Champions of Cagn Unbound!

Lambach wrote:

Just because PCK designed different cards than VEKN doesn't mean their ideas are awful or that the playgroups who may want to use their cards are idiots who know nothing about v:tes

You are correct.
It is not because their cards are different is that they are awful.
They are awful SIMPLY because they are AWFUL. ESPECIALLY the seat-switcher vp-sniping silver bullet.

To be honest, I read through the card Sparing the Weak and from my opinion I see it as a useful card for Bruise/Bleed type decks.
To call all the cards AWFUL is a bit overblown.
To call some of the cards AWFUL is probably correct.
But there do seem to be some good ideas from the development they are doing.

Pendargon wrote:

Lambach wrote:

Just because PCK designed different cards than VEKN doesn't mean their ideas are awful or that the playgroups who may want to use their cards are idiots who know nothing about v:tes

You are correct.
It is not because their cards are different is that they are awful.
They are awful SIMPLY because they are AWFUL. ESPECIALLY the seat-switcher vp-sniping silver bullet.

What do you think is so awful about it? You don't like the seat switcher, got that. What are the other awful cards?

Lambach wrote:

What are the other awful cards?

List of awful cards
1. Seat Switcher
2. 2 Quantum Entangled Camera Phones
3. Diamond Mine
4. Kilimanjaro
5. Inviolate Land
6. Ties that Bind
7. Pledge Sword (You want the Laibon Salubri-antis to have an undodgable melee weapon??? Now that Death Seeker is around to cancel S:CE?)
8. Skin of the King: XYZ - All of them are terrible
9. Subjugate is just another Finding the Path and without an interesting kicker.
10. Power of Knowledge wastes 7 lines of text that is useless
11. Because Street Cred is being played constantly... It's worse than Unholy Penance by a LONG way.
12. Soul Washer - Why do I want a little Chump Blocker with +1i for a clan with ANI & PRE????
13. Raiment of Ishtar
14. Jungle Hunt - Haven Hunting isn't exactly tearing things up... and Osebo do have access to Psyche...
15. Secrets of the Dark Continent - Mozambique Allure as an Event
16. Devil-Channel: Head - I Frenzy and am able to block more? Going into a horrible rage of feral instinctive fury makes me better at intercepting my enemies plans??
17. Taking the Skin Cannibal: Just graft on [tha] and use Thefts.
18. Free the Beast Within (See Devil-Channel: Head)
19. Spirit Channel: Telepathic Counter and Lost in Crowds on the one card??? OH for 3 ORUNS... There's the crap part.
20. Flower of Death: Blur but for melee combat only... Or I could pack Blur just so I can have a few guns around if I want.
21. Flick: Everybody needs a tap your prey card... apparently.
22. Absent Sway: Because we should hate Lawfirms more. Especially Daughters, they should hate Lawfirms and Princes the most...
23. Claw Immunity: Skin of Steel + Fuck you Carrion Crows... Silver bullet??
24. Feral Imbuing: After you decline to flick I get to kill my birds to oust you...
25. Accursed Rage: Taunt the Caged Beast + some stuff...
26. Unassailable Parry: Sideslip the Wind Dance version
27. Pulse of Undeath: Enhanced Senses, Precognition, Spirit's Touch...
28. Lunge: A range-less grapple only playable before range that doesn't set range.
29. Blessings of Cagn: An attempt to allow people to play a 60 card deck + 12 Oruns as a 60 Card Deck...
30. Spiritual Journey: Maybe if we make enough random ways for people to fish out Orun and Aye they'll love one of them.
31. Guiding Spirit: See Spiritual Journey
32. Spirit of Cagn: Worse than Leverage, all of the dominate cards, about Aire of Elation at

, worse than the Auspex one that Laibon have access to.

33. Magnificence of Cagn: Everyones been using those High Aye and High Orun and that other one that uses 3 Aye and 3 Orun...

34. Orchestrating Ashe: See Magnificence of Cagn

35. Obayifo: A bad Nephandus

36. Dream Sensation: Movement of the Slow Body... with a big card opportunity cost

37. Things Fall Apart: If you don't pick the right card, then you're screwed and it prevents you from then... flicking for instance.

38. The Centre Cannot Hold: Things Fall Apart is bad, at least other minions might be able to do something to help you.  The Centre Cannot Hold is astoundingly worse than that... since nobody else can push the bleed up or the votes or Voter Cap or... or... or...



Should I go on to of the vampires now?

1. All of the Magajis who become Kholos when Merged.  Awful. You lose No Secrets from the Magaji, you lose a non-unique title to gain... *waits for the awesome*... a contestable 2 vote title and maybe a kicker text.

2. Most of the rest of the vampires are as uninspiring as mashed cardboard.





[Edit]

I just noticed that as I began, I was just listing... then as it went on my serious dislike of how awful these cards are began to build and so did the comments.

List of awful cards

Some of those were designed to make Aye/Orun techs more viable, so it seems absurd considering using/fetching those a fatal flaw by itself.

As for my personal taste, there seems to be just too many cards. This gives a feeling, that the set tries to shake the metagame, instead of evolving it. It is not bad as an idea by itself, but perhaps a slightly more measured aproach would have been better. Most people criticise individual cards instead taking the set as a whole. Therefore, I doubt many would actually give the effort to print EVERYTHING out just to understand why things are the way they are. Failing to do so, it is hardly worthwhile to bother at all. It is sad, given the high quality of lore behind the set (I'd recommend people to read that just just for the entertainment, not for the cards themselves).

Lambach wrote:

Pendargon wrote:

No, actually, despite his rather brusque way of saying things, Kevin is completely right. This set is probably one of the worst designed fan sets i have ever seen. Seat switchers i will not even try to elaborate how utterly horrid, stupid and broken idea it is. We been that path before, it got banned. For a reason.

Why do you feel this way?

He explained it to you, but you're so blinded by love for these cards (or love for PCK, or hatred for others) that you can't see it.

History is an excellent teacher. Seat-switchers were horriawful cards. Everyone hated them. They literally destroyed the game that was meant to be played. The highest-level players at the time tried for YEARS, with LSJ's blessing, to reword them so that they could be playable. They failed.

So, one can either learn from history or be doomed to repeat it.

In the same way, Orun and Aye have proven to be failed concepts. They were a neat idea, especially from an RPG point-of-view, but the game moves too quickly for the required setup, and even if one does survive post-setup, the powers and abilities that Orun and Aye give to the player are almost never enough to counter the lost setup time. Attempting to mitigate this flaw through dozens of cards that require substitution in one's deck for cards that are actually playable doesn't fix the inherent problem. Orun and Aye still suck.

So, despite the few good, playable cards in this fan set, this is just the old problems all over again.

Remember how, before Jeff Kuta asploded and PCK seceded from the VEKN, Round 1 of the first VEKN set had (Jeff's words) "gone through months of shaping and scrutiny" and "through [a] critical vetting process of narrowing down concepts into a well-honed and themed set"? This was a set that had a *terrible* kludge-mechanic and utterly and completely *failed* in achieving the VEKN-stated goal of helping existing clans and strategies. As far as I can tell, the refusal of the VEKN leadership to acknowledge that failure was victory and bad cards would lead to victory points is what caused Jeff to snap and PCK to secede.

And if designers can't see the past clearly and don't see what they are doing in the present as flawed, then I will continue stating my assertion that it's as if they have never played VTES.