Balancing Ashur Tablets

Never understood why it would take longer than 2 minutes to resolve ashurs.

Play third tablet.

Picl up ash heap. Pile cards you want back. Count them. If less than 13, add more or dont, pick one for hand. If more, remove some.

Put one in hand. Put 12 or less in deck and shuffle. Offer cut. Discard down.

If nothing else, it says "up to" so decide or dont. Just figure it out.

Its as bad as imbued. If you play imbued, you know you want conviction, so freaking find one for each imbued and get on with it.

No, I do not think people need to take 7 hours to decide on cards. If I play MotS or Alastor, I may take 1minute 30 seconds to decide flamethrower or assault rifle or bowl or bow. But if you build the deck, you know whats in it. I have lapses where I forget, but I still pick an equipment and go.

There is no reason to draw out choices lile you are refinancing your house. Pick cards. If you cant pick them, ahsurs says "up to" so shuffle what you have and get it over with.

Ive not seen "Ashur Stall" but Ilbued stall is annoying, so I assume its similar. Seriously, why does it happen?

ReverendRevolver wrote:

Never understood why it would take longer than 2 minutes to resolve ashurs.
...
Ive not seen "Ashur Stall" but Ilbued stall is annoying, so I assume its similar. Seriously, why does it happen?

Short version: games are complicated. Imagine that you are told you can see exactly what everyone else is playing on the table in front of you, then side-board your deck to take that information into account. (It's not quite side-boarding, but it's close.) In games that allow it, side-boarding is often a difficult skill to master, and requires a non-zero amount of time between rounds.


Longer version:

You have 13 cards to put back in your library. If you're like (quite a few) Ashur decks, that's a fairly hefty amount of your current library. 9 Ashur Tablets in a 70-75 card library is probably a little towards the 'extreme' end, but far from unthinkable. e.g. www.veknfrance.com/decks/twd.htm#2013wone2 has 9 in 69.

So you play the first Ashur set with 23 cards down - 46 left, with 13 being added back in. That's 59 in your deck. Get through roughly half of those to get the next three out. So say you're down to about 25-30 cards. 13 cards going into that is a third to half your deck.

Now imagine you're playing, say, a fairly naive stealth and bleed deck. Say you have roughly 30-40 cards in your ash heap at this point. (Some cards have probably gone in play, like the occasional Villein or Blood Doll or whatever.) You might have the option of choosing from:

- a bunch of stealth
- a clutch of bleed action modifiers
- a handful of bleed actions
- a smattering of wake/bounce
- a dash of transient masters, like Sudden or DI

Looking at the table:

- you can probably oust your prey fairly swiftly, though he's shown an annoying tendency to cling on with some blood gain and Villein

- digging through your grand-prey's ash heap, she played a smattering of Second Traditions early in the game though nothing much since. Is that a lucky/unlucky shuffle, or has she been hoarding them to use against you?

- your predator is a vote-y deck, so your bleed bounce hasn't been that useful to you

- your grand-predator is making inroads into your predator, but it's slow work, mostly because your predator is generating a lot of pool with Voter Cap and friends. But if / when she does get through to you, your grand-pred is showing quite a lot of bleed, and your bounce might be more useful to you.


Now decide what you want to get back, taking everything into account. Do you go all bleed mod and bounce, to find yourself with a grand-prey who's now walling up with those Seconds and you wish you had more stealth, while your predator still won't budge so that bounce is pointless? Do you mix in mostly stealth with some bleed mods? Can you remember what's left in your library - is it a lot of stealth, bleed, bounce, something else - so you can get the ratios right?

Now imagine you're playing a much more intricate deck.

Now imagine you're playing a much more intricate deck, and the outcome of this table will very likely decide whether you get into the tournament finals or not.

Now imagine you're playing a much more intricate deck, and this is the final round of a Continental Championship.

To solve the timing issue: how about having a 1 turn delay on Ashur? You play your third Ashur, you gain the pool right away, but the cards are only shuffled back at your next untap phase. Now you have one full table turn to think about it

jamesatzephyr wrote:

Now imagine you're playing a much more intricate deck.

