Card Idea: Ill-gotten Gains

Surreal wrote:

Touch of Pain and Street Cred should had been stronger and maybe more multi-use with defense and offense packed in same card.

As a side note, I believe that they need more versatility. Both can be obscenely powerful once in a blue moon, and a touch of pain that would do 2/4 damage would be downright broken, for example. A touch of pain with something as cliche as :
[pot] [action] bleed at +1 bleed
[POT] [reaction] Play after the acting minion successfully bleed or pass a vote. Do 2 damage to the acting minion.
would already be much, much better.

@Ohlmann:
The problem with Touch of Pain is that the action must be successful. If you have 0 pool, it doesn't matter if that Touch of Pain would send your predator to torpor. Unless your decks only defence is to soak up the bleed and then try to ping for 2 blood backwards... you'll probably dead before you make any significant dent in the 6-8caps that are most likely to be doing it. It would need to be a proactive defence, not a reactive defence, to make it more viable.

@Surreal:
Bounce is a major part of this problem. The biggest problem is 'being the end of the flick chain' at a tournament. Invariably the end of the flick chains are trick decks and combat decks (sometimes they are non-defensive bleeders such as FoS).
Maybe also, people are thinking of different sorts of combat decks to myself as well. The "40-50 cards of red" decks are usually not viable purely through the joys of probability. But it should include: Cel-Guns (not just Weenie versions), Mass Reality Decks, Beast/Theo/Tariq/Muaziz/Ariadne Eats the World, Tzi Agg (either Wall or Rush), Combat Variations of Eurobrujah, Nos Rush (Beast + Others) and so on. When they are played right, they do not need to lead to the "Smoking Crater" phenomenon. More often than not I've seen Smoking Craters happen because a predator will basically bleed to the point of nearly ousting them while the combat deck might have out its second minion. Then the Smoking Crate begins. I've been left in many more 'Smoking Craters' by bleedzooka type decks than combat. I recently played a JOL game where I influenced one minion, took one action and then was basically able to do nothing (First Trads + Dom-Bleed)... that was much less engaging and entertaining than having a rush-predator. On the same score, I've had some people who have turned around and obliterated every minion I have. Which means that playing primary combat is a more subtle/difficult art than playing any other method. I'm not trying to discount the ability of a deck to instigate a tactical rush, but there is little difference between that and Pentex Subversion; it's basically Pentex by Red Cards.

Street Cred had far too many restrictions on it to make it useful and a fairly small benefit. Touch of Pain has the problem of needing a successful action (so you have to take the bleed first). I suspect that the reason the cards are this way is because of the entrenched opinion of players, like Izaak, who believe that damage-based defences shouldn't be strong (either as Reactions, Actions or Rush-Combat) because they lead to 'unfun games' by leaving a player in a 'I have nothing I can do' state.

I was for cards that reward actual combat, but not anymore (I was talked out of it; call it weak mind if you will) and I read this thread with some thought.

Someone said, that combat without torporizing minions is useless. In this I disagree: Combat is useful by consuming your opponents' secondary resources - blood on a vampires. It's not always useful to axe them outright.

With that in mind, you need to give some thought who you attack and how. That depends on the situation: Stealth Bleeder needs to go down if you don't have bounce, for example. Other than that, you just need to play smart enough not to be ousted, allow your prey to play their game and not take crap for anyone (because you don't need to).

If you pack 50+ combat cards in your deck and begin your endless rampage, you'll be ousted by no time - think of Una Freakshow: all the players will begin to play against you and you will have hard time to get victory points. Same goes with Theo+Beast rushers if you play carelessly.

That said, I don't think that there is a pure rush deck that can actually win. There are decks that focus on combat (like wheenie ANI, CEL/POT, CEL/gun, ANI/POT), but most of them need more than Fame+Dragonbound to oust people: usually bleed.

What combat is useful for is to control minion presence on the table. But like all decks, combat needs to be played with thought. There are bad combat decks and there are good combat decks. There are also other basic archetypes that are good or bad.

But what's most important, winning with any deck depends on us - players.