VTES 3rd Edition (Third) is a complete base set for White Wolf's trading card game released on 4 September 2006. White Wolf's page dedicated to the set indicates the reasoning for calling it the third edition: "White Wolf's eleventh expansion for Vampire: The Eternal Struggle is a stand-alone base set. It is called Third Edition (after the Camarilla Edition, which is reckoned as the second edition)."[1] The expansion also happens to be the third set based on the Sabbat sect. It contained a whole new set of vampires, but mainly reprints of library cards. Due to insufficient quality management the distribution of the cards in the boosters and the overall printing quality was significantly worse than in previous expansions. In addition the card backs are printed upside-down (in comparison to all other expansions). De facto it is now required to use card sleeves in tournaments when a player uses cards from the 3rd Edition set mixed with cards from other expansions. These flaws caused some resentment towards the 3rd Edition set in the player community. Nonetheless, the expansion won the InQuest Gamer 2007 Fan Awards for best trading card expansion.[2]
Part of the expansion are 4 different pre-constructed decks with 89 cards each as well as boosters with 11 cards each (5 common, 3 vampire, 2 uncommon and 1 rare). There is a total of 390 cards in this set, of which 136 cards are new, i.e. 10 new common, 10 uncommon, 10 rare cards, 6 fixed cards (from the starters) and 100 vampire cards; the rest of the 254 library cards are actually reprints from older sets. The pre-constructed decks are:
The vampires White Lily and Duality (also included in this set) were given as promo cards in a number of magazines. Simultaneously White Wolf released a players kit which contained half of each of the four pre-constructed starters as well as counters and an extensive example of play.