Imbued vs Xeper

Ah, that makes more sense. I guess the secret must be kept with a magagi is better anyway, getting to pick and whatnot.

Still, even less sympathy for the imbued.

I havent dealt with them on a more than once very 12 games basis since like 2009-10, but but back then even, playing was better than building to hurt them. And there was a fad of the fourth cycle in alot of decks for like a year in Ohio. But minion stealers getting imbued is an oh well thing. Stickmen cant stop dying to war ghouls midgame with little blood, nearly no presses, and just prevent when the ghouls play traps. Imbued can always try blocking or rushing Xeper and company. Its the rockpaperscissors, but in this case its not even a complete inevitable, soul crushing defeat, like would be lets say getting bled out by nocturns in 6 turns or less while your deck cant ven get setup beyond one vamp before dying.

ReverendRevolver wrote:

But una and girls woulda been nerfed a lomg time ago if not for the fact that its not worth kilking so much of the game to stop them. Trifles being worded differwntly in the rules would help.

It's certainly possible to do something to do something to affect such decks without the collateral damage of hitting every deck ever. Many suggestions have been made in the Card Ideas forum, some of which have potential. It would, for example, be possible to do something like:

- selectively disabling a vampire's special ability, a sort of bastard hybrid of Pentex Subversion and Seeds of Corruption

- some sort of card (Event? Vote? Vampire special?(*)) that prevents minions from granting extra master phase actions, so impinging on Anson, Nana or Huitzilopochtli, without bothering Trifles or The Parthenon (which, as a location, is already somewhat vulnerable). You can change "prevents" into any sort of downside you want - increased cost, tapping, whatever.

( (*) Aside: There's no inherent harm in allowing vampires to have cool special abilities like this, but it's a problem if you make it the only way of accessing it, because a vampire in Group 5, for example, is totally inaccessible to a Group 2 Choir deck, or whatever. A special that's contingent on being ready is decent. Along similar lines, I have a mild fondness for cards that go on your own vampires e.g. equipment, that provide abilities while the vampire is ready, since you can potentially screw up the vampire.)


And many variations. However, the problems are two-fold:

1) You typically want to create interesting table dynamics, and true silver bullet cards may lack interest.

2) You want the card to be useful for its own sake, so that players think to include it. A card that is super, super excellent at hosing Anson MMPA, Girls, or whatever may only be useful on a small number of tables, so the player packing the hoser actually loses out and the benefit is accrued by another player on the table who doesn't have to face MMPA and hasn't filled their deck with anti-MMPA tech.


So what you really want to find is a happy medium that's playable for its own sake, interesting for its own sake. Something like a more generally available Seeds of Corruption (with appropriate costs, burn clauses etc., relative to its power) might be one way to go for that, because you could often find an annoying minion you want to disable even if it's not Nana. Yeah, being able to smack Arika around or neuter Lutz a little... maybe it's worth including? But design here is tricky.


What you don't want to do is end up with the game turning into a roll of the dice of who included which 5 silver bullets that turned out to be super important this time. You sometimes see elements of that in, say, competitive Magic, where - in some rotation blocks - a lot of luck and skill has more been in the sideboarding so that you could nullify particular strategies.

ReverendRevolver wrote:

But freak,drive cant be changed in rules, and shouldnt be.

Well, "shouldn't be" is a different question, but it's certainly possible that you could address this in the rules.

A suggestion that comes up from time-to-time is along the lines of a rule that says:

"A vampire cannot untap more times in your minion phase than his capacity."

Or something like that. These days, you might tweak it to include Imbued, or all allies, or something.

It's actually relatively neat in addressing the Una issue, without hitting the ordinary user of Forced March, Rutor's Hand, Dual Form (inferior), Truth of a Thousand Lies, Instantaneous Transformation - or even Freak Drive itself, supposing that you're not untapping 6 times in one turn with Catherine du Bois.

Depending on the wording, you might run into some issues with an Imbued tooling up with Powers in the first turn or two after coming out, especially with the little ones. You could maybe get around that by simply providing a hard number - "cannot untap more than 5 times", say.

There are two issues:

1) A rule that's basically there to affect one vampire seems a bit overkill.

2) It's hard to affect turbo decks, because the new vampire is usually considered entirely fresh.