More Cards for Serpentis

Another card (Shell Company) was added to the original post.

I think shell company shouldn't be able to burn blood from the acting vampires controllers minions.

Ohlmann wrote:

I don't see how this relate to the strawman fallacy. If we suppose bloodlust is not an useable card by any mean, it's a bad argument, but I don't have the impression Suoli said that you had created the card just to broke Bloodlust or something.

Bloodlust is pretty lackluster even for free, and don't untap you, so I can agree that Bloodlust ain't a real risk. For me, Mind Rape or Sacrifical Lamb are much more scary with this card.

You don't need to be playing Bloodlust for its own sake. I mean, maybe you do have a plan for a weird Setite combat deck and that's cool, but you could already be doing that with Frontal Assault or something. It's just a way of very rapidly emptying a vampire so that you can use Form of Corruption to perma-steal a vampire with two actions and no risk of combat (as typically required for, say, Graverobbing). Oh look, Arika is on the table with 9 blood. So I play Bloodlust and select these nine vampires, and she's empty and has to hunt next turn and....


Other expensive actions are obviously an option, of course. I could see a deck of this sort including Impundulu, for shits and giggles. But since you're likely playing Setites who likely have Presence, including a small number of Bloodlust to throw at key vampires is a decent option. (Mandatory? No.)

Juggernaut1981 wrote:

RE: Feeding Your Addiction

1) Yes it is meant to be a "Super Cryptic Mission" at and a "Cryptic Mission meets Voter Cap" at .

Okay, so problem one is that Cryptic Mission is already a very, very solid card in very dull Cryptic Mission decks. It doesn't need to be made super, because it's already very solid. (They're really-OMG-I-think-I-might-kill-myself-I'm-going-to-bleed-so-I-get-the-edge-just-so-I-can-swallow-it-and-choke-myself-to-death dull. Almost Una-90-Freak-Drive dull.) And Cryptic Mission doesn't have two potent cards that trigger off the amount of blood the vampire has freely to hand. Serpentis does. So your aim was to take a solid card, make it more aggressive, and give it potential significant pool gain.

Juggernaut1981 wrote:

3) The "Corruption" action is just as bad if not worse with Waters of the Duat than this card is. First you have to get the corruption counters out on the table... THEN you need to use this card. It has a setup time.

This overlooks a fundamental facet of Corruption - it's based on your capacity. Temptation and Form of Corruption are based on blood. Now, it certainly does happen that some vampires stay at close to full capacity, and people do play Giant's Blood, but typically a lot of vampires do drop down to quite a lot less blood. So you would often need many fewer actions to trigger a Form of Corruption or Temptation than you would to trigger a stealing a vampire with Corruption actions.

Additionally, Corruption counters do not in general also give you a steady stream of blood to fuel cards such as Blood Doll, Vessel, Tribute etc.

Juggernaut1981 wrote:

4) Kahina the Sorceress already has a similar text (her's dealing damage instead of stealing blood) and who again... rarely sees the light of day as the star of a deck. (8 decks in the TWDA, star of none of them, commonly 1 copy)

1 damage to (possibly) several minions, once per turn, is rather different from a swarm of weenies doing 1 "damage", gaining a blood, and possibly gaining pool (for the few who have or manage to get SER).

Your formulation makes it very easy to target one vampire (or ally) since the Methuselah has to give the counter from a "minion ... with one of your Corruption counters". So you pop out one Corruption counter, and the blood/life has to come from that minion.

Juggernaut1981 wrote:

Note: Excluding Bloodlust, none of the likely choices for actions (FoS, Pre, Ser) cost more than 2 blood with most costing 1 blood.

Why are you only looking at the likely actions? Cards in the real world interact with any card players find that work well with them, not just the ones deemed "likely".

Lyndhurst Estate isn't totally unthinkable, costing three. Given you need SER, it's also likely to be a larger vampire (midbie upwards), at which point you might be getting other disciplines. There's a fair spread of vampires across several groups with SER/nec+, who could fuel Shambling Hordes.

Nor is there a need to go for Setite vampires. Summon History costs X and Nehemiah has TEM/SER, for example.

Juggernaut1981 wrote:

Most FoS/Ser actions are cheap (except for Heart of Darkness).

Yes, if we exclude problematic combos from examination, it's easy to see no card is ever a problem.

Juggernaut1981 wrote:

- Eldest Command Undeath (which would really require you to play two decks in one to make it work)

Not necessarily. Being able to kill a vampire and pay for it from a second might be sufficient deck-fu, though you might toss in a couple of Form of Corruption or something. Temptation is always fun, given you can use it as an untap for yourself, so it might be worthwhile for itself. But maybe you decide you don't need either. There are a few Laibon with SER (three of them), two Setites and a Guruhi, and you get pre/PRE. And ECU's usual "Do not gain blood" restriction is somewhat irrelevant when you're not necessarily paying for it yourself.

Juggernaut1981 wrote:

Note: Bloodlust & TWDA... there are two entries including Bloodlust. Both are single copies within that deck. None since 2009.

That's because Bloodlust is often a bit rubbish. With a "get someone else to pay for it" modifier, you wouldn't typically be including Bloodlust for its own ability, just to get an arbitrary amount of blood off a vampire. The combat is entirely optional - it doesn't grant a mandatory action, it grants an optional one.

Juggernaut1981 wrote:

- Give a corruption counter in a targeted way (preferably Predator but maybe a table threat somewhere else)
- Use your deck AS NORMAL
- Have other minions pay for the cost.

Yeah, a design that assumes players will play a deck that doesn't explicitly intend to make use of the free actions as hard as possible is... unhelpful.

Good players don't just make a run-of-the-mill deck and throw in a few toys and see what happens. (Well, they might as a "Let's explore these cards" test at a casual game.) That happens in draft games, sure. In competitive constructive play, the best decks are designed of parts that fit together and are there because they fit together. Playing the deck AS NORMAL is playing the deck knowing that you have tech that lets you get actions for free, and using that tech (as part of your whole deck) to win the game. There is no AS NORMAL, plus some OMG-I-just-realised-I-have-this-totally-cool-ability-tee-hee tech bolted on the side.