Honest Idea for fixing overly strong master cards!

Suoli wrote:

I'm wary of giving examples as it usually sidetracks into long arguments about some irrelevant details at the cost of discussing the issues that were meant to be highlighted.

You must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.

While I know what you mean about getting sidetracked, in this case I do think it would be useful to offer at least deck archetypes, rather than decklists. The latter is a lot less likely to get picked apart than the former, and since you're insisting that there are good toolbox decks, the burden of proof is on you to at least mention what they are.

Suoli wrote:

That said, the new Tremere royalty might be a good example. They have access to some of the most efficient cards in the game and between Alastor, offensive votes, Dominate, Second Trad and so on can choose from several lines of attack without fully committing to any of them.

Agreed. I'm kind of surprised that I haven't seen more of them in tournaments, actually. Probably more of a psychological block about people only wanting to play honed, streamlined decks rather than taking a chance on versatility. Fear is the mind-killer, people!

It's also worth pointing out that both the NAC and EC in 2010 were won by toolbox decks. I don't want to go so far as to say that those decks were better than the other ones that finalized, since I'm convinced that player skill has a much greater impact on the game than deck contents (ie, the Jay Kristoff Factor), but those are at least good examples that toolbox decks can win in the face of even the most serious competition.

Demnogonis Saastuttaja, you're quite hostile in your response and you're really unreasonable in a few formulations, but I'll try to answer anyway.

As I said in the end of my post (and that you, by chance, couldn't be bothered to reply to) I was willfully oversimplifying simply to illustrate which trends will appear in a meta with only 'versatile' or toolboxy decks.

Demnogonis wrote:

VTES is a game of luck where seating determines everything, the game that follows alters the preordained result only by odd card draws and mistakes if the players make them.

Sure, seating will give players' different chances of winning the game from the start. What makes a good player is one who can realize what those percentages are early enough to start affecting them (by deals, cross-table interaction, waiting to oust or lounging for an oust early), which becomes a lot harder if other players around the table try to do the same. This is what vtes really is; a game about realizing what the other players' have realized that the other players' have realized about... etc, etc. The player who manages to stay the step ahead of everyone else will have a higher win chance than everyone else. An unfocused deck can't do either of 1)deals, 2)cross-table interaction, 3)waiting to oust or 4)lounging for an oust early nearly as well as a focused deck.

And if you really want to be argumentative it's actually the roll of a die which decides the seating order, and that roll depends on a person and how he/she rolls it in interaction with gravity and the surface's texture and tilt. Additionally everyone's ability to predict the table could be determined in advance as well as everyones' responses to this. Being deterministic is not really helpful in a discussion like this.

Demnogonis wrote:

If everybody does this then the game becomes much more interesting and more about playing the game than winning with lol luck.

This is covered in the rulebook; you have to play to win. Anything else is a rules' breach.

Demnogonis wrote:

But anyway a toolbox deck is usually built in such a way that it survives, at least that's what I think.

No, sorry, that's just inaccurate. A toolbox deck can by definition never be as effective in defending as a focused deck, because you have things that are non-defensive in the library.

Demnogonis wrote:

How so undervalued? Of course it's important now. Hey how about building a solid deck you think has a stable performance and taking that and then playing the game...

I'm not a 100% sure I understand you, so correct me if I'm getting this wrong. If you're implying that there is a deck that has a "stable performance" in every single tournament, you're wholly incorrect (unless you mean that 1,5vp is stable?). Providing you played flawlessly and that everyone else played flawlessly, if you didn't win the tournament there was a better deck choice to make.

Demnogonis wrote:

Anti-things decks such as 14 entrancement decks and coinflip strategies such as stealth bleeds that are either 0% or 100% don't make for good gameplay, just a waste of time of for whom lady fortuna whores.

If you analyzed the meta game and concluded that there would be a lot of allies and then went for Gines' Simply Irresistable deck as a counter and you won the tournament because of the 14 entrancement you deserve the win, in my opinion. If you haven't analyzed the climate and just went for a counter-deck blindly, I'd tend to agree, though.

Demnogonis wrote:

Okay, just what sort of decks are you talking about that don't have a strategy, and how is the game gravitating towards that?

I'm not saying the game is actually gravitating towards anything, it was in the hypothetical scenario discussed. Sorry if I was unclear. My opinion is that the actual changes going on the world are going in the other direction.

Decks that don't have a strategy? I'd rather not throw around insults, so I'll stick to non-specifics. About 98% of all decks in the TWDA are unfocused decks by my definition, though decks have gotten alot better in recent years. So start reading from the start.

Kushiel wrote:

No offense, but are you being serious here? I can't tell, because I can't imagine wanting to play the game if that's really how you think it plays, but at the same time the rest of your post seems to support the idea that you really mean this.