Now imagine you're playing a much more intricate deck, and the outcome of this table will very likely decide whether you get into the tournament finals or not.

Now imagine you're playing a much more intricate deck, and this is the final round of a Continental Championship.

so... rationalization and making excuses all around? intense situations happen all the time, man. haggling over price doesn't get us anywhere if goalposts are going to be moved depending on the situation. How long is too long to be futzing around with tablets? "well, it depends!" is a pretty awful answer. I can understand having greater sympathy for time taken when the stakes get high, but that doesn't seem to be that high of a complaint that i've noticed in this thread. i'm probably wrong though.

in a way, this whole thing reminds me of an argument i once had with someone about a table-top wargame. the point of contention was where the burden of playing fair lay: with the player, to not play like an asshole and do assholish things with the available options, or with the designer whose job it was to nominally ensure a level playing field and keep all the obviously shitty situations out of reach of the player. if you've got a situation in your game where the designer goes "well who plays like that?" you're looking at poor design.

I shpuld re-word my statements:

I never umderstood why people take 15 minutes to resolve ashurs when:
A. Theyve been at the table all game, and even if they misses important plays amd discards may look at any other players {at the table, obviously} asheap whenever they want, as often as they want.
B. They have very solid knowledge of at LEAST 8-10 cards they want back, since they've been playing or discarding the cards in the ash heap to begin with {or fed them to liquidation and still SAW them go in there} and should know on q strategic basis the basics of A.
C. Have at the absolute least some idea of WHEN they will play an Ashur. If you have 2 out and one in hand, why the hell arent the gears turning? {If something happens during other players turns, MAYBE you change something, but still not a reason to spend 20 minutes contemplating if 4 grapples is a knee-jerk reaction to scary grand predators bleed of 12. You need it or not.} In mmpa decks, assume you can play 3. If you dont have 13 worth taking, either dont play them or take less than 13. If you had 2 out and topdexk one off of a villein, the idea shouldve been planted. Its not some "oh shit, I forgot what the third tablet did" thing. If you played it, there shoulda been some forethought.

On "Ashur stalling" Ive seen tablets take 16 minutes to resolve, and almost fell asleep and drooled on the table. I have NOTseen somebody deliberately stalling oit tablets to be a prick for an in game advantage or for the sake of being a prick. Yet. But since I have seen somebody take stupid long just to be "TACTICAL" Id probably come unglued if someone stalled it further deliberately.

Ive used Tablets in Anson second trad guns since I got 4 of them, which was whem KoT was still easily obtainable in shops and on WW website. I always wanted more tastes, pursuits, DI, dreams, and sexond trads. Id often want more blurs, rushes, sideslips, and haven uncovereds. Sometimes Id pick up fames, tension, or enchamt kindred/Aire of elation. Never did I take >3 minutes to decide what was happening. Id say on a scale of 1-5 of complexity, with1 being stealthbleed, 2 weenie potence, 3 being imbued, 4 being girls and 5 being purgr combo based on bookkeeping and being attentive, Anson second trad is around 3 ish.
Theres more complex and less complex stuff out there. Ive used tablets in KS decks, DBR decks, and weenie for+pre flash grenades and still taken ~3 minutes tops to decide.

If it takes that much time to decide stuff to shuffle in, how much time should it take to decide to block? Or to debate bleeding out of fear of bounce?

Theres tboughtful, then theres calculating, then theres "are we even still playing?"

Edit: Self Biased, were you playing with 40k Chaos Rhino-rush, Fantasy "Hero-Hammer" or the later"I have 6 Hydras" darkelves/"I kill you, ressurrect you, you amd I kill you" VC? I once got the Nigjt goblin initiative check vortex dropped on Saurus. Yea, initiative 2. Lotsa dead lizards. I dont think me taking 6 Salamanders compares to someone stalling out or just being disrespectfully slow about resolving tablets. Una is a perfect example of "blame players v. Designers" debates though. Maybe girls decks in general as well......

