Vampire: Elder Kindred Network Newsletter June 2022

TWDs at VDB haven't been updated with decks from the current year, but there are 521 entries featuring Parthenon.

Taking out recursion effects (Khazar, EL, AT, Sudario) from The Parthenon set, leaves you with 284.

I did quick review of the last bit doesn't suggest any particular deck pattern. There are 44 Anarch Revolt decks, but they're not even the same style AR decks. We don't seem to care about these tearing up the meta.

To my point, are there MMPA decks (and I mean deck archetypes) that are successful? Can you be like, Oh yeah, I know exactly what that deck is doing? Is there a Girls-caliber anything left in that set?

Is the problem really MMPA? Or is the problem recursion?

Tablets are obviously problematic cards as Bram has shown, that nearly any deck can be improved by removing extra copies of main engine and adding Parthenons and Ashurs. But it kind of balances itself because of "contest".

Liquidation as is seems fine, or even weak as I haven't seen anybody played it without some sort of combo, but with Ashurs or some other ability to abuse ash heap it enters zone of MTG-level broken stupidity. So removing it (or errataing to remove cards from the game or something) feels easiest solution.

elotar wrote:

Tablets are obviously problematic cards as Bram has shown, that nearly any deck can be improved by removing extra copies of main engine and adding Parthenons and Ashurs. But it kind of balances itself because of "contest".

Liquidation as is seems fine, or even weak as I haven't seen anybody played it without some sort of combo, but with Ashurs or some other ability to abuse ash heap it enters zone of MTG-level broken stupidity. So removing it (or errataing to remove cards from the game or something) feels easiest solution.

Can you define your subjective vision of “problematic”?
It seems that you guys tend to put the “problematic” tag on stuff you don’t like.

I could also say that new crypts are “problematic” for the game because they give too many votes per point of pool invested and on the top of that a free bounce for barons.

You are constantly making absolute statements on your opinion of how the game should be.

cordovader wrote:

Can you define your subjective vision of “problematic”?

It's not obvious, that master card which gives 3 pool with benefits is too good?

cordovader wrote:

I could also say that new crypts are “problematic” for the game because they give too many votes per point of pool invested and on the top of that a free bounce for barons.

That too may be a problem. At least they are "in the points".

It's fine for MTG to have big possible power disparity between decks because it's two players game which lasts 15 minutes, so not a big deal if one will be steamrolled. But in VtES it's 2 hours for 5 players. If there some serious disbalance, making the game meaningless, than it's 10 hours of lifetime lost.

elotar wrote:

It's fine for MTG to have big possible power disparity between decks because it's two players game which lasts 15 minutes, so not a big deal if one will be steamrolled. But in VtES it's 2 hours for 5 players. If there some serious disbalance, making the game meaningless, than it's 10 hours of lifetime lost.

In some environment there are players whose deckbuilding choice are very poor and, sadly, they deserve to be steamrolled because they don't want to play vtes, they want to play what vtes is in their mind with absurd combos that never work.