deck will be less efficient on the short run, because the card flow is slightly worse than regular deck, and because you might want to play some “kinder” (surprise cards you play once a game against specific decks) more than usual, with a way to get them back, but you are going to build solid foundations to finish the game, should you survive till then.

 

What allows for playing 40+ masters modules efficiently is not new. Play Parthenon and/or a vampire granting 2 master phases + Anthelios to get important masters back at the right time, and off you go. But even with that, I don’t recall of decks running 40 masters relying on this. Hand jamming masters would be far too dangerous and too frequent. Now, you have a killer card to allow you that kind of stuff: I am of course referring to Liquidation.

Liquidation when it goes out was the territory of Giovannis. The obvious combination it does with sudario refraction and shambling hordes are probably among the easiest and most powerful of all V:tes. Before 2009, only player TWDing with more than 1 liquidation was an Imbued deck in 2007. Imbued also goes well with liquidation of course.

 

Liquidation is surely getting pretty well with Parthelios combo but not well enough to rely on it, because you are losing non-master cards in the process and it can be resources heavy. But KoT with ashur tablets changed that situation. You now have a reliable way to get any card back, plus both cards grant you pool. Alfred Behrend’s Anson deck in EC was running like 8 liquidation and 8 ashur tablets, in addition to villain/ Golconda on Anson. Result was I could never pass him in 2 hours, even with 15 minions bleeding on the table.

 

So now you might understand where I was up to. Not only when you are making any deck you have the choice between Ashur tablets or not, but now you can also wonder if you play them, should you couple them with Liquidation. It is definitely not dumb to think that investing in a Parthenon, and maybe a Rumours of Gehenna, to gain pool and control the table later on the endgame might be a wise plan.

Focusing on Antonio’s master module (TWD 10^th January 2010) in his Cybele/Aksinia deck (note that both vampires have ways to use master efficiently):

 

Masters (44 cards) (out of 77 in the whole deck)

 

1 Archon Investigation

6 Ashur Tablets

1 Blind Spot

2 Direct Intervention

2 Dreams of the Sphinx

1 Fortschritt Library

1 Giant's Blood

2 Golconda: Inner Peace

2 Information Highway

1 Jake Washington (Hunter)

4 Liquidation

1 Metro Underground

2 Misdirection

1 Monastery of Shadows

1 Pentex Subversion

1 Sudden Reversal

1 The Coven

2 The Parthenon

6 Villein

1 Vox Domini

1 Wash

4 Zylla's Valley

 

What can we see: a twist between useful cards played in several exemplary: villain, liquidation, Ashur tablets. Good cards that could be useful once in play. So since you are digging the deck very fast with Liquidation, you have good spots at getting them back fairly easily with Ashur tablets or with Parthelios. Most trivial exemples would be metro underground, monastery of shadows, blind spot ,dreams, fortschritt… And the obvious cards you want to have when you have 2 masters and Anthelios: Jake, Pentex, Out-of-turn master cards.

 

If we remove situational cards and add some Parthenons, we have a fairly strong module that could probably enter any deck, isn’t that right: in the same order as Antonio’s list,

1 Archon investigation

6 Ashur tablets

2 Direct Intervention

2 Dreams of the sphinx

1 Fortschritt library

1 Giant’s blood

1 Jake Washington

4 Liquidation

1 Misdirection

1 Pentex subversion

1 Sudden reversal

1 Coven

6 Parthenon, the

6 Villein or 6 Vessel

1 Vox domini

1 Wash

= 36 masters module that allows you pool gain, library flexibility and survival abilities. Of course, you better play that with built-in 2 master phases, but it is not impossible to overcome this.

 

It looks pretty good, isn’t it? I would gladly consider playing a low resources consuming deck like that. Of course if you have 7 vampires out, all using 3 cards every action, it is probably not worth it. But I see many potential applications: what about recurring those bloating cards such as founders of the ebony kingdom, govern the unaligned, or remove permanent from your deck with magic of the smith to keep only bleed and defence cards. There is probably a lot of unexploited potential.

 

Now that this point is made, the main question I see is concerning the impact of those decks on the metagame. First thing is to understand that there is never a miracle way to deal with a specific kind of deck because these decks of a kind are often very different. You don’t have the same way to deal with war ghouls and with khazar’s diary, although they are both considered allies deck. For masters it is even more complicated since they can come with swarm, mid-cap or fatty vampires. So, strangely, the better way to deal with them might be destruction of Anthelios for example, or ash heap removal cards (that exists, yes). Is it worth it? Might be. What is for sure is that you need to comprehend how those decks work. Identify how powerful might be 3^rd Ashur tablet touching the ground, calculate the bloat potential and the agressivity potential of the deck, determine what is the current strategy of the player. It should be a good start.