Balancing Ashur Tablets

ReverendRevolver wrote:

Its all salt. There is no immidiate strategic advantage to ousting crosstable. Or backwards. Vp is to the left. Everyone has probably convinced a new player to go backwards with some KS bleeds, but bottomline is you are playing a deck that does something other than try to directly win.

So, why do it? The Santaleous deck, like many walls, wins in the "eventually" timeframe. So, stopping masters, gaining pool, shooting up Aksynia are all ways to overcome the fact that by lategame most decks have 10 ish pool but girls have 30 something.

Still says something that players build decks to kill the poisonous archetype being discussed.

you misunderstood me i belive. my aim was to out them cross table not event put them into position when thei predator can take advantage and kill them.
but from strategical point of view. if you do this once and by any accident are able to remove 2 or more ashurs from his asheap it's quite fair chance that you have just killed one of his tablet sets. as an addition you may remove some other cards player would dig back to library. strategicaly from loong term perspective you are lowering his chances to win whole game = increasing your own.

it's true that girl do have better situation in late game due to higher pool, but it's not the case all the time. i have notice when you put constant and slowly increasing pressure with low amount bleeds (1-2) in high quantities (3+ minions) you can kill girls easily whole it's just question of time. once you get him under 15 pool he will most probably not influence out new wamps due to average capacity 9,5 and he can't villien one cybele/aksinya indefinitely.

All discussions here about any broken anavailable card degrade into repeating same arguments over and over. Booooring.

My 2 cents anyway - obviously ashurs + MMPA are broken and we need to deal with one or other. In this case I prefer "only one non-trifle master card can be played during master phase"

ICL/Pascal are also right - choosing 13 cards takes too long. I think we just need to lower this number to 3 (for the sake of minimizing changes as well as simmetry - 3 tablets/3 pull/ 3 cards). I think then it will be on the acceptable power level comparing with the other recurion cards.

All other "swingy" cards are bad too and I'm convienced that the game will become better if we ban/errata them.

I don't see Ashurs taking that long in most cases. But sure, it CAN be used for playing time.

Same could be said for Vaticination, Heart of Nizchetus, discarding after Dreams etc etc.

Lönkka wrote:

I don't see Ashurs taking that long in most cases. But sure, it CAN be used for playing time.

Same could be said for Vaticination, Heart of Nizchetus, discarding after Dreams etc etc.

Sennadurek, Troglodytia, Auger, Deep cover agent, celestial harmony, forsee, etc COULD take a long time as well,

Making "decisions" is the ouch part.

Pascals idea mirrors the handling of discards with Fear the void below, Maqsue of judas, border skirmish, sudario, etc, where yoi simply point your hand, face down, at the table, shuffle, and let someome pick what goes (hypnotic spectre style). Theres a mechanical sort of quality to it, and its not time consuming like choice is, and adds more interesting randomness to the game. I ran Fear the void and Masque of judas in a Petaniqua deck once, and two randoms averaged 50% less time consuming than discards from DotS at end of turns.

We migjt need to impose a limit. Add in "you may remove any number of cards in your ash heap from the game, then shuffle you ash heap. Remove up to 13 cards at random from yoir ash heap, and shuffle them into you library." Maybe even a clause where your ash heap gets rfg after. So, random mostly, nothing to hand. No decision, other than removing cards from game, which could be edited to like 5 cards (so the non girls decks dont have to choke on junk because girls decks ruined the card)

Also, itd probably help timeout i guess.

Lönkka wrote:

I don't see Ashurs taking that long in most cases. But sure, it CAN be used for playing time.

Same could be said for Vaticination, Heart of Nizchetus, discarding after Dreams etc etc.

Two minutes doesn't seem like a long time to resolve a card, but it can be. When designing cards, I have to keep in mind a card's resoultion time. As an extreme example, suppose every card that was played took two minutes to resolve. In a tournament game, a total of 60 cards could be played, totalling 120 minutes and averaging 12 cards per player. Playing 12 cards isn't a satisfying game of V:TES.

It's ok if there are a few such cards. To paraphrase Ankha, it's ok to have a piece of chocolate once in a while, but if we ate chocolate all the time we'd get sick. Ashur Tablets is very much a piece of chocolate in my mind.