Making Aye and Orun Work

my anecdote:

the one time I made an Orun deck that didn't feel totally clunky was based around Umdava (Laibon magaji: You may use a master phase action to search your library or ash heap for an Aye or Orun to place on a ready Laibon.) it worked out pretty well, since I could get them in play relatively quickly -- one from hand, use trifle MPA to search for another, it was almost like cycling convictions.

the downsides were spending 9 pool for the vampire, plus 2 more for a Parthenon just to make sure I don't get handjammed, and having to build the deck around Akunanse and Umdava, which means no Brutal Influence. so I used Invoke Poison Glands to do 7 agg hand strikes.


even though i could get them in play with this method, there wasn't much to DO with them. they have maybe 3 or 4 cool unique tricks, and everything else could've just been replaced by existing discipline cards. but for the cards that do matter, now it's tricky to rebalance the mechanic because it'll be too easy to get the big payoff from Exile and Brutal Influence.

it could end up either too sucky or too strong. LSJ seemed to like "resource cards" a little bit too much, since he bolted so many of them onto VTES's mechanics.

Haze wrote:

LSJ seemed to like "resource cards" a little bit too much, since he bolted so many of them onto VTES's mechanics.

Could you explain a little bit more what you mean by resource cards, and why they're not desirable past a certain point? This sounds really interesting, but I'm not quite catching your meaning.

Legendre wrote:

Could you explain a little bit more what you mean by resource cards,

Cards that primarily provide a resource to be used to pay for other things, such as Aye, Orun, and Conviction, rather than being a particularly useful effect in their own right.

See also Land in Magic: the Gathering. Note that Land-style cards were something Garfield explicitly chose to avoid in V:TES, regarding having a third of your deck being a 'dull' card as a design he didn't want to repeat. Aye, Orun and Conviction aren't strictly like the basic land cards in MtG - which literally provided one mana and nothing else - but they are clearly closer to that model than, say, Govern the Unaligned is.

In a design sense, there's nothing outright wrong with land-style cards - Magic shows that it can work just fine as a design mechanic. Garfield's objection appeared to be more one of how 'fun' it felt to draw a land vs how fun it felt to draw a Sneaky Goblin.

A variety of subsequent CCGs have attempted interesting ways around the problem, such as multifunctional cards - either explicitly or implicitly. For example, in some games, there were literally two entirely separate functions on a card - one dull and bread-and-butter, the other exciting. Other games do things like turn the library itself into a resource. Still others just try to avoid the concept of 'resources' in anything like the same way.


Where there can be problems are when resource cards hit a paradigm that largely didn't originally support them. The different speeds at which the decks operate, and the different level of power that they can maintain, can be difficult to integrate well. For example, Aye and Orun are typically quite slow to build up (making it harder for a deck to exploit them well) and also compete for Master slots, nor do you get any for free. By contrast, when Imbued first hit the scene, their resources were much quicker to deploy and could get a significant headstart on other decks by having semi-permanent abilities available from the word go. Post the ban of Edge Explosion, the Imbued are at a much more reasonable level - there's now, for example, significant more thought required about which ones to play in order to get good use of Champion while still being able to play Determine, and that sort of decision. Most remaining Imbued gripes typically focus on how they don't interact with 'normal' cards that are trying to hinder vampires, rather than their own raw power per se.

The latest PCK set, Champions of Cagn, was focused on the Laibon sect and had improving the Aye and Orun concept as one of its chief goals.

Our blog is here: pckvtes.wordpress.com/

Our Set PDFs page is here: pckvtes.wordpress.com/set-pdfs/

We hope you have fun exploring these card ideas.

jamesatzephyr explains it well, though there's a lot of other cards I would fit in the definition. cards that seem to exist just to clog up decks so you can run its own gimmick.

* Trophies - you need a couple of these put into play to make hunting Red List worth it. usually also requires some other cards to turn a target vampire red list. not very popular.

* Gehenna events - to some extent. the bigger ones require other gehenna events to be used, so you sometimes see them all played to fuel each other. except Ennoia, for some strange reason.

* Choir - only works with itself. pile a bunch of them in one turn or they have no effect.

* Anarch - you require the cards to go anarch before you can play anarch cards. there is "going anarch the hard way", but it runs rather slow without the cards. this only became popular once you could skip the library cards and put Anarch Converts in the crypt instead.

* Black Hand - at first it needed cards to turn vampires black hand. but over time there's enough vampires that already begin as BH so you can build a whole crypt of them, and the concept is playable (much like Anarch Convert crypts). I've never seen Blooding or Mustajib used once.

* Spell of Life & Khazar's Diary - collect the whole set to do something unique! but you better draw them fast, or else your deck is just spinning its wheels.

* Ashur Tablets - collect all three for a reward. if you don't reliably draw all three they're worthless. yawn. (is it any wonder why this card went under the radar for years?)

* Research & Development - could this be the new Ashur Tablets?! probably not. cycling your library for these cards so you can search your library for other cards is redundant.

* Striga / Maleficia - I would argue these count as resources, as they are pseudo-disciplines that never appear on a crypt card. you can't build a crypt around them, so you have to draw the masters early or sit around.


so, there seems to be one of these in almost every expansion set, like throwing ideas at a wall. even WOTC tried to make a few themselves, like Corruption and War Ghouls. Corruption was obviously terrible, but War Ghoul was clever and fun because its resource was already a part of the game.

the base game of VTES is built around the resources of blood, disciplines, and sometimes titles. people find these fun to manage because you can get all of them on the crypt cards themselves, though it's always an option to enable them with library cards if you need to. it's possible that the crypt is more important than the library in VTES.

I'm not saying that trying to add resources in card form is bad, though it usually does turn out very clunky because of how card-drawing works in VTES. in the above list, the resources that are popular are the ones where you can skip the library entirely (and Ashur Tablets, which "skip" the library by feeding into the cycle of Liquidation + Anthelios). The lesson here is that adding a resource outside of blood/disciplines/titles makes it very hard to gauge its power level, since it's a different curve from the rest of the game. they're usually too weak, until a slight nudge suddenly makes them too powerful.

Jeff wrote:

The latest PCK set, Champions of Cagn, was focused on the Laibon sect and had improving the Aye and Orun concept as one of its chief goals.

Our blog is here: pckvtes.wordpress.com/

Our Set PDFs page is here: pckvtes.wordpress.com/set-pdfs/

We hope you have fun exploring these card ideas.

Jeff, this thread exists to confirm that those cards don't provide the solution you claim. Earlier posts in this thread, if you had read them and decided to make a contribution instead of an advertisement, would have helped shown that problem.

They don't:
a) Provide enough power to offset the 'resourcing time'.
b) Decrease the 'resourcing time'.
c) Tend to have the same flaw of burning the resources to operate.