Recruitment Exercise - Good for the Black Hand?

Jeff wrote:

I suppose we could wait for six or nine months before there are 50 instances in the TWDA with DM cards and then bother to take note of the changes to the metagame. But that would be folly in itself.

Huh? What do you suggest? Changing/banning the card? I think that waiting and seeing the effect it has over six to nine months is a lot better strategy. Do you disagree?

jamesatzephyr wrote:

Okay, so let's pretend that you did do the analysis, you did spot it, and you made totally, totally the wrong decision. Why does weenie disciplineless stealth bleed need to be made better? It doesn't, but your careful analytical process produced that end result. Yes, flopping out four one cap Panders on turn one, bleeding for 2 each at +1 stealth, awesome. Why did your analytical process produce this result? Since it produced this result, why is it a model anyone else should copy?

Your comments above presuppose that "weenie disciplineless stealth bleed" is a bad thing to be avoided. Tell me, when was the last time such a deck ever won a tournament? The answer is "Never."

Feel free to hypothesize that such a deck should never exist because it is bad for the game. Then go out and test that hypothesis and report back. All I have ever claimed is that Fiendish Tongue/Sabbat Intrigue was not shown to be problematic with our playtesting.

I suppose I need to post the relevant sections here too:

jamesatzephyr wrote:

Was there an aim of "make disciplineless weenie stealth-bleed really quite awesome"?

Jeff wrote:

No. In our final analyses, with weenie decks factored in, these cards provided a reasonable incremental change for the better.

By my reading of "really quite awesome", your comments were fairly snarky and sarcastic.

By my reading of my response, it was neutral, factual, and portrayed that our playtesting did not find that combination to be a problem.

If you are interpreting some sort of personal affront to yourself from my comments, then that's kind of on you. I will note that you haven't commented on that thread again, so why would I have ever assumed that there was a communication problem needing clarification?

See also: the Dunning Kruger effect.

Yeah, the person that trots this one out first always makes the other side look bad. Good on you for using that tactic.

This conversation is quite silly. Can we talk about something more productive?

Lech wrote:

The Deck of Martin was already build, and known to be good, before the new set release. Changing Effective Manegement and Clotho's Gifts for new card was no brainer. It was expected.

Yes, Martin is a very good player and deck-builder. As he said, his deck was "under the radar of the tournament scene", but still doing very well. His skills (and Guilhem's) have now shown the general V:tES community the way to use Recruitment Exercise to its best extent.

The immediate anecdotal evidence we have says (to me) much more than Recruitment Exercise was just the small bump needed. It's a "no brainer" that can help any Black Hand deck, especially the swarm bleed type which is it created by virtue of card text, win big with some skillful play. Perhaps the return of weenie Auspex is imminent as it frequently happens during these inflection points when new sets enter the tournament scene.

brandonsantacruz wrote:

This conversation is quite silly. Can we talk about something more productive?

Brandon, I fully agree. I wish the conversation would turn back toward the card and not be sidetracked by meta discussions.

However, I face a bit of a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario. Some people will always interpret my comments as polarizing. Others scream out that I need to engage them in a conversation, even as they insult me. Do I ignore them and then get called out for not arguing with them? Or do I respond as tactfully as possible and then deal with additional vehement rhetoric, or worse?

Just because others turn up the heat, doesn't mean they will make me leave the kitchen.

Jeff wrote:

Brandon, I fully agree. I wish the conversation would turn back toward the card and not be sidetracked by meta discussions.

However, I face a bit of a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario. Some people will always interpret my comments as polarizing. Others scream out that I need to engage them in a conversation, even as they insult me. Do I ignore them and then get called out for not arguing with them? Or do I respond as tactfully as possible and then deal with additional vehement rhetoric, or worse?

Just because others turn up the heat, doesn't mean they will make me leave the kitchen.

May I remind you that you turned up the heat yourself, the day you decided to send that C&D-letter. Until PCK answers for that, you will be looked at with much dubio from a large part of this community. That was an unnecessary douchebag move.
I don't mind if you design crappy cards. I don't mind if you make much fuss about that. It's perfectly possibly to design bad stuff and be a nice person. It is not pobbible to be a nice person AND not be a douchebag.
Being a good designer is something that you can learn. Being a nice person is something that you decide to be or not. And it is never too late to become a good person.

brandonsantacruz wrote:

This conversation is quite silly. Can we talk about something more productive?

True. Sorry for derailing. I sometimes get carried away.
I like Recruitment Exercise. It is definitely a good card. Time will tell if it is broken. I have played against it, and it did not feel as if that one card was totally screwing up my game. So my gaming exerience was relatively unaffected by the card. I still managed to play and I still enjoyed the game.
It's nog unlikely that only the obvious use cases of RE have surfaced now.
Look at Aksinya Daclau in the girl's deck. That only became common place a few years after 3rd Ed was released.
I would be very disappointed if the vtes-players of the world woudl only use cards in the way the designer intended. Sure, the extremities will probably be handled by the designer(s), but there is a whole field in between that is left open to exploration. The card is published, so now it's up to us to make something of it. For RE, the first part of that exploration is already done (some might call it 'ehrmagehrd, ernerther swerm blerd dèck').