Sure. VTES still has a bunch of good stuff, too, like how it gets cool people together, and deckbuilding is fun. But any luck-influenced mechanics I have grown to loathe in any strategy games, and this has greatly lessened my enthusiasm for VTES.

Perhaps I need to elaborate, I think that VTES skill is playing effectively in your seat, and very good players tend to nearly always win in the lucky seat - you don't just sit in an advantageous position and do pretty much whatever. You have to do it right. But I think everybody's in the community are so experienced now that somebody just botches it, plays it badly because they don't know what to do. I should also say that there's no such a thing as new players around here. A lot of situations in the game are told as facts nobody bothers to contest (who does that anymore, "Yeah my position isn't so good no not really just look" when it's clearly BS), or not said at all because they are so obvious.

Xaddam wrote:

Demnogonis Saastuttaja, you're quite hostile in your response and you're really unreasonable in a few formulations, but I'll try to answer anyway.

I don't mean to be hostile, if I seem so I apologize.

Xaddam wrote:

As I said in the end of my post (and that you, by chance, couldn't be bothered to reply to) I was willfully oversimplifying simply to illustrate which trends will appear in a meta with only 'versatile' or toolboxy decks.

I didn't think about that so much, what do you exactly mean?

Xaddam wrote:

Sure, seating will give players' different chances of winning the game from the start. What makes a good player is one who can realize what those percentages are early enough to start affecting them (by deals, cross-table interaction, waiting to oust or lounging for an oust early), which becomes a lot harder if other players around the table try to do the same. This is what vtes really is; a game about realizing what the other players' have realized that the other players' have realized about... etc, etc. The player who manages to stay the step ahead of everyone else will have a higher win chance than everyone else. An unfocused deck can't do either of 1)deals, 2)cross-table interaction, 3)waiting to oust or 4)lounging for an oust early nearly as well as a focused deck.

Agreed, well this is how VTES works when it's at it's finest. A lot of times, however, there exist a series of roadblocks, hard counters, total inability to defend or oust something, and so on. Then the game is just random lol, a result of seating that doesn't change at all during the game, a waste of time. And lately, an overwhelming majority of the games I have observed or played are so, I don't know why but something's changed, or possibly I didn't see that before. I just see a lot of games where somebody sits in the win seat and nothing else happens in the game as the other players don't have reasonable options but to play their game. Nobody will just go out their way to ruin their and somebody else's game to make somebody else win, or if they do, well then the new winner had the lucky seat.

Xaddam wrote:

And if you really want to be argumentative it's actually the roll of a die which decides the seating order, and that roll depends on a person and how he/she rolls it in interaction with gravity and the surface's texture and tilt. Additionally everyone's ability to predict the table could be determined in advance as well as everyones' responses to this. Being deterministic is not really helpful in a discussion like this.

Lol, who uses die anymore when you can just draw cards, what's this gravity business have to do with that? But let's say we have bad players, messing with the game, that's another luck element right there, helping some lucky guy. I have to ask, do you see a lot of deals such as "I don't bleed you the next turn", because I think nobody trusts that kind of stuff anymore. I have a rush deck, you have 3 Dominate minions, we all know what's going to happen and there's no point in making a BS deal somebody is going to break.

Xaddam wrote:

This is covered in the rulebook; you have to play to win. Anything else is a rules' breach.

Huh, I didn't say that people aren't playing to win. I'm saying that the game works fine with decks that have options in the given game and then people are thinking and there's strategy involved, but too many times there are no options, there are coinflip decks in the table and nobody has options save for maybe the lucky player who got to be in the winner's seat.

Xaddam wrote:

No, sorry, that's just inaccurate. A toolbox deck can by definition never be as effective in defending as a focused deck, because you have things that are non-defensive in the library.

No, you don't need maximum weenie auspex defense to survive. C'mon, you know that you can construct a deck with less or more defense, and a toolbox deck is one that tends to have more. A toolbox deck isn't a wall deck, but it has to be defensive enough that it's player can be patient in the game.

Demnogonis wrote:

I'm not a 100% sure I understand you, so correct me if I'm getting this wrong. If you're implying that there is a deck that has a "stable performance" in every single tournament, you're wholly incorrect (unless you mean that 1,5vp is stable?). Providing you played flawlessly and that everyone else played flawlessly, if you didn't win the tournament there was a better deck choice to make.

By stable performance I mean it's a deck that has a low amount of bad matchups, and I think a solid toolbox deck should be just that.

Xaddam wrote:

If you analyzed the meta game and concluded that there would be a lot of allies and then went for Gines' Simply Irresistable deck as a counter and you won the tournament because of the 14 entrancement you deserve the win, in my opinion. If you haven't analyzed the climate and just went for a counter-deck blindly, I'd tend to agree, though.

