New Card Idea: Undermining the Foundations

Name: Undermining the Foundations
Cardype: Master
Unique Master.
Put his card in play. At the end of the game if you have at least one victory point and your prey has no victory points you gain one additional victory point and your prey receives no victory points. If your prey successfully withdraws she gains an additional victory point and you are ousted (your predator does not gain a victory point).

Game development:
- Give the game additional ways to encourage forward pressure.

Flavor:
- None in particular.

Balance:
- Time-outs. Sometimes they are actually the fairest of results but for the most part they are a real drag. In an effort to diminish them I created this card, somewhat inspired by Gambit Accepted.

- I had in mind that this card might encourage the playing of certain undesirable decks to a given extent. After all, crippling your prey while not actually ousting it is the province of bad decks and lockdown based strategies. I tried to mitigate that by only having it work if you already have a VP. I thought about only making the card playable at all if you already had a VP but that always seems to push cards into non-playability or worse: fetch/recursion based strategies.

- The second part, withdrawal related, was added later and might not have enough merit to be included. You too will be the judge of that.

Competitiveness:
- High. This card can outright give you a VP from thin air, enough said.


Drain

Make GW harder (you can do 3/3 with this card after all).

Having never seen anyone retiring successfully, I think it's a waste of card space.

Good idea in that it give a strong additional incentive to break deal if they does not go as planned. (I.E. your prey may be tempted to break deal in order to make a VP and not feeding you one).

Need some reflexion about how to exploit it.

Ohlmann wrote:

Make GW harder (you can do 3/3 with this card after all).

Having never seen anyone retiring successfully, I think it's a waste of card space.

Good idea in that it give a strong additional incentive to break deal if they does not go as planned. (I.E. your prey may be tempted to break deal in order to make a VP and not feeding you one).

Need some reflexion about how to exploit it.

Yes, I know the part about withdrawing is very sketchy... its existence has more to do with my not liking to make cards with just a few lines of text. Can be axed without detriment.

I don't really see how this card allows a 3-3, though... it only entitles the player to a VP that is already present on the table, not one that appears out of thin air. Could I be missing something?


Drain

Drain wrote:

I don't really see how this card allows a 3-3, though... it only entitles the player to a VP that is already present on the table, not one that appears out of thin air. Could I be missing something?

I was too quick to jump to conclusion, sorry. It doesn't create VP after all, so the first reflexion is wrong all along.

It is however at its best for a wallish deck with a lot of eagle sight and / or Anneke. You still need to kill your first prey, but once you kill it you only have to prevent your prey killing anything and you dying and you get your GW (1 pt, +1 for surviving, +1 stolen from your prey).

It give incentive to your prey to kill its prey, but if you play a deck that can prevent that, with intercept or by rushing everything, then the card give you a VP.

So it may have some side effect of reinforcing defensive strategy. The deck must be able to get a VP, but may be content with it, curcumveting part of the reason for the creation of the GW rule.

Ohlmann wrote:

It is however at its best for a wallish deck with a lot of eagle sight and / or Anneke. You still need to kill your first prey, but once you kill it you only have to prevent your prey killing anything and you dying and you get your GW (1 pt, +1 for surviving, +1 stolen from your prey).

Exactly. Combat decks also come handily to mind. Mind you that I'm also not even close to being sure about this card. It was just an idea that was kicking around, could very well turn out to be horrid for a miriad reasons.

Ohlmann wrote:

It give incentive to your prey to kill its prey, but if you play a deck that can prevent that, with intercept or by rushing everything, then the card give you a VP.

Well, way I see it the card induces one to go for the first VP quite hard (crucial to make the card work) and the grand-prey to do the same. The walling up only comes later... do the two effects that call for forward action balance out the other effect that later calls for inaction? Does the card help with reducing time-outs?

- If a deck is too agressive while pursuing the objective of ousting its prey that usually means that the grand-prey gets a bit of a free ride and should also score a VP. The card was useless.

- If the deck takes it slow while ousting its first prey then most anything can happen but the result of the card giving you a VP is absolutely not a guarantee. Even if a stalemate ensues, only in some of the cases will this card break it. Also, it can be constested and is a card that doesn't actually help improve the game state of whoever plays it.

Ohlmann wrote:

So it may have some side effect of reinforcing defensive strategy. The deck must be able to get a VP, but may be content with it, curcumveting part of the reason for the creation of the GW rule.

Correct... maybe. If a grand-prey is not preoccupied with flailing about while waiting for the time to end and has a card like this on its back urging it to go forward or be ousted despite everything else could well enforce offensive play enough to merit its creation.


Drain