On Parity Shift 6. "problematic card".

Ankha wrote:

PRO

There's nothing wrong with Parity Shift.
It's not trivial to kill someone with it, unless you're yourself low on pool, which can be dangerous if blocked or delayed.
It has some strong requirements (Prince/Justicar+ less pool).
It has an interesting negociation part (how to divide pool).
It is interesting for table control (give pool to your grand-prey to save her for example).

It's stronger than Finding the Path, sure, but has nothing broken in it. You can see it coming miles away, so intercept/delaying will usually screw the deck counting too much on it.

PRO, ankha thinks exactly like me

PRO

everything you guys said, plus it can be defended against with disciplineless delaying tactics, poison pill and obf based confusion of the eye.

CON

Parity Shift is and always has been an incredibly overpowered card. A 10 pool swing (your prey loses 5, you gain 5) for what involves incredibly minimal set up effort ("Hmm. How do I get low on pool? I know! I'll bring out more powerful, huge vampires!") is ridiculous. And always has been.

Along with it being insanely overpowered, it also is one of the cards that makes playing, well, most vote decks that aren't Camarilla/Parity Shift based completely pointless. 90% of all attempts to build vote decks end at the "Huh. But why aren't I using Camarilla and Parity Shifts to do this?"

Yes. It requires a Prince/Justicar. Yes. It requires you to have less pool than your prey/target. Both of these conditions are incredibly minor conditions; Princes/Justicars are easy to get into play. Having less pool than your prey is easy to do either through shenanagins (Secret Horde; Gird Minions; Assault Rifles; whatever) or simply by getting big vampires out. Heck, if you have more pool than your prey, just steal 5 pool from someone else!

Parity Shift was a horrible idea when it was printed. It is a horrible idea now. It is insanely overpowered. It makes an entire strategy branch neutered before it even starts if the attempt to start it involves using something other than Parity Shift. If Parity Shift didn't exist, *soooo* many other vote strategies would look so much more attractive and competitive.

Killing it seems completely reasonable to me. It is one of the three cards I'm most invested in seeing something happen to (none of which are Villein, which while I'd like to see get a tweak, is less of a problem for the game as a whole than Parity Shift is, for my money). If it isn't going to get killed outright, reducing its power would be completely reasonable--make it steal X pool, where X is the number of players in the game, where X is no more than 3. Then it is doing the same damage as a KRC to one person, and you get an extra bonus of gaining 3 pool for the extra costs. Still incredibly powerful, but significantly less so.

PRO

It's fine.

Because:

Ankha wrote:

PRO

There's nothing wrong with Parity Shift.
It's not trivial to kill someone with it, unless you're yourself low on pool, which can be dangerous if blocked or delayed.
It has some strong requirements (Prince/Justicar+ less pool).
It has an interesting negociation part (how to divide pool).
It is interesting for table control (give pool to your grand-prey to save her for example).

It's stronger than Finding the Path, sure, but has nothing broken in it. You can see it coming miles away, so intercept/delaying will usually screw the deck counting too much on it.