Una Freak Drive

Una, as well as turbo decks, are fine - they just put all activities of one player into one turn. And it's meaningful activities - actions.

Pointless card manipulaytions, provided by ashur tablets, imbueds, sudario refractions ets are much more annoying.

Warning, long post.

TL;DR: The game requires variety.


There are similiar discussions in other card games, the one that comes to mind being MtG. In it, the design team has come to the conclusion that mechanics such as counters (aka, negating a play by someone else) and land destruction are "unfun" for players and proceeded to nerf them. In a not unrelated though process, creatures were made more relevant for "player interaction" (by which they mean "creatures bashing each other").

IMO, this has made MtG poorer, especially due to the greater creature significance. The evidence of this is that for the last +/- 3 years Standard (one of the formats) was populated by one or two deck archetypes – everything became so much more homogenous.

Back to VtES: I won't enter in the "Ashur Tablet should be banned" discussion (I don't agree with it and no argument I could provide seems to be able to change others' minds, since the reasoning is usually "It's boring and drags the game"), but I would like to point out that never in a table Una was played, it timed out because of it – if anything, since the deck is all or nothing, it made the table collapse faster. Una is a fragile deck, easy to shut down.


If Una is a type of deck (turbo) that shouldn't exist because it's boring, here's a few more that follow the same reasoning. Remember that winning is not relevant, only how boring/annoying the deck is.

Combat – a dedicated combat deck focuses on destroying your resources (vampires).

Wall – time outs and denial.

Weenie computer hacking – in a Zillah's Valley/Villein world, the prey won't play.

Imbued/allies – imune to a lot of stuff that vampires aren't.


If we take out combat and wall decks we are left with… bleed, allies and politics. Since there are no walls/fairly blocky decks, you no longer need that much stealth, which means lots of smaller minions is probably better. Seems very fun, with lots of interaction. I hear bouncing with dominate requires an untaped minion and blood.

Since a lot of people dislike allies anyway, let's go ahead and take those out, too. Now politics really doesn't have to worry about stealth, so they can focus of dealing pool damage that most of the time can't be countered/bounced.


I don't think banning or nerfing Una is the answer – if it was such a good deck that it was predominant, there might be room for discussion on banning, but as it is, it's a self-checking deck: people won't play it much because it doesn't win. Same with other turbo decks.

I agree with Sérgio. I have an Una deck like this before and it has only won once. Its not really a table threat, yes it does get to be a long turn for the player playing it. But its very easy to counter. It gets killed by Vampiric disease or Pentex Subversion easily, dedicated combat decks, bleed decks and even interceptor decks.
And as Sérgio mentioned, they dont win really. So nobody really plays them in a tourney.

blackday wrote:

I agree with Sérgio. I have an Una deck like this before and it has only won once. Its not really a table threat, yes it does get to be a long turn for the player playing it. But its very easy to counter. It gets killed by Vampiric disease or Pentex Subversion easily, dedicated combat decks, bleed decks and even interceptor decks.
And as Sérgio mentioned, they dont win really. So nobody really plays them in a tourney.

James specifically said that the discussion he's looking for doesn't take the power level of the deck into account, though.

Rather, he's curious if you think that the deck is problematic in terms of time limits and boring the other four people at the table. Since you've built and played the deck, I'd also be interested in hearing your experiences with regard to those potential issues - the only time I've ever seen it in play, it got shut down immediately, so I don't have any experience with the 30-45 minute toolup turn.