Six Player Variant

Did you have any instances where the "X number of Methuselah's" on a card got over-powered?

It seems that free cards like Conservative Agitation would get out of control very quickly. Simple combination of Closed Session and Conservative Agitation is a free 6 bleed which doesn't fit with game mechanics. Most other 6 bleeds cost 2 blood.
-Pulse of the Canaille (3 blood)
-Legal Manipulations+Conditioning (2 blood)
-Reckless Agitation (2 blood)
-Etc
Not only that, the vote can't be deflected or reduced in any way. Too much.

CelestialChoir wrote:

Did you have any instances where the "X number of Methuselah's" on a card got over-powered?

No, but keep in mind that the people playing 8 player games are not thinking in terms of how to make an environment suck for 8 player games.

I did play in a group that despised vote decks. This hatred very well may have developed from them playing large games with ConAg, et al, early on before I started playing with them. I don't know. I just know that I got away with playing votes because I hadn't played with them a long time and many of my votes were sillier ones.

In that 17 player game, may be amusing to know that an Anathema deck won. But, I recall no votes that mattered to the players several seats down or further away. Maybe people just discarded votes because they didn't want to convince six other players to allow them to pass them or whatever.

As to more reasonable sized games, like 6, you are playing in an insular metagame where people can adapt, whether through peer pressure or through deck design or through table management. At the point where everyone is loving the *idea* of PS/CA for 6, I'd imagine that passing a vote becomes kind of crazy and maybe the metagame shifts to people trying something else, like Black Spiral Buddy decks.

Sure, if you end up with lots of games where two vote decks just nuke tables until they face each other, house rule that out of the game. I'm not against house rules, I've played under all sorts of them, including the ridiculous NRSA (no repeat successful action ... hello Majesty+Aching Beauty+Alexandra). Just pointing out that they may not be necessary as I didn't find larger games to be all that bad without special rules.

I think link to Sirlin belongs here:

www.sirlin.net/ptw/

Played 7-players game yesterday. I was playing nos royalty with 8 parity shifts and votelock.

Passed it once, became table threat, the second one was blocked by eagle sight cross-table and then I was first to be ousted.

Fail.

Yeah, I'd be the first to jump on those guys. Sadly, the deck I'm speaking of specifically is a Ventrue w/ Hardenstadt at the helm. So he calls the vote. You block him. He has superior Fortitude and Majesty's out the ass. It's quite bothersome.