Damn, No signal

I think we could use a card that makes playin masters more difficult. They are very often the most powerful cards available but there is very little we can do about it, hardly an interaction with other players (ofcourse sudden, wash, bleeding the vine, but i find those too reactive).

So i was thinking perhaps a way to restrict other peoples mpa's. So they get to play less masters,...and thereby jam on them.

I use this tactic a lot for other cardtypes. I build my decks to "never get in combat" so other people jam on their combat cards. (never be blocked, never block, or play obedience/secure haven etc). Or to let people never use their bleed-defense/bounce (just votes, just rushes, never bleed) or letthem jam on their intercept/combat (never block, play blockdenial, like Saulot-neutral guard).

But it's not possible to have people jam on mastercards. And exactly those are already the most powerful cards in the game, and the least interactive. And as a bonus it interferes with those masterheavy strong decks.

So i was thinking,...


Vote: put this card in play with your prey. If it has no counters he loses a MPA. If he has had no mpa's this turn, the card gets a counter. It loses a counter when he plays a master.

Needs a lot of rephrasing obviously. the idea would be that if you dont play cards to get more MPA's you will get only 1 each 2 turns. If you DO play cards that give more MPA's it halfs those.

To sum up: i like the idea of fucking with peoples MPA's. That's a strong effect that needs balancing.

As balance i thought:
1) It only works on one prey, for the next prey you need another copy.
2) Let's not take away all mpa's, just half of them
3) make it a vote, so people need to worry about getting it in play. (like play stealth and votes)
4) people can do math and aim which masters they want to play when (in contrast with "sudden" etc)

balance 3 can be something else entirely: you need to torpor a vamp from you prey, or.... it affects you too, or... you need to sacrifice x pool/a minion/whatever, perhaps add a clause that you yourself cannot play sudden/wash, so that the masters they get to play are actually played., can be a gehenna event that others can use as well. ("any vampire can call a vote to..."

What do you guys think?

Play sudden and then they don't get trifles.

I don't like the idea of not allowing ppl to have master phase actions, so sudden is good enough.

Cooper wrote:

Vote: put this card in play with your prey. If it has no counters he loses a MPA. If he has had no mpa's this turn, the card gets a counter. It loses a counter when he plays a master.

Assuming this gets played much, this potentially makes MMPA tech much more desirable. With Parthenon (or Anson, or Nana, or Rumors etc.), I can still play a trifle and a non-trifle in one turn. With Anson + Parthenon, I can play, say, Villein + Pentex + Dreams of the Sphinx, even with this card working. Edit to add: Gah, I'm wrong on the exact way the card would work - I blame it being morning. But the basic point is, MMPA tech would let you get some stuff done.

The poor old deck that has poorer access to MMPA tech - say, any clan that isn't strong politically and doesn't have a good vampire special and so only really has Parthenon to toy with - comes out worse and probably jams a lot worse, since on a turn when it would normally be playing Wider View and Vast Wealth, it can't play either.

So it seems likely to be counter-productive - if it has an impact, it would encourage people to play MMPA tech to avoid it, possibly leading to quite a lot more master card action overall.

Hmm. I press "Edit" and get "Quote". Gah.

The thing is, decks that already count on more mpa's play more masters to begin with, so they will jam just as much as people withough more mpa's. Yes, if you dont have a lot of masters to play, you COULD include parthenon in case someone plays "no signal" to counteract,...but that seems stupid. spending 2 pool and a mpa on a location that you might not need,...It would only work in the way you describe if every second man plays it. We would have to balance it so it is good, but not THAT good.

I agree that multi-master cards is quite overpowered, and that it could help balancing the game to have more options to cripple MMPA.

The proposal to loose one master phase may be too harsh, but how about:
- loose all master phase actions the next turn
- each player has a maximum of one master phase action
- pay an extra pool for any master phase action after the first
- trifles do not grant an extra master phase action

I suppose these could be Gehenna cards, and could be removable for instance by mechanisms like add/remove a counter as a master phase, by skipping a number of master phases, or by discarding a master card, to make it temporary but still has an impact on the table.