Heirs to the Blood Draft Tourney

As Brandon has mentioned in his post, the South Bay group hosted an HttB draft tournament at Game Kastle last Saturday. 4 boosters per person, option of all HttB or switch some with KoT or 3rd. I opted for 3 HttB and 1 KoT; HttB lacks quite a few things a regular deck needs, like intercept, bleed enhancers.
Min 4 card crypt, Min 20 card library; from total of 12 vampires and 32 (+1 WwEF given to each person) library cards.

Pre-game I decided either Shalmath or the unnamed would be my top choice. None of my packs had them, despairing I started to pick Kiasyd before someone passed me a the unnamed. Thinking evil thoughts I started playing my first game when I realized a problem with the unnamed. It takes blood to power stealth cards like Masca, Under the Skin, Greater Curse and the one Public Trust (from KoT) I got. And the unnamed hunts poorly, thankfully I had a Visionquest (draft allows hunt and untap).

Got shut down in my first game with a prey having Serenna the White (1/turn can burn a blood to reduce a bleed by two. Not an action) and Nahum (gives 1 blood to a vampire during untap phase). Second game Andy could not deal with the unnamed's aggravated damage and let me bleed him out and gain pool. Ousted him fairly quickly, then the game stalemated 3 ways with Ian Thompson's Gargoyles bleeding Ian Lee's !Sal bleeding my unnamed. Ian Lee didn't want to oust me as he thought Ian T would dominate in a 2 way game. I slowly whittled Ian T's pool down and managed the second oust. Conceded the game to Ian Lee as by then he had nearly 20 pool from Off-Kilter, Tend the Flock and god knows what.

Coin-flipped my way into the Finals table, which was pretty bland for me.

Lessons:
Ian's design philosophy, as far as I can tell, revolves around surviving. Pool gain, blood management (Azrael's hunt special) and combat ends allow his vamps (and him) to survive to the other cards that ousts. Of all the games i've played with him as my prey, I think i've only ousted him once (he was playing a pre-HttB !Sal deck w/o intercept).

There's this concept in Warhammer 40k, called front-loading/back-loading. Front-loading involves spending points on stuff that kills things dead, like twin-linked plasma rifles or missile pods, while back-loading is all about shield drones and disruption pods. War40k skews towards front-loading due to the nature of the game (limited turns, really really frigging close range between the two armies, and alpha strike-ish nature of weaponry). Translated to VTES, that would mean that Malk OBF/DEM or Kiasyd OBT/MYT/DOM bleeding is front-loading. VTES however, its less unbalanced than War40k. Since lunging requires setup and the right moment, its best to hang around, stay alive til that time.