Please Ban The Unmasking

AaronC wrote:

Non-existant user wrote:

Lots of minions with +1 intercept != lots of intercept. or do not care about the Unmasking. Combat that can get through the allies does not care either.?"

I disagree with both of these statements. Any standing intercept will end up hurting a stealth bleed deck. These decks start to have trouble when every bleed action requires +2 stealth and every undirected action needs +1 stealth. Also take into account that Carlton + Unmasking increases it to +3 stealth per bleed. Plus you have to deal with the rushing allies, meaning that if you only pack stealth + and no combat defense, you may have a problem. TorranceCircle is correct that Carlton appears at every game in LA.

"Combat that can get through the allies" Hmm. Interesting concept. Many combat packages are not efficient against allies. And even after you've burned the ally, you may not have any combat cards left to deal with the actual vampires. Underbridge Stray, Vagabond Mystic and other effects make allies very resilient. The Unmasking + allies + Pentex Subversion vs. combat superstar = defeat of combat superstar deck as smaller vampires are unable to remove Pentex guarded by resilient or expendable allies.

Yeah - The Unmasking makes everything worse.

Stealthbleed typically likes cycling stealth, its a weakness of mozt of the deckes ive ever ran unmasking with.

Comabat superstar deckw ive ran are more than happy to bun allies with support cast if the star gets pentexed. Running, or even having access to, good supporters is how i decide if a deck is viable. My Anson combat has volker, saah brando, jimmy dunn and other to name a few who have opened a can on folks if anson is pentexed, banished, or whatever. Count germaine has pug, benedict, and others that play the same combat and kill allies in his stead, typically just until pentex is burned.
And then theres tension. Most ally decks, barring nkcturnes, wont discard the masters to burn it.
So, if your prey is allies, you are ousting slowly by them throwing allies under the bus. If its yoir predator, theyll wither stop or your grandpredator will be thrilled to oust them.

Imbued are strong. No hiding that. But if theres that much ally crap, meta against it. Or if your really worried, run bhmlks, sybils tongue for unmasking am black hand ritual play it, burn it, and its done.

Seems impraxtical, but ive never been as worried about the unmasking as others seem to be.

Also, unmasking is expensive. Banning would piss lots of people off. Pod aside, it wasnt thqt long ago my wife went through 3-4 boxes of gehenna for events like that, and before that it was $50 almost to get a pair of unmaskings.
Its,good, enables decks, and even when half my meta played imbued and war ghouls, we dealt with unmasking just fine. And thqts to say nothing for how carlton was always seen in our games.

I love to play decks with allies. But my playgroup adapted to this fact and I can't play them anymore because of all the Entrancements around. It's awful. Please ban Entrancement. And my Unmaskings fall to Uncoiling often enough. Damn.

Joscha wrote:

I love to play decks with allies. But my playgroup adapted to this fact and I can't play them anymore because of all the Entrancements around. It's awful. Please ban Entrancement. And my Unmaskings fall to Uncoiling often enough. Damn.

Also ban xeper and sebastien goulet

Joscha wrote:

I can't play them anymore because of all the Entrancements around. It's awful. Please ban Entrancement. And my Unmaskings fall to Uncoiling often enough. Damn.

Outside of the well-used irony to help the main point, I would say that anti-ally tech are a bit powerful. They would be perfect if every ally was something small and expendable like the Reanimated Corpse or Arms Dealer, but a lot of ally are similar to 3-cap vampire. Succeding to steal a War ghoul, the Remnant of an Endless Storm, or a Rock Cat is however a much bigger swing in balance than almost all action.

Of course, it's not a balance issue exactly. It's a design issue, where a game of small interaction have a portion with very huge swing.

Don't know about you folks but if I made a deck that would get slaughtered by Unmasking then I'd stick in 1-2 uncoiling (depending on library size). Chances are that if your prey has unmasking with allies blocking your grandprey might have difficulties too and would like the deal to remove uncoiling after you have taken it out.