[Submission] Cannibal (Nagaraja ghoul)

Ankha wrote:

jamesatzephyr wrote:

The major issue with Cannibal is giving combat free perma-bleed while making your opponents' vampires vanish.

How is that an issue ? (It is supposed to be the attended goal of the card).

The goal may be the issue. It do both very, very effectively.

For example, the ousting power of Return to innocence was the issue even thought it was the intended goal. Now, it's clearly not as broken as RtI, but it may still be a bit much.

My main problem is that you can recruit a cannibal and let, say, Hektor do the dirty job. I can see this card balanced if you need to use a nagaraja to put people in torpor, since even Asguresh is not a terror.

Or the ability could be used once in a game, per ally to get 2-3 bleed, and, perhaps, making it unique. You would still get a blood-hunt-free Amaranth with low opportunity cost, an action cost, a chump blocker and at a ridiculously low cost.

Ankha wrote:

jamesatzephyr wrote:

The major issue with Cannibal is giving combat free perma-bleed while making your opponents' vampires vanish.

How is that an issue ? (It is supposed to be the attended goal of the card).

Why is Return to Innocence an issue? It accomplishes its goal of massive bleed. (That is "I hit my design goal!" is in no way a useful justification of a card.)

Having vampires just go poof for a tiny amount of extra effort for a combat deck makes combat less interactive. Combat already has the issue of making the game Not Fun for an opponent by removing their ability to act. (For most decks, the ability to act is pretty crucial.) So blam, poof, *littlepileofcinders*, and I don't even get to call a Bloodhunt on you, or try to block the diablerie.

It's also a problem that it still combos with a variety of non-combat methods of slicing up vampires such as, as others have already pointed out, Baltimore Purge. Even when they get to choose their own vampire, you might easily find yourself with at least one player on a five player table having, say, a vampire with zero blood and a vampire with three blood, or something like that. Do I send the zero one to torpor, who you might immediately eat with Cannibal, or do I send the other vampire to torpor, who you might then wander over and eat anyway? This is a massively unfun choice.

See also annoyance with, say, Fourth Cycle.

Anathema burn 1 vampire, with additional hoops of putting him to 0 blood, and work only in combat. Also, recruiting is easier than passing a vote. Lastly, adding one small nagaraja is less of a restriction than adding justicar or princes. You already have said to add the 0 bood requirement, but not the other one.

So, your first check is already false. It's quite an effort to put up Anathema - or Dog of War - in a combat deck.

If the cannibal could eat only one vampire per game (while gaining more than 1 bleed to keep him useful on this regard), a comparison could be done.

Edit : Anathema does not make you gain action (you make Anathema action instead of diablerie). Cannibal is, even if you only eat one vampire, because you then gain bleed for 1 actions. And maybe some other option, like sacrificial block with Unmasking.

Re-edit : by the way, Cannibal can eat any torporized at 0 blood vampire on the table, while it's you who gain the benefit. So not only you have an easier time at burning, but you can steal the benefit of other people.

Non-existant user wrote:

Asguresh, strike: Breath of Thanatos, cancel your defense card, you burn.
Veejay + Shalmath: 2 aggravated before range, you burn.

Or, you know, just Summon History. I would play the hell out of this card in a Hourglass + Disarm deck.

Surprised nobody mentioned the obvious one: classic Speed Shamblers with a few more duplicates of Le Dinh Tho than usual.