Card Idea: Send a message

Ashur wrote:

alek wrote:

If you prefer playing with 90 combat cards it's bad deckbuilind not a bad game design.

Who plays with 90 combat cards?

Very, very, very many players, good and bad, sometime turn up with some Beast/Theo/Enkidu/whatever-deck with like 40-50 combat cards a bunch of Fames/Tensions and tries to win. This type of deck is VERY hard to win with. They either cripples it´s prey and/or predator and messes up the table balance, or "have to" rush people cross table to cycle cards/taste/hit someone thats seem like a threat. I would like to give them cards that actually oust people instead.

Fame, Tension in the Ranks, Dragonbound and Hell-For-Leather have pretty much exhausted the options for balanced combat-based ousting. We've seen how well that worked out. Maybe it's time for combat decks to take a look at Codex of the Edenic Groundskeepers, Andre Leroux and Deep Song.

Ashur wrote:

You mention Hell-for-leather. I think a card with that pool-loss effect could be a generic combat card without screwing up VTES. What do you think?

I don't see why combat should be an explicit win condition. It seems uninspired to me: instead of figuring out the ousting mechanism that best suits your specific combat deck, you're handed a generic one size fits all-solution. I would much rather see more cards like (but not exactly) Deep Song.

I think such a card, would create great unbalance in metagame and move it forward combat based game would be, in my opinion, very bad idea.
I can't see a reason why it's such a problem to pack few contitionings, legal manipulations, permanent +bleed actions and even few political actions to combat based decks. In any combat deck I've build I'm including such cards and it's working. If you check combat decks which won big tournament there are almost always such cards.
As for the proposed card - I think it's absurdly strong. Giving enter combat and strong ousting posibility in one effect is very overpowered. Idea is nice, but effect shuold be tempered. Imagine pot weenie. This card, with tension in the rank means you can attack f.e. five times the same weak target, dealing at the same time 15!!!! damage to your prey pool. What would be the reason to play anything else apart from weenie combat??
I think card like this:

Send a meesage
Action
D - Enter combat with your prey's minion. If this action is succesfful and at the end of combat your minion is ready and the opposing minion is not, put opposing minion in the ready region instead of torpor/ash heap with one blood/life. Your prey then burns one pool.

would be much more balanced and still very good.