Submission [Assassins Blade]

"Blood-slick Blade"

1
Only usable before range is determined.
Put this card on a melee weapon on this vampire. The melee weapon deals 1 additional damage and cannot be transferred or stolen. You may burn this card to cancel a grapple card played against this vampire.
As above, and you may move a melee weapon from your hand to this vampire (meet requirements and pay cost as normal) with this card attached to it. You may burn this card to prevent this weapon from being destroyed.

Concept: The Assamite imbues the blade with a slippery coating of vitae making it harder to steal or destroy. The Assamite can use up the coating to escape a sticky situation.

EDIT: It should either cost 2 blood or have a "only one per weapon" clause. Get the Path of Blood into play, put 60 copies in your deck, profit.

Interesting. So, there is a consensus that close range assamite is pretty weak?

I notice there is few good options for them. I will comment some:

Disease- Really nice card, but can be wasted against CE.

Khabar: Honor - Really nice strike card, but why you cant use melee with it? Even in the drawing we have a dagger.

Dagon Call - Regular card. Usually assamite combat dont have many rounds. Blood cost makes it bad, without path of blood.

Scorpion Touch - Awesome card. I really like it.

Wave of Lethargy - Interesting in a heavy CEL metagame, but nothing more than that.

Thin Blood - Another nice card. A pity it many times wastes tastes of vitae. Combos VERY nicely with shadow dance in a melee themed deck.

Overall: Only three good cards, and contract and hand strikes prerequisites removes Khabar: Honor from melee weapon decks, unless you're filling a gap.

Conclusion: Assamite close combat only works with the key cards: Thin blood, Disease and Scorpion touch. You could still be immortalized, canine striked, combat ends striked, etc. Assamite melee weapon close combat is deficient. Assamite clan should be AWESOME with melee weapons. Not this crap.

Against a deck that doesn't try to combat, Disease propose you to burn 1 blood to avoid taking 1 damage, so it's basically useless alone and weak with the Path. It also do nothing against animalism combat or celegun, which are the two easiest combat package. It's not nice at all for me ; it's a cornercase card at most. It should be free at the very least.

Scorpion's Touch simply don't do enough for the trouble. It prevent you from playing another strike card, if you're acting it's weak to S:CE, and both the -1 strength and the blood burning may very well be ignored long enough to win the game before wasting an action to remove it.

Thin Blood is a Carrion Crow that cannot put someone to torpor, cost a blood, require close range, and don't work against ally. It also avoid prevention, but preventing Carrion Crow tend to be on the hard side. It's not bad, but it's not very strong either.

Khabar: Honor suffer from the fact that contract aren't very good card themselves. Apart from that, it don't work well with multiple strike. Good thing Assamite don't have celerity.

Quietus have very few good card, and half of them are not combat card. It's almost comically bad for combat ; even Mysterceria have a better combat package in my opinion. Quietus (like some other discipline) suffer from the fact that a path exist, because almost every card cost one blood too many

I agree that Assamite should hold their own in combat, at the very least. Alas, it's simply not the case. I believe Lech will agree that Quietus is one of the worst discipline of the game, and certainly the most botched one.

Thoughts on Assamite combat...

It seems to me like Quietus and Celerity are currently pulling in different directions. Celerity is reactive, versatile and fluid. If you don't have a Stick or a Concealed Weapon, you can Flash to long, dodge with Sideslip, Pursuit for an additional, Psyche etc. ad infinitum. Eventually you'll draw what you wanted and smash faces. If someone plays combat defense, your answer is always more additionals, more Psyches, more Celerity. It works because your opponent will run out of relevant cards while you draw more and more Celerity. Unlike with some other combat modules, the amount of individual cards you can cycle per action is mostly capped by the card ratios of your deck. There is not a great degree of interdependency between the cards and the sequence you play them in is very flexible, unlike with, say, Potence combat.

Not counting a few exceptions, Quietus is the polar opposite, with proactive pre-range cards, strict sequencing and bad card flow. If one part of the sequence fails, the whole action is usually wasted. It's like it's trying to be Potence without any of the playable cards.

The exceptions to this are Baal's Blody Talons and Strike at the True Flesh, which sort of try to be good for melee/CEL but their roles can be filled by much more versatile cards like Pulled Fangs and Psyche.

So, instead of making clunky pre-range cards for Quietus, maybe it's time to embrace CEL/Stick and make a Quietus card that really supports that sort of fluid combat module? To go with the original theme, maybe just a better Walking Stick with some kind of interesting angle?

Assassin's Blade
Combat
Requires Quietus
Cost: 1 blood
First Strike: strength damage + 1.
First Strike: Equip and make a melee strike with a weapon from your hand (pay equip costs as normal). Put the weapon on this vampire.

Other's Petty Tricks
Combat
Requires Assamite
Only usable once per round as a minion opposing this Assamite declares their strike.
Cancel a Strike: Dodge as it is played or this vampire burns 1 blood to cancel a Strike: Combat Ends as it is played. The opposing minion does not pay the cost of their cancelled strike and must choose a new strike.

It is obvious that assamite melee weapon combat have three main problems.

1. Assamite melee weapon combat cant hold against simple combat packages (aid from bats + carrion crows), (torn + blur), (ranged weapons + CEL), (protean agravated package), (vicissitude aggravated package). Please, notice that weapons usually costs pool and have the problem to equip.

2. A way to work without being hosed by everything. Here, we have three main problems: Immortal Grapple, Frenzy cards, Combat Ends.


As filling a gap in the game, this is a golden opportunity. Assamites should be awesome in melee combat. Why not add flavor to game, making melee weapon combat fearsome as a toreador combat deck.

Those problems can not be worked in one card. It needs by minimum two to make it viable. Here some suggestions

Silent Approach
Cardtype: Combat
Cost: No cost.
Discipline: Quietus
Maneuver, only usable to go to close range.
As above, but this minion can equip with a melee weapon from your hand.

This card above could help a lot against guns and solve equipping problem (in old g2-3 crypt). Also, it wont stall your hand as a disguised does.

Name: Dance of Death
Cardtype: Combat
Cost: No cost.
Discipline: CEL/QUI
Clan: Not Applicable
This vampire gets first strike with melee weapons in the next strike resolution this round. Opposing minion cannot play any grapple cards for the remainder of the combat.
As above, and this vampire can burn 1 blood to cancel a Strike: Combat ends as its played. (no cost is paid)

Dance of Death have potential to make assamite combat suffer much less from combat ends and immortals by adressing both of issues. At inferior, it gives a chance to the vampire to strike in melee with POT decks and slight less chance to survive some other combat decks (by giving it first strike). Thoughts?