SCE

Elotar, may I ask for how long have you been playing this game? Out of that, for how long, competitively?

I belive you jumped really far to conclusion, almost sounding like conspiracy, that some people deliberately (or accidentally, due to stupidity) sabotaged the game at its birth, when Richard was not looking. Theory-crafting is always something I can appreciate, but that might go too far.

As the game progressed, sort of bumps have to be created in order to make it diverse (or vicissitudinary or protean ), and one way of doing these surprises is to divide peculiar powers amongst other clans. At the beginning of the game, fullfilling certain stereotypes were more than satisfying (like the warrior clans fought, the noble clans voted or bled, and occaisonally a toreador grabbed a chainsaw went medieval on others). As time got by, these lines blurred and now we have malkavians using protean, gangrels using auspex, ravnos using dementation, etc etc... you just simple can't blame interactions getting stronger or wierder on any designers who started this game. It's a really diverse game, but as all games it has tiers, of cards and mechanics also. But it also has the wonders any other games lack of, to make up for it. Countless times I had to just sit and pass due to using the aforementioned OP mechanics of S:CE, because a "weak" combat deck erased my 11 vamp Some of those instances I got a VP, without having any vamps in play

To sum it up, no, I don't believe we should nerf S:CE, espeically not certain cards like Earth Meld os Majesty.

Malachy wrote:

To sum it up, no, I don't believe we should nerf S:CE, espeically not certain cards like Earth Meld os Majesty.

You should start with it - if you got religious belief, than I obviously can't change it with rational arguments.

Argument "all the game elements are fine because there are X people playing it" you and others are using countless times is not a rational one - even if we don't see the obvious (that the game is not fine and actually during past 24 years got more problematic periods than fine ones), people may be playing the game because of countless reasons, doing nothing with said game elements.

Present MTG, for example, got no (or maybe just a couple) cards which was in the first set, rules have changed, art has changed, but it still is an MTG with all its good parts and with some, but less than it was, bad parts. Maybe not less - some new things are,in my opinion, terrible, but it's not important - point is that the game is a bigger entity than the sum of its parts, it will not go anywhere if we drop some broken features.

There may be an argument "SCE in their present form are essential to VtES because"... I'm open to them and even make one myself into some of the other threads. The ugly part is not SCE per se, it's a whole system of SCE, counters and collateral effects to other combat strategies, timing rules and the game as a whole. May be it should be changed leaving SCE as is.

History aspect is important, because I believe that Garfield was the only one who really is responsible for the "greater than the sum" part of VtES, everybody else involved are just tinkering with his ideas. Do we really have nobody here who remembers the past?

elotar wrote:

First, some decklist:

www.secretlibrary.info/index.php?deck=view&id=10839

For thouse, who is not in the know, idea there is to rush, play Earth Meld and untap, play psyche, beat target down, rush again because you are untapped, repeat...

Nasty, great pentex target, an IG deck will certainly make minced meat out of Enkidu. It can win a tournament for sure, but also lose a lot. Enkidu on the table draws a lot of table aggro. All in all, it's nasty when you're the target of mentioned deck, but it's far from being a silver bullet deck. I fear S:CE presence weenie bleeders or even stealth bleeders more.

And lets not start a religion around the great mr. Garfield... He's off VTES for quite some time now, probably sipping appletinis on a bermuda beach.

ps. Enkidu/S:CE/raptor/psyche/HoS deck! Lets make one soon!

elotar wrote:

One more step - what would you chose: 1)strike:dodge, or 2)no strike, receive damage, but then end combat?

Suddenly the answer is interesting - against ANI, POT or CEL it's better to suffer but then stop combat, against aggro-poke it's better to dodge. So such effect is quite comparable or even better than strike:dodge, which is accepted as fine basic discipline effect.

Your interesting answers seems dubious.

Against Potence, suffering then ending combat is bad for you. Why? Because Disarm. You have taken strike damage. Combat is now ending, so the round is ending, so Disarm is playable. Whether you're tapped, untapped or anything else, you're in torpor, which is not a good outcome for you.

Against aggro-poke, dodge is not great in a world with readily available additional strikes - which is what the City !Gangrel have. As do others (anyone who can access additional strikes and some agg damage), but it's what the City Gangrel have in spades, due to Cel/Pro.

elotar wrote:

So what I'm trying to say here is that speaking in the terms of the power level original SCE cards will be quite powerful on both basic and superior level even if SCE was not happening before other strikes.

If you're talking more about the original Jyhad set, Potence doesn't have Disarm, but early V:TES combat - particularly obf/pot combat with the Nosferatu - focused on being able to hit you for a lot of damage on that strike, meaning that Fists of Death saw play (which is rarely used in additional strike decks). Also, Pulled Fangs existed dealing agg damage.

