"...why proxies are not going to be allowed..."

Usually it is the complexity of the game, and partly there off the feeling for some that they either "slow down" the game or feel stupod because they have to ask about more or less everything.

On a side note, the only difference for me if other people stopped playing would be not going to stuff like NAC and EC. I don't see me and my friends stopping playing just because there isn't enough people everywhere else.

Full disclosure; I play in Aarhus, Denmark, where we don't play regular tournaments, I mainly play the ecq and danish championship, perhaps an ecq abroad, the EC (try to get to NAC).

So most of my v:tes is casual games, but we play by the tournament rules.

I also dislike proxies in casual games.

I totally agree with the poster above - it's the complexity of V:TES that turns people off, not availability. Any new player has to be ready to get his ass served to him on a plate for the first 3-6 months of playing (unless he/she learns amazingly fast), plus the amount of rulings and interpretations is beyond crazy. For any new person this game is insanely complex, especially if you move from a duel-type cardgame - add the whole multiplayer concept and the confusion goes skyhigh.

The argument of being unable to recruit players because of card availability is - in my opinion - flawed. Take Poland as an example: since the "rescue from torpor" in early 2000's we NEVER had any VTES cards sold in stores, everything was done online. The guy who created the vtes.pl website and forum actually created the online store as well (with singles + an option to order boxes), this later evolved into a community-organised ordering of cards. It has always been the players' / Princes' initiative to supply cards to everyone who needed them. The PL community is now booming; of course we have players quitting, but we also have players joining, the tournament scene has seen at least 20 people joining during this year. Not a bad result for a "dead" game.
Availability has ALWAYS been an issue here, back in the days cards like Dreams, Freak Drives and War Ghouls were on high demand (WG used to be the most expensive card in Poland a few years ago, while Freak Drive was the main thing to trade).But we still kept getting more and more players and we worked around it. There is absolutely no proof that giving people free stuff in whatever form will encourage them to play the game.

Besides - what cards do you want to proxy? Villeins? Deep songs? Ashurs? It has been proven many times before that you do not need those cards to create a tournament viable deck. If anything, I'd rather not see those cards proxied ever - I'm sick and tired of seeing the same deck archetypes over and over again, last thing I need is 15 more people playing Nana Buruku Ani rush or another variation of Girls. Yes, V:TES is out of print - that's a bad thing, but it also means there are piles over piles of cards and deck archetypes that have never been created / tested / played. Why not become creative and try to work around it, instead of the easy-mode "let's proxy shit for the win" idea?

Once you start to go down this slope it gets fairly lazy and dangerous.

More people do it and it degenerates and degrades the investments of ALL the players who supported the product.

Do it for casual play if you'd like, but for official tournaments....come on. Put in some effort.

This is a hobby. Not checkers.

It would be like playing warhammer 40k with chess pawns or flames of war with micro machines.

Soon there will be no cards for new players. In a year or two.


Money and greed already delivery a possibly fatal blow to this game.
(CCCP & Hasbro fault)


Greed will kill it forever.
(No proxies, No new players. "but your collection will be highly valued!"

How have the game survived the first total stop ?

Ohlmann wrote:

How have the game survived the first total stop ?

Here is a thread I opened to discuss that very question.
Nice answers from some of our elders.