TWDA Clan Breakdown

Hello! I've recently awaken from torpor and am just in the process of getting back into the game. I'm a frequent reader of ICLee's excellent gaming blog ( which you can find here ), and I noticed that in one of his posts, he lamented that TWDA no longer separated decks by clan. I agreed that this was a shame, and thought that I could start to put together a google sheet in which I could track clan wins. The URL for that google doc is included at the end, for those who want to skip down to it.

So the first thing I had to do was to figure out how to display all of the information. I tried a couple of different formats, and while I'm not 100% sold on the one I'm currently using, I think it is fairly workable. Each clan is given a pair of columns, one of which tracks the number of participants at the tournament in question, the second which states the name of the winner, the Crypt Groups used, and the country where the event took place. The information in this second column also provides a link to TWDA to the specific deck in question. Finally, the decks with no clan affiliation have a 1-2 word descriptor next to them to indicate the type of deck I think it is (Tupdog, Weenie Vote, MMPA, etc). These are simply included so that somebody can search those decks for an archetype of interest. They aren't meant to be a firm analysis of the deck, just a guide.

On a separate tab, I have tracked the number of events for each year (well, 2013, 14, 15 - I'll work on earlier years over time), the number of attendees, and the average tournament attendance.

Finally, on a third tab, I have kept track of how many wins each clan accumulated during the course of a given year, and which Crypt Groups were used by those winning decks. This gives some very interesting information that I could see somebody wanting to run statistical analysis on at a later time. For example, 2013-2015 have featured 22 Tzimisce decks, but only 2 of those have not used the original group 2/3 crypt.

Ok, so that's what the information looks like, and how it's organized, but how did a deck end up with a specific Clan affiliation? Well, I know that the Lasombra previously kept TWDA separated by clan, but I don't know what criteria he used to assign a deck an affiliation. So, by my logic, a deck can only be considered to be part of a specific clan if >50% of the Crypt cards belong to the same clan, and if there are at least 2 different vampires of that clan in the Crypt. A Tupdog deck would easily meet the first criteria, but it clearly isn't a Gargoyle Clan deck, it's a Tupdog deck, so the second criterion is there to prevent star vampire decks from being listed as belonging to the clan of their star vampire.

Ok, without further ado, here's the link:

TWDA Clan Breakdown Google Doc

Now, I intend to keep this google doc up to date. As new decks are added to TWDA, I'll add them here. But I'm curious if anybody has feedback for me on how to make this a more useful resource to the community. That's really what I'm hoping to do here - make something that people will use to generate deck ideas, refine their own decks, and perhaps spark some good conversations about how Clan X is doing (for example, I notice that almost every winning Gangrel deck is a Stanislava deck with a few Gangrel buddies, what does that say about Clan Gangrel?). So I welcome feedback and suggestions for improving this google doc into a better and better resource community. Thanks for your comments, hope you enjoy!

Nice work!
Only comment I have right now is that under these rules the scarce bloodlines have a real hard time getting a clan based entry. Not that winning with say Abominations is that easy to begin with.

brettscho wrote: Well, I know that the Lasombra previously kept TWDA separated by clan, but I don't know what criteria he used to assign a deck an affiliation.

Lasombra Jeff's criteria were:

- at least 5 members of a given clan
- not more than the representation of any other clan

One could "double dip" by having 5 vampires of one clan and 5 of another, getting credit for both.

Great work, btw!

Hi Ben - Thanks for letting me know! With all of the massive amount of respect that is due to Lasombra Jeff and the awesome work that he did, I don't think that allowing a deck to count as two different clans is a good idea for a couple of reasons. First, as it stands, the google doc I'm putting together allows you to do some statistics on how many people attend VTES events each year, which crypt groups are most popular, etc. These statistics won't work out if certain decks are represented twice in the spreadsheet. That's the practical concern. From a philosophical perspective, I'm a little uncomfortable with a deck proclaiming multiple clan affiliations in the same way I'd be uncomfortable with a deck claiming multiple sect affiliations (assuming we wanted to track sect). You can have a Camarilla deck, a Sabbat deck, or a mixed deck, but you can't have a deck that simultaneously owes allegiance to the Camarilla and to the Sabbat. Perhaps I'm just over thinking it.

Point is - Jeff's previous criteria sound fine, but I don't think I'd be interested in continuing with that tradition.

Whisker wrote: Only comment I have right now is that under these rules the scarce bloodlines have a real hard time getting a clan based entry. Not that winning with say Abominations is that easy to begin with.

Thank you! I agree that I wouldn't expect the scarce bloodlines to have any decks. Imagine my surprise when the Salubri pulled off two wins in 2013! And neither deck included Saulot! So it certainly can be done, but I agree that I wouldn't expect to see any Abombination or Nagaraja decks. What's interesting to me is that there haven't been any Blood Brothers decks at least since 2013. But thanks for your comments!

Does anybody have any suggestions on how to improve this resource? Would anybody actually use it? Thanks again!

BenPeal wrote:

brettscho wrote: Well, I know that the Lasombra previously kept TWDA separated by clan, but I don't know what criteria he used to assign a deck an affiliation.

Lasombra Jeff's criteria were:

- at least 5 members of a given clan
- not more than the representation of any other clan

Great work, btw!

Does having 50 copies of shalmath, and another 10 vamps, count?

Blooded Sand wrote: Does having 50 copies of shalmath, and another 10 vamps, count?

It looks like such a deck would have counted as a True Brujah deck using the old criteria. However, my current system would categorize that as an unaligned deck because that isn't really a True Brujah deck, it's just a Shalmath deck. Now, you could get tricksy and have one of those other 10 vampires be True Brujah, and then BAM - your deck is now a True Brujah deck. But at least that way you have a chance of having 2 True Brujah on the table at the same time. Close enough for me