[submission] Preparing for war

Name: Preparing for war
Cardtype: Master
Put this card in play. Your minions can take an action to put a counter on this card. During your master phase you can remove this card from the game and reshuffle
X combat cards into your deck where X is the amount of counters on this card.

Flavor text:
To be prepared is half the victory. - Miguel de Cervantes

Art notes:
Vampires hauling crates of weaponry of a truck.

World of Darkness reference:
Not at all too familiar with WoD, but I am sure there are some war preparations in one of them books somewhere

How does this card address a compelling game need?:
A lot of combat cards are turned into wallpaper since using 5+ card combo’s depletes the deck rather fast.
Ashur’s tablet does mitigate this problem a tiny bit, however they are currently too expensive and rare to attain.
Caution should be taken when designing card recycling cards, however I feel zero stealth actions to put counters on this card offer ample opportunity for countermeasures.

Created by:
Ben Gerrissen

Ankha wrote:

The idea is ok, but the cost seems tremendous. It would probably be ok if each action would add half the capacity of the vampire taking the action; do you want imbued to use it too?

Half the capacity of a vampire seems too powerful in my opinion.
Even putting 2 counters on the card per action also smells a bit overpowered.

Consider Summon Soul, which returns 2 cards from your ash heap.
Lets say you want to return 10 cards.
Thats 5 actions and 5 cards taking space in your deck.

With "Preparing for war" as is, it takes 10 actions and 1 card.

In most combat decks where you would need card recycling, actions are cheap and card slots are expensive. Just add a few weenies to do the actions. In fact, weenie combat decks are somewhat of a worry for me with this card...

Don't know about how powerful this card would be for imbueds, if deemed overpowered, just change "minion" to "vampire", but thematically, I see no reason to.

GreyB wrote:

Consider Summon Soul, which returns 2 cards from your ash heap.
Lets say you want to return 10 cards.
Thats 5 actions and 5 cards taking space in your deck.

With "Preparing for war" as is, it takes 10 actions and 1 card.

But overall, Summon Soul just isn't all that great anyway. Doing a search on SecretLibrary for tournament-winning decks (size >= 5) with Summon Soul, I get 4, with 2 copies each. Given that Necromancy does really quite well overall, that's really very poor indeed. By way of comparison, there are 129 decks with Call of the Hungry Dead and 65 with Shambling Hordes (61 with both). By luck, all three cards happen to come in Final Nights.

GreyB wrote:

In most combat decks where you would need card recycling, actions are cheap and card slots are expensive. Just add a few weenies to do the actions.

That depends a lot on the deck. In many very active combat decks, cycling many cards, pool gain is something the decks struggle with. Because of cycling so many cards, they don't want to draw into 'dead' cards that fill their hand, such as being in combat and drawing into multiple master cards during the first combat in a turn - so they may well have less (and less reliable) access to cards like Blood Doll, Vessel, and Villein. So just bringing out a couple of extra weenies can be a lot of effort for the deck - 4 or 5 pool can be a lot, if you're generating your pool more slowly than other decks.

Note also that being a master card, it's competing against those cards that might actually let them afford the weenies. And it's competing for an often reduced number of card slots.

Look at - taking a random example - this deck from Hugh Angseesing, Lorrie goes nuts (with some discussion here ). 89 library cards, but a mere 13 masters, with 2 of those being Trifles. That's a low number of master cards, but not completely atypical for such decks. A card needs to be really good to oust one of those scant few master cards, and a card that's taking 5 actions to move 5 cards to your library probably isn't cutting it.



I would consider either going for something with more one-off bang, or something that uses the same card cycling theme but works in a very different way. For example:





Or going for something very different:

The "Requires a Sabbat vampire" could be anything really - some sect, some discipline, some trait. It just feels wrong if it's disciplineless. The melee weapon side of things is to make the card a bit more flexible in the early game, or if you don't need the recycling.

Ok I am convinced the amount of actions required to make it useful is too expensive. So my next idea is to give the "Research Area" a new twist.

Name: Veterans
Cardtype: Master
Put this card in play. Once each combat, instead of discarding, put the combat card into your research area. Burn this card to reshuffle all cards from your research area into your deck. Any minion can burn this card as a D action. A methuselah can have only one Veterans in play.

Also empowers some Research Area cards a teensy bit.