Concerning lilith's blessing, ashur tablets and liquidation

Izaak wrote:

Lech wrote:

It's Lilith's Blessing and Jake Washington and Giant's Blood and Golconda and Taste of Vitae and Voter Captivation that are problem, not card that convert blood into pool. Villein is more or less fine, it don't create blood out of thin air.

You forget to differentiate the varies blood creation cards here.

* Jake Washington requires a very specific condition to trigger in *your untap*. That means either you have a Vessel on the vampire and it has one blood, or you leave it empty at the end of your turn. It's harder than you think to make a Jake trigger and you can't really use it for poolgain. Also, Jake doubles as a chump blocker, stays in play, is unique and can be contested before you get benefit.

It's quite hard to trigger blood gain, but not only blood gain make Jake so strong, it's master recursion allowing you to block one minion for free in every turn and it can recruit other allies when nobody is able to block, say first turn Ossian/Carlton. It's also 4 blood when you need it out of one master.

Izaak wrote:

* Taste of Vitae requires you to first be low on blood, then enter combat with a vampire that has a lot of blood, then play various combat cards and then play the Taste. This isn't actually too trivial and completely loses value in endgame where vampires simply don't have a lot of blood.

Taste of Vitae influenced combat in vtes too much imo by rewarding you for doing what you want to do anyway. It's not completely useless in enggame, vampire may be low on blood, but playing it for 3 or 4 is not that hard.

Izaak wrote:

* Voter Cap is certainly strong, but requires you to be low on blood first, then take a political action that can be blocked, then pass the vote with enough votes to benefit from voter captivation, then hope your vote doesn't get Delayed after playing your votepush and then hope your Voter Cap doesn't get Touch of Clarity'd (something that is happening more and more).

It don't require you to be low on blood, it's perfectly fine when you are full too. As with ToV, it reward you for doing things you want to do.

Izaak wrote:

* Golconda blows up a vampire and refunds you the pool. Ye, sure you can use it as a stay alive mechanism (it's actually used a lot like this in the various Girls... iterations) but it isn't making you win and just gives your prey time.

It can be used for pool damage to, and to refund you for vampire that would be unplayable anyway (torpor with fame/haven/contract).

Izaak wrote:

Giant's Blood and Lilith's Blessing create blood out of nowhere, with nothing you can do about it *immediately* after emptying the vampire (something you can't do in the case of Cap and Taste). Yeh, sure people can play Suddens and in fact are doing more and more nowadays but you can only play one each passing and it messes with your own master phase in the process. In a world where trifle+master is the standard instead of the exception this puts real pressure on your cardflow.

Lilith's Blood cannot be canceled. After you play villein for that 134 or so (to take all blood from a vampire) you can just tap the card to give him 3 blood back, it's not like anyone can steal master phase from you. People can only sudden your Villein.

In case of GB it's different, but GB offer most of times 6-10 pool out of thin air and won many games.

Aaron wrote:

Brum wrote:

....

All this still sounds to me like some players not wanting to build decks with silly cards like Suddens, Washes, Arsons or even Haven Uncovereds, or not wanting to change their playstyle just because a deck requires you to, and asking Pascal to solve the problem for them.
Well, sorry. I thing it's your job to do that, not his.

Cheers!
Tiago, the guy that uses Dan Murdock (also because when he goes to torpor I scream MACGUYVEEEEEERRRrrrrr...)

You've said several times in this forum that you feel that the game is fine the way it is. I can't believe that every design decision made in the last ten years was correctly balanced and remained so with the release of every set and promo.

Are you saying that nothing CAN be improved or that nothing SHOULD be improved? If you're saying that nothing CAN be improved, I'm pretty sure you're wrong. All design decisions were made arbitrarily by a person or people with incomplete knowledge of the future. The designers made decisions that we as players have every privilege to judge and measure.

You say it is not Pascal's job to alter the game to allow more decks to be playable or competitive. Whatver Pascal's mandate may be, it certainly COULD be VEKN's job to allow more decks to be playable. Allowing more decks to be playable, such as the standard deck that Pendargon likes, is good for players like Pendargon, and VTES is now player-run.

What I said was that some people, 1. don't want to take the trouble to play differently dependending the opponents they have and 2. don't want to change to smarter card choices.
Instead, they want reality to change in accordance to their laziness.

Yes, I think the game can improve. I've said on many occasions how.
No, I don't think there's anything wrong with the cards we have.

I hate Imbued. I think it makes no sense in the game. This is not called Imbued the Eternal Hunting.
But it exists and despite some discussion about it, I remember one sentence Adonai made that intrigued me (besides the obvious that applies against everything).
"Against Imbued, all you need is to play differently".
So I rolled up my sleeves, did a deck, got all the cards borrowed and played it in several games. It changed my view if them and now I build better Vampire decks for it.
Yes, if LSJ or Pascal banned Imbued it would have saved me allot of work.

That's all you people are asking here, in my opinion.
If you want the game to improve, you should start by trying to improve your game.

Liquidation is not a problem in itself. It's somewhat bothersome in combination with Ashur Tablets, that's all.

