Winter 2023: The Kuyen Supremacy

 

Every whisper, of every waking hour
I´m choosing my confessions
Trying to keep an eye on you
Like a hurt, lost and blinded fool
Oh no, I said too much
I set it up

Hello, visitor.

Welcome to the Thessalian scrolls. Enter freely. Go safely, and leave something of the happiness you bring.

This is a place to share information, and some pointless digression about the never-ending war of the Kindred. If you have reached this place by chance, please find out what this is all about here. If you came willingly, take a sit and allow me to share some information that can be useful or, at least, entertaining.

What you are reading is a special issue of this endless chronicle. After handling data of the tournaments of the first three months of the year, I thought it would be interesting to mix all that information together, and write a report with the accumulated information. So here we are.

First of all, a quick note for all who have read the previous entries: I made some minor alterations in some criteria, which have evolved since the creation of the blog. I have changed some archetypes denominations so that we have a clearer idea of the different kind of decks that are winning. As I have written before, the idea is that the data gathering, and also the final output, are evolving and getting more accurate. I hope I am achieving it.

I also want to clear a feature I will deliver in this kind of seasonal reports: I will indicate if what I bring to each section is the aggregation of data for those three months (accumulated), a representation of the evolution of a particular fact (evolution), or both.

As always, I want to thank all the people who are working with the tournament information, creating tools where we can check all the data for the decks and participants: El Setita Loco (also has a blog, and I have incorporated a link in the sites section), the VEKN, VTES decks, VDB, and BCN Crisis. I also want to praise all those princes and tournament runners, that are providing and publishing the info of those events. It is quite valuable for our tools. And I encourage all players to support this publicity by sharing the info, their experiences and their decks with the community.

As the image for this entry, I have chosen the city where the most successful archetype this season achieved its greatest victory (spoiler alert).

Ostrava, in the core center of Europe, seems to be the domain of some feral, highly territorial kindred

Now, let´s go. I hope you like charts.

PARTICIPANTS (evolution).

Winter season is traditionally not very populated, both in events and in players. Even then, I was able to record 60 regular tournaments in those first three months, including 1090 participants, and 2 non-regular events (Sevilla), which hosted 183 methuselahs.  The evolution on the participants is now a little simple, but in the future it will give us a view.

 

Please note that for this chapter only, I am counting both events is Sevilla, taking the total of players to 1273. I will keep those events out of the scope of the rest of this article, for the reasons I explain in here. But for the sake of completeness, I thought I should include them in the participants chapter.

Let´s see the number of tournaments and average methuselahs in them. Sevilla weekend is still here included:

Ascendant lines are usually a good sign in a chart. I am sure Spring season will consolidate the tendency.

CLANS (accumulated).

A feature that is indeed consolidating in my way of accounting the results and data is that I will take the "number of players defeated" as the main reference, counting the participating players in the events as a measure of the success of a deck, whenever is possible. I think the report is more accurate this way. According to that, the clans that have shined this season are as follows:

I think I never explained how I consider this indicator: I usually allocate a deck to the clan that has a majority in the deck´s crypt. If there is a tie (very rare case), I have considered the importance of both in the deck´s mechanic. It´s somehow subjetive, but I think there were like 1 or 2 cases, and I am sure I guessed correctly.

When we go to archetypes, we will see a link with the clans. But first I would like to highlight the huge variety we can see here. Decks with 21 different clans are represented in that chart, and Gangrel, the one that performed best, got to win over 15% of the players. Brilliant, but not overwhelming.

PLAYSTYLE (both).

Now let´s see what kind of strategies have been able to triumph. If you read the previous entries in this blog, you will surely have a clear idea that active decks tend to succeed in like half of the tournaments, and the other half is won by others, being reactive (decks focused in block and reactions), control decks (bruisers that attack other vampires consistently) or mixed strategies (commonly known as toolbox). Let us see the accumulated data (again, according to players defeated):

Even more interesting than the accumulated, we can see the evolution of these playstyles in the three months of the season:

 

Evolution on the playstyle keeps the active decks more or less constant, and what really seems to fluctuate is the range between mixed and reactive strategies, while control decks seem to be subject to some randomness. Also, we can see that in the accumulated data, mixed strategy decks have achieved slightly less success than reactive ones, but it seems to be bound to January results, and the tendency seems to favour them in the future. Q2 (Spring season) may confirm the trend, or not.

