The End-Game 2/3 player Variant by Legbiter It struck me the other day that ALL VTES games eventually break down to two or three player games [ok, i know there are rare exceptions], and that one way to play duels and threesomes might be to acknowledge this and to structure the duel/threesome so's to replicate the mid/end game of a REAL Jyhad match. Obviously one wouldn't want to copy the rather boring mid/end games where one player is OBVIOUSLY going to sweep, but rather the fun ones where everything is up for grabs. In a real game you already have vampires and permanents out by the time you reach the 2/3 player stage, you have built your hand a bit, and you've paid some pool. So we need to find a variant where these conditions are met. i suggest that the way to do this might be as follows: For a three-player: each player deals herself 4 crypt cards and then influences out up to fifteen pool's worth of vampires. If you don't have fifteen points worth of vampires in your opening uncontrolled region you may pay an additional pool to bring out another vampire, until you have a number which suits you. Each of these vampires has half its capacity in blood [round up]. Each player turns over the top card of their library until they find a permanent or they have turned over thirty cards. The permanent can be put into play, paying the pool. Each player has 12 pool [just a number i plucked out of the air, vary to taste], minus anything they pay for permanents and extra vampires. Optionally, at this stage you could move blood from your pool to your vampires. Each player may take three cards from their library and put them into their hand. Each player now shuffles their library and discards thirty cards, and then makes their hand size up to its normal level. Play! Two-player: same as above, but each player may have 20 pool's worth of vampires and two permanents in play [turning over up to 45 cards to find them], and discards 45 cards. Obviously you could break this by building a deck to work well with these rules, so on the whole i'ld suggest that this is a variant to use with decks which you would normally play in a five-player. And yet i don't know, it might be worth trying to build a deck that could win in these conditions, and then seeing if it would still work in a five-player ... maybe this could be a new approach to deck-design?