No More Bounce Cards

How about some form of bleed reduction that reduces the bleed to one? Not the most efficient in the world, but slows down hyper-bleed?

Would it work to have something like a reaction form of daring the dawn?

Could either of these concepts works as fortitude reaction cards? Just ideas.

Dorrinal wrote:

We do not need any more Deflections in the game. A new bounce card would:

• Inhibit creativity in deck design.
• Create a hostile metagame for stealth bleed decks, which should be a viable deck type.
• Further blur the distinction among the various disciplines.

When I am not at work I'll be happy to further explain and defend my position. But I believe the case is quite strong. We do not need more bounce.

We do need to have options other than:

Speed Stealth-bleed
Powerbleed
Super-Bloat
Prince-Vote (Mostly Toreador Vote)

To do that we either need to
- kick Dominate in the junk...
- give many other deck types a boost (without helping the 'No Teeth Wall Decks' still sit there and do nothing)

Games timing out due to Super-Bloat or Prince-Vote decks bloating beyond the capacity to oust them is purely a reaction to the expectation that any given tournament table will contain at least 1 Dominate-Based Sleaze Deck. "Girls will.." is again a reaction to the fact that you better bloat at a redonculous rate to survive Dominate Bleed predators. And so on.

Improving the ability for decks such as Combat Decks to oust forwards, will concentrate more of their efforts forward; making Path of the Salmon much less attractive.

Improving the ability for decks to limit constant fast aggressive bleed will also allow them to spend more resources and card slots going forward and less on bunkering down behind a mountain of pool or intercept.




It seems to be a common theme that people want other strategies to be more effective, but seem unwilling to have them become as powerful as Dominate-bleed based decks. You can't have both. Either the decks become viable (and Dominate-bleed/flick loses its priviledged place of 'the no-brainer-built-this-and-you'll-win-a-few-VPs' discipline) or you accept that you're bonkers to bring anything to a tournament that doesn't contain 8 Deflections, Carlton van Wyck, Pentex Subversion and 2-4 SR/Washes.

I totally disagree with the "I don't play this 8-10 cap vampire because it has no AUS or dom" stuff. Out of the last 14 games I played at a tournament I had only 2 times a bleed predator.

Also scrolling through the TWDA I see quite a lot of decks winning in 2011 that do not play bleed bounce. See for yourself, you'll find Assamite, DoC, big cap POT-PRE, Ahrimane, etc.

So yeah, I agree with the original post: we do not need any more bleed bounce!

I'm not 100% sold on your thesis. When building tournament decks with the current card pool:
- I often feel like I have three options: bounce, serious intercept, or weenies. (There would be four if I were willing to play Baali Girls, of course.)
- I quite often choose a selection of vampires not because they're interesting, but because they bring me to 5 vampires in my crypt with dominate.
- When examining crypt cards, I pay more attention to out-of-clan dominate than I do to all other out-of-clan disciplines put together.

The last piece is what really tells me that there's an issue. The discipline system in VtES is actually really interesting. I love the concept that you can pick a couple of disciplines, choose vampires that support them for your crypt, and go crazy with it - only, if one of those disciplines isn't dominate (or superior auspex), the deck almost certainly won't be viable. As someone who likes to design decks, I find that pretty depressing.

I don't buy that access to disciplineless bounce would make stealth bleed non-viable. I've seen stealth bleed take tables where every deck was running bounce. Hell, most tournament decks run bounce, and stealth bleed wins tournaments all the time. Nor is worrying about the strength of S+B a good way to make your point - I think I'd prefer that stealth bleed were a little less strong overall, and I don't think I'm the only one.

I'm not sure I like the idea of disciplineless or ubiquitous bounce. I would like to think that there's a way to balance things out without forcing everyone to use the same approach; though, I've yet to see a solution I'm happy with.

That all said, I _do_ think there's a place in the game for more Dominate bounce cards! Given the number of decks that run Dominate bounce, giving those decks choices other than Deflection makes for a better game without substantial overall changes. I like Redirection and Murmur of the False Will, and think they both have their place, just like Wake, OtQV, and Forced Awakening do.

We do not need any more Deflections in the game. A new bounce card would:
Inhibit creativity in deck design.
Create a hostile metagame for stealth bleed decks, which should be a viable deck type.
Further blur the distinction among the various disciplines.

Totally agree. One of the steps of building a viable deck is to think about how it should defend versus various archetypes. Giving bounce cards for every discipline makes any creativity concerning "How to defend against agressive bleed predator" going to thrash can.

Izaak wrote:

If we do not need more bounce, we need Lost in Translation to not be unplayble. Remove "younger" from it.

Why on earth?
I think that the card is just fine. The capacity/age restriction means that a weenie hordes aren't most likely able to use the card. Which is Good ^TM.

Dorrinal wrote:

We do not need any more Deflections in the game.

Agreed.