Coming back to the game

Hi All

Just joined the forum. Over the weekend I and a group of friends got together for the first time in a long, long time and had a couple of five player games. We had a great time and have since decided to meet up more frequently. I can see that proxy cards are now acceptable since the game was discontinued and there's a few resources for building decks and printing cards. I found Amaranth which seems great, but if there are any other recommendations out there please let me know

I've been looking through this site (vekn) and I've downloaded the updated rules, but there's one thing that my group are resisting on. We always played with a 4-card duplicate limit in our decks. I'm pretty sure this was a hang up from our early play days and was probably ported over from Magic, but looking at Decks and the way the game is played it really seems like this limit was fairly arbitrary. A couple of the guys are up for doing away with it but some are resisting, arguing that it would be too easy to build power decks without limits.

Anyone want to provide any general comments on this? My response is that getting rid of the arbitrary limit would allow a much bigger variety of decks, open us up to more clans and styles of play, while keeping it means that only a few types of play are actually viable. Also, any worry about someone filling up on overly powerful cards are balanced by deck size limits and vampire generations (something that we were fairly lax on)

Any suggestions or discussion welcome!

Des

Card limits enable some strategies to be more efficient than others. For instance, there are lots of stealth cards in Obsfuscate, making stealth easy to obtain with card limits, and a lot of different Dominate bleed actions and action modifiers. This makes stealth-bleed decks just as effective as they would be with unlimited choice. Other decks do not have the same breadth of options.

How could you build a Temptation deck with only 4 Temptations?

How do you counter Strike: Combat Ends in a combat deck? Immortal Grapple, Psyche!, etc. Presence has many ways to end combat, far outnumbering the counters available in a card limit environment, making combat even less effective.

Card limits don't prevent power creep; card limits prevent entire deck options from existing. You actually make the game less interesting and less versatile with card limits because fewer decks can be effective.

While kschaefer is right to an extent, you won't hear anyone suggesting the grouping rule be revoked because it limits deck options, even though that is exactly what it does.

And then the question arises: Why are there so many +stealth cards in Obfuscate and +bleed cards in Dominate, and S:CE cards in Presence, but the ways to counter S:CE are limited to Immortal Grapple in Potence and Psyche! in Celerity and Telepathic Tracking in Auspex. Why does Temptation use 'counters' but every other Serpentis card uses 'corruption counters' to achieve a similar effect? Why do these two things not interact *and* overlap in a non-synergistic way?

(It's because this game is old and the design team(s) at the time were operating in an environment where there weren't that many good examples of successful CCG design and formatting. Magic was successful despite the odds, and was surviving on power-creep and unintentionally broken cards, YuGiOh was unashamed of it's ludicrous power-creep, and Pokemon had the 8 year old demographic to sustain it and multi-media to sustain it, design didn't matter. Every other CCG was dead or dying.)

The problem with card limits is really one of functional duplicates and similar cards. There are only 3 Animalism cards that give +bleed: Deep Song, Adhocracy, and Tier of Souls. There is only 1 Army of Rats, and nothing else in Animalism really comes close to doing what it does to my knowledge.

Card limits would require players to take those mediocre and lame cards out of their shoe-boxes, and to weigh them against each other, and put them into decks. But do players want to do that? Probably not. Even though players' decks would probably be more varied because each player would include different but functionally similar cards.

And Black Chantry and Co. could support a move to card limits by printing cards that were functionally similar but different in key ways (beyond having an increased blood cost or a different inferior/superior option.) But they probably won't do that.

And yes, any card limit imposed will ultimately be arbitrary - the same way starting with 30 pool instead of 35 was arbitrary or having 4 starting uncontrolled vampires instead of 5 or 6 was arbitrary.

Welcome back!

Anyone want to provide any general comments on this? My response is that getting rid of the arbitrary limit would allow a much bigger variety of decks, open us up to more clans and styles of play, while keeping it means that only a few types of play are actually viable. Also, any worry about someone filling up on overly powerful cards are balanced by deck size limits and vampire generations (something that we were fairly lax on)

You're spot on. There's really no reason, I feel, not to play standard constructed tournament rules even on casual.

The most 'broken' archetypes will be better than most even with the 4 card limit, or any limit for that matter. There is no single card in the game that would be unreasonable to spam at 60 copies. If you actually try it out, practice will most likely prove this pretty quickly. You'll find balance issues with limited card amounts too, don't you?

Proxy printing with Amaranth is an excellent addition to the game. I whole heartedly recommend it. It added to my VtES experience a lot when introduced. And I've been playing this game for over a decade.

I'm not saying that limited wouldn't be fun, if you're having fun. I'm just saying that keeping up to house rules just for the sake of it even if the world wide community has found standard formats even more fun might prevent you guys from having even MORE fun.

TWDA is a great example of how the game hasn't been broken even on the highest levels of cheesing and major tournament levels, despite the unlimited card amounts.

How's this: let each of you print out a tournament winning deck of their choice from 2018 or 2017, play a game, and see if you had fun or not!

The freedom of deck building is the best part of the game. If it had a 4 of limit i would quit in a second.