[Submissions] Fixing Celerity Elotar's way

Ideas appeared after discussion of low power level:
www.vekn.net/forum/card-balance-strategy-discussion/77970-why-celerity-is-such-a-bad-discipline

Rapid response
Reaction
Only usable during action against you. Only one Rapid response may be played during an action per turn.
Tap this vampire and enter combat with acting minion. (Action is not blocked and will continue if the acting minion will remain ready).
As above, but usable with a tapped vampire.

Game need: Most clans got no reasonable bleed defense which makes them generally unplayable. This cards fixes this problem with effect, quite different than bounce or block, but imo comparable in power level.

Lightning Raid
Action
Cost: 1 blood
deal 2 damage to a minion
as above and gain 2 pool

Game need: got very few uses outside of combat which again makes it not interesting to build deck around. This card gives it quite powerful action (4 counter switch for 1 blood) which differs from all other such effects as well as solving already mentioned problem with no way to defend your pool. NB it's 0-stealth action so combination will become useful.

Fleet
Combat
Maneuver or burn 1 blood to cancel a grapple card as it is played (no cost is paid for that card).
Draw three cards

Game need: This card helps melee weapons, gives some use for for a decks which depend on majesty or other SCE as well as solves usual problem of combat (especially using + weapons) with card flow.

elotar wrote:

Rapid response
Reaction
Only usable during action against you. Only one Rapid response may be played during an action.
Tap this vampire and enter combat with acting minion. (Action is not blocked and will continue if the acting minion will remain ready).
As above, but usable with a tapped vampire.

Game need: Most clans got no reasonable bleed defense which makes them generally unplayable.

But I would suggest that this isn't reasonable bleed defence, and it has the potential to seriously detract from deck diversity. Currently, decks worried about being blocked can do a variety of things - they can pack stealth, they can pack "pseudo-stealth" such as Seduction or Call of the Hungry Dead, they can use some of the unblockable action possibilities, they can pack combat defence to survive the block, it can pack Pentex Subversion or Blind Spot, it can decide that if it is blocked it will send a slave in instead, it can threaten horrible outcomes with Dawn Operation. With your card, if you're thinking about playing a deck that will be action heavy, the sensible responses are either to stack combat defence, or to play a different deck (e.g. a vote deck). Yawp Court, to borrow the most obvious parallel, has the distinguishing feature that it's a lockable master, so more expensive to use, more restricted, and you can try to plan around it e.g. do you want to Yawp this Banishment I'm playing, which will let the Parity Shift you suspect I'm going to play later this turn go through with no Yawp?

Nor is it only bleed defence. There are a lot of other actions out there that don't really need hosing. Choir decks, for example, or Inside Dirt. An Assamite deck that's gone to the trouble of packing some Swallowed by the Night or Forgotten Labyrinth to single out a target when it needs to probably doesn't need that being blown up by any passing 2 cap with Celerity and a gun. Smiling Jack probably doesn't need the help being defended, because every attempt to burn it is a action that can be hit with this.

I'm pretty sure there is a place in Celerity for solid bleed defence, but I'm pretty sure this isn't it.

elotar wrote:

Lightning Raid
Action
Cost: 1 blood
deal 2 damage to a minion
as above and gain 2 pool

This is potentially quite interesting - although I suspect it may draw some players' ire as being a more aggressive Cryptic Mission deck, with a much better selection of weenie vampires available. (And decks with Tha weenies, oodles of Cryptic Mission and some Society of Leopold can be extremely dull to play against.)

So I suspect it may need some tweaking, but I think there's a solid idea here.

elotar wrote:

Fleet
Combat
Maneuver or burn 1 blood to cancel a grapple card as it is played (no cost is paid for that card).
Draw three cards

Game need: This card helps melee weapons,

The problem is, putting this in Celerity directly affects: the Brujah, Brujah antitribu, Osebo, Toreador, Toreador Antitribu, and the Assamites.

The first three all have Potence, and that's generally going to be much more efficient for them than messing with most melee weapons - other than Weighted Walking Stick - because they never have to take an equip action, they never have to wait for the cards to align to play Concealed Weapon, and they can use their own Immortal Grapples to defend against their opponent's S:CE. Transient Potence being so very good at close range combat squeezes out the vast majority of thoughts of using melee weapons, when a deck has solid access to Potence. As I've opined before , it makes sense from a WoD perspective for melee weapons to work with Potence - I have a titanium baseball bat and I shove it down your spine even harder - but in V:TES I don't think it works because the design of transient Potence is just so very, very good, for combat efficiency. I do think there are good avenues to be explored - I think Blade of Bellona is a great option, for example - but Potence gets in the way. It feels like, I don't know, trying to rehabiliate Pere Lachaise with the Giovanni, when they could just play Possession instead.

Toreador and Toreador antitribu are typically good with guns, which have the built-in maneuver - and the fact that they're effective at range means that you avoid a lot of soft hitback strategies, because you're at range. Is there a melee weapon strategy that they'd want to adopt instead of that, given that (even if they cancel Immortal Grapple) they can still get hit for a truck of damage or aggro-poked? Perhaps they can dodge+additional strike with cards like Acrobatics - but that feels like it's making one of the advantages of permanent combat cards weaker (short chain combat), if they have to add on another, different combat card to function well.

The Assamites might be interested in a way to help with melee weapon strategies - they're one of the suggestions I had on my earlier thoughts, linked above - although then it seems better to potentially design something more focused on them, I think.


