Some words from Ben Peal, Product Director of Black Chantry Productions:
Hey, everyone! The 30th anniversary of Vampire: the Eternal Struggle is coming up soon – August 16th! – and I wanted to talk a bit about the 30th Anniversary set we’ve created to celebrate the occasion.
We wanted to do something like the Stanislava deck we made for the 25th Anniversary Set, and the Toreador AAA (Anson, Anneke, Alexandra) archetype came to mind as it’s another classic archetype. But with the banning of Anthelios and with the design direction moving away from multiple master phase actions, that archetype is less viable in today’s meta and we felt a different approach was needed than recycling Toreador Grand Ball. We also wanted to give the Camarilla and politics a boost, as our preconstructed decks for Fifth Edition have tended towards stealth-bleed, intercept walls, and combat.
What we came up with is a deck we call “The Endless Dance”: a Toreador political deck that still centers around Toreador Grand Ball, but also uses a new action modifier called Loup (French for “eye mask”) to help get its actions to succeed. We took inspiration from the Ishtarri card Uncontrolled Impulse – we felt that the Toreador could really use a card like that. Giving it a feel of a masquerade ball, where you’re not certain of anyone’s identity, it’s an action modifier that gives all Toreador +1 stealth until the end of the turn or until a Toreador successfully performs an action. So if your first acting Toreador is blocked, each subsequent Toreador will get the +1 stealth until one of them succeeds at an action that turn.
We can’t have a deck without a crypt, so we have an assortment of all-new Toreador crypt cards for the deck. Looking through the Camarilla sourcebook for Fifth Edition Vampire: The Masquerade, we were thrilled to see our old friend François Villon still in charge of his domain in Paris. We chose to anchor the deck around him and newcomer Justicar Diana Iadanza. François Villon’s disciplines needed to be adjusted to account for the changes in Fifth Edition, so he has Animalism instead of Chimerstry. We carried over his +1 bleed to his new Group 6 version, and we’ve given him a new special to represent his skills of manipulation.
Another thing Vampire: The Eternal Struggle has needed is new Justicars for Group 7, representing the recently appointed clan Justicars in the Vampire: The Masquerade Fifth Edition canon. They didn’t quite fit into the preconstructed decks in the Fifth Edition boxed set or in the respective New Blood decks as they’d increase the average capacity of the crypt cards in those decks for minimal benefit – deck effectiveness won out in that regard. However, with the Toreador Justicar Diana Iadanza being in the Endless Dance deck and with some extra space left in the 30th Anniversary bundle, this seemed the ideal time to get all of the new Justicars printed.
The official release date of Vampire: The Eternal Struggle 30th Anniversary is July 20. Full content list and all previews is at the 30th Anniversary product page.
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