[Submission] Survivor of Kaymakli (HoS card removal and pool damage)

Mordechai is not really interested, for the simple reason he is enough to play army of rat, which will almost alway work better by the virtue of being simpler and not needing other cards to oust that may jam your hand when you really want to have only wake, intercept, and combat in hand.

That's a bit like why you don't try to oust with Dragonbound when you make a Adana de Sforza rush deck : bleeding for three is more reliable.

Ohlmann wrote:

Mordechai is not really interested, for the simple reason he is enough to play army of rat, which will almost alway work better by the virtue of being simpler and not needing other cards to oust that may jam your hand when you really want to have only wake, intercept, and combat in hand.

That's a bit like why you don't try to oust with Dragonbound when you make a Adana de Sforza rush deck : bleeding for three is more reliable.

Also, Adana is squishy, because even free adaptability sucks. If you try ousting with db in an ic deck, other than maybe Hardestadt, your doing it wrong.

Anyway, poor example. Mordechai plus jack plus rats doesnt work as well as having essentially a stackable rats that requiresxminimal setup for hos, other than running cards they can use anyway. If you run shaal fragment and nicomedes, you will probably get what you want in hand . Obviously, youd build planning on setting up pool damage with SoK. Its not dedicating a deck to it, like diary(which can win, is a gimmick, and requires your whole deck working toward one goal to accomplish). Its a module, in a wall deck. That does pool damage. As setup, you remove cards from ash heap, and pump bleeds.

"minimal" setup ? That's where we disagree.

This card demand a lot of setup, unlike army. If you just stack some and stop caring for it, it will do exactly nothing to oust your prey. You need something else to make it work.

In a HoS wall deck though, bleeds of one are all you do with most of yoir midgame actions with most minions.

So, making a few actions being to get this one a few minions, and then cycling into trochomancy (again, kinda eqzy with nicomedes) is easy setup. Your not taking more than an action to get it out per minion, and its just pumpimg bleeds after that.
And g45 can play rats too.

Is it as versatile as rats, no, but for a clan needing cool toys, a stackable rats variant seems solid.

So annoyingly, I wrote a response to this, then my machine blue-screened. (Actual blue screen. It was awesome.)

I spent some time trying to work out what was bugging me about the card, and it's roughly this. A deck that is permanent heavy probably sends very few cards to the ash heap. Maybe you're mostly playing Blood Dolls and allies and equipment, so relatively little hits the ash heap. You get hit by a card like this massively harder. Whereas, say, a Twister Burn Option/Liquidation deck that throws dozens of cards into the ash heap is hit way less.

Imbued decks are often permanent heavy. And SoK functions "during the untap phase", so you can order it after you've recycled some Convictions. But if you had an expensive turn last turn, you might have thrown lots of Conviction into the ash heap, and losing some of those might be really quite painful.



And so my basic issue is that in general deck-building, you simply do not care how many cards get into the ash heap. For sure, you care about having a good deck flow, but what that means for two different decks can be very different. A weenie Computer Hacking stealth deck has a very different 'burn rate' to Turbo-Arika which has a different burn rate to a wall-y grinder etc. Obviously, throwing some unexpected things a deck's way is fine - you want decks to react to things. But it's actually very hard to respond to a request of "More cards in the ash heap, please!" because if you don't have Liquidation or The Barrens or Dreams in your deck, you can't just magic them up. On the flip-side, punishment for things a deck can adapt to are more interesting - Anarch Revolt's "control an Anarch" option is readily thwarted by many decks, taking a burn action is readily achievable by many decks. Absolutely, your opponent will attempt to thwart you, such as by rushing your vampires or blocking their actions or whatever, but it's all within the realms of possibility. Suddenly turning a deck of permanents into a gushing torrent of card spray? Not so much.


Much like Slaughterhouse/Brinksmanship, I get antsy about cards that take utterly corner-case mechanisms and put them front and centre, with few reasonable ways of reacting. Well, ways that aren't just "Destroy the controlling Methuselah", because that can do funny things to table dynamics. (e.g. I feel forced to smash my predator to death, so my grand-predator gets an easy time)

So yes, it's an action, and yes it's on a vampire, so there are two points of interaction. (Though, reasonably, my wall deck might have been your grand-prey and unable to block you when you took the actions.) But it just feels a bit too "You played the wrong deck type? Here comes a beating with a sack of oranges."