The superior of this might well mean that it finds its way into all sorts of decks with Celerity in small quantities - but not related to melee weapons. e.g. the Toreador gun wall that uses it as an extra maneuver, but also to cycle cards when it wants to.

Rapid response fixed a little bit

jamesatzephyr wrote:

But I would suggest that this isn't reasonable bleed defence, and it has the potential to seriously detract from deck diversity. Currently, decks worried about being blocked can do a variety of things - they can pack stealth, they can pack "pseudo-stealth" such as Seduction or Call of the Hungry Dead, they can use some of the unblockable action possibilities, they can pack combat defence to survive the block, it can pack Pentex Subversion or Blind Spot, it can decide that if it is blocked it will send a slave in instead, it can threaten horrible outcomes with Dawn Operation. With your card, if you're thinking about playing a deck that will be action heavy, the sensible responses are either to stack combat defence, or to play a different deck (e.g. a vote deck). Yawp Court, to borrow the most obvious parallel, has the distinguishing feature that it's a lockable master, so more expensive to use, more restricted, and you can try to plan around it e.g. do you want to Yawp this Banishment I'm playing, which will let the Parity Shift you suspect I'm going to play later this turn go through with no Yawp?

Nor is it only bleed defence. There are a lot of other actions out there that don't really need hosing. Choir decks, for example, or Inside Dirt. An Assamite deck that's gone to the trouble of packing some Swallowed by the Night or Forgotten Labyrinth to single out a target when it needs to probably doesn't need that being blown up by any passing 2 cap with Celerity and a gun. Smiling Jack probably doesn't need the help being defended, because every attempt to burn it is a action that can be hit with this.

I'm pretty sure there is a place in Celerity for solid bleed defence, but I'm pretty sure this isn't it.

Well, it might be a bit over the top, but a lot of disciplines have over the top cards. Overall concept of entering combat after/before resolution of successful action is worth
exploring, and why not in celerity ? Also, why not give celerity continue action as unblocked ?

jamesatzephyr wrote:

This is potentially quite interesting - although I suspect it may draw some players' ire as being a more aggressive Cryptic Mission deck, with a much better selection of weenie vampires available. (And decks with Tha weenies, oodles of Cryptic Mission and some Society of Leopold can be extremely dull to play against.)

So I suspect it may need some tweaking, but I think there's a solid idea here.

It's 4 blood/pool swing from a single card that cost 1 blood, there obviously would arise decks that use such action.

jamesatzephyr wrote:

The problem is, putting this in Celerity directly affects: the Brujah, Brujah antitribu, Osebo, Toreador, Toreador Antitribu, and the Assamites.

The first three all have Potence, and that's generally going to be much more efficient for them than messing with most melee weapons - other than Weighted Walking Stick - because they never have to take an equip action, they never have to wait for the cards to align to play Concealed Weapon, and they can use their own Immortal Grapples to defend against their opponent's S:CE. Transient Potence being so very good at close range combat squeezes out the vast majority of thoughts of using melee weapons, when a deck has solid access to Potence. As I've opined before , it makes sense from a WoD perspective for melee weapons to work with Potence - I have a titanium baseball bat and I shove it down your spine even harder - but in V:TES I don't think it works because the design of transient Potence is just so very, very good, for combat efficiency. I do think there are good avenues to be explored - I think Blade of Bellona is a great option, for example - but Potence gets in the way. It feels like, I don't know, trying to rehabiliate Pere Lachaise with the Giovanni, when they could just play Possession instead.

Nothing prevent those clans to use just AUS/CEL or PRE/CEL and benefit from this card. On the other hand, i don't see something other than WWS played as a melee weapon for those clans right now and let's face it, this card is more suited for gun combat than melee weapons anyway.

jamesatzephyr wrote:

Toreador and Toreador antitribu are typically good with guns, which have the built-in maneuver - and the fact that they're effective at range means that you avoid a lot of soft hitback strategies, because you're at range. Is there a melee weapon strategy that they'd want to adopt instead of that, given that (even if they cancel Immortal Grapple) they can still get hit for a truck of damage or aggro-poked? Perhaps they can dodge+additional strike with cards like Acrobatics - but that feels like it's making one of the advantages of permanent combat cards weaker (short chain combat), if they have to add on another, different combat card to function well.

Again, this card is good enough to find place in most celerity combat decks, especially gun decks.

jamesatzephyr wrote:

The Assamites might be interested in a way to help with melee weapon strategies - they're one of the suggestions I had on my earlier thoughts, linked above - although then it seems better to potentially design something more focused on them, I think.

While Assamites might use melee weapons, they are better off with either WWS or guns anyway. And celerity have no good dodge+additional strike cards anyway unless you are anarch.

jamesatzephyr wrote:

The superior of this might well mean that it finds its way into all sorts of decks with Celerity in small quantities - but not related to melee weapons. e.g. the Toreador gun wall that uses it as an extra maneuver, but also to cycle cards when it wants to.

It fits all celerity decks for a simple reason, it's card draw and allows you to cycle into your concealed weapons/.44 faster, and flush them down after you are set up. It allows you to pack more masters than you would otherwise. It's also maneuver, that's cool side benefit.

Backup
Remove this card from the game.
Until the end of the action, all your played cards are placed in the end of your deck.
Until the end of the action, all your played cards are placed in the end of your deck.

elotar wrote:

Lightning Raid
Action
Cost: 1 blood
deal 2 damage to a minion
as above and gain 2 pool

The card seems good, but thematically, direct minion damage is more of a thing. And while the Assamite already have quite a few toys of their own, the Nosfe / !Nosfe still badly need good actions to spend their stealth on.