"Color Wheel" and VtES

Lech wrote:

INFERIOR: Do something. If capacity above X, do something.

It's not an elegant. There is no goal to put bigger vampires into play just for the sake of it. Higher capacity comes with more disciplines. The goal is to make them useful together, because than you will achieve diversity of the playing field. Bigger vampires will be consequence of it.

Lech wrote:

Perhaps some cards should follow the template:

INFERIOR: Do something. If capacity above X, do something.

I do think more cards should play with the age (capacity) of vampires, but for such a small single effect like what you suggest, I would do it different:

Quickness
Combat


Dodge, with an optional press to end combat.
If you burn Card Name, target minion can dodge as a strike this turn.

Elotar wants to see (correct me if I'm wrong) more cards that require superior discipline combinations specifically to empower a wider variety of high-caps. Those superior discipline cards would also need to have powerful unique effects, worthy of requiring double superior disciplines. I think this is design that should've been used a long time ago.

I do think that differentiating each discipline is also desirable. If every discipline gets +bleed, there need to be effects with that +bleed unique to that discipline or discipline combination.

Example:

Chrysalis
Action
Only usable by a vampire in torpor.
Put this card on this vampire. This vampire cannot be diablerized unless the acting minion burns 3 . During your untap phase, put 1 from the blood bank on this vampire.
As above, and when this vampire leaves torpor, burn this card and this vampire gets +X bleed until end of turn, where X is the amount of blood on this vampire.

Of course, we should try to find neat powerful effects that don't involve +bleeds, but the effects have to make sense for the discipline combination. So if Protean is a toolbox discipline, and Fortitude is primarily for preventing damage, what are some interesting cool effects we could think of for ?

Possibilities!

There is a lot of open design space with the Quicken Sight template: bundle the effects of multiple disciplines together on a dual discipline card to improve card efficiency.

Wet Dream
Combat
Strike: R steal 1 blood with an optional maneuver.
Strike: R steal 2 blood with an optional maneuver and an optional press.

LivesByProxy wrote:

Elotar wants to see (correct me if I'm wrong) more cards that require superior discipline combinations specifically to empower a wider variety of high-caps.

No!

Cards should be mono-discipline, two effects on one card is quite complicated already, discipline combinations should appear naturally when you need to have effects of both disciplines in a deck.

And the goal is not high caps, the goal is to have diversity of the deck strategies.

As I've said, you will play Vampire because you may use first for stealth, second for bleed and bounce, third for untap, forth for majesty and votes in political action after untap. There may be just 4 cards in the pool: Lost in crowds, Conditioning, Freak Drive, Majesty and vampire will be playable.

Or you can decide, that you don't like politics, so you have no second action, so can drop Freak Drives, and play with just Vampires, or drop any other discipline and again end with a playable combination etc down to weenie level.

So by having just 4 disciplines with one card in each we have provided 1+2+3+4=10 different archetypes, with all vampires from smallest to biggest playable in some of them (maybe, a little less - weenie with just freak drives, or with just majesties looks stupid, but in reality we got a little bit more cards in a discipline ).

But if we take, for example, combination, then even with all assortments of cards we have in our possession (203 ) , we will struggle to find even 2 playable archetypes. So most of the Vampires having them in any combinations, especially biggest one who have all of them, will be unplayable. That's design problem we need to solve.

We can make card: " Action: Win the game" but it looks kind of dumb and it still will at most add one archetype to this discipline combination.

Much better solution will be to make 4 cards, one in each discipline, which as in the example above, each can as work independently, as work in an any combination with each of the others. Then by making 4 cards we will add 10 archetypes to the game and make many vampires playable.

I think we could see more combination disciplines in the game, they are based on “metadisciplines” of the rpg.

Some clans have basic disciplines combination that dont synergies so well, like Giovanni for example, I can’t remember any POT/NEC, POT/DOM, NEC/DOM card

Some base clans like nosferatu struggle with some Very situational cards like Feline Saboteur OBF/ANI ( milling start to make sense with HoS only ) and shadow boxing OBF/POT ( aggressive combat inferior, usable only if blocked superior, don’t sinergize with stealth decks) and no POT/ANI card.

I believe that filling these gaps enable 2 disciple decks to work with weenies on base combinations and splash of masters, midcaps that share them even of multiple clans or highcaps

elotar wrote:

But if we take, for example, combination, then even with all assortments of cards we have in our possession (203 ) , we will struggle to find even 2 playable archetypes. So most of the Vampires having them in any combinations, especially biggest one who have all of them, will be unplayable. That's design problem we need to solve.

I counted 211 cards on Amaranth for those disciplines.

I think the problem with that discipline combination (and others) is that it has very little ousting power. None of those disciplines have great +bleed effects, and there are so few ways of burning pool otherwise, or directly contributing to ousting prey.

is a great combat pairing, but without a consistent way to oust its prey, (I mean, without cards of those disciplines that contribute directly to ousting) it will never be a TWD archetype.

Deck archetypes are also built around 3-5 key cards that all the decks of that archetype share in common, and many potential cards and discipline combinations are just waiting on one or two more cards to make an archetype come together. For example, Feline Saboteur lets you "mill" 5 cards from your preys deck with , and the card Brinkmanship can let you oust if you successfully mill them. But Brinkmanship is slow and clumsy, and there are just not enough cards in VTES to support a milling strategy. I guess you could play 20+ Feline Saboteurs and 10+ Slaughterhouses, but I don't think that's a winning strategy. And cards like Dirty Little Secrets from want to help, but they miss the mark IMO. (Does DLS stack? Can you bleed for 1 and then play 10+ Dirty Little Secrets all at once? IDK, but I doubt it.)

There need to be more forms of burning pool besides just bleeding and +bleed cards. And the +bleed cards need to do it differently! A good example would be Revelation of Desire, because it gives a nice +3 bleed if your prey has corruption counters on their minions, which is a nice conditional that players want to build decks around. And they can build decks around such a card because they get corruption counters from other cards.

I posted a week ago about how maybe could get "a second/third bleed action this turn. If the bleed is more than 1, ignore excess" to differentiate it from the other bleed disciplines. Maybe could get "+2 bleed if your stealth was 3 or more than the opposing minions intercept, only usable after blocks are attempted." or something, IDK.