Storyline Central Deck

Do you rate the "Central Deck" as a good idea in VTES Storylines?
What are your thoughts on the past "central deck" concepts??


Other ideas for Storyline events are usually:

BYO Minion
BYO Vamp
Special Cards (i.e. cards that are playable by anyone but only in the storyline)
"Stealable Cards" (i.e. players can 'steal' them but they are in play to start with)
Motivation Cards (i.e. factions, alternative win conditions, team bonus/penalty cards)

Others??

Central deck is very good idea in vtes storyline, if done right.

Execution so far wasn't very good, but wasn't bad either.

I thought imperator was fun, a good opportunity for the deck maker to make an interesting deck. Never played nergel.

Worked well in the past.

The positive of the decks is that they truly changed the environment. The negative is that they did so in a way that wasn't fun.

The Nergal player, which only existed for finalists, already making for a bad storyline format, had the "feature" that the correct thing to do was wipe Nergal off the table and go back to playing a normal game. I tried playing Nergal low key and all it did was mean I gave more time for everyone else to beat me down.

The Cultist deck was atrociously overpowered, which wasn't at all clear until you played with it. Speed became hugely important with it around - whoever got a quick start likely controlled Reverand Adams and abused all of the toys of the deck.

For Imperator, I built decks for the event with numerous cards I never see played, like the Holds. Nobody played the Holds or most of the other cards, Lextalionis being an exception I can recall off the top of my head. Much of the metagame was trying to minimize the effectiveness of using the central deck.

Getting off the topic:

In terms of play, The Eye of Hazimel may have been the best - I don't recall anything else being better. The infernal/not infernal thing was a metagame mess where people didn't know how to bid and Anarch Revolt decks were popular. The LB/G&M event was awesome in some ways - all bloodlines, no grouping, no scarce - and terrible in that LB made the format insipid. Motivated by Knowledge was awful, making games a battle of blood versus lack of blood to determine whether someone could draw a threat or answer ... constantly - essentially, someone only died with no blood on any vampires, even then, some other player might draw into a "do not oust" card by blowing off a bunch of blood to find a crosstable answer, like DI.

Anarchs and Alastors worked well in the one time I recall playing it as we had Dark Sovereigns in the draft mix - never realized how interesting DS is for draft. But, it lacked the clan identity that is the main draw of storyline play.

The holds didn't seem helpful at the time, I remember. Too much text, I hadn't seen them before and didn't feel like bothering. Now Channeling the Beast, that was a hotly contested card, as was Clan Loyalty.

Edit: Cards that have really basic effects or that are weak but situationally useful are good candidates, IMO. Ex: Victim of Habit, Esteem. Cards that will almost never find a slot in your deck.