Modern and legacy as formats

That's great to hear! I deeply believe that this game has enough mainstream appeal and it's great that the translation is helping it get out there. And I fully agree with your take on vampire contesting. I think it should be suspended for a limited format. We played with that rule in place during the new decks' release. It only came up once, but I can see it being super game-wrecking in a limited format where you can build your own deck.

Mmmmmm, five Stansilave decks in the finals...

There are quite a number of vampires currently in print.so I'm not all that sure the contesting rule needs to be waived.

For release tournaments of course

We did it because we were 5 players and there were only 4 new decks. Someone would necessarily have a higher risk of being hampered for having the same deck as another player (it was Ministry, btw), but it only came up with a low cap vampire.

Overwhelming number of a new cards is a problem, but BC-only format is not a solution because, obviously, it's totally not balanced and very thin (by now we got ~400 library cards and nearly the same number of vampires in it), so not fit for anything other then couple introductory games.

As a mental exercise it may be interesting to think, what will be most effective in such format, but dom + stealth is most obvious contender.

It _is_ perfectly doable for new players.
The idea is, AFAIK, not to produce some sort of perfect environment but just make an easy format for new players.

And the play arena will continue to mutate as new products, and legacy cards, will be made available.

Trying to locate the mythical absolute "balance" is a folly.

It's strange to me that 5 pages of this popped up about this.
The entire cardpool doesn't matter as much as the learning curve in general, so once that completely real barrier is overcome, asking what Shadow Twin or Canoptic Jar does isn't really a hindrance.
During that initial learning phase, a format where a group of people at a similar place, using a smaller card pool, makes some sense.
New player acquisition is important. We're getting old, it's important to bring in new blood before we lose our "training charisma " and start yelling at clouds.
But never (ever) was it stated some new format would usurp current standard constructed VTES, because that would make zero sense and none of the folks at BCP would do that. I frankly "ain't got time fo that", but between card accessibility and the asthetics of certain old layouts alone (cough cough, AH and DS cough) it would be helpful to have a beginner format like that.