Compromise on Villein

Non-existant user wrote:

It is strong enough to play instead of Minion Tap.
It is strong enough to play even when people are not playing Minion Tap.
When played, it weakens Minion Tap and itself.
Its existence makes running Minion Tap or not a slightly pause-giving decision.
It can't be blindly cycled in game, both individually and subsequently, making the number of Villein to run (if at all) a more interesting design decision, while also ensuring play decisions as well.

So, from the first line... it's purpose was to have a direct effect on Minion Tap specifically to weaken it within the game. Consequently, I feel confident to return to my previous comments about the reasons I can see for restricting/impacting Minion Tap were those outlined above.

Non-existant user wrote:

It can't be blindly cycled in game, both individually and subsequently, making the number of Villein to run (if at all) a more interesting design decision, while also ensuring play decisions as well.

However, the ruling allowing it to target any minion instead of those with 2 blood or more means that the only decision required is "Which of my minions do I target?" rather than "Can I afford to lose 2 blood from Vampire X instead of holding onto this card until I can play it?" That provides more of a decision-making event than Villein would seem to in its currently ruled version (playable on any Vampire where the chosen amount, or whatever the vampire has, must be removed).

It appears that now the deck decision is: Do I include Villein or not bother? Those amongst us in the "Optimal Deck Efficiency" Camp advocate for generally replacing Minion Tap with Villein in almost all circumstances. (I don't tend to build Optimal Decks since I can find them bland and homogenous). Which would suggest that the decision does not lie between Miniont Tap or Villein, but Villein for bloat or Option B that is available.

Thanks to LSJ for clearing up that much. Thanks to Lasombra for doing that small amount of legwork for us all.

The most obvious fix to balance villein imo would simply be to replace the 'villein costs x more to play on this vampire' with 'a vampire can have only one villein' Or alternatively, give a cap to how many blood you can move with villein to like say 4 max. I would personally prefer the first one, which would make it fairly bad for the tap and cap strategies, while still useful to those who were only going to get some blood off their guys once anyway.

See the thing is that the decks who want to repeatedly remove large amounts of blood during the Master Phase will either:

a) Use one Villein per minion (for the vast majority of the blood) before refilling them in the turn.

b) Rely on the frequency and regularity of their Tap to ignore the costs created by Villein.

c) Plan to Golconda the guy with Villein so it poses no more problems.


The option that isn't addressed by those changes to Villein is a comparatively master-heavy mid-to-weenie deck that intends to play one on each of a number of minions. In that scenario, which I would assume was considered during the designing of the card, is about heavily punishing Minion Tap. And the reasons I see for punishing Minion Tap specifically in such a strong cumulative way was addressed before.

Just my 2cents but I really don't see the problem with villein.
It really improves a lot of fatty decks that previously used minion taps, such as fatty rush decks, without preventing them from playing that precious Fame the same turn.
It would really sucks a lot to ban this card, as banning cards is a bad thing generally speaking. The errata on not impacting minion tap may be considerate but before villein about 90% of my decks did NOT use minion tap and relied on blood doll/vessel or other pool gain. You CAN live without minion taps. I often see such lobbying on banning a card as a way to not having to think about how dealing with other decks when building yours.
Sometimes it's justified (return to innocence, dramatic upheaval etc) sometimes it's not (PTO, Memories of Mortality, which could have been limited to 1 per game or made unique).
During my last tournament I think there were something like 4-5 villeins played each game, by all the 4-5 players. Evn in my deck where I put 7 villeins (on 83cards) I played only 2 and discarded the others (because contrary to minion tap I cannot cycle them for free on a vampire with already one villein, and cannot play them on my vamp with 1-2 blood without emptying him and loosing a turn), I included a lot just to have one early in the game.
So a player playing minion tap (and voter cap) would have lost between 0 and 4 pool per minion tap. It won't kill his game each time, even if it's painful I agree.