Card Idea: Deep-seeded Infiltration

Name: Deep-seeded Infiltration
Cardtype:
Cost: 2 blood
Only usable after successfully bleeding your prey for 2 or more.
Your prey reveals his hand to you.
Put this card on this vampire, the vampire with this card gets +2 bleed while bleeding your prey. Burn this card if this minion is blocked by a minion controlled by your prey. A vampire may only have one Deep-seeded Infiltration.

Game development:
- Increase the viability of the City !Gangrel through leverage of their clan disciplines.

Flavor:
- Obfuscate & Protean both possibilitate the impersonation of a third party (Mask of 1K faces, Old Friends, Loki's Gift) so how effective can we assume that a junction of the two would be at the same task? Pretty darn effective, if you asked me.

Balance:
- Ousting power is the challenge that this card aims to tackle. I didn't want it to be too easy to play so I drew heavily from Enkil Cog and made it only be playable in the case of a successful bleed on the prey. Much like Enkil, it is also a modifier and not an action since the !Gangrel don't multiact much and need card efficiency.

- Enkidu and other big'ol'meanies never left my mind while designing the card, so I made the restriction that if you're blocked by your prey the card goes away, conversely the bleed needing to be for two is a tricky restriction to impose on the !Gangrel... but once again it is aimed at making this card less playable by Enkidu. I'm not too sure if it should be dropped to increase the general playability of the card or not.

- The +2 bleed only works on the prey because it seemed thematically correct for the minion to only receive bleed while attacking the infiltrated Meth.

Competitiveness:
- High. Ousting power where there was little to none, enough said.

Drain

I feel "2 or more" is too heavy restriction with city gangrel abilities. Also that card doesn't combo at all with strong protean cards like Form of Mist or Earth Meld. That would just change city gangrel to use obfuscate stealth and forget protean even more.

Surreal wrote:

I feel "2 or more" is too heavy restriction with city gangrel abilities.

That sounds about right to me for a permament and responsible +2 bleed that takes no action. The card would probably be less disruptive if all the 2s on it were 1s, though: costs 1 blood, play on any successful bleed against your prey, +1 bleed.

Also that card doesn't combo at all with strong protean cards like Form of Mist or Earth Meld. That would just change city gangrel to use obfuscate stealth and forget protean even more.

That's easy to fix: make it burn on an unsuccessful bleed instead of a block.

Non-existant user wrote:

That's easy to fix: make it burn on an unsuccessful bleed instead of a block.

Even that wouldn't work with earth meld. Earth meld is very strong card but city gangrels are just missing decent actions. I would like to see some kind of permanent or modifier +bleed when target of the bleed doesn't control ready untapped minions (like Codex of the Edenic Groundskeepers) for PRO or PRO+CEL/OBF. That works good with earth meld and form of mist (+deep song also).

Surreal wrote:

I feel "2 or more" is too heavy restriction with city gangrel abilities.

Yes, quite possibly.

Surreal wrote:

Also that card doesn't combo at all with strong protean cards like Form of Mist or Earth Meld. That would just change city gangrel to use obfuscate stealth and forget protean even more.

Disagree. Protean stealth includes Rapid Change and Earth Control. Why should a given card just promote those that are already the top-tier cards of a discipline?

Non-existant user wrote:

The card would probably be less disruptive if all the 2s on it were 1s, though: costs 1 blood, play on any successful bleed against your prey, +1 bleed.

Agreed. It's just that OBF PRO is fairly difficult to find and +1 bleed is ultimately not swingy enough. After all, even if you're playing City Gangrel you typically will not have OBF PRO on all or even most of your minions.

Surreal wrote:

Even that wouldn't work with earth meld. Earth meld is very strong card but city gangrels are just missing decent actions. I would like to see some kind of permanent or modifier +bleed when target of the bleed doesn't control ready untapped minions (like Codex of the Edenic Groundskeepers) for PRO or PRO+CEL/OBF. That works good with earth meld and form of mist (+deep song also).

I see what you mean. But the Codex already exists and works beautifully just like you describe... why make an additional card catering to that?


Drain

Drain wrote:

Disagree. Protean stealth includes Rapid Change and Earth Control. Why should a given card just promote those that are already the top-tier cards of a discipline?

I see little use with PRO stealth when you have also OBF with same vampire and those PRO cards you mentioned doesn't offer really anything new you can't get from OBF. Meld and mist are like protean signature cards and offer cool play in combat and works good with CEL also (like Meld+Psyche or addiotionals+mist).

I would like to see city gangrel to get more out of those top-tier cards b/c it isn't happening now without ousting power.

Drain wrote:

I see what you mean. But the Codex already exists and works beautifully just like you describe... why make an additional card catering to that?

I just feel it would work good with PRO and offer unique play rather than just normal +bleed cards. It also works with city gangrel combat: Meld+psyche beat the opposing minion and bleed with next action. City gangrel are actually quite good in combat and "multi-acting" with meld+psyche and that kind of play is fun and different from other discplines.

EDIT
There is one example deck: extrala.blogspot.com/2011/12/deck-of-month-november-2011-toreador.html

I would like to see that kind of deck possible with normal city gangrel apart from Enkidu (and not make that deck too strong but it's very cool deck).