Recruitment Exercise - Good for the Black Hand?

Klaital wrote:

So if you don't use any obfuscate it in anymore, does it mean that you are now just relying on getting everything through with 1 stealth?

Well, with a watchtower, all undirected actions are at 2 stealth,
and once u get a seraph/seraphs second and a tatoo signal, the amount of actions u can take will overwhelm most blocking capabilities.
ALso, i play change of target, so if reunion is blocked, u untap and play RE instead. But yes, neighbor john or carna on turn 2 will ruin my day.

Reunion Kamut is already the backbone of Black Hand decks. I share the concern that adding Recruitment Exercise may have reinforced that backbone so much that there is little point playing any other way. Let me think out loud and play devil's advocate here. There are so many clans and sects and disciplines already; is it actually so bad if one subsect has exactly one shtick? Maybe not. Is bloat too effective now? Well, bleeding for 18 in a turn has been a thing since 1994 and you can't bounce them all.

jamesatzephyr wrote:

Given that you entirely failed to notice that Fiendish Tongue interacts with Sabbat Intrigue to make disciplineless stealth bleed much more efficient than it already was, I submit that it doesn't matter what the PCK thinks it does - it's really, really bad at it.

Really, James? I always thought your comments were much more careful than this.

You are trying to insinuate that my "Point taken" response means something completely different. Go read the comments and context again. I was acknowledging your point, and I immediately explained why "In our final analyses, with weenie decks factored in, these cards provided a reasonable incremental change for the better."

And then you take your unfounded comments and go ad hominem on PCK. If that's really your debate style (and from your interactions with AaronC, I am beginning to wonder), then so be it.

Juggernaut1981 wrote:

I cite my own comment about your statistic and your own comment about preference for anecdotal (and thereby scientifically unreliable) evidence over waiting for real statistics/evidence.

Nice try at putting words in my mouth. I did not say anything of the sort. The evidence we have is anecdotal. It may not be statistically significant, but that doesn't mean it should be discarded out of hand.

I suppose we could wait for six or nine months before there are 50 instances in the TWDA with DM cards and then bother to take note of the changes to the metagame. But that would be folly in itself.

If you would like some help from someone who is fairly strong at the basics of statistical analysis, I'd be happy to help you refine your techniques to the point where they provide scientifically reliable and scientifically valid results.

Yep. Again, you have no real argument and must reduce yourself to weak ad hominem attacks. I'll take my applied mathematics degree and decades of data analysis against whatever you can muster any day.

Either of you care to actually talk about the points I raised regarding Recruitment Exercise? Didn't think so...

M.Schumacher wrote:

Just my 2 cents...

Thanks for the additional background about your version of this deck.

M.Schumacher wrote:

Very often when cards come out, they are either
regarded as wall paper (everyone bitches about them) or they are very strong (lots of people bitch about them). DM had to have some impact on the game,
otherwise it would have been a complete waste of time. So in summary ithink its a well balanced card, and nowhere near the power level of, lets say, govern or parity shift

"DM had to have some impact on the game, otherwise it would have been a complete waste of time."

If Johannes had his way, every single card from DM would be showing up in TWDs in very short order. He basically stated the goal "Make cards that will immediately have an impact on tournaments." I thought this strategy was very reckless from my time on the Design Team. Such a goal is contrary to "Make cards that are good for V:tES" and will have long term deleterious effects.

Johannes' above stated design goal for this set was really just a good marketing ploy. Make some power cards and please people immediately, at whatever long term cost.

Jeff wrote:

Juggernaut1981 wrote:

I cite my own comment about your statistic and your own comment about preference for anecdotal (and thereby scientifically unreliable) evidence over waiting for real statistics/evidence.

Nice try at putting words in my mouth. I did not say anything of the sort. The evidence we have is anecdotal. It may not be statistically significant, but that doesn't mean it should be discarded out of hand.

If you had read my comments, and watched the fairly entertaining video of Neill deGrasse Tyson, you would have understood that I was discarding it out of hand. Discarding it because it is almost worthless as scientific evidence and more worthless as statistical evidence.


I would also note that you didn't address my four points which were in addition to James' comment that your cards enables disciplineless stealth-bleed.

In your response to James' comments are, in summary, "Our analysis says you thoughts are not relevant and we included weenie decks in our analysis."

Considering the flawed sampling methods for your analysis and the terrible methods you seem to use for statistics I call into question PCK's analytical methods. Based on their cards and their responses, your analysis is terrible.