The future of V:TES

DeathInABottle wrote:

makes me wonder how groups hold it together.

metropolitan area of 6 million. I can now get at least 5 for a once every 2 months social game. nevermind doing a tourney.

Reyda wrote:

jamesatzephyr wrote:

It's also somewhat more difficult to re-attract former players on a casual basis. "Yeah, we're playing the DeflectoShift ban block now. You can't come and play your favourite Ventrue Princes Group 1-2 deck, Bob, all the main cards are banned, sorry."

Well, there's a little thing called "common sense", that will let you allow your friend play his old deck in a casual game.
don't thank me, i'm cool with giving you some hints from time to time

Which means that the other players can't properly prepare for the tournament because they're now having to deal with all those banned cards again, and Bob can't drop into a tournament.

A really great way to cause problems all round.

jamesatzephyr wrote:

Reyda wrote:

jamesatzephyr wrote:

It's also somewhat more difficult to re-attract former players on a casual basis. "Yeah, we're playing the DeflectoShift ban block now. You can't come and play your favourite Ventrue Princes Group 1-2 deck, Bob, all the main cards are banned, sorry."

Well, there's a little thing called "common sense", that will let you allow your friend play his old deck in a casual game.
don't thank me, i'm cool with giving you some hints from time to time

Which means that the other players can't properly prepare for the tournament because they're now having to deal with all those banned cards again, and Bob can't drop into a tournament.

A really great way to cause problems all round.

Nowhere before you did talk about tournaments. You were talking about casual games with Bob... So suddenly it's about tournaments. I'm sure that if Bob really wants to try the competitiveg scene again, he will play a legal deck, and borrow cards from *friends*. Common sense, as always. But boy, how arguing with you even about trivial things is tiring...

Why are you refering to Bob as if he is retarded child and cannot change anything within his deck (and has only 1 and no spare cards)?

Reyda wrote:

Nowhere before you did talk about tournaments. You were talking about casual games with Bob...

No, I explicitly did talk about tournaments, preparing for tournaments and the fracturing of a home game.

I referred to re-attracting former casual players, but even casual players play the occasional tournament, and the competitive players like to try out new decks in their home games. Like I said. Explicitly.

Reyda wrote:

So suddenly it's about tournaments.

There's nothing sudden about it. It was right there in my post.

Reyda wrote:

I'm sure that if Bob really wants to try the competitiveg scene again, he will play a legal deck, and borrow cards from *friends*. Common sense, as always.

Again, telling a casual player that they have to reconstruct and re-learn entire decks before they can play does not make it easy to reattract former players. Common sense, as always.

Reyda wrote:

But boy, how arguing with you even about trivial things is tiring...

If you were more interested in understanding what I'd written and less interested in your bizarre, petty, topsy-turvy, let's-just-lie-about-what-you-said point-scoring that has - in this instance - required you to completely ignore the discussion of tournaments, preparation for tournaments, and fracturing of home games in order to pretend I'm only now suddenly talking about tournaments, it may be less tiring.

kombainas wrote:

Why are you refering to Bob as if he is retarded child and cannot change anything within his deck (and has only 1 and no spare cards)?

It's easier to re-attract a former casual player if they can play a deck they like, with minimal effort. Finding that your Ventrue deck is torpedoed by the loss of, say, Parity Shift, Second Tradition, Deflection, Voter Captivation and Giant's Blood is going to require a pretty serious amount of reworking. In order to 'shake up' the scene, it's pretty likely that it's those sorts of cards that are being hit. (It might not be those exact cards, of course.)

Losing Deflection, for example, would likely not just be a matter of tweaking a few cards - when losing Govern might be relatively easily handled with a sticking-plaster of switching to Scouting Mission or something like that. Key defensive and bloat features might well require significant reconstruction of a deck. Lots of players graft a little bit of Dominate into decks in order to play Deflection - a couple of weenies, a couple of skills cards, selecting vampires with some OOC Dominate. Banning Deflection would not be trivially replaceable with, say, Redirection, because at inferior it requires a younger vampire bleeding you - no use against Imbued. Murmur of the False Will requires DOM, and had similar issues against older vampires and Imbued (but is a pretty interesting card). So suddenly I need to go for DOM, which might require a significant change of crypt, and possibly a bit more bloat to cope with older vampires or Imbued. Domi-Ravnos, for example, is a pretty fun deck style, but I don't think there are any Ravnos at all with DOM - and though most of the Ravnos with it are pretty big, I may still find myself on the end of an Inner Circle bleedzooka and having issues.

Meta-banning Voter Cap might well screw with some powerful decks at the moment, and you might particularly dislike Deflection/Parity Shift/Voter Cap Camarilla decks being so powerful. (Seems reasonable.) But my favourite Setite deck might well be using Voter Cap to power some pool gain, which is partly a buffer against bleed decks. What do I do to replace that defensive measure? I can't exactly rely on Giant's Blood (which might be meta-banned anyway), maybe Lilith's Blessing (hard to get pre-POD, proxyable in casual games). I can't experiment with Fifth Tradition like the Camarilla might, or Festivo dello Estinto like the Sabbat might. Do we now find ourselves in a situation where the right way to defend is to back-oust in way more situations? That's pretty problematic.

This may get even more problematic if meta-bans include crypt cards. Losing a key vampire may just totally destroy a deck, because it was built around a unique or particularly optimal combination of disciplines, titles, and special abilities. And as these things go, meta-banning certain vampires might well have the effect people want on the tournament scene, making certain popular decks much harder to use. e.g. banning Arika, banning some of the vampires for AAA. You might be able to construct a similarly-purposed deck, but way less efficient, relying on some library resources etc. This may leave some library cards available for other decks, if it's not necessary to meta-ban them in order to disrupt the successful archetypes.