Card idea: One with Nature

Ankha wrote:

Name: One with Nature
Cardtype: Action
Clan: Ahrimane
+1 stealth action.
Remove this vampire from the game and put this card into play with X animal retainers from your hand or ash heap on it, where X is the capacity of the vampire. This card represents an unique ally with 0 strength, 0 bleed, 1 life, 1 stealth. It cannot gain retainers nor life and burn when it has no retainer. You may burn a retainer on it to untap it. For each damage it takes, you may burn 1 life from any of its retainers instead. When this card is burned, put the vampire back into play, empty, tapped, in your torpor region.

This could be compared to the Great Beast for the Baali. Trade your vampire for an ally that can have many build-in abilities brung by the allies, but that has no buit-in rush or bleed. Loses its strength with each combat as the retainers die.
Keep in mind that it requires some setup to get the retainers in hand or in graveyard, and if you include some exotic animals (Elephant, Rafiki), these are dead cards otherwise since you can't play them with a standard Ahrimane deck. Has some interaction with Summon Spirit Beast. You can make it a wall, or an elephant-lion-wolf trampling beast, or anything in-between.

Some examples:
5 cap:
5 Raptor (5 Intercept, 6 life, reduce hand size by 5)
1 Elephant Guardian (2 damage during strike resolution), 1 Dog Pack (no CE), 2 Duma Rafiki (2 damage during strike resolution), 1 Raptor(reduce hand size by 1) 10 life
7 cap:
7 Raptor (7 Intercept, 8 life, reduce hand size by 7)
1 Elephant Guardian (2 damage during strike resolution), 1 Dog Pack (no CE), 1 Owl Companion (see opposing hand), 1 Duma Rafiki (1 damage during strike resolution), 2 Murder of Crows (2R damage), 1 Raptor (1 intercept) 10 life

Is it balanced? (if not, why?)

Difficult to say.

As you say, it does require a bit of setup, and if you want the best combination of retainers then you'd probably have a few otherwise dead cards in your deck.

However, you haven't put a blood cost on the card, and any retainers that die from it will go straight back to the ashheap. So two vampires could alternate doing this with the same set of retainers, or when the vampire comes back it could get rescued -> Engling Fury -> One With Nature (assuming you make sure she comes back in your predators turn, which should be possible to do).

If you wanted to prevent that, the easy way is to say that any retainers burned from it are removed from the game.
Is the effect powerful enough that you need to stop it being easily repeated? I'm not sure, would need playtesting.
I think allowing it to be repeated but giving it a 3 blood cost is what I'd recommend.

Is it interesting (if not, why?)

Definitely is interesting.

The wording needs to be cleared up a bit though. From your examples your intention seems to be that cost and requirements for the allies are ignored, but that the retainers have life and abilities as though recruited with the superior discipline. The latter part of that would need to be explicitly stated on the card.

Also, while your vampire is removed from the game, there is nothing to stop you recruiting a second copy of her. Is that deliberate? Of course if someone did this, and still had the second copy in play when the first came back then they'd lose the one coming back into play, so it's not much of an issue.

I like the idea and find it interesting. It is just hard to balance and takes lot of thinking. That version is easily unbalanced tho. I don't like that it becomes ally, I would prefer vampire which cannot gain blood and I would remove untap by burning retainers b/c it is way too strong. Like this 7 cap blocker would be very scary with untap: 3x raven spy, 1x dog pack, 3x elephant guardian and it has ton of life too. Raptor version would be annoying too. That untap ability is huge.

EDIT or I guess it is better as ally, I just don't like that stealing it with entrancement is too big effect.

EDIT I am also thinking is this card fun to play against. If my prey would have this with 7 or more raptors my game would be very boring and there is very little I could do. So that card can add lot of stalling to game. I'm not big fan of cards that doesn't help the game go forward at all.

Problem of it being ally is that it dies to one inferior theft with that wording.

Different version:

Name: One with Nature
Cardtype: Action
Clan: Ahrimane
+1 stealth action.
2 blood
Remove this vampire from the game and put this card into play with X animal retainers from your hand or ash heap on it, where X is half the capacity of the vampire (round down). This card becomes clanless independent vampire with X capacity, 2 strength and 0 bleed. Move X blood to him from the blood bank. This vampire gets +1 bleed for every animal retainer it has. It cannot gain retainers and burn when it has no retainer. For each damage it takes, you may burn 1 life from any of its retainers instead. During your untap phase this vampire takes 2 damage. When this card is burned, put the vampire back into play, empty, in your torpor region.