TWDA Clan Breakdown

Kushiel wrote: I get the sense that Lasombra Jeff's rules were pretty well established as the rules to judge clanniness. It's your project, of course, so feel free to use whatever criteria you like, but I suspect you'll run into at least a bit of resistance to convincing people to see your criteria as superior. The TWDA's clan criteria were kind of an institution...

Huh?

There might have been a system, but "rules"? When I looked at someone's five copies of one dude plus some other stuff, I didn't think clan deck. When I saw 12 copies of the same dude, I didn't think clan deck. When I saw 5/5/1/1, 5/5/2, 6/6, I didn't think clan deck. I didn't argue about it because someone was doing a ton of work to support the game, and I wasn't going to start my own project to do it differently.

When one of my decks showed up under Toreador because it had 7 Toreador ... out of 21 vampires, I just thought it was an amusing consequence of an arbitrary system devised to try to put some sort of meaning to raw data.

Every system is going to be one of opinion. Is a deck with 7 vampires of one clan and 5 others that plays zero of the clan's disciplines and zero clan requiring cards a clan deck? Not in my mind. But, to put in some criterion so awkward that it accounts for this case just wastes time, so we live with lumping these things under a clan.

Two things of value can come out of slicing the data by clan. One is fun. Some people like to check off the clans or whatever. I played certain clans for a long time because they lacked any wins under Jeff's system, though I used my own criteria for what constituted a deck of a particular clan. The second is that we have nothing else to give us any sense of what is good or not than the TWDA. I used to track wins by clan each year because I thought it was interesting how what people seemed to be saying was at odds with reality or because how history changed dramatically over time and trying to determine what caused the trends in the data might give a clue as to what matters in making something better.

If you were going to base decisions on what to create to help at the clan level, dearth of victories could help with prioritization. Danse Macabre seemed to aim for helping worse Sabbies, though it seemed to also identify !Gangrel as one of those when !Gangrel have done really well in stretches (where Pander constantly get shafted). KoT certainly did a lot for Brujah, who historically have sucked in an apples to apples comparison, gave Nosferatu Dominate. And, so on.

Anyway, it's entirely possible to come to some sort of majority view on these things, but to assume something has to be the way it is because it has always been that way leads to such things as not addressing fundamental flaws in game play.

I also think that this is a more satisfying way to define the concept of a "clan deck". A superstar deck is not a clan deck, because a clan is a group, and a superstar is an individual.

That said, I'm not sure I see the use of tracking the success of clan decks against each other. I think archetypes, like those discussed on the VTES ONE blog, are more relevant for the game. It happens that most archetypes, for example, Triple AAA, Venture Law Firm, and Renegade Garou, end up classifying as clan decks. But not all do, like most weenie decks, Inner Circle Vote, or many superstar decks. Do the clan TWDs represent known "archetypes" or a more general "clan deck"? I think of a clan deck as one that uses all three clan disciplines, features two or more clan cards, and includes vampires with a range of capacities from that clan.

This information seems useful for either one, tracking archetypes that we know go with certain clans and groupings or two, seeing what groupings in the clans lend themselves to archetype status.

One problem is that decks that focus on a Camarilla clan and its Sabbat counterpart will not be considered a clan deck, even though they essentially function as such. My OBF POT deck from 2013 that is in the Unaligned column had only three vampires out of 12 vampires that were neither or It sure felt like a clan deck to me.

Technical question: Why are there stats for 2015 and 2012, but not 2013 and 2014?

Hi Aaron - Thanks for your comments! I actually agree with you regarding tracking archetypes rather than clan decks (or perhaps in addition to), and I've tried to do this a little bit by tagging the unaligned decks with a short descriptor of what they are. Frankly, many of these tags (like "Star Vampire") aren't useful, but a few (like "DOM bleed" and "Weenie Vote") are. But my simple attempt to tag the unaligned decks reveals the real problem with this system: what criteria should be used to have a deck fit into one archetype or another? How tightly should a deck adhere to the "core" of the archetype, or how much should they be allowed to stray? And even if we could create some solid criteria, the problem then becomes my judgement, and how accurately it can assign archetypes to decks. Trust me when I say that we don't want me categorizing all the decks. I think I'm getting better as I go back in time, but a lot of my early tags are just horribly inaccurate.

All of that having been said, I will continue to refine those tags and try to make them more useful. Maybe I should start tracking them separately....

As to your comment about Cam clans and their antitribu counterparts, again, I completely agree with you! I've always thought of the Nos and !Nos as being the same clan, albeit with different allegiances. I remember seeing your deck (names I know stand out to me), and a bunch of Tremere / !Tremere decks and even a few Malk / !Malk decks and being a little disappointed that these were getting categorized as "unaligned" when their creators had clearly had a clan-like theme in mind. Perhaps that is a fault of my definition. But for better or worse, the game considers the antitribu to be separate clans, and if I'm going to track clan decks, I'm not sure it's appropriate to put those decks in with the "pure" clan decks. What do people think - is it better to consider the antitribu as the same clan, or as a different clan?

Oh, and finally, about the stats - the front tab only contains win stats for years that I'm currently working on (so I'm still transposing 2012 decks, and 2015 obviously isn't over yet). All the completed years can be found on the second tab ("Clan Statistics"). Once I finish a year, those stats get moved to this page and deleted from the first page (so that it doesn't get overly cluttered. The separate tab is really much better for tracking statistics. And finally, the over all attendance is tracked in a third tab. Interesting to see how the average number of attendees is pretty much the same from 2013 to present, but the number of events is steadily going down.... The last analysis that I might do for attendance is to track individual events like National Championships, or something. Might be interesting to see how those numbers have changed over time.

Anyway, hope all that rambling helped! Hope to see you in Nor Cal soon (and / or we'll just have to come down to one of your tournaments)!

For those interested - I just finished cataloging 2012. Also, I got rid of the "Attendance" tab, and simply integrated that information into the statistics page. I'll start on 2011 sometime in the near(-ish) future.

Does anybody know how often the TDWA gets updated these days? I'm trying to decide if I should start adding entries for decks that have been posted on the forums, but haven't yet made it to the TDWA. It looks like there are about a month worth of tournaments that haven't made it up yet. Thanks!

brettscho wrote: Does anybody know how often the TDWA gets updated these days? I'm trying to decide if I should start adding entries for decks that have been posted on the forums, but haven't yet made it to the TDWA. It looks like there are about a month worth of tournaments that haven't made it up yet. Thanks!

it's simple... now quite often. reason is simple. closing of EC means lot of older tournaments are entered in and as well there are few tournaments for last moment qualification
(we do hold our national championship week before EC )