card ideas: more ado about the gangrel antitribu

Lech wrote:

It's card design problem. You would see a lot more mixed clan decks if discipline cards would be 2 in 1 (say OR combo that gives intercept on auspex and do some corruption stuff on serpentis), we would see more diverse crypts.

Well, sort of. Maybe.

Anarch three-ways provide something along those lines, but much of the time you just see someone putting together a reasonably normal deck, adding 4 Anarch Converts and a bunch of their favourite Anarch cards. Power of One for weenie-to-midcap Presence is an obvious one. I get the feeling it was hoped that Anarch decks might be more freewheeling - these guys with Pot and these guys with For using different forms of each card for different effects - but it rarely seems to work out like that.

You're unlikely to ever see enough such cards that every card in your deck is playable by everyone. When the guys with Serpentis run up against your Eyes of Argus, many players will be cursing the library (or crypt) and wishing they had something more consistent.

You sometimes see analogous issues in (for example) super-star decks - the super-star falls and many of the supporting weenies can't cycle the cards at all. (The best super-star+fans decks work hard to avoid that, of course.)

Anarch three-ways were just inferior levels, and were not that good (great for inferiors, but not playable out of the box thanks to anarch requirements).

Lets consider the scenario: vtes is done from the scratches to avoid legal threats from WotC (no deckmaster brand). Game mechanic is mostly the same. All discipline cards are now two-ways (there is one auspex card shared with all other disciplines for example).

In the scenario, you want to do some bruise-bleed-block. You go with crypt. Both clans share and so it's covered, now you can use /, /, / , / and / combo cards to make sure every vampire in your crypt can play every card. If there is no shared discipline like in and example, you can still use /, / , / , /, /, /, /, /AUS:,/ to make sure every vampire in your crypt can play every card.

Considering that every card is more or less playable, and fit it's discipline, you can build decks that work more or less like a coterie where one guy block, another act unblocked and another bruise.

Lech wrote:

In the scenario, you want to do some bruise-bleed-block. You go with crypt. Both clans share and so it's covered, now you can use /, /, / , / and / combo cards to make sure every vampire in your crypt can play every card.

This is more or less re-designing V:TES from the ground up.

For example, are you going to duplicate effects across multiple combos? Does Fortitude get Freak Drive on an AUS/FOR card, a FOR/DAI card, a FOR/CEL card and a FOR/OBF card? The first is needed for my !Ventrue/Toreador deck, the second for my Gangrel Baali deck, the third for Brujah/Ventrue cross-over, and the fourth for my Nosferatu/Blood Brothers deck.

If it _is_ duplicated, does that get boring after a while? If not, and I really want the effect, do I have to put a card in my deck that's useless to half or more of my vampires, when other people apparently don't?

If integrating it into the existing game, do we have to reprint dozens upon dozens of bread-and-butter effects onto new cards - with duplicates, to handle the discipline cross-overs?

Does each card get 4 levels? (dom/DOM/cel/CEL) Makes the text box quite... tight, especially if you want to explain an unusual effect. Beware of using myriad keywords to overcome this! In part, they can steeply increase the learning curve; in part, you might find yourself issuing errata to dozens of existing cards to match the keywords.

Is the dom/DOM level of the dom/DOM/cel/CEL card up to scratch with Conditioning? If it's exactly the same, we've just wallpapered Conditioning - why play it when you can play CeleritousConditioning, and maybe get the Celerity option too? If it's not as good, am I putting together a deck that's not as good as my pre-existing deck that uses Conditioning?



There is almost certainly a potential, coherent game system in there. Grafting it onto the existing V:TES card set at this point, though? Not so much.

Ashur wrote:

Pack-cards shouldn´t necessarily have anything to do with discipline combinations. I´m thinking more of cards like Coterie Tactics or the Sanguinus-cards, ie tap one weenie to help another weenie in the same pack or stuff like that.

If they're decently playable, which already-successful weenie strategies do you want to make more powerful? There aren't many underpowered weenie strategies that you could empower without improving something else that's already good.

Weenie Pander - Legacy of Pander can still power a decent vote deck (though not as rampant as days of yore!)
Weenie Presence - Good bleed, potentially good vote
Weenie Dominate - Obviously excellent bleed, with minor stealth and with bounce
Weenie Dementation - Pretty excellent bleed
Weenie Fortitude - Some very nasty grinding decks, usually with Undead Persistence
Weenie Animalism - Historically a little annoying to get that small, but Carrion Crows / Bats swarms can be brutal to face
Weenie Auspex - Block everything, grind slowly

So in there, there's pretty nasty bleed, combat, survivability/grind, and vote.

What do we do? Add a survivability option that helps out weenie Dominate? Add a plus to bleed that helps out an already successful grinder? Add a bleed reducer that might help weenie Dementation?