My deck was meant to test the speed of minion stealing decks by using Disarm to torporize other vamps, then Grave Robbing them. Without my rush, though, the deck fell flat. I kept drawing my strikes, and not even enough intercept to block anything coming at me!
In conclusion, I think I design decks poorly. That's all I can conclude on my side.
Well, actually I didn't think this game was particularly interesting.
We already knew that the Ravnos were weak, and that the Setites don't have much in the way of bleed defense.
My own deck, which was designed around for/pot princes, kindred antipathy, and archon, didn't quite work as planned (i drew no princes and my useful votes seemed to all be lying around on the other side of my deck). I managed to pick a vp only because Justin's deck apparently had no way of dealing with the kind of combat I was using.
Octavio is quite nice, but his inability to gain a title and the cost of his rush ability caused me some problems.
I was pleased to see that Chris' allies deck did well, although in a slightly stronger environment I think it would have had more problems. However, it seemed that the success of his deck had little to do with the playtest cards as it was based around existing obfuscate cards and nephandi.
My deck was meant mainly to test the abilities of our new ally cards. In particular: Conjuration, Taste of the Eternal, and Angel of Life. Loyalty and Royal Canberra seemed pretty useless to me, as did Srinivasen. I also had Change of Mind (old version of Alertness), which I never got to use, due to the fact that no one tried to steal my vamps. About halfway through the playtest I found that Memories of Mortality was better than Angel of Life. But Conjuration helped me get out the wonderful Political Ally and Taste of the Eternal kept my allies alive pretty well. The new Tremere Antitribu vamps were essential, as I needed small vamps with THA. Half of my crypt was playtest.
Advanced Networking was worth the price, but not overpowered. Good card. And the Political Toady came out too late to make a difference. The only reason I wasted the action to Conjure him was in hopes of being blocked.
All in all, my deck would have been trashed in a high-combat game. But the only combat in this game was Pulled Fangs combat, and that was useless against my allies. Memories of Mortality would have helped a lot versus combat, but I suppose my bad luck in forgetting about it matched my good luck that there wasn't much combat.
Like my playtest1 and playtest4 decks, this was another "gimmick" deck. My idea was to put Vicissitude on other meth's vampires, take control of them using Lure the Beast or Temptation, then have the stolen vamps use Inner Essence to reduce their capacity to 1. When returned to their owner, the vamps would then be easy prey for Temptation, Addictive Blood, or Form of Corruption.
Unfortunately, my deck had combat defence completely inadequate to deal with Rob's deck and died a quick death.
Playtest cards used: A number of vamps: Quintus, with his immunity to rush actions, might have saved me, but I couldn't get him out in time. Addictive Blood, Lure the Beast, and Inner Essence, obviously, none of which I actually got to use. I encountered problems designing the deck, because I needed high cap-vampire at full or nearly full blood to use Lure the Beast (this led me to include Drop of Ancient Vitae.) This led me to conclude that Lure the Beast needed to be revised to make it somewhat more useful (this has since been done).