Lost Crown

So, I suppose I should have written something by now about going to the Los Angeles storyline.

As usual, I had factored in plenty of time for our drive, only to be screwed by all of the accidents in the hills above LA.  Losing that hour probably didn’t have a huge impact on how many casual games we played, but losing any playing time for such a short trip where more time was spent traveling than actually being awake in LA was undesirable.  The return trip lacked such annoyances.

Anyway, first casual game:

Shane (anarch Ventrue) -> Ian (16 Daggers) -> Matt (Eze) -> Robert S. (Lambach Hazimel)

Not a bad way to start things out.  I Computer Hacked Matt for a while.  Lambach did little.  I could have probably ousted if I didn’t get hit with both Mind Rape and Banishment right before my turn.  Prey bloated back some.  I got ousted.  Robert got ousted.  Endgame went a while due to bloat.  The main thing about this game was I got to do the stuff I was supposed to do even if I hardly fought with people.

Then:

Robert S. (FoS steal/vote) -> Ian (Perfectly Lucid) -> Jeff (P/J Celerity) -> Aaron (old school midcap Toreador) -> Mike (!Toreador + War Ghouls)

Kind of odd.  As usual, people have the oddest reactions to my bringing out Lucian, The Perfect.  Mike bled Robert a bit, but Robert basically was unmolested.  Lucian got Temptationed, which was kind of annoying, though it mean hunting to stay at 11 blood was something to do.  I didn’t have good targets for Dominate Kine, so Lucian and Elimelech mostly hung out.  Eli got Temptationed as well.  I could have ousted Jeff either by playing The Sleeping Mind on a first bleed or by drawing into something different while bleeding that would have seen me let myself get blocked, but the two Into the Airs in hand tempted me to do crazy things like try to get two bleeds through.  The primary decision for me in the game was to go for the oust on that turn or Golconda Eli and bring up Luna Giovanni.  I could have easily, I think, stalled the game out, but since I hadn’t done virtually anything during the game, I felt a desire to go forward and ended up with both dudes empty in torpor.  I did kill a Parity Shift of my prey since he didn’t offer any pool to me, I guess people don’t realize that my non-threats to disrupt their games aren’t idle.  Not exciting, but it could have been worse.  While Jeff did try to block a hunt, he did only block my attempts to bleed rather than do crazy stuff backwards.

Storyline, round 1:

Brandon (Principia Discordia Edenic Groundskeepers) -> Ian (Laecanus, The Archer) -> Jeff (Nostoket) -> Robert G. (Henry Taylor 10 card deck)

Brandon beat me down early, so I did nothing of consequence in the game.  The Rumor Mill was mostly just a blood loss engine for me.  That left Jeff to do whatever he felt like.  Robert didn’t bring out Henry for a long time so just bled forward for 1 a lot, which almost killed Brandon, but he didn’t finish him off.  A Failsafe kept me around long enough for Jeff to sweep.

Round 2:

Robert G. -> Shane (anarch Ventrue) -> Ian -> Robert S. (Lasombra Corporal Reservoir) -> Conner (Howler wall)

I had a crazy master start with The Parthenon, Dreams.  Followed fairly quickly by Channel 10 and Powerbase: LA(!!).  The interesting thing was how much pool I was losing just bringing up two dudes.  We settled into a long game where little happened.  Going forward was limited because I quickly took the Crown of Angels and whoever got the first VP was not rewarded.  Eventually, with time running down, I went forward, both Roberts ousted, and I stole from Goudie since he was okay with leaving.  I did put out one or two Twilight Camps, use a Failsafe, play Constant Revolution after blocking my predator’s, contest The Parthenon, Dreams, The Rack, The Barrens at some point in the game.  Never did lose or contest the Crown, though I think it would have been easy for someone to do it with my predator’s Ventrue Headquarters help.

Taking from Goudie rather than Scythe meant coming in a guaranteed sixth, so no foreigners at the final table, also no anarchs – they fought amongst themselves quite a bit during the event.  Andy’s Blood Brothers won from holding on to the Crown, though it was finally contested at some point.

Jeff was a gracious host as we crashed at his place.

