Honest Idea for fixing overly strong master cards!

Suoli wrote:

I don't know if there are that many archetypes that can only be countered by specific archetypes. Most matchups can be handled by adding more stealth, bounce, combat defense, intercept, maneuvers, specific hoser cards like Scourge of the Enochians, etc. to the deck of your choice. Some decks will still outright suck against other decks. I have a feeling that there are significantly more decks that suck against Girls than there are decks that suck against the other major archetypes.

And yet somehow those Girls decks aren't winning every tournament they're being played in, in spite of most other decks sucking against them. Mostly it's just when Hugh or Erik plays the Girls that they win - I know where I think that causal chain originates, just as when Vignes was the most hated flavor of the month and people didn't seem to notice that it was generally awesome players who were winning with it. I notice nobody else has responded to this point, which Izaak made earlier in the thread, but I don't really expect them to due to how the pattern of I-Hate-the-New-Flavor! plays out.

Suoli wrote:

I've heard people say that but I haven't heard any convincing arguments. The TWDA isn't very strong proof if you don't adjust for the difficulty of acquiring multiple Villeins, Ashurs and Liquidations.

If that difficulty is a real factor, and Girls decks are so hard to build that few people can do so, there's even less chance that the archetype is going to somehow warp the metagame in the same "play it or play to beat it" way that Return to Innocence did.

Suoli wrote:

I contend that against past [hated new deck type]s it was enough for most decks to add countermeasures but against Girls most decks outright suck.

What evidence is this contention based on? I hear a lot of bitterness on these boards about Girls; other than that, I don't see them winning more than any other Tier One deck, which indicates that people seem to be beating it just as well as any other good deck.

Kushiel wrote:

Suoli wrote:

I contend that against past [hated new deck type]s it was enough for most decks to add countermeasures but against Girls most decks outright suck.

What evidence is this contention based on? I hear a lot of bitterness on these boards about Girls; other than that, I don't see them winning more than any other Tier One deck, which indicates that people seem to be beating it just as well as any other good deck.

I think that the most frustrating thing is how difficult it is to oust. As a predator, you can write off a lot of games when you discover that after a few turns, your prey will be gaining at least a handful of pool every turn. If you are playing powerbleed and cripple it early, you may not have a problem. If you are playing rush combat, you may "win the battle and lose the war," as often happens. You're not going to block the deck because it doesn't have to act to survive.

Is it all-powerful? No, but it is a bitch to oust. This isn't to say that it is unique in it's survival capabilities (see weenie auspex), it just may be unusually difficult to handle.

I don't think bitterness comes from what wins or not but how it feels to play against a particular deck archetype. The hostility to Girls, I believe, likely comes from the ease with which it bloats and the difficulty of interacting with the bloat. That's not specific to this archetype, but it's much easier, say, to stop a weenie deck from Con Booning for a ton of pool.

I don't get the sense that weenie decks win disproportionately either, as a different sort of example, but the hostility comes from how easy it is to get taken out of a game before you can do anything. I always like to point to how my pool doubled in a tournament before I took an action, from 1 to 2, to what a weenie deck is capable of. That deck lost, by the way.

brandonsantacruz wrote:

I think that the most frustrating thing is how difficult it is to oust.

This flashes me back to "Vignes is impossible to oust" and "imbued are impossible to oust" so hard that I'm seeing trails.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not disagreeing with you here. But nobody called for a change to Raven Spy once Nevermore won, and that deck was just as annoying as Girls. Would that deck have been the victim of New Flavor Hate if it had become popular? Of course. Which is why I kind of roll my eyes at all the griping about Girls, just like I did Vignes, and turbo-Parity Shift, and the imbued, and every other new decktype that suddenly became popular (often after having been played for years without winning - there's a newsgroup post of me asking how an early iteration of Girls won a tournament way before they were so visible, and asking "how does that win?" is stage one of the New Flavor Hate cycle).

I only jumped into this thread to dispute the argument that the emergence of Girls on the tournament scene is going to somehow be a black hole of tournament deckbuilding, as I don't really care enough to argue about the specific merits/weaknesses/artwork/whatever of the Girls deck itself. It's just...this New Deck Hate? It's happened before, and will happen again. It's not going to stop anyone from playing Shattering decks or Samedi rush or whatever crazy shit they like or think can take some people by surprise, any more than the previous decks which have completed the New Flavor Hate cycle and now are considered merely tournament staples did.

ICL wrote:

I don't think bitterness comes from what wins or not but how it feels to play against a particular deck archetype. The hostility to Girls, I believe, likely comes from the ease with which it bloats and the difficulty of interacting with the bloat.

I agree, but that's not generally what gets verbalized about the deck by people who despise it, at least around these parts. There's a big difference between "that deck's boring/annoying" and "that deck is so good that I need to built a specific antideck to beat it," and I keep seeing the latter here.

Karo wrote:

elotar wrote:

But I still want to mention, that the problem really is not in the deck, but just in Villein + MMPA + ash heap recursion combination.

Agreed.

As I see many people ignore the fact that isn't the problem in Girls Archetype it's in the boring recursion that Elotar said very good, and nothing else. And it's a winner/broken in many TWDA as Kiasyd bleed/ Tupdog rush/ Girls etc. It's the recursion that affects the game in a bad manner while hosing other cards and other mechanics or gameplay. To that fact you can add that almost any deck is viable for play with Ashurs/Villein and as a response we get many weeny bleeders etc. to stop this. Yeah most people don't play this mechanic but it doesn't mean it isn't broken. Villein never should have been printed as it is, 2 pool max. would be enough and Ashurs should have been a clan based card.