I really don't like ashur tablets

I think the topic could say it all, but I'd like to at least try to not look as a troll

I really don't like Ashur Tablets. I think the card is annoying and makes the game more boring. I'd like to list my main three reasons for this:

1) "Thematic".
Recursion was a trick, and now it is a trick for anyone. It dilutes the themes of the disciplines and allows for clans without do have a very powerful way of performing recursion - even without spending vampire actions!

2) It's a master.
It's a master. You need to play three of it to trigger it. Thus this encourages playing multiple master actions. Multiple master actions leads to fear, fear leads to anger, anger leads to the...oh, sorry, wrong game. On a more serious note, it encourages multiple master actions - and if you already need multiple master actions you might as well play other tricks that encourages more master actions (anthelios, lilith, etc). And then you start having a lot more master actions in the game - which imho is tiresome and boring, this is a game about vampires.

3) It's deck rebuilding.
There are plenty of decks which has a modus operandi that consists of "put most of the deck into the ash heap, then use ashur to use the ash heap as the deck". It's a smart trick, the voice within me who enjoys smart tricks thinks this is awesome - but it is too strong. Almost all decks become better by playing a trick like this. And that is boring deckbuilding. I've begun feeling that there are now two kinds of decks in vtes, those that plays ashur and those who dont. And the ones who play ashurs is better and more flexible. And this is _boring_. It's not that I'm annoyed that I can't win - it's just that I think that the game becomes a lot more boring.


Bonus reasons:
* Ashurs is too "hard to get" for players who wasn't around when KoT-boosters was sold. This might be solved by PoD, but I'm not certain that adding more Tablets into the mix is the solution.
* Bloat. I'm not going to motivate this further
* Liquidation. Imho, the intent of this card was "Trade bad thing (lose top X cards off your deck) to get good thing (gain Y pool)", with ashurs this is purely a good thing.
* It's not an action. If you had to use three actions to trigger a tablet (maybe something like shatter the gates), I think I'd actually like it better - because then you could at least block it.


So, what do I want to do with this thread?
Well, apart from venting my frustration (*vent* *vent* *gah*) I'd like to restart the discussion about the Tablets. Am I the only one who feels this way?

I generally don't like banning cards (but I'd not cry if the tablets suddenly disappeared), so if we put that aside for now. How can you "shape" the meta to not use ashurs? What deck types can you play to just ruin the life of people running ashurs? I feel that sudden/wash is not very useful, and playing my own tablets to trigger my opponents tablets really doesn't feel right at all. Trochomancy does make life hard on tablet-users, but the card is just really not that good. I feel quite stumped as to how to mess tablets up in a good way (...yes! building a deck to mess other peoples decks up is a constructive way of solving the problem! ...maybe...)

Thoughts?

pod solves everything, its what $35 per tablet?

I can only second you. The worst versions of ashur abusing are the Girls... decks and the Nana Buruku ani deck (especially the latter).
On your first point: I've never thought about that, but I think you're right. Nec is quite a "special" discipline and this was it's territory of expetise. Now, the ashur is actually way better then any Nec based library recursion.
My main problem is that it makes pool. Without actions, you take back 13 cards, which is already quite broken, but to get pool on top of it....All the above mentioned 2 decks are basically bloating as hell, without making an action. The Ani deck can focus on beating everything on the table into a pulp without the need no make any pool gaining action (or using up all the combat cards). That's waaay to strong....The PoD will just make things worse in this case. Everybody will use it, or much more at least and nowadays, I'm thinking of putting in like 4+ suddens in every deck (which I can't do many times). That'd be just worse...

i was looking at a deck in ardb with a friend, we ended up with 10x Wash

Actually, I think flooding the field with Ashur Tablets might just be the trick to balance it out.

If everyone is running 6 or more tablets, eventually triggering th tablets becomes so unreliable that people stop playing them so much.

I am not saying the tablets are good for the game, just that its current problem might be the numbers that are in circulation.

the1andonlime wrote:

If everyone is running 6 or more tablets, eventually triggering th tablets becomes so unreliable that people stop playing them so much.

It mean MPA will win the prize, and non-MPA deck will be forced out of using them.