Not much else to mention, really.  The first game was like the SF storyline all over again where being under constant pressure meant doing nothing and where I couldn’t ever move combat cards because people weren’t into combat.  Overall, though, because I actually did storyline stuff, it was decent.  Laecanus made his bid for Baron of LA, took control of the Crypt’s Sons, had a The Portrait done of himself which looked a lot like Banjoko, bolted to his Failsafe when things turned awkward, and his team was the only one to gain influence in the Powerbase: [that is] LA.  That was really weird when you think about it as it was an obvious inclusion to any anarch deck, though I think the other anarch players having much more limited collections was why it wasn’t more popular.

I suppose some other stuff happened that was notable, though I don’t remember a lot of it.  Andy’s Blood Brothers led by Ilse did a variety of stuff, of course, including actions that required an archbishop that only could be done with the Crown.  Archons Investigated Basir (3 cap, bleeding for 5) and something like three others.  Think there were only two Camarilla decks.  Smiling Jack got up to 2 and 4 in my second round.  Other LA-related cards made appearances.

Nice Hat

I just took the multiple choice test for the current Magic designer intern exams.

http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/mm/114

Only 38 right, only maybe 2 I’d argue, so I guess it’s Sad Nature’s Loser* time for me.

* http://www.cracked.com/article_16054_6-endangered-species-that-arent-endangered-enough_p2.html

Anyway, I can’t bring up the issue that question 50 addresses enough when I talk about CCGs. Okay, spoiler for those who want to take the test, so stop reading long enough to do that.

While wasting spoiler space, I can talk about my weekend. Drove an hour, half of that on a single lane road I’ve never been on before, driving so fast I couldn’t see the turnouts in time to get out of the way of the person tailgating me, to get out to P-town for some 4cl V:TES. Two fortitude decks and Enkidu. Not being the type to play nothing but combat cards, I eventually get beaten down. Four player game sees swinginess as I go from just having Elimelech and no ability to afford a second dude, to having Luna, Zelios, and a Graverobbed Aleph after my prey spends down way too low, only to get ground out because I choke on bleed bounce. Saturday, drive about 45 minutes, supposed to play Conan and, maybe run Solomon Kane, ends up turning into just running SK. Sunday, drive about an hour (in the rain), rushing around to finalize my San Francisco storyline decks and then have awful games dominated by bleed decks, mostly packing huge quantities of bounce. I keep imagining some sort of interesting metagame will develop in storyline events, when really, I should never run less than two Archon Investigations in any deck.

So, CCG complexity. This cropped up in the SF storyline, unsurprisingly. One of the reasons design is hard is because of the quest for elegance. Many folks can design cards. But, one of the most common mistakes I’ve seen and had to suffer through with various CCGs where the cards made it to print is overly complicated text, usually because the CCGs I play are based on some material where the designer is trying to capture the flavor of something momentous – major character, unique item, major event, etc.

Take a look at Jyhad/V:TES cards. Yes, there are painful cards. Rotschreck was a disaster to understand. Then, there are cards that don’t have complex text, necessarily, but have complex interactions. But, take a look at Undead Strength, Enhanced Senses, Lost in Crowds, Boxed In, The Barrens, and on and on and on. The cards have straightforward text. Now, is Undead Strength elegant? I would tend to call it simple. The Barrens, on the other hand, is elegant. People use The Barrens wrong all of the time, so it’s clearly a skill card. It’s a terrible beginner’s card because newbs are more likely to think discarding is bad and just grossly undervalue the ability. In fact, my nemesis Sunday was a Dom/Obf deck that was pretty much just bleed, stealth, wake, bounce. It put The Barrens in play with the storyline rule for the Old Guard faction, and the player almost never used it, not even when I stole it. … maybe he had the goods all of the time.

Elegance is not about card simplicity, it’s about text simplicity. The goal should always be to only put in as much text as needed for the card to serve its purpose. This, of course, assumes the designers know what the purpose of the card is, but that’s a separate problem that CCGs tend to have.

Nor, is elegance about reducing text. Note that the use of keywords is not about reducing text. With Magic, yes, sometimes it occurs. But, if you read Rosewater’s articles enough, you know that the benefits of keywording abilities is not in text reduction – typically, Magic will explain what a keyword does on the card, increasing the amount of text. Keywords are to have consistency, to have something that you can reference, to have something you can easily modify, etc. In other words, they produce elegance as they make information to the players more digestible.