I don't care about who wins the tournament or who deserves what, that just goes as it goes. But if the games are a series of complete shutdown matchups where some people don't actually get to play, that is boring and that shouldn't happen in a good strategy game.

Xaddam wrote:

I'm not saying the game is actually gravitating towards anything, it was in the hypothetical scenario discussed. Sorry if I was unclear. My opinion is that the actual changes going on the world are going in the other direction.

Decks that don't have a strategy? I'd rather not throw around insults, so I'll stick to non-specifics. About 98% of all decks in the TWDA are unfocused decks by my definition, though decks have gotten alot better in recent years. So start reading from the start.

Okay. I tend to agree, I mean a lot of TWDA decks make me think about lucky seating, obviously What I was curious about is what sort of decks do you mean that don't have a strategy? Was I confused in thinking you mean toolbox strategies aren't good for the game? Anyway, even unfocused, bad decks tend to have a strategy, they just can't execute it with much consistency.

I get the feeling there's some glitches in this discussion, what I said about seating is pretty off topic - I mean to say that good toolbox-style decks operate in a stable, less luck-dependent manner, unlike many of the ultra-focused strategies that have a lot of bad, even impossible matchups. Therefore I find games with a lot of toolbox strategies much more interesting and harder to accurately predict. However many toolbox decks (generally the ones without dominate) will find it difficult to deal with the current master bloat-heavy metagame, mostly because they don't have access to good, efficient solutions to that. So. Then we get games where we have zero options, impossible odds, completely predictable and unchangeable outcomes, bored faces, angry people and often somebody who gets VP's by the virtue of luck. Not every match - but the majority of them, in my perception.

Demnogonis wrote:

I didn't think about that so much, what do you exactly mean?

I don't actually mean that a table with 5 toolbox-decks will have a 20% chance of each player winning if you run the scenario 1000 times (the remark about the 5-sided dice). With toolbox decks the best player might have a 29% chance of winning and then 25%, 20%, 15%, 11% in order of descending skill. If all players played focused decks on the other hand the best player might have a 50% of winning and then 25%, 10%, 8% and 7% in descending order of skill. The latter is to prefer in my opinion.

Demnogonis wrote:

Agreed, well this is how VTES works when it's at it's finest. A lot of times, however, there exist a series of roadblocks, hard counters, total inability to defend or oust something, and so on. Then the game is just random lol, a result of seating that doesn't change at all during the game, a waste of time. And lately, an overwhelming majority of the games I have observed or played are so, I don't know why but something's changed, or possibly I didn't see that before. I just see a lot of games where somebody sits in the win seat and nothing else happens in the game as the other players don't have reasonable options but to play their game. Nobody will just go out their way to ruin their and somebody else's game to make somebody else win, or if they do, well then the new winner had the lucky seat.

This might just be my gamer brainwashing, but in my opinion there is always something that can be done. That thing to do might have been to choose another deck. The only time I've experienced domino-like tables in favour of a single player is if that player fielded an appropriate and focused deck on a table with unfocused and/or inefficient decks.

Demnogonis wrote:

I have to ask, do you see a lot of deals such as "I don't bleed you the next turn", because I think nobody trusts that kind of stuff anymore. I have a rush deck, you have 3 Dominate minions, we all know what's going to happen and there's no point in making a BS deal somebody is going to break.

Of course not. Those deals are, as you say, bullshit. The kind of deals I'm referring to is when two players see a mutual advantage in forcing a three-way or four-way and they need to cooperate (or simply confirm eachothers' intention) to bring it about. Deals without trust, but in which game theory dictates that they should talk about it to make sure they see the situation in the same way.

Demnogonis wrote:

No, you don't need maximum weenie auspex defense to survive. C'mon, you know that you can construct a deck with less or more defense, and a toolbox deck is one that tends to have more. A toolbox deck isn't a wall deck, but it has to be defensive enough that it's player can be patient in the game.

If you're gonna survive (in a way where you can still win the game) a focused ousting-oriented deck (Vignes, weenie KS, obf-vote), yeah you do kinda need an aus weenie. If you're just gonna survive other unfocused toolbox decks, no, I don't suppose you need to play an aus weenie.

Demnogonis wrote:

What I was curious about is what sort of decks do you mean that don't have a strategy? Was I confused in thinking you mean toolbox strategies aren't good for the game? Anyway, even unfocused, bad decks tend to have a strategy, they just can't execute it with much consistency.

