Slaves

Can we drop the rule that Slaves cannot perform D actions untill you control their masters?
Fix or ban on tupdogs will be required ofcourse.

Ankha wrote:

Why?

In short: to make gargoyle vampires matter.

It is possible to make a competitive deck with hatchlings.
It is possible to make a competitive deck with rockcats and mages.
It is possible to make a competitive deck with tupdogs.

If you're not playing the above decks, it's probably better to play gangrel or brujah then to try and make a slave gargoyle deck. If you take away the slave D action rule, they'd be on par with gangrel and people could have fun mixing and matching indy/slave gargoyles. You can still add tremere, but you don't NEED to.

The main reason this thread exists is because I tried to make a group 5-6 slave gargoyle deck tonight and saw the lame/expensive options I had in group 5-6 (!)tremeres. I was also dissapointed LoK gargoyle cards where mostly slave oriented and did not use the storyline where Gargoyles rebelled and became free.

Removing the D action slave rule would imo. make gargoyles as a clan equally competitive to other clans although tupdogs will need addressing.

GreyB wrote:

Removing the D action slave rule would imo. make gargoyles as a clan equally competitive to other clans although tupdogs will need addressing.

I put forward one semi-elegant-ish way of doing that: www.vekn.net/forum/card-balance-strategy-discussion/74734-bloodlines-gargoyles#75569 , which is essentially to keep the ban (D) actions in the first turn they're out only. So Tupdogs still need a master to do useful stuff, but others can probably get by.

If you would do this then you would need to rebalance all slave gargoyles, because then slave would be purely strong beneficial trait and they would all need a point taken out from somewhere else.

Klaital wrote:

If you would do this then you would need to rebalance all slave gargoyles, because then slave would be purely strong beneficial trait and they would all need a point taken out from somewhere else.

In the situation where slave didn't require a master, I'm not sure that the benefits would ever really materialize, because people wouldn't play them together. Complicating your crypt with incompatible disciplines is usually a real pain in the ass.

I suspect that what you'd get in reality the majority of the time in the best performing Gargoyle decks is just some of the slaves being used alongside some of the non-slave vampires for their compatible disciplines and abilities. And yes, some of the slave Gargoyles would be a bit of a bargain, but not really on a worse scale than quite a few other clans have a few really tasty vampires who feel undercosted compared to their fellows.