The downside of text complexity is that CCGs start complicated and grow exponentially more complicated as more cards are created and played. In my second round game Sunday, three of us lost 5 pool from Ancient Influence because we forgot that our Favor cards were tapped (can’t gain pool while they are tapped is a basic storyline special rule). The game state was not simple, the number of cards in play was large, and we were working under a rule we weren’t used to playing with.

What makes for a classic game? Chess – elegant (boring, but elegant). Go – elegant. Monopoly – not remotely elegant, but, then, it’s only argument for being classic is that it sells a lot and sees a lot of play (often incorrect play). Texas Hold’em is elegant; 5 card draw, deuces wild, not; 7 stud Baseball, not. Bridge – elegant. But, what about CCGs? Can Magic, for instance, ever be a classic game? Is Magic, overall, elegant?

Magic has such a major advantage over other CCGs because the basics of the game aren’t that complex, in fact fairly simple for a CCG. Whereas, the game becomes the most complex at its deepest levels. Now, a lot of that complexity is not from rules but from card text and large card pools. Though, the rules are actually extremely complex and pretty much incomprehensible before the 6th Edition cleanup of timing.

I can’t really see any CCG being elegant in a general sense, however, that just means that it’s essential to keep the complexity level under control. Chess can have Nightmare Chess added to it or be like Navia Dratp and people will still get it. I just gave up on trying to explain how the Babylon 5 CCG worked after around the Severed Dreams expansion. V:TES demoing? Can’t stand it. Pretty much at any point where the typical card has seven lines of text, the game has failed as a product marketable to the masses.

What’s so crazy about CCG design is that there are pretty much an infinite number of elegant cards. V:TES has no Celerity card that’s just maneuver at one level and dodge at another. Of course, there’s also a near infinite number of elegant cards that shouldn’t get made, whether for power reasons or because many variations on the same thing is deadly dull or because the effects simply aren’t needed. But, when talking about two nigh infinities, that still leaves no end to the number of elegant cards that could be made.

Not every card needs to be elegant. Some level of dense card text is not unreasonable. Spell of Life’s failure is not that it has a bunch of text and is complex in how it works; what makes it a failure is that it has draft text. Not because the draft text is broken, which it is, but because there was simply no reason to add draft text to a card that dense and that complicated. Most CCGs try to capture a specific flavor and sometimes the only way to do that well is to have some sort of unusual (therefore, probably complex) text.

Anyway, one can only hope that more designers and developers adopt a philosophy that card elegance matters. While the only CCG I play more than once in a blue moon is out of print, there’s still things like our storyline events where it would have been better if there was more editing of the storyline cards so that they weren’t overwhelming.

Standing In Line

Such a long time between posts … due to a rather convenient problem – gaming too much to spend time analyzing gaming.

Battle Lines – http://white-wolf.com/vtes/index.php?articleid=1190

It’s the last day of possible events, but really, they likely were all done over the weekend.  Having played in four of them, I have some thoughts.  Being an analyst, aka critic, aka negative nabob, I’ll start with my biggest criticisms.

#1  Lilith’s Blessing

I’m so totally in favor of Lilith that if the mechanics were the other way around I’d still be Bahari.  Yet, either way, it’s not even so much the massive disparity in the usefulness of LB vs. G&M, but just how annoying LB makes games.  The amount of bloat in the format was out of control.  Any deck with any sort of pool defense or other bloat was virtually impossible to oust.  I frustrated one predator in a game where I basically had no chance of ousting my prey because of his bloat by gaining “50″ pool. 

Well, what about combat to counteract bloat?  Well, what do we know about the efficacy of combat?

The first stage metagame answer was a swath of Suddens and Washes.  I played a deck with 7 of the former and 1 of the latter (and Ashur Tablets) and couldn’t stop prey from gaining pool to the point of inoustability.

It is, of course, a feature of our meta that ousting is less common than most places in the world, so the effect is more sensitive ’round here, but in minimal paying attention to what others encountered, I found similar issues elsewhere.