To be a good deck in my opinion the deck needs to only consist of cards that fit into the strategy seamlessly or be defensive cards that are extremely efficient and/or general enough that they're not dead cards. The defensive cards usable in decks where defense isn't a part of the strategy are cards like bounce, Delaying Tactics, Direct Intervention, Jake Washington, The Uncoiling, Nocturn or Majesty. Other than that an example of an unfocused deck is if you play a KS bleed deck and you choose to include two Passion. KS bleed is a stealth-bleed so using two cards that are tap-bleed diverges from the decks strategy. Another example is including earth swords in a Kiasyd stealth bleed. Simply put the cards that you face-palm when you replace instead of that stealth or +bleed you needed to win the table.

Xaddam wrote:

I don't actually mean that a table with 5 toolbox-decks will have a 20% chance of each player winning if you run the scenario 1000 times (the remark about the 5-sided dice). With toolbox decks the best player might have a 29% chance of winning and then 25%, 20%, 15%, 11% in order of descending skill. If all players played focused decks on the other hand the best player might have a 50% of winning and then 25%, 10%, 8% and 7% in descending order of skill. The latter is to prefer in my opinion.

Okay. I don't agree with this at all, obviously. Playing such a game where, say, everybody stealth bleeds doesn't require an ounce of skill or thought from anyone, and it resolves in a mechanical manner. The best player, in this case, needs to be the one who gets the best seat (or card drawing luck since in this case the decks are so similar), because everybody is playing a railroaded coinflip deck.

Xaddam wrote:

This might just be my gamer brainwashing, but in my opinion there is always something that can be done. That thing to do might have been to choose another deck. The only time I've experienced domino-like tables in favour of a single player is if that player fielded an appropriate and focused deck on a table with unfocused and/or inefficient decks.

Scenario : Your minions are being matched by an equal number of Asanbonsam ghouls with Unmasking. You can't generate 3 stealth on your bleed actions, instead you have something like Seduction and Block Fails which won't help you with these buggers, one doesn't work and the other just makes him change the blocker to another AG. You don't pack offensive combat, neither can you chip through them with hand strikes, as that would mean taking 6 damage (later you could be facing FBI and Vagabond Mystic, which are likely in this deck). To boot, the Tzimisce, the bastard that he is, has bounce. So : your ousting is completely blocked. You might even have a predator, that's not good, what to do...

(If your deck a toolbox, you could probably kill them, or block them as they are recruited, but you are a focused necrobleed or some such thing, so this is what you get.)

Choosing another deck is a matter for the next games, it doesn't improve this single game in any way and won't give you options to do anything.

Many focused decks are made with other focused decks in mind and often hard counter them in one way or another.

Xaddam wrote:

If you're gonna survive (in a way where you can still win the game) a focused ousting-oriented deck (Vignes, weenie KS, obf-vote), yeah you do kinda need an aus weenie. If you're just gonna survive other unfocused toolbox decks, no, I don't suppose you need to play an aus weenie.

This is simply not true, defenses against bleed decks are pretty elementary. Obf vote is more difficult, it depends on how much stealth he has crammed on to the thing and how many of those are Forgotten Labyrinth. But Vignes, KS... these are the kind of decks I like seeing as my predator if I play a solid Toolbox myself.

That being said, should the VTES become the kind of lol game where there's ten different power decks, including the likes of weenie KS and Vignes, I don't think there's any point in continuing to play, you could as well play poker by then, at least you can win money in that one.

Xaddam wrote:

To be a good deck in my opinion the deck needs to only consist of cards that fit into the strategy seamlessly or be defensive cards that are extremely efficient and/or general enough that they're not dead cards. The defensive cards usable in decks where defense isn't a part of the strategy are cards like bounce, Delaying Tactics, Direct Intervention, Jake Washington, The Uncoiling, Nocturn or Majesty. Other than that an example of an unfocused deck is if you play a KS bleed deck and you choose to include two Passion. KS bleed is a stealth-bleed so using two cards that are tap-bleed diverges from the decks strategy. Another example is including earth swords in a Kiasyd stealth bleed. Simply put the cards that you face-palm when you replace instead of that stealth or +bleed you needed to win the table.

Yes. This applies to a toolbox deck as well, it shouldn't have lolrandom cards and magic bullets.

Demnogonis wrote:

VTES is a game of luck where seating determines everything, the game that follows alters the preordained result only by odd card draws and mistakes if the players make them. The player who sits in the right position wins, and no matter how much skill everybody has they can't change their seat, and no matter what anyone says everybody knows how the game works and won't be conned into doing silly things.

Yeah, that's why the same players keep racking up win after win in the VTES Hall of Fame, because it's all due to seating and odd card draws.

I'm not sure that I've ever seen such a complete misunderstanding of a game as embodied in this quote of yours, so I've got to ask: Do you really, actually believe this?