A proposition to change Lilith's Blessing and Anthelios

I would ban all promo cards from tournament play that do not have an identical non-promo version. Also, ban any of the 10th Anniversary Set only cards (from tournament play).

The problem with concentrating on a card here or a card there is that there are a host of cards that contribute to annoying play but not play that is so degenerate that the game lacks reasonable levels of balance, variety, and fun. So many that you could just as easily leave them all alone and let them tussle with each other. After all, one person's LB is another person's Villein is another person's Ashur Tablets is another person's Carlton is another person's Voter Cap is another person's Parity Shift is another person's Anthelios is another person's The Unmasking is another person's Imbued is ...

It is true that Lilith meddles with many strategies.
Combat ? "hey, get me out of torpor, i'll lilith myself up"
attrition ? "it's ok, i'll get some blood during my untap"
smiling jack ? "i can survive for like 3 or 4 turns without spending a single pool until I find/negociate a solution"

And if there is no strategy to meddle with, then it's 3 to 9 pool gain from a single master every single game.

Yes, I hate lilith. Yet I am forced to play with it, since it's the only way to keep up with others more competitive decks I see around.

Please do something. Make it unique ? So it can be contested ? Make a master card mandatory, so it requires some intelligent deckbuilding ?

Ohlmann wrote:

As a matter of fact, for everyone which wasn't actively buying products on the small windows where KoT booster were affordable, three cards are infuriatingly hard to come : Deep Song, Eye of Argus, and Villein.

You know all three cards you mentioned were in HttB pre-con right? Especially Villein, which was in all the pre-con IIRC. If you chose not to get the HttB starters because "I don't like them for <insert reason>", then you really have no cause to be complaining.

However, I will admit that for players that come in after HttB, the process of acquiring these cards is infuriatingly difficult. Villein is not scarce if you can pay upwards of $10 for each, or have access to large player bases with sufficient quantities to trade, but not everyone can do so.

@Ankha : except it's significantly slower, more expensive to put on the table, and more importantly less front loaded.

A vampire with three blood can immediatly do a govern + conditionning, and then still have a blood for OtQV + Deflection, for example. With an hunting ground, you need a lot of time to make that.

the1andonlime wrote:

You know all three cards you mentioned were in HttB pre-con right? Especially Villein, which was in all the pre-con IIRC. If you chose not to get the HttB starters because "I don't like them for <insert reason>", then you really have no cause to be complaining.

No, I didn't get any because I wasn't active at the time, and when I restarted VtES, only one shop in the whole world still proposed them.

While I would have no problems at all with the suggested changes to Liliths and Anthelios, I still think that Ashur Tablets is a larger problem. I'm not convinced that saying that the tablets could only target minion cards would be a good enough fix for that card, I'd rather see that card recursion was kept as a trick available only for -users..