Emerald Legionnaire — First Black Chantry Nerf?

It is a bit strong.

My position is that the multiplayer aspect creates some strange kind of balance. It's not perfect, and is not true in each and every game, but it's real, at least to me.

I have played against Madness/Reversal, Tupdogs, Weenie DBR, all kind of deadly S/B, weenie ANI, Legacy of Pander, Vignes or Giovanni power leed, all kind of allies (Nephandi, War Ghoul, Khazar's Diary, Nocturn...), Inner Circle vote, weenie vote, Palla grande, AAA, Ventrue Obf, Unnamed, Una freakshow, Weenie auspex, Enkidu, Gangrel votes, Baltimore Purge, Girlz... I think Legionnaires are strong, but not stronger than all the things I mentioned.

I usually play almost no stealth nor combat, and I still ousted Nephandus decks with the unmasking in play many times. Though my decks usually handle them very badly, I did so through using table dynamics, deals, and the fact that they are seen as a huge threat. And I'm not even a good player (my Vekn ID is 3490023, if you want to take a look at my track records, though my biggest accomplishment is not recorded, for some reason).

I felt overwhelmed by good decks many times, it was very frustrating, I had more than my share of blaming the overpowered cards. I would have called for bans many times, but great players helped me think of solutions with cards, but also psychology and flux knowledge.

If you play almost no stealth or combat you must have a sore jaw after every game.

I'm thinking that EL is strong, as it was intended to be, but not overtly strong or broken.


Nephandi are all the rage because of Antonio d'Erlette and I do think his ability is way overpowered. No one is advocating in nerfing him.

I think he would be much more balanced if the Nephandi his recruits should come only from the hand.

i once played vs emerald deck with a deck with 6 entrancement;
they guy said entrancement should be banned.
good day and good night

Problematic card in VtES is not the same as a problematic card in other two player CCGs - we got contest, table dynamics and silver bullets to fix spikes in power, so we will never see real dominance in statistics from any "narrow" (not available to everybody, like pentex) card. Key problem is mentioned earlier fun factor - cards should be banned/changed/or something on the basis of making the play less fun.

Obviously fun is subjective, so there must be some authority (Lead Game Designer) who will decide, what is fun in this game and what is not. Still haven't heard anything in this regard from current "powers".

I can still speculate, that there are two problems in EL - that others can't interact with their put into play ability (it should be 1 stealth action) and Unmasking, which together with ally swarm makes small stealth pointless, by which half of actions in the game became pointless, because if you should invest into delivery mechanism for each action than you can't allow to have small effects, but it's just my opinion.

Part of the illusion of EL being overpowered comes from Unmasking. Unmasking is certainly not overpowered, however, there is no efficient way to get rid of it. The popularity of unmasking increased with EL and the boost of Nephandi (the vampire whose name shall not be spoken). Maybe it is time for a new unique card that says "-1 intercept to allies" or even "-1 bleed to predator's allies".