Submission: Wails and Whipsers

Another "alternative bounce" card. Unlike my other concepts, this one is more indirect.

Using the Necromancy ash heap resource to power this version, I like the concept of creating something from the ash heap that the superior version represents. I think this may be the most overpowered suggestion, I've made thus far, but it's hard to tell how good the bleed reduction or wraith would be in practice without play-testing it.

Name: Wails and Whispers
Cardtype:
Cost: X blood
A vampire may play ony one Wails and Whispers each turn.
Remove 2X cards in your ash heap from the game to reduce a bleed against you by 2X.
As above, and place this card in play. While in play, this card represents a non-unique wraith ally with 2 life, 1 strength, and 2 bleed with X fetter counters. Once each action, this ally may burn a fetter counter to get +1 stealth, +1 intercept, or to prevent one damage in combat. Remove a fetter counter during your discard phase. This ally burns when it has no fetter counters.


Things that concern me:
- How to ensure that someone can't reduce a bleed of 2 by 6 to put a really powerful ally in play. Would that even matter?
- Is the ally powerful enough to have Giovanni not use regular Dominate bounce or Harbingers to use Auspex bounce instead without being too powerful overall?
- Are we removing too many cards from the ash heap? Should it be X instead?
- Should we type the cards that we are removing? Minion cards? Something more specific might require a further reduction in how many cards are removed.
- Remove from game instead of burn when fetter counters are gone?

From a bounce standpoint, you take 2X bleed to put an ally in play that can last X of your turns and bleed for 2, so the conversion is one to one, just over time. The ally also offers other benefits, such as being able to block, etc. It's time constrained. I had considered making it more powerful, but using "If this ally is locked during your unlock phase, burn it." That would have been interesting with Funeral Wake.

I also considered a flock of really weak allies created by putting cards from the ash heap in play. This would also use a "remove from game if locked during your unlock phase" effect to keep the allies from getting crazy. This felt too dicey. What if the Meth plays a unique card from their ash heap, etc. Too many complications.

Against a Govern + Conditioning bleed, you'd be able to create an ally that lasts for 3 turns, assuming it doesn't die in combat or burn counters for stealth, etc. Comparing this to a Reanimated Corpse, it's easier to play, but costs more. It's weaker overall in combat. With the optional uses for fetter counters, the ally also has a shorter life expectancy.

This is beyond cool.

I think the fetter counters should be tied to how much of a bleed is actually reduced. Somehow it makes sense. I don't know how to implement this however.

Like, you couldn't just bring up a huge wraith from a random bleed of 1. As is, you can - burn 4 blood and remove 8 cards from your ash heap to reduce the bleed to -7, and bring up a pretty big wraith.

You did balance the wraith pretty well though, I'll give you that. It'll always be a very short term ally. That said, I'd actually make it only 1 bleed and 0 strength or something similar, since the effects are rather powerful as is. A 1 stealth bleed of 1 as an extra to bleed reduction would be rather powerful. 2 bleed might be pushing it. Remember that this can be used in a clan with NEC + DOM.

Giovanni are not known for their shortage of bleed power.

Oh, and you don't have to specify the wraith ally is non-unique. Allies by default are non-unique.

I would warn against making a bleed reduction card using . Necromancy is one the most flexible disciplines in the game. For an effect like this a combination discipline like and would make more sense.

Yeah, I get that. It's not straight up bleed reduction though, you have to burn your own ash heap to make it happen. I also believe this is an idea to be toyed with, not necessarily the final idea.

That being said, I there are several disciplines that offer bleed reduction that we could combine with Necromancy (value followed by vamps):
133 71
53 21
45 17
27 4

If we had to go with a combination discipline, I'd rather pick than . Only slightly fewer vampires have it, but it opens options for disciplines without access to bounce.

kschaefer wrote:

If we had to go with a combination discipline, I'd rather pick than . Only slightly fewer vampires have it, but it opens options for disciplines without access to bounce.

I'd be somewhat wary of going with Nec/For and NEC/FOR. NEC/FOR picks up broadly:

- a few Giovanni, who can all play Deflection
- a bunch of Harbingers, a chunk of whom can play Telepathic Misdirection or be replaced with a different Harbinger who can
- one Lasombra who can play Deflection
- four Samedi, who include The Baron on his own in group 2, or three vamps (6, 8, 10 cap) in group 4

And while a permanent-ish ally is vaguely interesting, faffing around with potentially expensive blood costs, and needing cards in your ash heap to get started (a pain if you find a heavy bleeder starting on you quickly), Deflection is likely to win out, much as it does now against other lesser bleed defences.

So then you find yourself thinking that while the Samedi wouldn't mind some decent bleed defence at all, if you're going to craft a card that's mostly relevant to them, there are probably better and more targeted ways of doing that.