Balancing Ashur Tablets

ReverendRevolver wrote:

...Which is in many cases (Id guess 65-78% of the time) what happens with voter cap. You already were passing a vote with a 10 cap justicar, you have 2-3 princes as well, you called a KRC and had cap and awe in hand. You AWE for 6, gain 12, and have 20 votes.

If you can get that set up, you deserve to Voter Cap for a lot (and gain 2 pool).

No player deserves a single counter more than 1 from a Voter Cap whenever possible. They are ousting their prey and working towards gaining 6 pool + 1VP... any other counters you let them have is your own foolishness. It's not about 'deserving' things.

The point still stands Ankha & Jeff... Voter Cap is easy to dump counters into play and it works while you still go about ousting your prey.

For Summon Soul to be equivalent to Ashur Tablets, it needs to be changed to give 4 cards to the library and 1 pool at Superior. Then you're comparing effects with effects... because being able to be blocked is a bigger risk cost than basically crossing your fingers that people are not holding Wash/Sudden Reversel.

Juggernaut1981 wrote:

No player deserves a single counter more than 1 from a Voter Cap whenever possible. They are ousting their prey and working towards gaining 6 pool + 1VP... any other counters you let them have is your own foolishness. It's not about 'deserving' things.

They do certainly deserve to gain the full benefit of playing a Voter Captivation successfully. They took a successful action, passed a successful referendum and had a special card in play that provides that effect. Kudos to the vote decks!

Do you have problems with Social Charm, Legal Manipulation and Kindred Spirits too? Oust your prey and gain pool...with a single card!

The point still stands Ankha & Jeff... Voter Cap is easy to dump counters into play and it works while you still go about ousting your prey.

"Easy"? Says who? That point is debatable. See my above contrast/compare with Con Boon.

For Summon Soul to be equivalent to Ashur Tablets, it needs to be...

A master card.

I know I will be oversimplifying things rather a lot here but -as a 'general rule' for Vtes-card design- you could say that any card that adds 5 or more counters (blood or pool) to the game in one go should raise some flags unless there are some very very very serious drawbacks attached (not like e.g Abactor with a Mindraped vampire or with Muaziz/Ariadne).
I never understood how Fifth Tradition went to 4 counters (5 would have been ideal here, I feel) and Voter Cap as an 'en passant'-modifier was allowed to stay exactly the same... A Giant's Blood + 2 pool every time you pass a vote with enough votes. Pretty crazy when you consider all the easy ways of gaining votes in some games/metas.
Other examples of cards that are potentially game-disrupting IMHO because they add too many counters at once are Ravnos Carnival (6+ counters and you know the game is all but decided), Villeining an 11-cap down to next to nothing (preferably followed by a Giant's Blood and another Villein), Concert Tour though this *does* have severe limitations because of its built-in delay and the small capacities of all-non-Scout Y. , Renewed Vigour @ (also OK thanks to the Scarcity of and the fact that they can only play it on other vampires besides themselves, Festivo, Alamuth + Revolutionary Council, ...

In short, I feel Vtes was not made for near-infinite 'dotcom-bubble' or MtG-amounts of counters, but for the more realistic and reasonable '1 to 5' amounts. It is of course a lot of fun to see where it might go with the gloves off but neigh-unfixable 'Return to Innocence'-fiasco's are always SO damn near.

Oh, and Ashur Tablets, I feel there is a 'before' and 'after Ashur'-Vtes. That's just how good it is and how deep it affects the game. But it is an interesting card allowing MANY -if at times quite similar- new deck-types, even if it is too vanilla and not nearly Harbingers-flavoured enough for my taste.

I agree that open-ended/unbounded effects are things to be concerned with and generally avoided in design, but, actually, I'd say the correct number is 4 and not 5 for capping effects. I know that breaks the symmetry of the number of players in a game being from 1-5, but that means the cards that are based on number of players can be exceptions that makes them feel more special.

Fifth Tradition is a very good card, as it currently is. Whether very good cards are worth card slots, well, that's another story in a world where there are far too many beyond very good cards.

Some setups that happen while ousting are properly "deserved". If thucimia with khabar glory ousts with a kindred spirits bleed, its legit. You played cards to set up the extra pool gain that were only going to help with ousting on one axtion (or another oist action for glory).

Vc isnt hard to set up. You already were doing what you needed to do in order to capitalize.

Daughters can parity shift.
They play lily prelude with bribes then cap. No pool requirement. They can deal 4 damage to thier prey then gain 4 pool. With at least 3 cards not countimg vote push setup.
So lets call it 7 cards. The prelude, bribes, vc, awe, bo, a fee stake, and conductor.

You can parity shift and gain 4, then cap to gain 2 more, then minion tap your 10 cap next turn.

Its a stupid good card, but its not the same as tablets due to even presence monopoly on voting not competing with the innerworkings of girls mmpa.

We dont need mtg level resource creation. I had a Thallid casual deck that would exponentially generate saprolings. No joke, you needed a calculator doubling season, sporesower, all sorts of other thallids....

Vtes is hard enough without that crap. But we arent even close to that bad yet.

Vc is balanced, as is tablets outside of some applications.

We have to decide where the machine goes turbo with girls mmpa, since its the big problem.