New Set?

Ashur wrote:

Lönkka wrote:

Actually adding one (1) Imbued related card to every expansion would be a solid idea.

I´d prefer banning Imbued from tournament play and never speak of them again

I like the imbued thematically. And they bring a solid competitive base standard in long-game attrition play that helps to weed out a good bit of "elaborate combo table fappening." I found the initially introduced Events were more disruptive upon early design (as per set theme, Gehenna, duh ), and imbued just ened up exposing that glaring, gaping loophole early. And thankfully so, because we could then take earlier pause about Event development -- global effects need way more consideration than others.

Imbued just became the easy scapegoat from these major legacy loopholes. It's the overlooked loopholes that became glaring, but the problem was always lying in wait.

As for myself, I'm currently with banning big bleeding to reduce the current over-necessity of bounce, still democratize bounce, democratize Voter Cap vote bloat, sprinkle way more untap (freaks n wakes), and graduate the game from its (IME) calcified, torpored 1994 thinking already. That way the game becomes more of a "rock, paper, scissors" contest of interactive attritions in: bounces, untaps, & non-master bloats. It liberates the game from the rather funny skew we've been living with for decades now.

Azel wrote:

I like the imbued thematically. And they bring a solid competitive base standard in long-game attrition play that helps to weed out a good bit of "elaborate combo table fappening."

They also do a good job of extending the length of the game, with their being tailor made for long-game attrition and all.

As for myself, I'm currently with banning big bleeding to reduce the current over-necessity of bounce, still democratize bounce, democratize Voter Cap vote bloat, sprinkle way more untap (freaks n wakes), and graduate the game from its (IME) calcified, torpored 1994 thinking already.

In what way would what you propose above graduate the game? Most would just make this game take longer to play (no thanks). Banning big bleed and democratizing any bloat like Voter Cap is just asking for extending games past the 2-hour mark. Giving more opportunities to untap will also extend turns because a minion can only bleed once per turn. I'm with you on democratizing bounce, although, if doing so, make a flat rule that a methuselah can redirect a bleed only once per turn to avoid making the game a bounce fest, and also avoid making strong decks stronger.

That way the game becomes more of a "rock, paper, scissors" contest of interactive attritions in: bounces, untaps, & non-master bloats. It liberates the game from the rather funny skew we've been living with for decades now.

I hear this a lot, that VTES has "evolved" into a game of chance. It's like people forget that VTES is a card game. You shuffle the cards. There's is built-in a randomization process. Hence why there is all the randomness in attritions in certain effects. That's how card games work, and that's how VTES has always been. If you want to remove that aspect, then you need to change VTES into something other than a card game.

Azel wrote:

As for myself, I'm currently with banning big bleeding to reduce the current over-necessity of bounce,

This doesn't tend to work as well as you think it might. While it's never been outright banned, the introduction of Archon Investigation and Protected Resources in the core V:TES set (post Jyhad) meant a lot of people stopped playing anything that looked like big bleed temporarily. A number of people were particularly upset that an Inner Circle (all of them in DS had +2 bleed) playing any bleed modifier at all could just be burned. Things settled down later, obviously, but a few lessons did come out of it.

Broadly, stealth-bleed is unaffected by this sort of thing. Wherever the limit is set, it builds itself around bleeding for that, at stealth. Depending on the exact deck, this can also mean it goes for slightly smaller vampires if the superior discipline becomes slightly less useful (though you can still have a clutch of DOM vampires for superior Deflection). Weenie bleed tends similarly to be unaffected - bleed for 2 or 3 a lot evading any cap on big bleeding.

A number of toolboxy decks are less competitive but like big bleeds, occasionally. A bruise-bleed deck that is doing other actions but wants to push through a single bleed for 6 (Govern + superior Conditioning, any bleed of five plus Pentex Loves You) isn't really hurting you any more than the stealth bleed deck bleeding you for three with three vampires, and nor is the Toreador wall deck that wants to shove through a Legal Manipulations and Aire of Elation occasionally. They can be hurt quite a bit by caps.

