Card ideas to help bruise

I was thinking more of the combat problem. Ousting should come through bleeding or voting and not by combat. Combat should be a way to deliver oust. But there is a problem when clan with good combat capacities don't have any way to increase bleed.

There should be more thinking about taking the bleed or facing the combat when playing against combat/bleed deck. Now bleeds are usually 1 so easy just take bleed. And when you finally bleed 3 Public Trust with combat deck it is easily bounced because there can't be so many big bleed actions coming from combat deck. So have to make bleeds by combat decks count.

Anyway I would like to see cards more which helps combat as a way to make oust but not help other bleed decks at same time. Bleed amount by combat decks should of course not be as good as stealth & bleed because you gain other benefits by playing combat (table control).

Here are two example cards:

Juggernaut
Action modifiers cannot be played during this action.
Bleed with +1 bleed. Cards that change the target of a bleed cannot be played during this action.
As above, and if this action is blocked, blocking minion takes 1 unpreventable damage.

Other simpler and more extreme

Juggernaut
1
Action modifiers cannot be played during this action.
Bleed with +2 bleed.
As above, and cards that change the target of a bleed cannot be played during this action.


Action modifier cannot be played during this action is a bit extreme and boring clause. But there needs to be some way to make these cards played in bruise style decks and not normal bleed decks. Idea of the card is to make difficult choice for prey: do I take the bleed or face the combat. I want to punish overplayed bounce also and make underplayed reduce a bit better.

There can be arguments about not every discpline should have ousting possibilities. I agree but little ousting power should be available to 1-2 more basic discpilines. I don't want every discpline to have plain conditioning. Just some unique way to help ousting little more. There is a problem when one dicpline is very good at ousting and other discpline is very good as delivering the oust . They work great together, no problem with that. But then there comes problem when clan has only discplines to deliver the oust but not anything to oust (like Gangrel antribu).

One option is to make combat to do direct pool damage more but that I don't want to see (there are couple other topics already about that). Actually I think designing bruise&bleed cards would make 50 red card rush monster decks worse. I don't want to encourage that kind of combat.

This topic came bit longer than I expected. Anyways I think game is quite good balanced but some basic discplines could use a bit more diversity. I am more interested to hear what role you think combat plays in Vtes than comments about my cards.

Surreal wrote:

Action modifier cannot be played during this action is a bit extreme and boring clause.

I would go for a clause like "you can't bleed over X" more than no action modifier. Lucian the perfect or Saulot (with some permanent) would already love this card. With maybe a stealth malus, if you want to be sure.

Juggernaut

Bleed with +1 bleed. If more than 2 pool is bled with this action, ignore the excess. The target of this bleed cannot be changed.
As above, and if this action is blocked, the blocking minion takes 1 unpreventable damage before combat begins.

I like it. It helps , weakens bounce a bit without helping power bleed (so it makes bleed reduction a bit stronger), and provides a little bit of help against Obedience too. A bleed at +2 at would probably be too strong.

EDIT: I changed the anti-bounce text to make it work against Aksynia as well.

I was thinking more of the combat problem. Ousting should come through bleeding or voting and not by combat. Combat should be a way to deliver oust. But there is a problem when clan with good combat capacities don't have any way to increase bleed.

Every clan can use clanless equipment and retainers which increase bleed potential. The best for combat decks is IMO Codex of the Edenic Groundskeepers which lets you bleed with +3 bleed. Other possibilities include camero phones, j.s.simons, tasha morgan, robert carter and some more probably.

Now bleeds are usually 1 so easy just take bleed. And when you finally bleed 3 Public Trust with combat deck it is easily bounced because there can't be so many big bleed actions coming from combat deck. So have to make bleeds by combat decks count.

I can't agree with that. Thx to combat angle you should be able to disable minion which is going to deflect and THEN bleed with public trust. Of course if you are making it in different order you have a problem. But that's not a problem of combat decks but a problem of poor playing

alek wrote:

I can't agree with that. Thx to combat angle you should be able to disable minion which is going to deflect and THEN bleed with public trust. Of course if you are making it in different order you have a problem. But that's not a problem of combat decks but a problem of poor playing

I don't understand the argument. It's more or less "since you play combat, you will be able to reduce every ennemy minion to bloody chunk". That's simply not the case : in general, you will be able to dunk one, maybe two important vampire. To avoid bleed, you must take care of every single minion with or . Which isn't doable everytime, and should not be doable on a regular basis.

And to compound the problem, when you destroy one or more minion, your main problem is that you stop the offensive of the targeted deck, but more rarely its defence.

Combat is not a good solution for deflection for now. If combat were letting people gain a short-term advantage they could exploit to lunge, it would be. But it's a long-term, difficult to do, endeavor.

alek wrote:

I can't agree with that. Thx to combat angle you should be able to disable minion which is going to deflect and THEN bleed with public trust. Of course if you are making it in different order you have a problem. But that's not a problem of combat decks but a problem of poor playing

This is again problem that players understand "combat" different. I don't want encourage rush all your preys minions combat style as ousting because that leads to boring games (also that is very poor deck type so everybody just loses). I planned those cards to think how combat could work beside rushing. When I speak about combat I don't necessary mean rush combat. Of course rushes is part of almost every combat deck but I don't want that to be focus with combat decks what is happening now.

I want to think what other roles combat could have than just pure rushing minion control. Idea of those bleed cards is use combat as threat for prey: take the bleed or face the combat.