[Submission} Cohesion

brandonsantacruz wrote:

Name: Cohesion
Cardtype: Action
Cost: 0
+1 stealth action. Requires a Primogen.
Put this card on a vampire of the same clan as this acting vampire. The vampire with this card gains one capacity. During a referendum this vampire may burn a blood and tap x cohesion to gain x votes.

Leaving aside the Turbo possibilities that Miasmat has covered, for its apparent mainline use of bolstering a Primogen voter, it seems very poor. Agate Talisman is already available to get an extra vote (one per vampire, but not unique), and a TWDA search on SecretLibrary shows no hits. Will of the Council and Of Noble Blood let you hand out Primogen titles and get extra votes. They see almost no play, because they're pretty terrible, all in all.

If I'm playing a clan-centred deck - which seems to be the case here - and I'm a Camarilla clan, a lot of the time it's going to just be better to play the Clan Justicar card instead, or even a Praxis Seizure. Pass the vote and you get 3 votes that don't require a blood and can be used on every vote, all the time. That's better than three of these, and presumably you're planning to use Cohesion offensively, so the deck should be geared up to try to pass votes now and then - obviously, you could use it defensively (fail a vote) if the situation dictated, but it would be extremely slow vote defence compared to just playing Delaying Tactics.

The reason that Primogen in general aren't played(*) isn't the standing votes they have (or don't have), but that being a Prince is so much better. You get Parity Shift. You get Second Tradition. You get First Tradition. You get Archon. Brujah Princes get Carthage Remembered. And since they're not wasting an action or three on Cohesion, they get to do that little bit more than the Primogen.

On the offensive side, transient vote push is usually better. If the idea is to help out clans that don't have good access to transient vote push, this is very slow. After three actions, you can push one vote by three votes once per turn, for a blood - something that Perfect Paragon would let you do already, with Pre. So it's going to be very slow. And in order to get any reasonable number out, how many of this are in your deck? How many actions are you taking? Get 2, 3 of these out, and that's 9 damage to your prey you could have done with Kine Resources Contested.


For my money, if you want to make Primogen more attractive as voters, you probably want to give them access to something new and different, that makes them a consideration for a new or different style of deck. This just seems like a poor substitute for better tech.


(*) By which I mean "No-one build a deck around them being a Primogen". It's totally fine to include Primogen in decks if they happen to be useful vampires.

What about removing the tap and burn a blood part and replacing it with just "burn a blood to gain x votes where is is the number of Cohesion you control"?

brandonsantacruz wrote:

What about removing the tap and burn a blood part and replacing it with just "burn a blood to gain x votes where is is the number of Cohesion you control"?

Or a built-in untap after the successful Cohesion action, making it a "free" action. Or add the Sanguine Instruction effect of gaining a level of a discipline the primogen has.

brandonsantacruz wrote:

What about removing the tap and burn a blood part and replacing it with just "burn a blood to gain x votes where is is the number of Cohesion you control"?

Then you only have to deal with having a poorer title, having more tricky card flow, and wasting an action on something often better accomplished through transient cards.

Miasmat wrote:

Or a built-in untap after the successful Cohesion action, making it a "free" action. Or add the Sanguine Instruction effect of gaining a level of a discipline the primogen has.

The built-in untap would help a fair bit, but you still have the issue that once you have 'enough' of these out, you're still drawing them. A lot of the very best cards in the game are playable and desirable throughout the whole game - bleed is almost always good, damage votes are almost always good, Govern the Unaligned can power a crypt machine or bleed, Dreams of the Sphinx is useful throughout the whole game etc. Those that aren't - say, bleed bounce during the end game, or wanting the timing just right for Week of Nightmares - are very good at certain points, offsetting that. This just seems very bland.

The extra discipline would be an interesting option. I could see interesting design possibilities opening up where Primogen (and maybe Bishops too) become desirable in their own right for some mildly unusual non-political ability like that. Then you stop having a deck that feels like you're putting band-aids on because you couldn't find your box full of Princes that day, and actually presents an interesting deck-building and play challenge in its own right.

Cohesive Clan
Reaction
1 blood
Only usable when a minion you control is chosen in the terms of a referendum or as a action. Usable during a blood hunt. Only playable by a Primogen or Bishop.
You gain +X additional votes during the referendum or +X intercept, where X is the number vampires of the same clan as this Primogen or Bishop.

Cohesion
Action Modifier
1 blood
Only playable by a Primogen or Bishop.
Choose X vampires of the same clan as the Primogen and pay 1 blood from each chosen vampires. +X bleed.