Asnek wrote:

how did you get to 4 cards provided for methuselah in reinforcment? using same math as you used for ashurs you would gain ONLY 2 cards not 4. returning 3 cards at cost of 1 card.
ashurs do have slightly better results when you count that they do return 13 card for cost of 3.5 cards.
yes in fact it's 3.5 card and not a whole card as you have suggested. many times you simply drop duplicity from your hand or card you know would not be needed around the table. in such cases you are in card benefit and not in card lose!!!

another fact you definitively need to take in acount is that Reinforcment is an action not master. any moron around the table might be able to simply throw away telepatic misdirection (that is played in like 1/3-1/4 of decks) and screw whole your gain. how many deck do intentonaly play suddens and/or washes? i believe it would be much lower number.

Apologies, I had it in mind that Reinforcments returned 4 cards... which just means that it is worse than before with the comparison and pushes Ashur Tablets further above the 'general card recursion point'.

Ashur Tablets makes you discard a card by over-sizing your hand. The card chosen might be less valuable at that time due to other factors, but the simplest cost is "1 card". Attempting to put a more elegant cost on a card requires the kind of modelling and actuarial work I couldn't be bothered doing concretely. If there is an actuary out there who feels like they want to put actuarial coefficients on the various possible card discards after drawing the "one card" of Ashur Tablets... I'm all for it. While you are at it, please give approximate pool and blood costs of all minion actions at all points in the game. It's about the same level of complexity and work required.

I never claimed Reinforcements couldn't be stopped, in fact I've usually said it is far easier to stop and provides only marginally better benefits from its required setup (i.e. title, majority referendum, not being blocked) than other action-based recursion. Again, Ashur Tablets is a less interactive master card play and is more likely to be achieved; its 'setback cost' of the triggering event is made less of an issue due to card scarcity, but it is also not a particularly strong penalty for what would appear to be easier to accomplish than 4 unblocked referendums by a titled vampire.

Asnek wrote:

hey judge it takes him 2 minutes to choose 13th card [...]recepie for hot water PLEASE

Or you could just say "Judge can you stop the clock for our table, this guy seems to be wasting time making a decision."

Asnek wrote:

you can't separate these two as you are trying to suggest. time loss is equal to quantity of cards you need to find and fact you are searching for more cards does not help.[...] you might be able to play can be more time consuming than any ashurs we have ever seen.

Duh, playing 3 MotS takes more time than playing 1 MotS. Eating 3 sandwiches takes more time than eating one. But in the end, MotS limits you to one equipment card... so that means you can ignore any non-equipment card in your library AND you are probably doing this action with the item of equipment already in mind.

My claim on time loss is that time lost is increased by the number of cards chosen AND the number of cards which are valid choices AND it's probably not a straight multiplier of those two factors (i.e. choosing 2 cards from 4 cards is probably going to be longer than twice the time of choosing 1 card from 4 cards). I am saying that MotS will have a shorter search time than for instance Spirit Summoning Chamber (burn a blood to search for a THA card). I am also saying that the search Alastor will have a similar time than MotS because Alastor has the same choice limits AND like the MotS case you have probably already got a shorter list of choices out of the possible choices (i.e. you are choosing between Helicopter and Assault Rifle for your Alastor but ignoring the Sports Bikes, Ankara Citadel and Palatial Estates).

What makes playing Ashur Tablets far longer is that you must first choose 13 cards and then choose 1 to go to your hand. Because there are two sets of choices and both of them are made on reasonably large numbers of cards.

If you have the problem that you telegraph to your opponents that you are planning to play your 3rd Ashur Tablets by looking at your ashheap, then look at it more often so they can't tell when you are playing it. That's just bad tactics on your part.

Asnek wrote:

simple scenario description. who did not see it before?
player puts 3rd ashur on the table. next 15-30 seconds he is explaining to whole table what will happen. then he chose 7-9 cards right away in another 30 seconds, but choice for remaining 4-5 cards takes another 3-5 minutes as he is checking card counts and deck situation and his hand few more times.

That is my point about the decisions being more complex and taking more time the greater the size of the groups and number of choices to be made.