On Villein. 1. "problematic card"

I'm putting together a Gangrel anti deck with this idea in mind. If you play Villein, I'll rush you and torp your vamp. I have plenty of cards to choose from that can get rid of vampires in torpor via diablerie, without diablerie and even take out vamps in their inactive region if the opportunity arises with memories fading glimpse.

And how will you win? (*)

(*) Rhetorical

Boring the other player to death maybe ?

Seriously, you want to actively destroy games because theirs decks don't suit you. It's pretty vindicative to say the least, and it will only help you to stop playing because nobody will want you at the table.

Kushiel wrote:

I've never known if the various playtest groups got differing sets of cards to test. I don't think so, because I don't remember ever seeing anything in a new set which we hadn't seen before, during playtest.

Early in the process, we certainly got different sets of cards to test, but only in the sense of Group A got half the set and Group B got the other half of the set (i.e. during Bloodlines playtest, my group got Blood Brothers, Gargoyles, and Samedi, IIRC). I don't know for sure that different groups of playtesters got different versions of the same cards, but indications are that they didn't.

Master.
Put this card on a vampire you control and move 1 or more blood from that vampire to your pool. Minion Tap cards cost an additional pool. Villein costs an additional pool to play on this vampire.

Yeah, we got the same one. We never saw Villein as a trifle, but suggested it be a trifle many times (but also suggested it have a limit of, like, 2 or something to go with it being a trifle). I never saw the final version of Villein till it was printed. I'll also point out that Lillith's Blessing was a card that was in circulation during one of the playtest sets, but given that it was in playtest during a time when Villein was very scarce (if not in the same set as Villein), I suspect that it didn't get a lot of playtesting with Villein (yes, I realize that someone could have proxied Villeins during playtesting, but I suspect that as Villein was few and far between at that point, it didn't really occur to many people).

Looking at the other three iterations of the card, the only changes to them were that sometimes it was "1 blood" and other times it was "2 blood." We never had any indication that it would be printed as a trifle, nor did we test it that way. I can't remember if we suggested that; I do remember that the general consensus in our group (which we sent to LSJ) was that Villein wouldn't be very likely to be played instead of Minion Tap.

Oh, every playtest report we made indicated that Villein as presented (i.e. without being a trifle) was weak and unlikely to see play, as if it weren't hosing Minion Tap, it was just plain worse than Minion Tap, and it probably wasn't worth using just to hose Minion Tap. So we suggested it be a trifle. Every time. Except we also suggested it have other limits (I think the most common suggestion in our reports was "make it a trifle that takes exactly 2 blood" or possibly 3.)

Ohlmann wrote:

Boring the other player to death maybe ?

What's wrong with playing a combat/rush deck?

Plenty of viable ways of ousting nowadays...

Graverob
Fame
Tension in the Ranks
Dragonbound
Anathema
Codex of Edenic Groundkeepers
just to name a few...

People are whining about how insanely strong Lilith is and the nimute someone announces he'll put together a deck to counter the excessive use of Lilith everyone and their grandmother is accusing of him of making crappy/boring/non-winning deck. Right-o!

Lönkka wrote:

What's wrong with playing a combat/rush deck?

That were *not* the problem. The problem was "I play to punish Villein abuse and not to win". The deck he propose is not particulary strong against such abuses, so it's pretty much a bad idea.

I have on following post said that combat does not oust. And it's true, like vote lock does nothing by itself combat does not kill your prey, bleed or votes do.

All the goodies you propose are pretty slow, interesting because in endgame they can do a lot of good, but they are useless if you need to kill your prey on the spot because he's preparing something you can't control. No every prey will do that, maybe you can do combat deck that don't care about that, but since you can put 20 bleed card in a combat viable deck, the possibility should not be ignored.

CONTRA

I do not play Villein often, really. I feel kinda dirty with it in my deck.

Nerfing could balance it for sure, and my opinion is that you should do it with simple added sentence that goes:
"This vampire cannot gain blood this turn; any blood he or she gains goes to the blood bank instead."
Simple, no combos, and it makes target minion really vulnerable for one turn.