One year with Vampire: The Eternal Struggle: a new player’s perspective

About a year ago, I discovered the collectible card game (CCG) Vampire: The Eternal Struggle (VTES) while looking for an alternative to Magic: the Gathering, the very popular card game I and many others grew up with. I mainly played Commander, a free-for-all social format usually involving 4 players that sounds incredible in theory, but is more often than not a complete let-down in practice either due to Magic’s limitations (bad draws, mana screw/flood) or because someone goes infinite very early and wins before others are able to develop their game. Over the years, Magic became less fun yet more expensive, and I needed a cheaper and more fair social game to play.

While sorting Magic cards to put up for sale, I came across a Marcus Vitel promo I got for free as a kid in a card game magazine and decided to look for the game. The art on the card had always intrigued me and I hoped I could grab hundreds of cards for cheap off eBay. I hadn’t heard about Vampire in years and figured the game was long gone. After a quick search, I discovered that Vampire: The Masquerade, as a whole, was going through a renaissance, and VTES was a part of it, now being produced by Black Chantry Productions (BCP), a company put together by a group of dedicated fans. I also found that the game was designed by none other than Richard Garfield…