Let´s take a look at deck classification, in an accumulated chart for the three months (players defeated):

Bleeders, bleed&vote, bruise&bleed and Political are the active decks. Blockers and block&bruise are the reactive ones, and the other two represent themselves. No misteries revealed here, but the chart adds more detail.

DISCIPLINES (both).

Delving on the disciplines used by the winning decks, I have to say here I am only counting tournaments won. The nature of my data researhing job does not allow me to easily count the players defeated, so in this case I will present just the events a deck got to triumph on. Let´s see the accumulated:

Attending to the first three months, we see a thight difference in eight disciplines, with dominate as the most used in the winning decks. Personally, I am surprised to see celerity as the fourth (I would not have guessed), but then I have reviewed the decks, and indeed it was not an accident. We had a clue on the list of clans, where we can see Toreador, Brujah and Banu Haqim among the ten with more TWDs.

And if we look at the evolution of the five most used disciplines, we can see a tendency towards change, which can be confirmed (or not) in April. Let´s see:

I have chosen to highlight the evolution of the five most used disciplines so that we have an easily readable chart. In march, we can see a growth in the use of presence at the expense of both dominate and fortitude. 

But we will see in the next season. In winter, I would highlight that the use of disciplines is wide, and the differences are tight. Personally I like that, as I find that variety is good for a better experience in tournaments.

ARQUETYPES (accumulated).

And now, lets go see one of the most interesting and colorful features of my research. As I said before, I have made some small adjustments in some denominations, for the sake of consistency. This is, of course, a personal classification, but I do try to use the terms and ideas I hear and read from the player community, and am open to hear any suggestion or correction from the elders.

Let´s see the chart of Archetypes, classified by the number of players in the events they won:

The first thing I have concluded from this and the rest of indicators, is how difficult it is to conclude anything. I mean, we can see Gangrel has shined this season, but the differences among the rest of decks are quite tight. And even Gangrel, being the best performing clan and holding the most successful archetype (one that is deeply linked to the clan), has got 15% on clan performance, and the archetype got 11%. That means some sort of supremacy, but far from  an overwhelming dominance. And then, there are 11 other archetypes that have won more than one tournament, and range from 3% to 7% winning rate. I think there is a variety of archetypes in the current meta that exceeds by far any other card game in the market. And I personally find this is an asset. 

Features of VTES as a game definitely favor variety: the multiplayer design brews the fact that there are so many circumstances that can influence the outcome of a game, and a wide range of different approaches to success. Also, in that scene, piloting both the development your strategy and the interaction with others is crucial, and is an independent factor from archetype chosen. And we have to consider that a number of players favour more varied strategies to avoid colliding with others and avoid contesting. But I think we can also say that the design and publication of new material on the last few years has allowed an increase of diversity in the archetypes, while maintaining a balanced meta. I think it is fair to allocate that achievement on BCP.

In fact, one of the features that attracted my attention on the archetypes list, is the good position on the chart that several V5 decks have achieved. I would like to highlight specially the four clans published in the "anarch wave": Gangrel, Ministry, Banu Haqim and Brujah. Decks based on those preconstructed are performing quite well in the season, with Modern Gangrel anarch and Modern Ministry stealth killer decks on the top of the list. Modern Banu Haqim are on the 6th position, and the anarch Brujah are not so high on the spotlight because I decided to divide them (for good reasons I believe, as they play quite differently) in two archetypes: one bruiser and one more like a toolbox deck. But if we were to consider both together, Brujah archetypes would be fourth in the chart, with relatively few victories (3), but indeed hard to achieve ones (66 players).

To this, we shall add some other V5 decks that are being represented, such as Tremere V5 toolbox and Tremere multiaction. Malkavian 22 (crypts 5 and 6) are not showing off on the regular tournaments, but are shining in events with +100 participants. I am sure V5 Nosferatu, Ventrue and Toreador are waiting for their moment to come. The clan of the rose had a share of success this season, but it was with crypt 1-2 in all four occasions.

FEATURE: REDIRECTION (evolution).

In what comes to the ability to bounce the bleeds, in these three months there has been a wide majority of decks able to do it. And the tendency is to get wider.

