What is missing from VtES?

So to the op; Speed up the game.

The opening turn(s). There is a format where each player draws his hand and uncon region and then simultaneouslly selects up to 10 pool worth of cards, and places them facedown to be revealed and paid for all at once, and then may discard any of his remaining cards in hand and draws a whole new hand. Perhaps even allow one undirected action card to be attached to each minion (cost paid by minion). This allows people a mulligan to a certain degree and get out the minion they want right off the bat.

Contesting. Change the damn rule so that the contest is an immediate auction and the loser gets his pool on the lost minion back. Still a blow to his game but neither player has to linger on indefinitely and cripple the game.

More trifles (and unwallpapering some cards). This hedges towards hated erratta, but I keep looking at the mediocre to bad cards and think to myself 'if only this were a trifle' or 'if only it didnt cost that much' or 'if only the effect was....'. Erratta is bad unless you can reprint the card with updated text, but a simple rule of making all archeytpes (but perfectionist) and skill cards trifles for instance, along with a short list of other never used master cards (when's the last time you saw secret passage played?) would inject some new life to the game.

Kill the golden bullets. This is my pet peeve. I hate Sudden Reversal, Wash and DI. I almost never use them. I come to the game to play my cards and watch others play theirs, and match mine against theirs. Not to drop golden bullets to make others plays disapear. You must match theirs with intercept, or greater speed or combat, or bloat, etc. I would like to see SR become limited, once per player per game. Or only effect non trifle non location cards (as there are plenty of steal/destroy location cards already) and Wash only effect trifles (being a trifle itself, which made the golden bullet effect far too accessible). DI I would make limited as well, or make it apply to action cards only, or have an increasing pool cost based on DIs played by the player.

So, those are the 4 areas for change off the top of my head.

Another area is how to speed up the game after the initial turns and prevent timeouts or ousted players sitting around bored, but a hard 2 hour limit should in theory help with that, I just dont know that it actually works...

I was not going to go further but....

Having something for the sabbat to do politically might be fun. KRC is getting old...

Having more useful cards for the Laibon...their set of laibon only cards is weak (with a few notable exceptions), and compare their clan only cards to others...yuck. Weak. Laibon are underdeveloped.

Fix Aye and Orun. I have never really made those cards work, I think the three or more threshold is too high, perhaps two or more might help as a start. The strategy on the whole right now is just weak....play 3 cards so that this one card will work? Terrible. Just play 4 copies of a card that works first.

Screw SCE. Combat tends to be full on combat or just SCE. Make players put some hitback or variety into their deck for combat defence. The current extremes need to have more variation between them somehow. Maybe a card like narrow minds to punish the pure SCE decks? Only thing that comes to mind right now.

Advocating for killing golden bullets and in the next post advocating for one to kill SCE

Problem is that if you have a deck containing a golden bullet and the deck it was designed to work against the original deck will most likely win. The golden bullet deck ain't gonna pack so many copies of the said gold bullet that it'll certainly do its own thing well.

If your strategy is a counter-strategy you are going to lose. Many different golden bullets exist, do you pack them all in the deck in case you ran across a deck using them?

Talonz's ideas are generally strange, but removing ScE is not so bad, actually. This mechanics is kind of non-intuitive.

I've actually had a few moments where my opponent didn't pack any S:CE and I punched his vampire for 1 because my hand was jammed with S:CE cancel cards...

GreyB wrote:

I've actually had a few moments where my opponent didn't pack any S:CE and I punched his vampire for 1 because my hand was jammed with S:CE cancel cards...

Is the problem that S:CE is flawed game design or is the problem that you built a shitty deck? I'm thinking the latter...