On Parity Shift

While many people don't want change, large amount of players want to change the card. I don't think that decreasing pool swing by 1 would make the card better balanced, yet still extremely powerful.

Lech wrote:

While many people don't want change, large amount of players want to change the card.

Hm, apparently not. Until now at least. There is a clear 63%-majority of leaving the card as it is. If there are people around who want a change they should really let us now. I can't see any "large amounts" which want a change.

Joscha wrote:

Hm, apparently not. Until now at least. There is a clear 63%-majority of leaving the card as it is. If there are people around who want a change they should really let us now. I can't see any "large amounts" which want a change.

I can see 37% (a third) as being a large amount, but I agree that it is not a majority.

Don't forget that the poll is not supposed to be the only factor ; thoses who want (or do not want) change may want to put some arguments in the PRO/CON thread.

After all, I suppose that VEKN would be willing to risk a change not supported by the poll if they are dead sure it will do good to the game. And vice versa.

Lech wrote:

While many people don't want change, large amount of players want to change the card. I don't think that decreasing pool swing by 1 would make the card better balanced, yet still extremely powerful.

I think that what You said is some kind of misuse. In total poll there is about 70players total. This is not even the total number of polish players...

There is no majority in this thread. Only a few people. I know that in democracy a few can reign the rest but vtes is not like democracy. Please, remember about that

Väinämöinen wrote:

I don't want Parity Shift to change. Majority people seem to feel the same, still the very few active participants make it like there is so much fuss and sudden need to change the damn card.

There is nothing remotely sudden about this. Discussion about Parity Shift being overpowered has been going on for 15+ years.

Clearly, I think Parity Shift is too powerful and warps the game (by making non Camarilla vote strategies seem wildly under effective in comparison). But that is me. I realize that not everyone thinks this is the case. I just think they are wrong.

However, if you want to change it let it be playable by corresponding sabbat titles as well, not making it once per game or once per Meth.

That is certainly an option. But then it is still a wildly overpowered card.

Off course, I got many of them, paid a lot of cash for them and don't want to lose both money and playability with them being wallpapered.

See, that isn't actually a legitimate reason for objecting to making the game work better. Any more than "I don't like errata" is. If the game needs fixing, the game needs fixing. I'm not expecting that everyone is going to side with me on initiative "Parity Shift needs fixing to make the game better", but if enough people were convinced of this, I don't think it would be rational to not fix the game in the name of people who spent money on Parity Shifts. I mean, yeah, I realize that these are both not insignificant motivators to decision making, but they shouldn't be. As the game being a better game is infinitely more important than a few people being cranky 'cause the cards they paid too much for are suddenly less good. Yeah, errata is a pain in the ass. And no one likes it. But objecting to all changes based on "I don't like errata" is going to result in nothing ever getting fixed; I suspect the inconvenience of the Villein errata is less damaging to the game than the improvement 'caused by the errata.

bakija wrote:

Clearly, I think Parity Shift is too powerful and warps the game (by making non Camarilla vote strategies seem wildly under effective in comparison). But that is me. I realize that not everyone thinks this is the case. I just think they are wrong.

Certainly, it can dwarf many other vote strategies, and it is very attractive when you think about building a vote deck. (I think certain forms of breed-boon are still attractive, because of their relative resilience to the votes screwing up by turning into swarm decks.)


However, it doesn't seem like every tournament is being torn up by Parity Shift decks. Going back to the start of October in the TWD, I find roughly 45 decks and 6 of them using Parity Shift. 3 of those are fairly substantial political decks, the other three have a small number (2-5) political actions. Parity Shift in all cases is low in number - no more than 3, often 2.

Over the same time period, I find roughly 6 or 7 reasonably substantial political decks that aren't using Parity Shift - mostly using a bunch of KRC, with perhaps Banishment, Political Strangehold, Ancient Influence and other similar cards in smaller numbers.


So, 3 out of 10 reasonably political decks are using Parity Shift, 6 out of 13 or so if you include all the Parity Shift decks. That does seem to be over-representing the Camarilla somewhat, if you make the (obviously naive) assumption that Camarilla and Sabbat should be roughly equal, with a bit of other sects too. So we might reasonably make the argument that Parity Shift is too good, relative to other votes. We might also make the argument that Parity Shift is sufficiently good that any deck that can reasonably include a copy or two does include a copy or two.

But Parity Shift, and politics generally, doesn't seem to me to be too good relative to other strategies. 6 Parity Shift winners out of 45 decks isn't that much to me.


Over the same time period, there's a lot of intercept-y combat-y walls, quite a bit of bounce, quite a lot of Wakes (of various sorts). That certainly seems to be one direction the game is going. Grindy walls with a small clutch of bleed increasers (actions, action mods or whatever) seems to be very popular.


And the grindy walls with bleed modifiers do point out one problem with just counting up copies of Parity Shift. For example, one grindy deck is based on Harbingers and has 8 Trochomancy. Another deck has Heart of the City and Mr Winthrop. The Imbued have Convictions. Dominate has half a dozen options.

Parity Shift can be used by any Camarilla clan and is the same for all of them. If Parity Shift was (say) three subtly different cards for Ventrue, Toreador and Brujah, you might well see the Tournament Winning Deck Archive having a split of all three cards.

I suspect that Parity Shift attracts attention against, say, grindy-wall decks or stealth-bleed decks because the power is on the Parity Shift - but it uses the backup of the vote modifier etc. too. By contrast, stealth-bleed has smaller parts that combine to form a whole - without a single card that is as obviously "Ow" as Parity Shift. Parity Shift plus Perfect Paragon can do significant damage - but so can Govern the Unaligned plus Conditioning, and it's not like it's hard to cycle a medium-long chain of cards onto a single bleed action if you choose to, with little worry of horrible hand jam.



So, overall, 1) it does seem to be doing better than a raw divvying up of political deck wins might suggest. But, 2) it doesn't seem to be creating an overpowering number of wins for itself (like, say, Return to Innocence did).

The first point suggests it's stronger than other political options - not to the point that it's the only way to play politics, but certainly it's a strong one. But point two seems to me to suggest that it's not dominating the game as a whole. At which point, isn't the right answer to make other political options more viable? A small expansion next year might well allow for (say) a decent political action, politically motivated master card, and/or action modifer for Sabbat titles that could boost Sabbat representation somewhat.