Expansion Update

I would have no problem with that, or even with this version :

Villein
Master: trifle.
Put this card on a vampire you control and move 2 or more blood from that vampire to your pool. Villein costs an additional pool to play on this vampire.

Why punish Minion tap at all, when it is, i feel , inherently weaker in all cases, except when you plan to minion tap same vampire multiple times during the course of the game (Only some rare decks, like Qadir's world tour or similar)

Aaron wrote:

Villein
Master: trifle.
Put this card on a vampire you control and move 2 or more blood from that vampire to your pool. Minion Tap cards cost one pool. Villein costs an additional pool to play on this vampire.

I don't have a horse in this race, but I want to point out that this doesn't change the way that Villein works now, because card effects stack. (That is, exchanging "an additional" with "one" doesn't actually have any effect on how the card works, because you still have to add up all the "ones" from Villeins in play when an MT is played. This is why Army of Rats has its "You may only..." sentence.)

Kushiel wrote:

Aaron wrote:

Villein
Master: trifle.
Put this card on a vampire you control and move 2 or more blood from that vampire to your pool. Minion Tap cards cost one pool. Villein costs an additional pool to play on this vampire.

I don't have a horse in this race, but I want to point out that this doesn't change the way that Villein works now, because card effects stack. (That is, exchanging "an additional" with "one" doesn't actually have any effect on how the card works, because you still have to add up all the "ones" from Villeins in play when an MT is played. This is why Army of Rats has its "You may only..." sentence.)

I would think that every additional Villein sets the cost of a Minion Tap to one, in the same vein that multiple Signposts set a minion's base strength to 2/3.

Villein
Master: trifle.
Put this card on a vampire you control and move 2 blood from that vampire to your pool.

Pendargon wrote:

Haze wrote:

number of tournament winning decks running at least 1 Minion Tap in 2011: 10/232
number of tournament winning decks running at least 1 Villein in 2011: 81/232

ebay price of Villein: $4 according to Kevin's anecdotal evidence, though the only recently sold listing I could find was $15. let's average these together to $9.
ebay price of latest MtG dual-lands: usually $2 to $3 if you buy a set of four together.

so to get this staple resource-management card to play one third of the game, you have to pay more money than Magic players do for their must-have rares. Yay.

I'm not necessarily for or against legalized proxies of all VTES cards, but I am convinced Villein by itself is fucking ridiculous.

And i answer to this : so what??? You want to play the game at the most competitive level, pay something to do it.

I am a student, with no regular income, AND living in a god-forsaken country where average wage is below 300 euros per month (yeah, that is right). By saving, and putting money aside, in 3 months i bought 8 villeins off auctions on ebay, paying between 6-8 dollars per card. I have put aside 20 euros monthly for my hobbies, and i got them. Why??? Because i wanted them. If i could do it, in these conditions, anybody can do it. It is not like villeins are enkil cog or Ur-Shulgi...

good for you. have a chocolate bar.

the point is the price to even enter the game. one third of of all the vampires in the game are so pool expensive they require Villein to be playable. a common argument I see is "there are no new players joining the game" but with the cost to play one third of the gamespace I would say it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I love how the Enkil Cog is constantly used as a strawman argument here, since apparently everybody wants 4 copies for their deck FOR FREE. Enkil Cog was used in about 20 TWDs this year, about 10% of the total. Interestingly, only 10% of the vampire cards in the game can play Enkil Cog. Most decks only used 1 copy.
20% of TWDs used Ashur Tablets, and those often appeared in quantities of 7 or 9. I can't find price data on Ashur Tablets but I'm guessing it costs a lot more to get 6+ than for one Enkil Cog, and it appears twice as often! But still, Ashur Tablets never wallpapered a staple common card.
I'm not even going to bother looking up Ur-Shulgi usage.

Villein shoulda been more common. or shoulda been less OP. if the VEKN is too paralyzed to address either issue, it's going to continue to be a problem.

Haze wrote:

good for you. have a chocolate bar.

the point is the price to even enter the game. o

Uuuuh, how witty and snappy comeback. You must be a debate god at your kindergarden.

You do not HAVE to have Villeins to enter the game. That is a strawman argument right there, and not enkil cog mentioning in previous posts...