Which Master do you most hate to see played in a tournament?

i just don't want to see playable cards getting banned while we're out of print. i realize our current lack of being published is somewhat of an out of rules context consideration, but still, tablets are just good, not broken, if used moderately. of course, noone uses that good of a card just moderately, but its danger lies in the possibility of excess use.

turbo parity shift is annoying to sit at a table with, especially when other players are dumb enough not to stop it. of course, they have to spend pool to steal pool, and they give it away (which is also an annoying strategy for the table as a whole) so it requires more set up than "my master phase action is ashur tablets. my cybele master phase action is ashur tablets. i tap parthenon and play ashur tablets."

the difficulty in preventing a currently very common deck from dropping 3 tablets in one turn is painful. they re-use DI, Pentex, Dreams, or whatever they want. i don't think its quite as bad as imbued, but its getting close.

as i said, talk of banning any cards other than possibly gas powered chainsaw and gangrel atavism makes me grit my teeth. if ashurs could only pick up minion cards, or were limited to going of once per methuselah per game, they would still be very good, but not completely broken.

no other effect gets so many cards back into the deck, so even with limitations it would be stronger than sudario refraction or waste management op.

i'm all in favor of tablets only being able to pick up 1 action to the hand and 12 combat cards to the deck (combat, stealth, and reaction cards are what normally moves from hands quickly, so those could benefit from 2 uses) but i like the tablets existing.

Multiple MPAs are a problem independent of broken/overpowered masters like Ashur Tablets. Interesting minion interaction, the heart of both the game play and the theme, is ignored at best by decks playing 2 or more master cards per turn.

KevinM wrote:

ReverendRevolver wrote:

i'm just tired of girls decks winning tournaments

Then play bounce.

ReverendRevolver wrote:

and i think ashur tablets, non lilliths blessing, is largely responsible for their current effectiveness.

Then play Sudden Reversal.

When you start to play cards that directly metagame against popular deck types, those deck types will get played less.

i have an anti-girls deck. santaleous, trockomancy, that sort of fun stuff. it ruins my preys day if they're running that sort of deck. taking away one master phase with a sudden doesn't hurt those decks very much, i've found dedicated combat can catch them off guard as can lots of dominate. but they are very efficient decks. most of the cards people complain need banned lately are ashurs, villein, and lilliths blessing(which i find awesome and think should have been printed in some way ages ago). the issue isn't with the individual cards so much as with the deck using them very effectively. they aren't the end-all-be-all, otherwise you couldn't win without 30+masters and Anson, Nana, or Cybele. but they are very good. currently these decks are shaping the tournament meta, and i'm sure they will rotate out eventually and become just another staple people like to play.

taking cards out of their discard pile hurts them, and i don't think the cards girls decks run on are broken, i just think that more cards should attack the ash heap as an afterthought.
cards don't need to be made to re-arrange the meta. decks do that.

I have put 6-9x Ashur Tablets in every single JOL deck I have played since they were released. If I owned more than 4, I would have 6x in every deck I play in a tournament, irrespective of MMPA capability.

This is interesting. I own 19 and I have only one deck with one master phase that plays them and that's my Assamite Black Hand deck that was featured on Extrala's blog earlier. It runs them solely because that deck has *always* runs out of cards in every game I played with it.

Pretty much every other deck is better off just sticking in more of the stuff you are going to recycle anyway and play more useful masters instead. It's simply not worth cutting out a Fame or a Dreams of the Sphinx in favor of 13-card recursion near the end of the game. Six tablets is a HUGE opportunity cost in that you cannot play six *other* masters that might actually help you win. Certainly a lot "huger" than the 6 pool you gain from it.

TryDeflectingThisGrapple, interesting analysis about the fourth resource. I certainly agree recursion is strong, similar to how Deflection and Govern are strong. Ashur Tablets is a good card, don't get me wrong. But what you -and many other people are forgetting- is that Ashur Tablets are a long-term plan. I talked at length with Brian Morris about this at the recent EC, after the LCQ finals were won by a Nana deck and he put it like this:

Any deck with more than 3 or 4 Ashurs is very weak early on. It has all sorts of prayer cards and weird card ratio's because it BANKS on being able to discard the useless stuff and put the useful stuff back in. If you hit them early on, they're going to have like one Wake and no bounce or maybe a combat card, because their hand is full of masters and cards that are not good at this specific table, but might give them the win next round. Then when you give them time to discard the useless stuff and let them Ashur back in like 20 cards, their library is going to gave FUCK YOU written all over it.

And that's how accurate it gets. Of course, in a world where people play extremely defensive and are more occupied with staying alive and controlling the table instead of killing their preys such decks THRIVE.