Card idea: Trust no One

Heh, so you are one of those people who think combat decks can't win tables? You must be playing against really terrible ones then. Here is some anti ally cards to you that are useful even when there is no allies around that I can think of right now.

Chair of Hades
Entombment
Entrancement
Force of Personality
Mercy for Seth
Sensory Deprivation
Skin Trap
Still the Mortal Flesh
Target Vitals
Tenebrous Form

One of my more successful ally decks is a Nephandus-type Deck. All in all it's an elaborate Cryptic Mission Deck. It regularly gets hosed by trumpy combat (Cel-Pot is making a revival around here) and with a few Osebo decks making appearances, I get frequently hammered off the table. Even with the fair whack of untap and Dominate flick, I reasonably frequently have to worry about keeping a S&B predator hunting as much as possible... and then it doesn't really get to the fun and cool stage until I get The Unmasking and/or Restricted Vitae.

Is it effective? If it survives, it gets table wins. It's generally a 3VP or 0VP kind of deck (a bit like combat decks really).

Would it be completely pantsed and hosed by most of the votes people are talking about? YOU BET YOUR DAMNED LIFE.

Is the card proposed balanced? NOT ON YOUR LIFE. That thing is basically designed to single-shot oust a particular deck type. Its terrible design, its not promoting diversity and its a hamfisted way to solve a problem that I doubt is really there.

Izaak wrote:

The thing is, there are only two efficient ways to deal with allies.

This is completely untrue. See the list of ally related cards posted elsewhere in this topic.

So in the deck building phase you either decide you want to play Crows or Presence, or you don't. If you choose to do so, allies are trivial to deal with. If you don't, you're going to get your game randomly destroyed every few games.

Or, if you're not playing a combat deck, you either play with enough stealth to be able to pass actions, enough combat defense to be able to survive fights, enough bloat to be able to keep going if you lose a minion or two, or any of the other ways you would normally design a deck to get around light combat.

This is not neccesarily bad or anything, but I think it's pretty silly there are so few playable (playable meaning it's actually usable when there are no allies) cards that mess up allies. I'm thinking of stuff like:
<snip>
You get the idea. At least give decks the option to deal with allies. As is, you're pretty much forced to ignore allies because there's just no viable options (ya know, outside of Entrancement and fighty stuff).

The thing is, ignoring the fact that they're allies is frequently the correct call. Treat them like any other minion with a similar ability, and decide how you're going to get around them that way.

FYI, you cannot block Piper.

Setup required to make people anarch, plenty of solutions to deal with this.

You cannot block Antonio's special.

He can fetch one useful ally with his ability. That ally has no intrinsic stealth or intercept.

Good luck blocking a turn 2 Garou between Form of Mist and Earth Control

Since there are exactly two vampires in the game who can recruit Renegade Garou and can play Form of Mist at superior on turn 2, it's not something I'm going to get overly concerned about.

and good luck blocking a summoned Remnant with Tangle and some random stealth card.

Any wall deck should be able to block that action all day, most toolbox style decks would also be able to (though not as reliably).

You're just not going to block someone playing a dedicated ally deck.

You really are, as often as you want to if playing a wall deck. Alternatively, if he's putting in all that stealth to get his allies recruited, there's not so much space left for actually doing anything useful with them.

On a related matter, if you don't think ally decks are too strong, why do you think the game needs more ally hosers? Particularly one like this.

Mael wrote:

FYI, you cannot block Piper.

Setup required to make people anarch, plenty of solutions to deal with this.

I can't think of any practical solutions to prevent Anarch Convert

You cannot block Antonio's special.

He can fetch one useful ally with his ability. That ally has no intrinsic stealth or intercept.

+1 intercept from Unmasking

Good luck blocking a turn 2 Garou between Form of Mist and Earth Control

Since there are exactly two vampires in the game who can recruit Renegade Garou and can play Form of Mist at superior on turn 2, it's not something I'm going to get overly concerned about.

sixteen vampires with Info Hwy or Zillah's valley. twenty more if you play a protean discipline card on turn 2.

Both Renegade Garou and Shambling Hordes get pretty well wrecked by discplineless Target Vitals that any chump can play. War Ghoul is considerably more durable, but is fairly expensive and has no built-in manuever or additionals or anything like that so pretty much ANY kind of combat defense works against them