Recruitment Exercise - Good for the Black Hand?

I plainly recall having like 3 feet of text in me origional comment on this subjuect(on the twd thread)

I feel ive been misquoted in part.

I dont see a particular need to keep harping on this same topic, i mean, if the horse is dead, has been dead several months, and furthermore is not buried in a mystical pet semetary, why the hell are we still beating the dead horse?

Open quoting yours truly, have like 3 half validish points, then it spins into "vekn didnt guess right, this arxhetype will ruin the game...." and insinuating, im sorry, stating, that every card in the set was intended to do so at the onset of developement?

I get pissed when my ideas get passed over too. But come on, cant we just talk about vtes without this bitterness of old buisness? Be pissy because some asshat ousted you intentionally crosstable with a malkacian prank(and i'll admit to having done that ) not because of something long done and over.

The cards not pto reprinted for any titled vamp with capacity above 2. Its a playable card, thats really it.

Why start fights over it? What agenda can that possibly be helping?

And mathmatically, no proof exists that this card will crush the global meta, or that vekn tests things in a manner less optimally than pck. You have a weenie swarm bleed enabler. You blew off(i just read tbat thread 10 minutes ago) people saying something about it. Its not a real set, so its not going to matter in twds, so we will never have statistical proof that pck testing one way trumps vekn testing another. Just the assumption that vekn killed too strong of cards.


Ive seen one good opinion against this card, and the rest dont see a problem. And honestly, i play too many Anatole/Matthias/neighbor john/mordechai bennun style decks to honestly see a deck reliant upon no fluid stealth ruining my vtes experience longer than one game.

Taking in that Recruitment Exercise is only slightly better than Clotho's gift (mainly in that it doesn't require minions with obfuscate) it doesn't really do much that couldn't have been done almost as good already.

Jeff wrote:

Some points:

One piece of Unique Equipment (e.g. Guarded Rubrics) and the reliance on untap, even if permanent like Tattoo Signal, does not make for good bleed tech, even with multiple copies of the unique card. I will point out that Martin Schumacher's deck only had a single copy of Guarded Rubrics in the deck list, and not a single Heidelberg Castle. Bleeding for 1 with 6 or 7 minions at +1 stealth due to Watchtower: The Wolves Feed is pretty strong, and that is clearly the objective of Martin's deck most of the time. I suspect that was also the case with Guilhem's deck in practice, though he did have more bleed modifiers available.

Bleeding few times for 1 isn't that weak, but guarded rubrics will come eventually, and at the start all you do is RE and RK bloat anyway (and Thugges, if you play the crypt with them). THEN you lunge bleed for a lot.

Jeff wrote:

Klaital opines that Reunion Kamut is better. I think that Recruitment Exercise is too similar to Reunion Kamut. I think it interesting that when Martin won, he had already nearly won a tournament with the deck while using Effective Management to draw more vampires from his crypt. Clearly Recruitment Exercise dramatically increased the power of this type of crypt machine.

Martin was using clotho's gift outferior to get the crypt to uncontrolled before, no wonder that he use card that is free, less restricted in his crypt and give that vampire a blood. Is it worse than Kamut ? A bit in raw power, but it's great when you can do both (signal/second), and it's required if you want to influence entire crypt.

Jeff wrote:

Leave it to Juggernaut to intentionally (?) miss the point of my post entirely and focus on something else. Clearly, meaningful statistics can't be determined, but the anecdotal evidence is critical. There have been only six tournaments since DM was tourney legal and two of them have Recruitment Exercise! Sure, it's not 50 tournaments, but the explosion of this new card onto the tournament scene needs to be closely watched, if it doesn't already suggest that the card was a bad idea from the start.

The archetype (near disciplineless bh) was good even without recruitment excercise. Now it's just improved. For me, as a black hand fan, it's not what the sub-sect need (i don't really like weenie strategies), but it's not that bad either.

Jeff wrote:

Keep in mind that Recruitment Exercise is a *library* card and not a crypt card. One of the easiest things for players to do when a new set comes out is to simply use a new crypt with their existing libraries, and maybe change a handful of cards. The disciplines generally match for a given clan across groupings, so when Lodin shows up in a bunch of decks quickly, that's not a big surprise. Besides, individual vampires, with the possible exception of Una, don't really make a huge impact on the game, mainly due to contesting and Pentex Subversion. Library cards have significant, immediate and unpredictable impacts on the game. Maybe the Black Hand crypt machine was expected, but I don't see this as being a good thing for V:tES.

The Deck of Martin was already build, and known to be good, before the new set release. Changing Effective Manegement and Clotho's Gifts for new card was no brainer. It was expected.

