r Chameleon
Highlights
This is a Ministry r combo deck using Sergio Bueno as star. The goal is to use Chameleon to steal other vampires on the table, disabling everyone else by doing so, and finish off the preys with either with Revolutionary Council or just by bleeding.
It is not easy to pull off Chameleon consistently multiple times. The card is expensive, of course, but also it can only target younger freshly arrived vampires. So you need a higher capacity vampire, and it needs to be there before your opponents influence theirs. And you have five opponents!
Nonetheless, Teemu Sainomaa won the 2024 Atlantic Cup with this deck, and Otso Saariluoma happend to make the finals of the same tournament with the same deck, so it must at least have fitted the meta very well that day.
Of course, there are a few tricks to it. Running a tight library, a lot of stealth to ensure Chameleon and the votes can go through, it aims to land a Heidelberg Castle early. The first few Chameleon will target any available vampire, with a preference for the prey or predator, a Baron if possible, titled otherwise, just an Anarch if nothing else. The blood goes back to Sergio through Heidelberg so he can Chameleon again the next turn.
During the course of the game, Abombwe is used to increase Sergio's capacity to 10, so that only the biggest vampires can hope to escape him. When running out of freshly influenced vampires, Sergio can simply use Banishment to remove the target and, if it's influenced anew, then it can be stolen with Chameleon immediately.
Considerations
This is a dreadful deck you do not want to bring on a casual table if you want to keep your friends. It is fast and egregious and has very few blind spots. Using Chameleon to target other titled vampires as a priority, it gets the vote lock easily, even over dedicated Inner Circle builds like Lutz Politics. Those are probably the biggest threat to the deck though. Maybe it's worth including a Fear of Mekhet or two?
Garibaldi‑Meucci Museum is so strong here that it's been doubled. It can fetch a needed Chameleon or , but also end a dangerous combat if some Anarch tries to take Sergio down.
All in all it's a very strong, very hard to build, horribly crippling thing we have here. Was this only a lucky fluke because of an ideal meta that was running too many mid-caps and not enough big caps? Or can this deck make it to the top tier in the next few months?