About deals and withdrawing

Stefan wrote:

1. Remove the possibility to withdraw from the game. Seriously - it adds nothing interesting at all and is, in today's tournament play, only used in shady deals. It also consumes time since there is always someone at a table who doesn't know the rules for withdrawal and needs to be reminded.

I don't see any of my suggestions removing any of the good parts of table politics but they put an end to some of the bad parts.

What do you think?

I completely disagree with this. There are times when declaring a withdrawal is the best play to maximise your own VPs or guarantee the game win, or just to force your opponents to make sub-optimal plays to prevent you withdrawing.

I do agree with your other point though.

Mael wrote:

There are times when declaring a withdrawal is the best play to maximise your own VPs or guarantee the game win, or just to force your opponents to make sub-optimal plays to prevent you withdrawing.

Pics or it didn't happen Seriously, an honest question: how often have you declared a withdrawal? For me, it's 0. And it could not have been much more than that since the times I exhausted my library can be counted on the fingers of one hand, not even considering the other conditions. Even my 60 card Imbued with 18 convictions didn't manage to deck itself.

Even my 60 card Imbued with 18 convictions didn't manage to deck itself.

That is in no way an example. That is akin to saying "I played a 60 card deck with 12 Ashur's when nobody else was and I never decked myself".

When you always play convictions from hand if you can (if only to draw more cards) and can play 2 or 3 powers in a turn when you get a new Imbued out, the cardflow is actually very good and stable. I didn't manage to put the whole deck on the table as I thought but went pretty close.

What, off-topic?

Non-existant user wrote:

Mael wrote:

There are times when declaring a withdrawal is the best play to maximise your own VPs or guarantee the game win, or just to force your opponents to make sub-optimal plays to prevent you withdrawing.

Pics or it didn't happen Seriously, an honest question: how often have you declared a withdrawal? For me, it's 0. And it could not have been much more than that since the times I exhausted my library can be counted on the fingers of one hand, not even considering the other conditions. Even my 60 card Imbued with 18 convictions didn't manage to deck itself.

My 60 card Shatter the Gate deck would deck itself in about half the games I played with it (it's currently retired pending reconstruction for this reason). It's also the deck I have that's most likely to be able to successfully withdraw because of Mental Maze (with cost reduced by Nergal) and Unleash Hell's Fury. I don't think I ever did try to withdraw with it, but I considered it on a couple of occasions and if I played the deck more often I think I probably would eventually. The closest I came was in one game where I could withdraw for a safe 1.5 vp, but decided against it to try to go for the game win. If the rest of the table state had been different then that decision could have gone the other way.

A contrived example that's possible to occur with other decks would be if a suicidal (or desperate) player had reduced both himself and his prey to smoking holes in the ground. The prey in this situation might see that there's no way to recover before his grand-predator bleeds through his predator and then himself, so would declare a withdraw if he could as half a vp is better than none.

Edit: I also was ousted by a brinkmanship deck before, but I don't think that counts for the purposes of this discussion