Along similar lines, any deck with a more limited number of actions may also want to make the actions it has as good as possible. For example, if I'm playing reasonably large vampires and can play Freak Drive or similar a lot, I can do some bleeding and some other actions. If I can't play Freak Drive style tech, I have to choose between bleeding and some other actions - so when I bleed, I may want to make the most of it.

Bleedzookas that stacked up a ton of permanents etc. on one vampire weren't really a thing in the same way, in that you had fewer options for doing it. However, if you set a limit on big bleeding, it would obviously hurt such decks. They're not unplayable currently, though they can obviously be a bit fragile in terms of getting hit by a variety of defences.

Imbued doing the long game doesn't bother me. All CCG play will have a long game regardless, only its turn size to get to it will be relative. It's the strength of play during which that'd matter.

The big delay of game is the continuous table talk and deal making. That by far, in my humble experience, eclipses everything else. And though it may be more egregious in vote deck strategies, it is nowhere near tied to that strategy alone. But there is no way to really stop that.

What I would like to see is a greater reinforcement of 3-player viability. THAT is the big limiter, and why multiplayer pick up games pale in frequency to duel CCGs. VTES shines with 5 players, but the lack of an interesting 3 player would be a good design place to explore.

As for the "rock, paper, scissors" you are reading me grossly wrong. We already know about CCGs and their randomization. The whole point of deck building is the mitigation of probability thereof into greater reliability. This commentary advances nothing.

What I am talking about is ratios of competing defenses; some decks will pack 'more paper than rock'. But all decks have to juggle a bit of bloat, untap, direct defense (block/reduce/bounce). Similar to how we believe all decks have to account for bleed, vote, and combat into our deck slots. And the more we can minimize our mitigation packages gives us positive slots to focus on our offense package.

Thus the paper, rock, scissors is to diversify our mitigation into other minimizable packages -- basically stop the skew of grafted dom because it has the tightest mitigation package directly attached to a strong offense package.

But then we found there is an abusable upper limit to big bleed as well, hence Return to Innocence being banned. So there is a middle ground and a noticeable gap in readily available defenses. The question then becomes how do you democratise bounce, and then subsequently diversify bounce defense, as a single big bleed is pulling out multiple copies of bounce defense?

Make weaker bounces that have bleed reduction built in?

Make minions heavily damaged or dunked, not destroyed? (the obt pot cards really didn't show the promise of "damage acting minion on a successful bleed.")

Other? (bounce is a hard act to follow, let alone design laterally competitively.)

Azel wrote:

As for the "rock, paper, scissors" you are reading me grossly wrong.

If I am reading you wrong, it is because you are not doing a good job of conveying yourself clearly. Don't blame the reader, just write better.

What I am talking about is ratios of competing defenses; some decks will pack 'more paper than rock'. But all decks have to juggle a bit of bloat, untap, direct defense (block/reduce/bounce). Similar to how we believe all decks have to account for bleed, vote, and combat into our deck slots. And the more we can minimize our mitigation packages gives us positive slots to focus on our offense package.

Thus the paper, rock, scissors is to diversify our mitigation into other minimizable packages -- basically stop the skew of grafted dom because it has the tightest mitigation package directly attached to a strong offense package.

I understand exactly what you are saying. I am disagreeing with your assertion that minimizing mitigation packages makes for a superior game. It's just not the case in card games. And your previous post made it seem like the game evolved into this reliance on dominate and mitigation packages from some previous ideal that never existed. This reliance on mitigation strategies has been the case since 1994, and it's been the case since 1994 because that's pretty much how all card games operate. There are trumps that you need to include in your deck that you shuffle and draw randomly to mitigate common effects that your opponents may or may not use in the game. Sometimes you draw paper to your opponent's rock. Other times, you draw scissors to your opponents rock. That's card games.