Sure.Longes wrote:I'll admit that I'm very interested in hearing about Vampire card game. It seemed interesting, but getting enough people to actually play it on tabletop simulator is impossible.
Let's talk about Jyhad er... Vampire: The Eternal Struggle.
So the elephant in the room of this game is that the originally called it "Jyhad" on the grounds that that was the stupid made-up-word that Rein*Hagen insisted on using for the eternal struggle of elder vampires and younger vampires. Turns out that in a post-Gulf War environment where people are increasingly cognizant of the Arab speaking parts of the world, that's really offensive. Who knew?!
Anyway, right about the time of the Sabbat expansion, WotC became another victim of political correctness and renamed their game - having to change the card backs and giving everyone a Sad! And while the Sabbat expansion was certainly neat in a lot of ways and did make the game better, it did not overcome many of the core problems with the game which were there from the beginning. So we're going to be talking about the first set for the most part.
So the concept of the game is that you're an impossibly old vampire struggling it out with other impossibly old vampires through minions doing extremely abstract things to hurt each other's plans. The game had two major innovations: the first was that you started with almost all the resources you were ever going to get and everything most just burned down rather than building up, and the second was that the game was inherently multiplayer. A player started with 30 points in their pool to put minion vampires and stuff into play with, and lost the game when that pool emptied. You got points towards final victory when the person to your left lost the game just as the person to your right scored for your losing the game. As the table shrunk, each player always had one predator and one prey, until there was just two players standing and then they were both predator and prey for each other.
You have two decks. The first is your Crypt deck, which is composed just of Vampires. At the beginning of the game you get 4 face down vampires. Every turn you can transfer up to 4 of your pool onto your vampires, and they come into play when they have as much pool as they have blood capacity. Then their blood capacity is their hit points but also a currency they can use to use some of their own powers that come from your action deck.
Your action deck gives you a hand of seven cards that mostly represent actions or powers used by your minions. You draw a replacement card every time you use a card from your hand. While many cards cost pool from you or blood from your minions, the real cost of any action card is the time it spends cluttering up your hand before it gets used. That is, a card that can only be used in a rare situation is an expensive card because it shrinks your hand for a long time, while a card that can be used in a common situation is a cheap card because it cycles quickly. Much of the strategy of the game involves denying your opponent the chance to use their cards, thus slowing their card flow to a crawl.
So let's get to the first big problem in the game: Expensive Vampires are shit.
The basic action you can perform with a minion is to "bleed" your prey. That is, you attack their interests in non non-specific way and if they don't intercept with one of their minions and start a fight they lose one of their pool and you get the Edge. This is very unimpressive, but it's better than nothing (which is what you'd get if you had no minion), and to use any of the cool political actions or bleed modifiers or ally recruitment cards you have in your hand requires a minion to do the dirty work. So the difference between a 2 cost vampire and a 10 cost vampire would have to be fucking titanic. The 2 cost vampire comes out in half a turn and the 10 cost vampire won't be out there for 3 turns. And the ten cost vampire costs five times as much even disregarding the lag time of getting them into play at all. As it happens, the actual conversion is that a 10 coster is maybe twice as good as a 2 coster. It's not directly comparable and of course there are ways it's exactly as good and ways it's massively better, but the important part is that it falls massively short on being good enough to justify the higher cost and longer entering play delays.
So let's talk about what this character actually does. First of all, just having a cost of 10 also gives her 10 hit points, so in the world of infinite slap fights she's fine. You don't live in that world, so it's largely irrelevant. The second thing you note is that she has various discipline symbols in squares or diamonds. In order to play actions, maneuvers, action modifiers, reactions, or special cards that trigger off magic vampiric disciplines, you need to have a minion that has that discipline. And if that discipline symbol is in a diamond, you can use the super mode (for some cards, the super mode is just getting +1 to the effect of whatever it was already doing, but sometimes it gives you whole new ways of using the card).
But here's the big issue: you design your deck. You are not going to put cards into your deck that you can't consistently use. Lucretia "has" six disciplines, but she only meaningfully has those disciplines that you have cards for in your deck. And since you are probably only going to base your deck around 2-4 disciplines, the fact that she has six disciplines on the card means you are necessarily paying for disciplines that your deck isn't going to use. Lucretia could go into a Nosferatu themed deck (Potence, Animalism, Obfuscation), or she could go into a deck that was a bit more Brujah themed with the fact that she has Potenence and Celerity. But if you just wanted someone with basic Potence and basic Celerity, you could get that off a 3 cost vampire.
In essence, every high cost vampire was paying for the priviledge of being somewhat playable in decks that weren't yours. And that naturally meant that they weren't playable in any deck.
The next thing I need to talk about is the three main strategies: Bleed, Politics, and Combat. Of those three, only Combat has much use for bigger vampires, and even then anything bigger than 7 is a waste of your fucking time.
The Bleed strategy spams minions and uses powers like Dominate or Presence to increase the bleeding. Usually it uses stealth to avoid combat. It is a fast strategy that will eliminate its prey quickly when it works.
The Political strategy uses a few votes to vote itself more votes and then hogs the political stage and then uses a bunch of votes that drain their prey of pool. It's a fast strategy, and can interfere constructively or destructively if there are other political decks at the table. The game tries to sell you on the idea of big expensive vampires for a political deck by giving small numbers of votes to expensive vampires, but this is "fucking retarded" and the actual political deck is a bunch of 1-3 cost vampires gibbering in the night.
The combat strategy involves direct attacks, big low-stealth bleeds, or high intercept blocks to get into fights and then uses a bunch of combat cards to destroy enemy minions. Once predator and prey have been stripped of acting vampires, the combat deck closes the deal. This strategy is slow as... a slow thing.
The obvious issue is that the table effects are really massive. If you're playing a slower deck and there's a Malkavian rush bleed deck on the far side of the table with some weaker players between them and you, they are going to tear through the table and get themselves a winning pile of points before you can do shit about it. If two political decks spend their first bunch of turns stopping each other from getting their praxis seizures on the board, it's possible that both decks can be pretty much paralyzed all game. The setup can in short be incredibly unfair and result in a pretty much telegraphed game that will still take 3 fucking hours to play out.
Another issue is that a lot of cards fit into pretty much no strategy. The top end of all the vampires are pretty much completely useless, but even at the low and medium end it's not entirely clear why you'd want a character with just basic Thaumaturgy or basic Fortitude. Those don't really do anything.
-Username17