Jeff wrote:

Regarding the identify of Black Hand: I just hope that Recruitment Exercise/Reunion Kamut/swarm bleed doesn't subsume all other possible identities. It's not just about swarm bleeding either. I've heard many people out there, especially some members of the VEKN Inner Circle and Design team, say that bloating is bad for the game. It slows down games, leads to table timeouts, causes all sorts of problems. Guilhem's deck could gain 46 pool and 40 transfers (actually 10 decrypts outside the influence phase, which is probably even better than 4 transfers) from RE/RK alone. Martin's deck could gain 60 pool and 40 transfers! Compare that to Better Gents with Sticks which gains 39 pool and 39 transfers with Govern the Unaligned at a cost of 13 blood (scale it up to ~45 pool/45 transfers if a 90 card deck costing 15 blood).

Who was playing with all haquim's law: leadership deck, i can't remember.

Jeff wrote:

Did someone on the VEKN design team do this kind of analysis with the cards? Seriously, did someone do this kind of analysis of the cards? PCK does.

As for the goal of the card being "make the weak bh guys good", I was just quoting Reverend Revolver. But the effect of the card is exactly what a crypt machine wants: draw a new vamp and put blood on that vampire. It's an action so the machine keeps feeding itself--there is almost no need for the master phase or influence phase at all, except to bring out the new vampires which might already be full.

Yes, thats what crypt machine wants. There is still need for master phase for other things than influencing out new vampires. Which leaves it for interesting things, like black hand masters.

Jeff wrote:

As an analogy, why would a Dominate deck play with anything other than the best toys it has? There are so many unused Dominate cards and strategies because the best ones are just so overwhelmingly good. Recruitment Exercise just did that for the Black Hand. I see them all becoming crypt machine bleed swarms with almost no disciplines. Maybe Ke will prove otherwise with his new deck.

I think that there is still some space for mono-clan black hand decks, like assamites. Those decks are bit weaker, as is weak, but still okayish.

Recruitment Exercise is not just an evolution, it's a revolution. I don't see that as good for the game.

It's evolution imo.

Jeff wrote:

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.

And then you take your unfounded comments and go ad hominem on PCK.

Jeff, when PCK showed that they put a card into a production set without understanding how it interacted with another card, and are then criticized on that issue, PCK doesn't get to say THAT'S AN AD HOMINEM ATTACK BLEARG!!! Because it isn't. The critique is well-reasoned.

If you can't deal with that except by performing your own ad hominem, then I suggest you batten down the hatches over there at PCK Enterprises and don't let crap like this slip by. LSJ got rightly pooped on when he made Tyler and the decks that came from her abusing Anathema.

If you can't take the designer heat, stay out of the designed kitchen.

Jeff wrote:

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...

Jeff, I'll take on your applied mathematics degree. I have a degree in Pure Mathematics and in Physical-Theoretical Chemistry. A large amount of my chemistry major is based entirely on statistical analysis of large cross sections of data to come up with meaningful trends. My Pure mathematics, while not directly related to this, did include a mandatory statistics course including the various standard hypothesis testing methods via T- and Z- score methods.

My argument, as you have dodged in your reply, is not an 'ad hominem' (#1) attack. I have introduced NO premises about you. I have responded to premises you have made yourself; namely that PCK utilises some form of analysis when creating/playtesting their cards and the implication that the Design Team does not.

Instead, I have attacked your claim to use analysis. I have attacked it on three fronts (none of which you have addressed except by an appeal to authority) namely:
1) The evidence you accept in your analysis.
2) The skill with which you apply your analysis to data (especially in light of the flawed data sampling)
3) The results of your analysis are flawed and presumably so is the analysis.

Since you brought up your qualifications and experience. Based on the observable details (i.e. PCKs card publications), your analytical methods and expertise are flawed. This is not ad hominem, purely because you brought this premise into the debate.

References:
#1 Taxonomy of Fallacies
www.fallacyfiles.org/adhomine.html

Jeff wrote:

And then you take your unfounded comments and go ad hominem on PCK.

Okay, so let's pretend that you did do the analysis, you did spot it, and you made totally, totally the wrong decision. Why does weenie disciplineless stealth bleed need to be made better? It doesn't, but your careful analytical process produced that end result. Yes, flopping out four one cap Panders on turn one, bleeding for 2 each at +1 stealth, awesome. Why did your analytical process produce this result? Since it produced this result, why is it a model anyone else should copy?

If you make truly awful calls, all the analysis in the world won't save you from your own ineptitude.

See also: the Dunning Kruger effect.