Contents and card changes in 25th Anniversary revealed

Yeah, there is something "poetic" in the idea that someone should listen to a Random Guy Who Likes Old Pentex instead of 100+ playtesters & the whole current design team. And decades of player feedback & discussion.

Or was the word "idiotic"? Or "arrogant"? Whatever.

You don't like this change? Fair enough. But stop being a dick about it and insulting other players.

Vlad wrote:

That's great reading from you : So people who don't play finals have nothing to say about the game ?!?

That's very rude and elitist...

Kind of like changing decades-old card text to serve the interests of tournament players? Lost in all this is casual players now have to play with these changes if they want to buy new cards. That's the difference between banning and changing card text. In my opinion, these changes were really not needed from a casual standpoint.

Yes, I understand casual players can just play the cards as they were printed previously, but, if doing that, it would be nice to buy new cards without any changes.

All this said, I cannot comment on how this affects tournament-level VTES. Maybe it will make for a better game, casual or competitive. Here's hoping these changes do that.

Was anybody around for the changes to Fifth Tradition? It seems like the changes to Pentex and Parity Shift are comparable (people can let me know if I'm mistaken). I wonder how the Fifth Tradition change affected the game and the opinions people have on that.

PetriWessman wrote:

Yeah, there is something "poetic" in the idea that someone should listen to a Random Guy Who Likes Old Pentex instead of 100+ playtesters & the whole current design team. And decades of player feedback & discussion.

Or was the word "idiotic"? Or "arrogant"? Whatever.

You don't like this change? Fair enough. But stop being a dick about it and insulting other players.

I didn’t insult anyone, if you felt insulted that’s maybe your problem.

Arrogant is almost a compliment for me, so thank you.

You seem a better person than player anyway.

somehow the feeling I get is very similar to the one on election day.
yay for Trump (for those that dont know me - just sssslightly sssarcastic)

In general, it's a mistake to think the game should (only) cater for some small group of tournament winners. Black Chantry (and playtesters) make changes based on what's good for the overall health of the game, which includes the general game experience, and includes both tournament play and casual play.

This means that cards and decks which promote a bad play experience -- in the form of "often cannot get to play at all", like Una & Pentex -- are problems for the game, and must be dealt with. And it's not all about just tournaments, a *vast* majority of games played are casual games. Where everyone is trying their best to win, of course. In general, one could argue that casual games are perhaps *more* important to the general health of the game, tournaments are a side attraction.

On to the actual changes:

Pentex is now an oust card (like Anarch Troublemaker), and not a one-stop solution to everything or a defense card. It's probably annoying to have to *think* about what to include now, instead of just auto-including 1-2 Pentex, but that's life. I expect to see less Pentex in tournaments (and casual) from now on, but I would be extremely surprised if I didn't see it at all. It's still a great finisher.

As for Parity Shift, everyone knows it was too powerful. Full stop. Now it's a lot more balanced (though still by far the best vote in the game); less powerful in beginning, more powerful in the last 1-on-1 portion. I'd still include lots of it in titled Cam vote decks, nothing much changes there.

And Una? That's not something people focused on tournament wins should care about in the first place; Una Twister decks don't win reliably, what they do reliably do is kill everyone else's game and bypass basic game interaction. Good riddance. Sure, there are other degenerate decks like that out there (which the Ankara change didn't kill), but like BC said in the article, they're keeping an eye on the developing meta. I like the fact that BC avoided touching FD itself, I think that was a good call.

It's not the end of the world, even if one disagrees with the changes, and the actually good players will quickly adapt. The ones who now suddenly can't win without old-style Pentex or Parity Shift, well maybe they weren't actually all that good in the first place. We'll see.

PetriWessman wrote:

Black Metamorphosis gets +1 stealth: yeah, very minor, but nice and makes sense. This of course begs the question: shouldn't Shadow of the Beast get this too?

Very minor tweak. Don't know how muych this was needed as Obtenebration does have (good) access to stealth.

I think that, for example, Rampage would've been a far better candidate to fix.
It is one of the few discipline based cards featuring only the inferior version (Army of Rats also springs to mind but that card actually is just fine as it sees frequent use) and is only just barely marginally better than Arson which has zero requirements (replace immediately and get +1 stealth if it is your _own_ location... *roll eyes* )

And it is not like Potence is ANY way close to being as good a discipline as Obtenebration. So Potence would most definitely need all the love it can get. And hugs. With Potence you gotta have hugs!

+1 stealth to Rampage AND superior version which would probably work best, also thematically, if it was a rush.

So here is my idea:

Rampage
+1 stealth
(pot) Burn any location.
(POT) Enter combat with a ready minion controlled by another Methuselah.

An alternative would be to have bleed for superior effect but I think thematically the rush would be far better suited for Rampage.

HULK SMASH!


(Lastly, kinda true about Shadow of the Beast but Protean actually has even better stealth package than Obtenebration is there hardly is need for SoB to have inbuilt stealth. Although I'm not advocating against it as SoB doesn't see play. At all.

In light of that I'd be inclined to remove the one blood cost from it too. Or at least since that is probably the bigger reason it doesn't see play...)