Card Idea: Scrawl

Time for a new idea!

Scrawl
Reaction
cost: 1 blood
Only usable during referendum, before votes are cast.
obf: This reacting vampire gains 3 votes.
OBF: As above, and the methuselah of the reacting vampire may change the terms, then the referendum continues.

Game development
- Currently if you expect to be up against vote decks, you put in some delaying tactics and only delaying tactics for defense (or maybe confusion of the eye?). This card is intended to give some versatility in vote defense.

Flavor
The obfuscate power scrawl. 'Scrawl: Hide messages in writing legible only to an intended viewer'

Balance
Could prove better than DT against cards with changeable terms that would pass by a small margin, for example KRC, Parity Shift and Consanguinous Boon, while worse against cards such as Ancient Influence or Political Stranglehold. Since it would not prevent more copies to be played (which could be crucial during a lunge) but could also give turn some referendums in your favor, all in all it's about the same as DT.

Competitiveness
Moderate. Nothing to rely on yet nothing to scoff at.

Cons
Messes a little with current mechanics and could lead to even lengthier referendums.

What does it have to do with ? Strong voting effects rather belong to and defence generally does not belong to . It looks a bit like giving them a bounce to me: just wrong.

Ankha wrote:

Secondly, changing the terms is very strong, especially if you gain 3 votes at the same time to make it pass according your terms. Should at least have a "younger" clause (reacting vs acting), or not be usable at superior if the acting minion has Auspex.

At first I had the inferior and superior separate but changed to an 'As above' in the end. Maybe it's a tad strong but my reasoning was that someone making a vote is most of the time able to pass it alone or setting terms to pass it, hence a change of terms would hardly ever make it still pass. Not gaining the extra votes would make it probably worse than the disciplineless DT. Would 2 votes feel more reasonable?

What does it have to do with ? Strong voting effects rather belong to and defence generally does not belong to . It looks a bit like giving them a bounce to me: just wrong.

Well, for starters there's confusion of the eye. Also vote defence in general is not as tightly connected to a single discipline as acting voting is. Searching for 'Reaction' and 'Referendum' yields 34 cards including cards for Dom, Tem, Guruhi, Chi, Dem, Kiasyd, !Ven and a load of disciplineless ones. There's a lot of weak clans as well (!Nos, !Gang, Samedi, Assamite to name a few) with obfuscate in common that would surely not mind a bit of help, even playing along with a theme they have for another existing card.

Hurr someone plays Parity Shift and negotiates a deal.

You play this card and change the terms of the votes so your prey loses 5 and the pool goes wherever it needs to go for the vote to pass. Score!

Broken too.

I concur with Izaak. Maybe the idea of changing term is exploitable, but here it's way too easy. Especially since some inner circle like Lutz already have .

Also, with such a card, it would mean that vote ousting will not even have the advantage of being "immune" to redirection. I don't think vote is strong enough to warrant lose this advantage.

Edit : also, it's cross-table redirection. That can redirect damage to the original minion controller. You cast parity shift, and your predator make parity shift yourself ! By itself, it may remove any pool damage vote from use.