The 'Metaban' Project - A rolling ban project for VTES Tournaments

ICL wrote:

A survey, like the marketing one that went out, could help get a broader group of opinions. But, the survey would be incredibly involved to where I think few would bother putting the effort into listing 20 cards to kill.

I'm pretty sure that, even at this stage, you could get enough votes for banning the three Conviction cards - and thereby essentially banning essentially all of Nights of Reckoning. (I mean, yeah, technically you could play Crusader Sword with True Faith or get Moise Kasavubu with Summon History. But you get the point.)

The crowd couldn't have come up with the simple, elegant fix to Villein. Locally we've recently started doing some "cube" style drafts, but we didn't try to determine the list and count of cards as a group effort, rather our Prince found and extended some existing lists. I think that for issues like this, a benevolent dictatorship is the better way to go.

Anyway, (aside from the polling) I love the idea. Both because it'd be interesting to re-think deck ideas, and because if a few decent tournaments happen with one particular ban list, it'd be useful data for future game development.

And hey, if your local group hates the idea, no one is telling you that you must run your tournaments this way.

It's not about democracy vs dictatorship, it's about global vs local decisions. One cannot select the 20 cards independently, or one could end up with whole disciplines scrapped from the game, all the bleed bounce removed, all meaningful combat removed,... You need someone to design the banned pools. Then, you can have people vote for the pool they prefer if you want. I don't think it is necessary since they are supposed to rotate anyway, but it could work that way.

1. VEKN has to run it. In general, people in the VTES community are strongly against non-centralized attempts to influence the course of the game. There are no commonly agreed-upon ways for fan-based initiatives to be accepted by the community.

2. The tournaments have to be fully sanctioned by VEKN. Currently the only meta-reward for playing in a tournament is the chance to have their deck appear in the TWD on the site www.thelasombra.com or the chance to get in the Hall of Fame on that same site. Since these tournaments would not follow the normal VEKN tournament rules, players would not have a chance to increase their fame on that site. Many local playgroups will not run any form of non-sanctioned tournaments.

3. The OP should propose an initial list of 20 banned cards in order to fully describe the format he is proposing. This would show that he has carefully considered his idea and is willing to take a leadership role in getting it started on the unlikely chance that VEKN would nominate him for such a role.

Shockwave wrote:

What is it?Feedback, comments, thoughts welcomed.

Do plenty of local tournaments using the system and after that tell us how it went. No point in adopting something like this far and wide if it hasn't been field tested.

All in all I'm kinda meh/undecided on this.

Incidentally - The polling suggestion was precisely because it creates further 'entanglement' from players, and keeps them attached to the game. If one 'Season' has a poor selection of 20 cards, what does it really matter? So that Season will see some truly odd things occur (either the domination of a deck inadvertantly buffed by the change, or another accidentally driven into the ground) but that's entirely the point - To encourage metagame shifts and try to see new ideas pop up.

I specifically did NOT propose cards, because that would provide the (especially in the VTES community) obvious counter-argument of 'This is just a roundabout way for the OP to suggest the banning of x, y or z, which wasn't the point. Nor would I care to be drawn into that.

James has pointed out an obvious flaw to consider using the Convictions as an example, and I'd be happy to see some effort (beyond making the original suggestion around an 'Exempt' list broad enough that you risk invalidating the whole project) to avoid that.

I can't stress enough the purpose of the proposal is to encourage creativity, not stifle it. This would historically have been caused by the addition of new cards and sets, which of course is currently problematic.

Yes, polling the VEKN community at large only gets you the common view - But that common view only gets to hold away for one season, and wouldn't it be kind of interesting anyway to see 'What would the game be like' for that once?

(This was another unmentioned reason I'd like to see them TWDA recorded - The data gathering could actually be influential for the Design Team, as it provides a broader way to say 'What happens if x or y didn't exist' that is unavailable with the necessarily small Playtester groups.)