Suggestion : a V:TES format for competitive play Asetukset

I only agree particularly with one of those statements:

The removal of Pentex Subversion from the game.

The card, on its own, requires specific consideration. No other card in the game requires specific consideration by players of any deck type. Sure, if you are playing a bleed & flick deck you must consider a voting predator (and pack a defence against a generic voting predator). Sure, if you play a wall deck, you need to consider a Block-Fails contingency for your predator or prey. Sure, if you play a vote deck then you need to consider a wall or a rushing predator or prey.

No card, other than Pentex Subversion, requires a specific consideration. People play Carlton because he's good. They don't often feel the need to build in a specific "Anti-Carlton" angle to a deck. Most people seem to recommend that you include 2+ Washes/SR or your own Pentex Subversion to mitigate the arrival of another Pentex Subversion on you. That is a distortion of the metagame away from "Archetype vs Archetype" which I always considered the best aspect of this game (there really are no 'super-uber-win Net-deck type concepts).

So yeah, Pentex can go the way of the Dodo as far as I care...

Demnogonis wrote:

I feel there should be some additional measures against stalling, but I don't know what they should be.

If it's a tournament, call a judge. The judge should then alert the "stalling" player -- and the rest of the table, for that matter -- that they each have one minute per action, and that the table is under review.

If it's a non-tournament game, you just harass your friends a little bit until they get their butts in gear. hehee

Demnogonis wrote:

I also feel self-ousting shouldn't be in the game.

I, too, feel this way. Really, though, there are SO FEW situations where self-ousting is legal in a tournament where the self-oust actually affects the game to any measurable degree -- since if the self-ouster COULD affect the game, they (mostly) wouldn't be allowed to self-oust without getting ejected from the tournament -- that this isn't a problem, assuming you have a judge that is actually willing to JUDGE.

I've run almost 100 tournaments, and in nearly a thousand tables, I've had exactly TWO players try to self-oust where other players complained. Both times I forced the player to play it out. One got 1vp and one got 3vp, so I don't feel too bad about forcing them to play the game we all agreed to play when we sat down at the table.

Demnogonis wrote:

I think both are lame and bad sportsmanship, and especially stalling exists entirely outside the mechanics of the game.

Stalling doesn't exist outside the mechanics of the tournament rules. Self-ousting IS lame, and to eliminate it, you need to educate, have patience, and possibly ostracize a player to eliminate in your playgroup.

Please keep in mind that we're discussing about an alternative format to standard V:TES, the goal which is to encourage variety. Something that would be fun to try out, play some tournaments with it, have something different every once in a while to keep things interesting. That kind of a thing seems to work for many games.

@Karo : Fixing cards is much harder to do now than banning them. I also think that the existence of any cards need to be justified in the game I.E. what do they bring to the game. Say, Parity Shift, what does it do? Make prince decks so much superior to nearly all other vote strategies that you have to think very hard why would your vote strategy revolve around something else than princes, and the answer will very likely be that it shouldn't. This is my tournament and metagame experience, and it sure seems so if you view TWDA, that prince decks obsolete other vote strategies.

@Suoli : I have no idea what are you talking about. A HG takes forever to pay itself back, and DotS is unique and everybody plays them. LB replaces your traditional HG's and such since with a good Villein/LB ratio you can play free minions. You have LB in play, a Villein in hand, might as well transfer any minion on table since in the end, you don't pay for it. And you can use LB to give 3 blood to a minion you emptied in some other way, obviously, it's multi-purpose, might make even master : disciplines good in some decks.

@prunesquallor
Any delay in the 1111 attack helps, and any help 9+ caps in getting to table also helps even the odds between the two. I mainly thought about this because I thought Scourge needs to go.
The +MPA decks are prolific, and some of the minions - like Anson - seem to wallpaper a huge bunch of other crypt cards. And like I said, I feel MPA's are too uninteractive for their huge effects when you have multiples of them.
Do you think Sudden/Wash would show up in every deck, if they could cancel events? Anyway, maybe the Uncoiling simply is enough.

The problem with GB is that there's a luck-based ~10 pool coming for somebody, and the others can't get that anymore when it happens. That's too much in a game built around managing scarce resources.

Forcing you to play Camarilla isn't really any kind of a con these days if you look at the superb minions and the other effects Princes can play. And your prey isn't the only person whose pool you can steal, screwing your predator or even some cross-table bloat machine is perfectly doable. Anyway, some strategies revolve entirely around managing pool/parity shift, even now I wouldn't do that because it sounds so risky, but having ~4 shift makes your prince deck considerably stronger than a comparable Sabbat deck.

On Pentex : the problem is that you aren't allowed to act, making having Pentex necessary in nearly every deck. Though I have tried playing Colgonda in a Enkidu deck in Pentex's place, that worked too... But hey, there are many, many masters in this game but alas, you always need to have certain cards in your master slots, such as Pentex.

About Scourge : all I'm saying is that I have seen the disappearance of breed and weenie horde strategies entirely, and when I consider building a breed deck, I just think that I don't want to play a strategy that is entirely screwed by a card that everybody plays and you can't prevent entering the game. Is it a strategy so strong it can well afford having multiple copies of the Uncoiling, possibly sitting on that card the entire game?

@Juggernaut1981 : Exactly, and it's silly how the best counter to a Pentex is another Pentex. (Whoa, now I need to play Mechwarrior)

@KevinM : Maybe in the future I will, even while I'm tired of arguing in this game. And I'm talking about the sort of, I don't care anymore I'm done for self-ousting that makes the player a kingmaker.

@Jhattara : 'sup man, do you still live in Turku? Anyway that kind of tournament maneuvering I can understand, even if I don't think you should be able to dictate who goes to finals when you are in a lost position.

Déjà vu B)

@Suoli : I have no idea what are you talking about. A HG takes forever to pay itself back,

Yes, HG's are pretty bad. But compared to Lilith's Blessing, they will net slightly less blood a lot more reliably over the game for only 1 master phase action. Most of the time I would rather use MPAs for archetypes and other permanent effects than a single boost.

and DotS is unique and everybody plays them.

I rarely see DotS getting contested or discarded around here. Anyway, it's just a generic baseline for the power of MPA's.

LB replaces your traditional HG's and such since with a good Villein/LB ratio you can play free minions.

Very few decks can have a reliable V/LB ratio without choking on LB's. You want to Villein your big caps as soon as they hit the table so you want a very early LB, at least around the time you're transferring a second fattie. That's before you really start cycling minion cards so you'd need 6 or more LB's in 90 cards to draw them early enough. Otherwise you're not really capitalizing on the combo and might as well play archetypes.

You have LB in play, a Villein in hand, might as well transfer any minion on table since in the end, you don't pay for it. And you can use LB to give 3 blood to a minion you emptied in some other way, obviously, it's multi-purpose, might make even master : disciplines good in some decks.

Well, truth be told you can bring out a fresh guy, Villein him to 1 and be at -2 blood, +-0 pool, +1 card slot and +2 MPA's when compared to the LB/Villein scenario.

Don't get me wrong though, LB is a great card for those decks that can use it well and a decent 1-of for many others. It's just not an auto-include in every deck ever and definitely not broken.