New Crypt Card: Valdano, the Carrier

Name: Valdano, the Carrier
Clan: Nosferatu Antitribu
Group: 5
Capacity: 6
Discipline: ani for obf POT
Sabbat. When Valdano enters play from the uncontrolled region he gains a disease counter. He is immune to Vampiric Disease. Sterile.

Game development:
- Extension of the Sabbat crypt options.
- Putting a new spin on a known archtype.

Flavor:
- Nosferatu plague carriers. I liked Smallpox Griet but cannot fail to point that she had the doubtful honour of once being considered by the newsgroup posters to be one of the worst nine-caps ever to exist. Valdano is somewhat more of the same concept, only polished for more usablility.

Balance:
- This time I took a step that I'm fairly unsure of, design-wise: I made the minion interact with counters provided by a totally unrelated master card. I wonder if this is acceptable, if it should be avoided or if it is permissible but might require more descriptive text that points to the functioning of the counter.
- Initially slated to be a 7-cap, I reduced it after pondering how much mileage one can really expect to pull from the disease counters and how they might come to haunt back the minion's player.
- Giving Valdano fortitude makes for a whopping 7 vampires in the 4-5 grouping with For. !Nosferatu however can really use the extra help so I didn't really see it as anything groundbreaking or that needed to be avoided.

Competitiveness:
- Low. Multi-Rush and Blood Denial are not really game winners but I think he is a fairly interesting minion nonetheless.


Drain

He needs more text if he is going to function as a plague carrier.

"Minions opposing Valdano in combat gain a disease counter at the end of combat if range is close. Any minion with a disease counter, other than Valdano, burns a blood during their untap counter. If a vampire has no blood, burn the disease counter."

That would make him a genuine disease/plague carrier.

Juggernaut1981 wrote:

He needs more text if he is going to function as a plague carrier.

"Minions opposing Valdano in combat gain a disease counter at the end of combat if range is close. Any minion with a disease counter, other than Valdano, burns a blood during their untap counter. If a vampire has no blood, burn the disease counter."

That would make him a genuine disease/plague carrier.

My thinking was to make his existing text-given disease counter work like a Vampiric Disease had been previously played on him, thus minimizing his textbox clutter, the unfortunate side effect of that being that the particular rules for its functioning would be found on another card.

But you're right, of course, it's far more linear to just allow him self-contained functioning.

Name: Valdano, the Carrier
Clan: Nosferatu Antitribu
Group: 5
Capacity: 6
Discipline: ani for obf POT
Sabbat. Vampires opposing Valdano in combat gain a disease counter if range is close. Any minion with a disease counter burns a blood when they untap. If a vampire has no blood, burn all disease counters on him or her. Valdano is immune to disease counters. Sterile.

There. I had to rework the text a little bit for streamlining. Now it's basically a non-retransmissible version of Vampiric Disease, also lacking the "minion may not hunt" text but that, on the other hand, is actually stackable. This should keep the minion viable and feels elegant since it still allows me enough text space to make him immune to VD and sterile, for flavour purposes. Quite happy with it.


Drain

It looks great.
Don't know how it will look if it is home printed, because of the small font size, but the R&D folks would see to it to be readable.

Drain wrote:

Name: Valdano, the Carrier
Clan: Nosferatu Antitribu
Group: 5
Capacity: 6
Discipline: ani for obf POT
Sabbat. Vampires opposing Valdano in combat gain a disease counter if range is close. Any minion with a disease counter burns a blood when they untap. If a vampire has no blood, burn all disease counters on him or her. Valdano is immune to disease counters. Sterile.

There. I had to rework the text a little bit for streamlining. Now it's basically a non-retransmissible version of Vampiric Disease, also lacking the "minion may not hunt" text but that, on the other hand, is actually stackable. This should keep the minion viable and feels elegant since it still allows me enough text space to make him immune to VD and sterile, for flavour purposes. Quite happy with it.


Drain

If it's not doing the same thing as a disease counter, you may want to call it with a different name.

Pascal,
I think the idea is that its a vampire that has a built-in Vamp Disease and the vampire itself is immune to Vamp Disease.
So yeah, they would be disease counters, just like normal Vamp Disease.