Card idea: Focus of the Eye

Well, it's far from being useless against maneuver card.

What it is useless against are .44 magnum and sniper rifle. And I do believe that with Death seeker, fortitude maneuver and, more importantly, eye of the unforgiving heaven, they are more than adequate against thoses threats.

If anything, !Salubri like a lot of combat clan lack sup' govern-like action, ousting power, and political power. And even then, they can work around it. Salubri aren't bad, they just are a pretty slow clan, and some other tend to be pretty better.

Juggernaut1981 wrote:

Blood cost to cancel a card is fair.

It's not, it's really not. Here's a fun exercise: on secretlibrary.info search for all combat cards with a cost greater than or equal to 1. It's showing me 146 as of this post. Now look through the list for good cards - the kind you consistently see in winning decks. There are only about 20 of them! And most of them fit into these two categories:

• Aggravated Damage: Bone Spur, Chiropteran Marauder, Claws of the Dead, Devil-Channel: Hands, Wolf Claws, Entombment, Breath of the Dragon, Conflagration, Taste of Death
• Damage Avoidance: Acrobatics, Apparition, Evil Eye, Illusions of the Kindred, Majesty, Mirror Image, Oubliette, Rapid Change, Shadow Body, Rolling with the Punches, Skin of Steel, Superior Mettle

Notable exceptions include Blur, Brick by Brick (costs Tupdog 0) and Slam.

In the first category, aggravated damage, blood is spent to "win" instantly by sending the opposing minion straight to torpor. These cards are competitive despite their blood costs. In the second category, the cards cost the blood the minion would otherwise spend to heal damage.

Now I'm not claiming any sort of causality here, but think about it. How many of the remaining 120 or so cards would be upgraded from "wallpaper" to "playable" by just eliminating blood costs? That's the fun part of the exercise so I'll leave it up to the reader.

Finally, back to your original assertion, contrast Death Seeker with Evil Eye. Death Seeker has an easier clan/discipline requirement, to be sure, but that doesn't make up for its lack of amazing reaction ability. And if you use Death Seeker on a strike card it still lets the opposing minion strike!

The idea was to make a card that basically said "the !Salubri are the best at swordfighting and other melee weapon combat and such, and if you try to do it with them, you'll lose, they'll hit you and break your weapon too."

It doesn't really deal with the other weaknesses they have, no...in particular the outferior I wasn't too sure about. The original version I thought of was just a variation on Anaesthetic Touch - whereas Obeah's works with hand strikes, the Valeren one with melee weapons, ending combat after you swing with your baseball bat or whatever. But I think the version I originally posted could work, maybe with a more flexible (and in-clan) outferior? would certainly work with the name...

Maneuver, only usable to go to close range.

How's that? add that instead of the ability. Does that work better? Giving a limited ability to maneuver, possibly at that blood cost of 1, without intercepting something first would be cool, too, and might make it more interesting.

It's still terrible. This card does not make melee weapons any better for the minion who plays it. It costs too much.

LunaSlave wrote:

The idea was to make a card that basically said "the !Salubri are the best at swordfighting and other melee weapon combat and such, and if you try to do it with them, you'll lose, they'll hit you and break your weapon too."

Except the !Salubri don't really fear other people using melee weapons. In particular, melee weapons are - in the round - rarely seen in most groups. Adding a card that hoses other people's melee weapons, even slightly, is unlikely to make them more prevalent. Except in very, very specific metagames, you'd very likely rather play a damage prevention card - you can still make your melee weapon strike, and damage prevention is versatile (Dodge helps little against a Crows deck), and you might be able to get that for free.

So, it's not something I'm ever really going to plan for.

If you want to improve the !Salubri's melee weapon expertise, it's probably better to empower them positively in a way they can plan for, rather than a corner-case luck element.

LunaSlave wrote:

Maneuver, only usable to go to close range.

The [cel] ability was the only thing on the card that interested me, personally. But if you wanted that, you'd probably just play Vengeance of Samiel.

Putting it at [cel] in some weird Brujah melee weapon/Forger's Hammer deck might be possible, I guess. But I wouldn't be using it for the [val]/[VAL] options.