New card idea, sabbat parity shift

I think the card is worth playtesting although it lacks the inherit barganing power of Parity Shift

Juggernaut1981 wrote:

I can very much see this card turning up in strange ways that allow you to manipulate things like the old "Kindred Restructure" tricks.

If my deck can bloat well, I can use this card to push my grand-prey out of reach of my prey (by sharing my pool with my GPrey). This would then allow me to take out my prey and stop them getting their VP. Repeat and rinse with successive prey-GrandPrey combinations until I gain enough VPs to be guaranteed to win.

This is just like the old trick of VP sniping by Kindred Restructure, just with a little more pool on the line and a little less reorganising.

This is a tactic that would be easily doable today aswell, with Parity shift or bloat+lifeboon. Although I believe the tactic to be subpar and not tournament worthy.

Parity shift is one of the most boring cards in the game in my opinion. A 10 pool shift of pool is not something to aspire to or even compare against. It is way to powerful. No matter what theorizing brings up in terms of usability or opportunity cost you cannot create too powerful cards and just increase the cost. People will find a way to work around the cost and then it'll be bad.

Even if you limit the steal of pool to say, 4, I still think it would need some other restriction in my opinion. Among the most frustrating things that can happen in a game of V:tES is to be cross-table ousted by a parity shift because that other player "needs those 5 pool". Not because he actually want you ousted, he might even find it strategically bad to see you go. But he'll still do it because it's so easy and it's still worth it, 5 pool is too much to pass up on. It would need something like "only usable on prey" or "not usable unless another methuselah votes in favor".

I'm actually kinda on Lönkka's train of thought for this one. Just creating another (slightly modified) Parity Shift is not that fun. We should be able to innovate a bit more than that. The Sabbat have some nifty tricks already, even though arguably they're not as strong as the Camarilla's. But it's not an emergency, if there's an imbalance it's minor. Also, thematically I'm fine with the Camarilla being more votey than the Sabbat.

Xaddam wrote:

Parity shift is one of the most boring cards in the game in my opinion. A 10 pool shift of pool is not something to aspire to or even compare against. It is way to powerful. No matter what theorizing brings up in terms of usability or opportunity cost you cannot create too powerful cards and just increase the cost. People will find a way to work around the cost and then it'll be bad.

Even if you limit the steal of pool to say, 4, I still think it would need some other restriction in my opinion. Among the most frustrating things that can happen in a game of V:tES is to be cross-table ousted by a parity shift because that other player "needs those 5 pool". Not because he actually want you ousted, he might even find it strategically bad to see you go. But he'll still do it because it's so easy and it's still worth it, 5 pool is too much to pass up on. It would need something like "only usable on prey" or "not usable unless another methuselah votes in favor".

I'm actually kinda on Lönkka's train of thought for this one. Just creating another (slightly modified) Parity Shift is not that fun. We should be able to innovate a bit more than that. The Sabbat have some nifty tricks already, even though arguably they're not as strong as the Camarilla's. But it's not an emergency, if there's an imbalance it's minor. Also, thematically I'm fine with the Camarilla being more votey than the Sabbat.

I'm thinking that what we need for the player driven expansion is a manifest, a vision on what we want to achieve with the new cards. At the moment I believe that the tier1 decks are limited to a few disciplines and sects and also that the game often is too slow since bloating has become alot more common with the addition of villein and ashur tablet recursion with liquidation. Most tables I sit down at these days during tournaments basically starts with me trying to beat the clock, some tables are faster but on the whole the clock is the greatest opponent. Creating powerful cards is not bad in itself if they are on par with other already existing powerful cards, as I stated earlier, more viable tier1 decks are needed, and having a sub-par sect/clan etc just means they are not played as much if you want to min/max.

Most cards I see created are defensive atm, I don't know if this is what we need or just a knee-jerk reaction in v:tes in general since it's seen often with backousting-walling-bloating and timing out in general. Personally I believe we need more active cards that create ousts i.e. more governs, more conditionings and more aggresive votes.

I'm unsure we're able to create a more creative set of cards for this first expansion, they will probably be iterations of already existing cards since it's easier and more accessible for players, once trust of the design team has been solidified we can have more interesting cards, maybe even cards that create a new ousting mechanism?

My own personal snoozecard is probably Govern the Unaligned, it's just too much imo, but it's needed, there is no card that can compare to it.