But at the same time, we can see an interesting contrast, as the average number of redirections has been decreasing. Let´s take this feature just as an indicator, because I have not yet crossed these numbers with deck size (what would give us a clearer view). I will enhance this on the next months.

The orange line shows the average number of bounces among decks that are including those cards, and the green one shows an overall average among all TWDs that month. For the moment, we can conclude that, while there are more decks able to redirect every month, the number of redirection cards is decreasing.

FEATURE: THE ASHUR TABLETS AFFAIR (evolution).

Recently, there has been some debate about the power and wide use of Ashur tablets, specially when combined with multi-master abilities like those on Anson, Nana, Cybele or the Partenon. At least in the spanish community, a number of players have expressed their concern on the strenght of those tools, and the frequency they are played by decks we see in final games. When I read their reasons and the answers, I thought I could add some information about this feature to the report. The following chart shows the evolution on the use of tablets and multi-master among the TWDs I have recorded this season:

Again, I am rating the decks according to the number of players in the events they won. In January, Ashur+multimaster decks had a rate of 13%., and one Banu Haqim deck with Ashur but no mm got 5%. In February, rate grew to 22%, and in March, to 24% for A+mm, and 9% for Ashur decks with no mm.

There are many considerations here, and each player will have his thoughts on the matter. Looking at the chart, I take some conclusions both in favor and against the idea that this is an abusively widespread mechanic. On one side, the rating is not bad for ashur+mm, but I find it is not overwhelming. Other mechanics are more widespread among the TWDs. On the other side, Ashur+mm rating shows an upward trend this season. But also, intuition suggests that the efficiency of this mechanic in particular will have some kind of limit or cap, due to the fact that its effectiveness diminishes the more widespread it is (Ashur tablets effect is punished if two or more players are using it in the same table).

As in other features, I think the data I am showing should be considered just an indicator. At the moment, I am able to register events that host like 70% of the participating methuselahs, according to the VEKN calendar. And I also left out the big tournament in Sevilla, and the side event. Neither of those TWDs were using the tablets.

I will keep monitoring this feature, hoping to add some interesting numbers to the debate.

DECK SIZE (evolution).

First of all, average deck size for the season was 83. This does not mean much, does it? Don´t worry, I can do better. In fact, the average number of cards per TWD is evolving in a clear direction. Let´s see:

Average was 86 in Jan, 83 in Feb and dropped to 80 in March. It is only three months, anyway. Let´s see what happens in the future. 

For now, we can check also the evolution of decks: I have divided them in three categories: 90 card decks, 80-89 card decks, and less than 80 cards. The chart brings no contrast and is quite congruent with the above:

So yes, winning decks in regular tournaments are getting thinner. As I mentioned in the Sevilla special report, I don´t think this will work the same way for very big tournaments. But for the moment, in regular ones there seems to be a tendency. Is it time to dust off your ancient idea for a deck with 14 Feline saboteurs? Well, that´s up to you only. I will not assume any responsibility.

CRYPT CAPACITY (evolution).

This season, average crypt capacity has been 6. I added the average capacity of all crypts registered, divided it on the number of TWDs, and the result is 6,04. I personally find this number low, compared to my expectations. The evolution is, for the moment, constant.

For the moment, not many conclusions can be extracted. It will be interesting to watch if there is any change on this indicator after new products are released.

To add a little more depth to the analysis, I thought it would be a good point to extract the highest capacity vampire of each TWD´s crypt, and then have an idea of what kind of vampires are more successful. After watching the chart with all capacities displayed from 11 to 3, I saw it was hardly comprehensible at first sight, so I decided to organize the decks in three groups: vampires ranged 9 to 11 (big caps), vampires ranged 7-8, and finally vampires with capacity 6 or less. Please remember this is the maximum capacity in the crypt. Let´s see the evolution:

We see he most played crypts involve vampires with cap 7-8 as the oldest. Close enough are the big caps, and finally the weenies. And apparently, the chart shows a tendency to higher capacity. Will the trend continue? This will again be revealed after the spring season.

And that´s all I got for this special issue. I hope you obtained some useful information, or at least some oddities that have given some joy. As usual, I am open to suggestion, comments or bleeds, that can make this place more useful. I always will try to make the next entry a step forward.

Until then, I thank you for reading so far, and wish you a nice wake with the evening´s freshness.

Pritoos.