Recruitment Exercise - Good for the Black Hand?

For various definitions of good. From my perspective, good cards help minions that can play them do interesting and relevant things toward victory within the framework of the overall game design.

Recruitment Exercise
+1 stealth action. Requires a
Black Hand vampire.
Show the top card of your crypt
to all Methuselahs and move it to
your uncontrolled region. Add
1 blood from the blood bank to
it if it is a Black Hand vampire.

ReverendRevolver wrote:

Unintended consequences?

Next time, mayne they get disciplineless combat, so they do what they always shoulda.

Also, BH needs more goodstuff, and i LOVE combat, but makimg the weak bh guys good @ combat doesnt fix issues with disciplines lining up or make combat with a fee bh cards and vamps with little else in common viable

So, mesu/infonetwork action for bh is whatever.

But, this card is meh.

Other uses are out there, this is the most logical "win n stuff " build.

I think these points are all well taken, and they actually point out some of the unintended consequences.

If the goal was to "make the weak bh guys good", then this card really fails to do that. All it does is turn every Black Hand deck into a crypt machine, especially coupled with Reunion Kamut.

You mention three issues with the Black Hand: Disciplines lining up, improve Black Hand combat, make vamps with little else in common more viable. Looking just at the card text, does Recruitment Exercise address any of these three? Maybe a bit on the third one, but uyet another Dom/Obf crypt machine is not what V:tES needs. Recruitment Exercise doesn't even come close to addressing the first two.

I can't help but think about Jay Kristoff's comments in the notes to his Gangrel antitribu TWD called July Bell: Worst to First : "I heard some talk at Origins 2011 that the Gangrel-antitribu are the worst clan. I built this deck to display some of their strengths."

The strengths that Jay sarcastically refers to are Leathery Hide and a couple of boring Master cards to create a baby-maker swarm bleed deck. He is trying to make the point that Cel/Obf/Pro doesn't oust well. I think that Recruitment Exercise does the same for the Black Hand. It does nothing flavorful or canonical, and just makes more minions with disciplines which still don't line up and still have poor combat, but which bleed for 1 really well (/sarcasm). Is this the mundane fate of the mighty Black Hand?

ReverendRevolver wrote:

We COULD easily reflect this in sets. But its alot of work.

To that point: Do Recruitment Exercise and Shakar: the Hunt represent the culmination of the past year of work to improve the Black Hand?

Two TWDs in barely the first month that this library card has been around tells me that this card is already having too much of an impact. And by this I mean that Black Hand strategies may have been permanently skewed toward swarm bleed decks. One could argue that this is all they really were already. But why focus on that instead of on other victory conditions?

Yeah, I am thinking critically, and publicly, about this particular card. I hope others will do the same. It has been eerily silent on the VEKN forums about specific cards from Danse Macabre, other than slaps on the back for a job well done (the artwork is pretty darn good).

I rate it, it serves a purpose and is in keeping with a lot of blackhand decks.

It frees up space for other masters, is balanced due to blackhand limitation and perhaps most importantly: it's not wallpaper.

I reached a final a couple of weeks ago using blackhand tech, different deck compared to the other twds — but most definitely one that recruitment excecise enabled to the point of being tournament worthy.

It was the little push very much needed.

Jeff wrote:

... but which bleed for 1 really well (/sarcasm). Is this the mundane fate of the mighty Black Hand?
...

Where do you see Black Hands bleeding for one?
They go like this:
- equip with Guarded Rubrics
- untap with black hand tech
- bleed with Guarded Rubrics
So I think it is good advice to replace the [/sarcasm] with [/good card]

Jeff wrote:

Yeah, I am thinking critically, and publicly, about this particular card. I hope others will do the same. It has been eerily silent on the VEKN forums about specific cards from Danse Macabre, other than slaps on the back for a job well done (the artwork is pretty darn good).

I'm sorry for not posting decks here. I was too busy building decks with the new cards and playing them. On #vtes there has been lively discussion about Spoils of War, Public Vilification, Inside Dirt (probably more, but I'm not always online there).
There was a whole thread on these forums about Spoils of War:
- a deck
- the card itself

Black Hand vampires interestingly enough have their most prevalent discipline as AUSPEX. You can make a reasonable deck using that. Plus with the new DM guy you can potentially get a sizable horde of BH vampires 'the slow way' as well.

I personally don't really see recruitment exercise as that good because black hand already has kamut, which is better, so why would you need this card, unless you are making some kind of multiact thingy that aims to do both with same minion in a turn, because outside of that, I would pretty much always want kamut over this card.

Jeff wrote:

To that point: Do Recruitment Exercise and Shakar: the Hunt represent the culmination of the past year of work to improve the Black Hand?

Two TWDs in barely the first month that this library card has been around tells me that this card is already having too much of an impact. And by this I mean that Black Hand strategies may have been permanently skewed toward swarm bleed decks. One could argue that this is all they really were already. But why focus on that instead of on other victory conditions?

Yeah, I am thinking critically, and publicly, about this particular card. I hope others will do the same. It has been eerily silent on the VEKN forums about specific cards from Danse Macabre, other than slaps on the back for a job well done (the artwork is pretty darn good).

As a critical commentary on your sampling methods upon which you base your statistical claims...

1) The European Championship was in early October. The AUSNZ Championship was on the same day. DM was not valid for those tournaments.

2) Because of something similar to organiser fatigue... there have been very few tournaments.

Therefore your statements about only two TWDA entries is flawed statistics. Your sample is arbitrarily small and unlikely to be representative.