Emerald Legionnaire — First Black Chantry Nerf?

To say people aren't metagaming against them is, at least on Lackey, a mostly invalid statement. We've had post-game chats about how to handle them. Almost any Presence deck I run includes 6+ Entrancement instead of 2+ by default. All my vote decks now have extra copies of Anarchist Uprising and Ancilla Empowerment (and possibly Domain Challenge). All of these changes mess with the flow of decks. Now my own votes are damaging me, etc, which cascade into other changes, so formerly solid decks are less so because they need to be able to handle this new meta.

Damnans wrote:

Out of curiosity, has any of you ever used Nightmares upon Nightmares against Emerald Legionnaire decks?

I have looked at this for another tool in the anti-ally toolkit (mostly for Nephandi and Diary wraiths). I haven't gotten around to trying it for or against Legionnaires yet.

It'll be borne out in practice, but at least early on it helps Legionnaire decks. I was actually thinking of playing it with a couple of other events to hose weenie decks as I tune my deck, bringing out Legionnaires and whatever else as necessary.

skimflux wrote:

Try these for comparison: Zillah's Valley also got its first 4 wins in 4 months. Deep Song got 13 wins in 10 months. Ashur Tablets had 8 wins at 4 months. None of these have been nerfed.

Ashur Tablets came out during what was probably the height of VtES popularity and activity. What's the ratio of wins/all tournaments, for each of those deck types in the first four month period? And for WoN, I'd run the stats again against Tumnimos and see what effect that had.

Damnans wrote:

Out of curiosity, has any of you ever used Nightmares upon Nightmares against Emerald Legionnaire decks?

I am considering making room for it in some of my decks.

Name: Nightmares upon Nightmares
[Gehenna:R]
Cardtype: Event
Gehenna. Do not replace until your next discard phase.
For each minion a Methuselah controls during his or her unlock phase, the Methuselah must burn a card from his or her hand or lock that minion. Cards burned in this way are not replaced until the master phase. Vampires with capacity greater than the number of Gehenna cards in play and mortal allies are not affected by this card.
Artist: Mark Nelson

Bill also pointed out that that card would ruin his deck. It definitely would. But nobody uses that card normally. It would have no good reason to be in a deck other than to destroy Legionairre swarms. The other ally killers like Entrancement, Ancilla Empowerment, and Uncoiling (to burn Unmasking) have other uses. So if somebody needs to have that cornercase card to beat Bill's deck, it only further supports my argument that the Legionairres need modification.

mjvtes521 wrote:

Alcoan has CEL and fortitude. So the deck has rushes, Legionairres, a ton of Infernal Pursuit, a couple Forced March and Zephyr for 100% unlock after the rush, and then one or two copies of all the cards that keep other decks from stopping it. He rushes, and whether he is blocked or not, gets to fill his ash heap with a ton of cards...

I have some questions. Again, very casual VTES player here.

What if the target plays Obedience? Wouldn't that card completely foil this plan? Or Secure Haven?

as well as getting the the perfect hand for preventing anybody from stopping the swarm of Legionairres....

Everything you go on to list after this part is basically every card included in every deck ever. I mean, people don't really have an answer for Poison Pill or Delaying Tactics?

DJ, Mewcat, and I play on Lackey a lot, so we have all seen several Legionairre decks, many many times. So this is no knee jerk reaction. I've seen plenty of people trying to meta against Legionairres.

How exactly did they try to "meta" against it and fail?

I didn't think they needed nerfing until I saw Bill's deck. This is a new mechanic, unlike anything else that exists in VTES, and Bill's deck shows that it is unfairly strong and broken.

Again, what attempts have you made to meta against this particular deck that failed?

kschaefer wrote:

To say people aren't metagaming against them is, at least on Lackey, a mostly invalid statement. We've had post-game chats about how to handle them. Almost any Presence deck I run includes 6+ Entrancement instead of 2+ by default.

All my vote decks now have extra copies of Anarchist Uprising and Ancilla Empowerment (and possibly Domain Challenge). All of these changes mess with the flow of decks. Now my own votes are damaging me, etc, which cascade into other changes, so formerly solid decks are less so because they need to be able to handle this new meta.

So the argument you'd make is that Emerald Legionnaire can be meta gamed against, it's just that doing so warps the meta game in a direction that is problematic in terms of deck building?

skimflux wrote:

DJHedgehog wrote:

There have been 3 decks on the TWD as tournament winners and at least 1 more that hasn't been added from Martin. 4 wins in 4 months sounds solid to me.

The comparison to Week of Nightmares was made, so I checked and there have been 5 week of nightmare deck wins in the last 5 years.

To me that seems like it's worth looking at.

WoN is a poor comparison for TWDA statistics - it was missing the 'breed' component when it first showed up in FN, the first winning deck using WoN is from 2002 (one year after release).

Try these for comparison: Zillah's Valley also got its first 4 wins in 4 months. Deep Song got 13 wins in 10 months. Ashur Tablets had 8 wins at 4 months. None of these have been nerfed.

It's funny that you say that because literally those are all cards I speak out against pretty regularly, with the exception of Zillah's Valley. Ashur is silly for this game and Deep Song is overtuned,

I was looking at WoN wins in the *last 5 years*, not the first 5 after it came out.