Ashur Tablets needs many copies and/or another way to get a MPA to work properly. Because if you don't have those, any other deck that packs AT have a reasonably good chance to put down 3 copies before you.
Recursion is really good, but the card is written in a way that you have to design your deck around it to be used reliably.
That's not an argument either for or against it, it's just stating a fact.

Lilith's Blessing really looks like it is supposed to be a Unique master.
It's a good card and 3 blood is nice, but 3 blood won't get you far depending on the other decks. For one, you have very little blood to use for to oust.
For another, it's just 3 blood for you to have as your defense, barring cards in hand. 3 blood is a joke to any good combat deck. Or for that matter, any deck using Rock Cat, Muddled Vampire Hunter, Shambling Hordes, War Ghoul, Renegade Garou, hell even a Tupdog Shotgun which is half combat half bleed. Even if you have combat defense in hand, the combat deck will probably trump it and the ally deck will probably have more allies to attack with.

The same thing can be said about Villein. Just like minion tap, it makes decks stronger against bleed/vote decks and weaker against combat decks.
Isn't that how it's always been?
Did that really change?

Or is it just that so many players around the globe focus so hard on non-combat decks just because combat decks oust slower and thus forget that they exist?

I get that a standard combat deck has nowhere near the potential speed for ousting that a dedicated bleed/vote have. But that's a choice of strategy.
Sometimes it seems to me that players want all the offensive power and complain how something counters it without them realizing this has always been the case.

The overall metagame is always in motion. I'll give you all a good example:
We had a lot of powerbleeding decks in our meta. The people started packing Archons Investigation (a card it seems some people have forgotten that it exist) and their 6+ powerbleeding minions just burnt to ash for the relatively low cost of less than half the damage they would have caused anyway.
So people start making decks that bleeds for no more than 3. Eventually, since everyone do this, people will stop putting AI in their decks. This means the powerbleeders return and thus the cycle continues.

It is the same principle on a grand scale here.
It's a metagame focused on generating a lot of pool damage. So people have constructed their decks to deal with this accordingly. Now instead of grasping for strategies that take advantage of the low blood on vampires a discussion whether or not some cards are to good appear?
Curious. I wonder if discussions such as these have been on Eternal Vigilance or No Secrets from the Magaji in a weenie-bleed heavy metagame.
It stands to reason it probably have.

If your regular deck can't handle the meta, you can always construct an anti-meta deck. It's an inescapable fact that certain decks will always be at a disadvantage at a certain point in time depending on how the metagame looks. That applies to all card games. I don't see that changing.

For example before the EC I had never considered Rock Cat to be worth it.
4 pool for something with that little life?
Those cats would get their stony buttocks spanked over here. Or at least back in how our metagame looked a few years back. Now?
Now they could work. The meta always shifts.


As for GB have won many games?
Many players that played GB have still been ousted.
It's once per game and it's a gamble on who gets it. I can deal with that gamble.

Completely agree with you

I agree that methagame changes. But there I see one deck, that somehow doesn´t work in that rulling. Nana Buruku and her animalism Ashur/lilith/villein combat party.
The whole explanation about how a bloating mechanism with lilith and villein works doesn´t fit in here, as you are having combat in hand, not the best one sure but a strong one. You can take vamps like Stick for free as they already cost 3 pool, and when nana gets tired of non-life, golconda, take another one and once again villein+lilith, not forgeting to play an ashur each turn and 2 if neccesary. The same card that you use to rush, you can use it to bleed too... There is something I keep missing in how a certain deck, a very fast deck indeed, is messing with theese cards.

It's a metagame focused on generating a lot of pool damage. So people have constructed their decks to deal with this accordingly. Now instead of grasping for strategies that take advantage of the low blood on vampires a discussion whether or not some cards are to good appear?

Actually, the metagame has ALREADY shifted that way. The problem with these decks is that they can´t remove the pool that goes with decks that have low blood on their minions. All this shift does is lead to timeouts where everyone is jockying for 1 VP in the last 5 minutes.

Curious. I wonder if discussions such as these have been on Eternal Vigilance or No Secrets from the Magaji in a weenie-bleed heavy metagame. It stands to reason it probably have.

Nobody really cared that weenie bleed decks got shut down. It's just one (really annoying) archtype that might get shut down. Gran Madre shuts down Tupdogs too, but you can't reliably count on it doing so. Similar to you can't count on No Secrets to shut down weenie bleed reliably. They'll just toss a Pentex and you die anyhow.

<snip Nana Animalism rant>
There is something I keep missing in how a certain deck, a very fast deck indeed, is messing with theese cards.

To be fair, I don't think the whole Nana Animalism Ashur deck is all that great in our current meta. Yes, Deep Song is insanely good, but having played various versions extensively, I must say it *really* has trouble ousting. Everything is at 0 stealth, so people just throw up chump blockers that got crosstable rescued not to mention that Majesty completely shuts it down.

This decktype needs to get some lucky break to get a gamewin in the preliminary rounds and then do in the finals what its best at: get 1 VP and don't die.