But if you're talking about the original set, the power level is not directly comparable to today, because a number of hugely powerful things could happen back in Jyhad, where it doesn't matter if you dodge the strike or the combat ends after the strike. The most obvious is that Zip Gun exists, can be used for multiple strikes (if you get additional strikes, obviously), and can be combined with Dragon's Breath Rounds. And if you go back to the Jyhad wording of DBR, it is played "as damage is being resolved", so it very clearly comes after you know if the other guy is dodging or ending combat or not. So suffer+end combat, play it on the that strike. If they dodge, play an additional strike (or two) and use it there.

If you're blocking / being rushed, why stop there? Jyhad had Rotschreck printed to work the way it does now (it was reversed for a while, making the agg user go to torpor, despite the Jyhad text being clear). That could combine with Zip Gun and DBR to end combat immediately. It's not a strike, and you even get to keep the Zip Gun.

Bottom line: the design of Jyhad combat had some glaring flaws in it, so I would not use it as a paragon of game design.

elotar wrote:

It explains why there was no way for Gangrels to fight SCE (they was fine torporising with the initial strike), cards like Drawing out the Beast, Vampiric Speed and crap load of second round strikes, which obviously are totally useless if combat are supposed to be decided at the first round. O, and melee weapons.

Vaguely kinda sorta. What we know of/can deduce of Jyhad playtesting is that although the game had been designed without card limits, they didn't really look at what happens if you ramped some of the cards up to a significantly higher number - hence a few big omissions like Presence decks being able to bleed, get blocked, and untap repeatedly until the bleed got through (because no NRA aspects to the game back then), nor did they catch Gangrel (almost-)infinite loop decks going to torpor, using Movement of the Slow Body, untapping, repeating.

There's also a strong suggestion that 'combat' decks in Jyhad playtest were much more along the lines of what we would categorise as bruise-and-bleed, where a lot of combats would come from blocks (rather than rushes), and where a 'combat' deck might intimidate you into not blocking because you didn't want to lose your vampire. Yes, Haven Uncovered, Bum's Rush, Bloodhunt, Wynn etc. existed, but they seem to have been regarded as things to spice up a deck, cause surprises, not things to power the central feature of the deck. The difference in that from how the game panned out in reality would suggest that their decks had a much lower level of combat defence than many decks that happened in the real world. So getting hit with Majesty in a playtest would be a "Hah, good one!" moment, not an "Aargh, another one!" moment.

elotar wrote:

But then at some moment (I hope at the playtesting and not just by management decision) there was a change, then it was found that SCE are too powerful, but instead of returning to design intent the IG and Pshyche was introduced, regardless of them breaking all combat structure (it really looks like dumb management decision which were widespread at the industry at the time). And than the game was unleashed on the public and the world still suffer because of it.

If IG was introduced as a way of dealing with ubiquitous S:CE, making it rare (R2 in Jyhad, I think) would be an add odd way of doing that. Jyhad wasn't afraid to make cards that it thought would be very useful common - lots of bleed actions and bleed modifiers, stealth etc. are common, as are both Majesty and Earth Meld.

Again, the fact that Presence block-untap-repeat combat made it through to the real world without the remotest hint of a good way of dealing with on Jyhad's release suggests strongly to me that S:CE wasn't being played heavily in the playtest, and so IG and Psyche! were seen as things that could make a combat deck more fun, rather than necessary hard counters. IG restricting you to hand strikes has obvious other applications, principally defending you from weapons. The big weapons like Assault Rifle were intended to see play - there's a comment from one of the books that says something like guns were supposed to be something of an equaliser between weenies and fatties, as a reflection of that happenign in the WoD, so being able to shut down a strike from an Assault Rifle occasionally would also be a handy thing for clans that didn't have access to damage prevention, something which wasn't easily available on in-clan disciplines for the Nosferatu or Brujah (some fatty Nosferatu have Fortitude, and Celerity had Sideslip).

elotar wrote:

TwoRazorReign wrote:

The world is not suffering.

It is. Your comment, empty of any substance, but full of aggression, totally uncalled for, clearly shows your pain.

Um...it's a card game about vampires. My response is making light of how serious you are being about a card game about vampires. I ensure you there is no agression or "pain."

When you are trying to ignore problems they not go away, they start to torture you from inside.

Again, it's a card game about vampires. I do not associate the words "game" and "torture."

Combat idiosyncrasies were a topic from the very beginning of the game and as we can see they still is. There were couple of moments during said 24 years when it was possible to fix the problem, but powers that be failed to do it, we have such moment now, I would prefer to use it instead of leaving it to others, who will be here after us.

Sure. But they weren't "fixed." And the game went on with these "idiosyncrasies." That this causes you "pain" is really dramatic. Hence why I'm making light of your post.

It all will be especially sad, if it really is a result of a one minute decision of somebody not very involved in the design of Jyhad.

Oh yes, we will all be very sad about a card game about vampires that happens to have "problems" like being random and having trumps. I don't know how the world will keep turning when a card game about vampires has the huge problem of being characteristic of a card game...