Fortitude reaction card

finbury wrote:

I don't think that a bleed defense card needs to be as strong as Deflection in order to see play in this context. Bloat is already pretty reasonable if given the chance to set up. What they really shouldn't get is a global bleed reducer. Something that is strong enough to blunt a DOM offensive could utterly negate a more moderately built predator.

Lönkka wrote:

Fortitude is already an insanely strong discipline due to untaps, but also for damage prevention. Many players consider big caps that aren't able to multiact due to lack of fortitude a vaste of time. The disciplinen doesnät need to be made stronger with absurdly powerfull reduce (five or whatever) or bounce.

Both your points are that a reduce by five would be too strong. Compare it to deflection. Even ignoring the offensive capabilities of bleeding your prey for free. It will reduce infinity. For one blood. With inferior dominate. Without capacity restrictions. Any defense needs to be compared to these. Making a strictly inferior card but of equal defense is my suggestion. A reaction card like this couldn't logically be imbalanced with the reason that fortitude is already so strong because there are an incredible amount of decks which uses both dominate and fortitude and which are all fine balance-wise.

(As a footnote, I'm not arguing for banning deflection or whatever. I think V:TES is the best game in the world. We don't need to change anything which has an integral part of the game. I'm simply suggesting to add more stuff to make it even more awesome.)

finbury wrote:

I also think it would be interesting if there was a Fortitude reaction set up the same way as a Sense the Savage Way, ie only available to 7+ vampires. From a design point of view this lets you make a card that is "for" elder vampires, without being unreliable because it says "younger". That might look something like:

In the Way
Reaction
Requires a vampire with capacity above 6.
for: Play when a political action would cause you to burn pool. You may burn blood from this vampire as though it were your pool.
FOR: Only usable during an action directed at you or a card you control. Usable by a tapped vampire. This vampire untaps and attempts to block.

what about a discipline-less elder only card in the same vein as CHAMPION?

No Respect
Reaction
Requires a vampire with capacity above 7.
Only usable if you are being bled for 4 or more pool.

The action fails and the acting minion enters combat with this reacting vampire instead. Tap this reacting vampire.

it would not necessarily be a benefit for the reacting vampire, as it would entail entering combat with the acting minion, but my assamite decks would surely enjoy having this around

jtroyve wrote:

No Respect
Reaction
Requires a vampire with capacity above 7.
Only usable if you are being bled for 4 or more pool.

The action fails and the acting minion enters combat with this reacting vampire instead. Tap this reacting vampire.

I see some issues here. First, this is a pretty conditional card; anyone who has held onto an AI for an entire game knows what I mean here! It isn't easily cycleable if it isn't applicable. What's more, if you're in a situation where it's useful, you'll probably want more than a couple of copies - unless your combat is extremely lethal.

Which leads me to the second concern: while this is useful for many decks that run elders, it's most useful for combat decks. That may or may not be a good thing.

Third, it's fairly easy to play around. Knowing their prey is running this, a bleeding predator can slow down a little and make it a dead card. Sure, that gives their prey a bit more room to stabilize, but combat decks are generally more sensitive to hand jam than bleed decks anyway, so it's probably a bit of a push. This also means that a deck can't rely on this as a sole defense, especially if they draw multiples early and are forced to let the cat out of the bag by discarding one.

Finally, in effect this is very close to Archon Investigation. The trigger condition is identical, and the card is playable by the same clans (ie, all of them). The costs - "discard some combat cards and burn some blood from your vampire" vs "burn 3 pool" - are different, but of similar value. The requirements for AI are much easier to meet - you don't need a vampire in play at all. And AI will eliminate the acting vampire more reliably. So, I think many decks would just want to run AI instead.

You could certainly tweak the card to be more cycleable - give it another effect or something. But I don't think that's appropriate for a non-discipline card. You could also push the power level up, but it's a delicate balancing act - if it's less powerful than AI, it's difficult to justify playing with it, but if it's more powerful then you might just end up with a game where nobody ever bleeds for more than three. That's not fun; it tends to make bleed decks a lot more uniform, and lack of diversity is what we're trying to get away from here.

Randy wrote:

Further more I dont like decks that play to stay and not to get any VPs, if your deck poolgains as defence and gets ousted the ousting deck will prolly have a very hard time getting the next oust because the deck has run out of resources

Poolgain: not a good way of playing the game IMO

I'd expand that a bit.

Playing just defense and no offense: not a good way of playing the game.

I think that many people don't like to feel like they lost a game. And, for many of those people, being ousted feels like losing, but timing out doesn't - even though they both count as losses by the rules of the game.

Clearly, this behavior should not be encouraged. However, I don't think there's anything the card pool could do to discourage that without nerfing all defenses to the point of uselessness. Otherwise, the people who pathologically hate being ousted will just find another way. Right now they can build wall decks, or decks that bloat, or decks that backrush their predator into oblivion and then bleed for 1 with 8-cap vampires a lot...

I think the fix there may actually be to tweak the rules - to say that a timeout is only worth 0.5VP if you already have a VP, that otherwise it's a loss, and be very clear that a timed out game with no VPs is an "everyone loses" game. But that's a discussion for another time and another thread.

There's also a second category of people, who are less interested in "not losing", but do want to play the clan they choose for its strengths without messing about with out-of-clan disciplines. Right now, if these people play DoC or Samedi, they're probably going to be bloating a lot. And, in order to make a deck that has any chance of success, they'll probably be lowballing offense in favor of extra bloat; sure, that means they'll only be able to oust when the stars are right, but that is (marginally) better than just being ousted quickly.

I want those decks to have the room to include offense. And that means giving them tools against heavy bleed.

I also think that bloat is an interesting thing to have at the table, because most bloat involves a lot of actions at +1 or +2 stealth. This makes splashed or minor intercept a bit more compelling, and means that blocking decks are a bit better at ousting certain types of prey. These are good things. It's another complexity in the metagame, another dimension to the rock-paper-scissors matchup.

Xaddam wrote:

Compare it to deflection. Even ignoring the offensive capabilities of bleeding your prey for free. It will reduce infinity. For one blood. With inferior dominate. Without capacity restrictions. Any defense needs to be compared to these. Making a strictly inferior card but of equal defense is my suggestion.

Deflection is the high point of bouncing.
All others should be inferior to it.
Most likely clearly inferior.
Especially if new disciplines are added to the bounce mix.

Xaddam wrote:

A reaction card like this couldn't logically be imbalanced with the reason that fortitude is already so strong because there are an incredible amount of decks which uses both dominate and fortitude and which are all fine balance-wise.

Fortitude is already a great discipline.
No need to overtly bolster it with amazing bounce as well.