When I asked Ben Peal about the Bringer of War list, the first thing he said was that the number one should be Una.

First of all, who’s Una? The picture at the right side show the vampire, as you already see it. At first glance, its a nice Country !Gangrel, with a title and presence, making her a potential good political deck star vampire. And her special is hot from the start, making her able to use freak drive and good damage prevention for free. But then… if she can freak drive for free, why not just giving her all the good equipment and permanent effect actions in one single turn? This is the principle that last year in LA turned a regular player, Matt Wedge, into the most hated player for many people in this game.

He just developed a deck where Una on a single turn can equip a lot of stuff, and blocking all that is a mad issue, because even the most strong wall doesn’t have 45+ wakes, and then rush all the table with the goods he just acquired. The deck get some sucess, mainly because getting the 45+ freak drives the deck needs is not easy, but since the beggining of 2008, it just showed in a number of places at full power. And yes this deck wins a lot.

The last report was from the European Qualifier in France, this saturday, and he just get a second place. But the problem isn’t this. Sometimes a deck shows power, or new power, and get a lot of sucess in the tournament scene. I can recall the quintuple A (Ambulance, Aching Beauty, Alexandra, Anson, Anneke), that have show at full power late 2007 and 2008, and no one said much against it. Why? Because its a regular VtES deck, that is strong, but do the things at the same point that VtES is always played. Una just exploits a gap on VtES, at least is what a lot of people think, just like the Turbo deck’s. The diference is that Una is getting wins at it.

The big question here is: Playing a turn of 30-40 minutes with almost zero interaction with the table, that is the main fun on VtES, is fair? What do you think? Many players around the world think that’s not. Sure that some things can be putted togheter to stop this at organization level. I’m not talking at banning (or even rewrite) Freak Drive, one of the most played cards ever. And even not sure about doing it to Una. If there is any solution, my favorite as to make a limit to the number of actions a vampire can make in a turn. Maybe a number around six or eight, will be fine. The normal decks using freak drive wouldn’t have many troubles with this, and the exploit like Una would be end.