On Villein. 1. "problematic card"

Amenophobis wrote:

A trifle should never have such a game-changing effect.

CON
That's one of the biggest points against. "Full" Masters should be the ones making major effects. I can't think of any other trifle, other than maybe Wash, that has THAT kind of effect for a trifle.

CON

Totally against the card these days - especially since they made Lilith's tournament legal. I think that was stupid as hell, but let's not go there. Villein made Minion Tap redundant. While trying to restrict a 'strong' staple master, it just hosed it while being better at the same time. So stupid.

The best options I see are either removing the trifleness (which wouldn't make it wallpaper anyways, since even then it would be better than Minion Tap - it requires only one player playing Villein to make Minion Taps just a pain in the ass to keep in your deck), or rewording the card to say 'up to 5 blood'.

I don't know which would be better, though - probably the latter, since then we would have something different to Minion Tap.

But yeah, these days I'm totally CON Villein. The Bloat machine's just horrible.

PRO

It allows for high-cap vampires and master slot diversity, which is good. It has strong synergy with some infamous cards but I don't think villein is were to do the changes.

I would also like to note that all the hate against bloat is somewhat unjustified. It makes decks unable to bounce or wall up air tight able to survive a focused predator. If they would have to spend even more resources on not dying they will never be able to put pressure forward.

PRO

Pre-villein this deck could never have existed:
www.thelasombra.com/decks/twd.htm#2k9archoninvestos
I'm sure there are plenty of other examples of decks which were made viable since villein was released.

I agree with Izaak, the problem is not Villein; it's the master you play after villein which makes the difference. If you play Zillah's Valley and bring out another minion you're not bloating and you're playing for your GW. If you're playing Golconda (removing the vampire) or using Lilith's Blessing (putting the vampire low enough on blood to be useless for the rest of the game), yeah, that makes you impossible to oust and you won't get your GW.

As Tiago said yesterday; we need to learn to play with and against these new cards.

Xaddam wrote:

PRO
Pre-villein this deck could never have existed:
www.thelasombra.com/decks/twd.htm#2k9archoninvestos
I'm sure there are plenty of other examples of decks which were made viable since villein was released.

That is something of a straw-man.

Pre-villein this deck would have had:
2+ x Parthenon
2+ x Rumors of Gehenna

That's it. The deck would have used the historical methods for gaining additional MPAs: Anson, Parthenon & Rumors of Gehenna.

This deck would be just as viable by these additions, it has 16 cardslots spare and there would be limited impact by including around 4 cards to give you the additional MPAs.

@Louhi
The point is, if you are planning to bloat the blood back off your minions then you used to play Minion Taps. That was the deal. If you weren't going to bloat back the pool, then you didn't play Minion Taps. All Villein has done is move Minion Tap into a Trifle. That hasn't resulted in "Master Diversity" it's just resulted in Villein turning up in every deck, when Minion Tap used to turn up in some decks.

It's not promoting diversity if everyone basically does it.

Juggernaut1981 wrote:

That is something of a straw-man.

Pre-villein this deck would have had:
2+ x Parthenon
2+ x Rumors of Gehenna

That's it. The deck would have used the historical methods for gaining additional MPAs: Anson, Parthenon & Rumors of Gehenna.

This deck would be just as viable by these additions, it has 16 cardslots spare and there would be limited impact by including around 4 cards to give you the additional MPAs.

Are we looking at the same deck? It has 14 cards too many and would be extremely sub-optimal with 4 parthenons in it.

Let's try not to weigh tastes against each other here. My point was that big cap decks are more viable since the release of Villein, please argue with this point instead of discussing deck-building.