#2  Tupdogs

Speaking of combat.  All evidence suggests that I play Tupdogs in decks more than most other playgroups combined, even considering that I don’t actually play Tupdog decks.  I’m not bitter because one of the events saw a Tupdog deck make every game pointless.  Tupdogs begin life broken.  Why make them more broken?  Or, put another way, why force people to metagame against something unfun and something easily played in a non-storyline environment?  Sure, fine, remove negative traits of the slave rule, but be cognizant that there are Gargoyles and then there are Tupdogs.

#3  How I Won With Dominate And Stealth

This is not a rant against Kiasyd.  I actually always liked Kiasyd, more so in the RPG where the real Kiasyd didn’t have Dominate.  It’s a criticism of the banal.  Different players have different interests, and you can’t legislate fun.  Yet, it’s always the warped metagames of the storylines that manage to elicit some smidgen of enthusiasm from me.  Why play something you can play in a non-storyline environment?

Nor am I ranting about stealth bleed.  On mostly a tangent, I am amazed at how much hate there is for stealth bleed.  I actually like playing games when I play games, even if they are short.  Stealth bleed allows that where the rush decks and wall decks of the world must inherently prevent people from playing.

I guess I’m ranting about making the meta far less interesting than it should be.  This is a theme with all of these criticisms – the metagame was blown apart but coalesced too much around “can I deal with Tupdogs?”, “oh, right, Tinker Bell is part of this magical world”, “so, gain another 8 pool?”, etc.

Anyway, win with Kiasyd?  Sure, whatever.  But, let’s do something different.  Kiasyd Dauntain Black Magician bleed/rush should be all the rage, right?

Joys:

#1  Something Different

Every deck at the table is a bloodlines deck.  People who may have never played a bloodline, certainly haven’t played them to any significant degree, all of the sudden playing an interesting deck.  Far better than any of the other storylines, this storyline forced variation.

#2  Brilliance Is The Absence Of Insipidiosity

We have the grouping rule, long live the grouping rule – don’t care enough to care.  Scarce is already defined by the grouping rule, what exactly is gained by making the game less fun?

Oh, look, that Horde deck works pretty darn respectably.  Eh.  Oh, look, that Great Beast deck can be even more pool-wise.  Eh.  Oh, look, someone might actually play midcap Baali.  Holy … er … Unholy Moley.  Not that I was going to ever play Baali when there was, like, scarce clans to play, but it’s the principle of the thang.

It’s sad that I only played in four events.  I never got around to a Gargoyle deck, you know, with slaves who don’t pay one less for Visceratika cards.

#3  …

There really should be a number three, but I think 1 and 2 pretty well cover the best things about the event.  Maybe 3 can be that the game is still in good enough shape to even have such an event.

Eden Storyline – Santa Clara

Yesterday, we had our first Eden’s Legacy event – http://white-wolf.com/vtes/index.php?articleid=1157.  I was quite pleased.

First, having five players from Castro Valley/Hayward show up was huge, not just for the numbers but for the refreshing attitude that tournaments are a good thing, an opportunity to be part of a larger community of players.

Second, people metagamed for the storyline rules.  Far too often, I see players just bring some normal deck and put no thought into how to leverage the special rules to one’s best advantage.  What a wasted opportunity to think about the game considering that people don’t really need to metagame in standard constructed play around here.

I hear the !Brujah are doing well and they certainly need help, not that winning storylines really means jack, but we can pretend it does.  So, I considered playing them, but with a bloodlines set coming out soon, I also thought about reminding people that bloodlines are functional currently (with a few exceptions) and I’m always for promoting the more obscure clans.

I ended up building three decks before the tournament.  One was to lend out, so I didn’t stretch very far – Kiasyd.  One was insanity – Abomination rush.  The one I ended up playing was a ripoff of a Harbingers deck I played in this year’s qualifier.  The one that got borrowed was the Abomination deck and somehow he got a VP.

There were several features of this event I focused on, but one that had a lot of resonance was bleed reduction.  I don’t play bleed reduction much.  I don’t think it’s that good since it doesn’t oust my prey like bleed bounce does.  I also just have a general aversion to strategies that make games last longer since we have such a problem with games timing out.  The beauty of bleed bounce is that it doesn’t preserve the amount of blood in the game.  Specifically to metagame to these rules, three of the four Motivations require having the edge, so not letting the edge go to one’s predator is actually important.

For the Kiasyd deck, that was easily achieved with Folderol.  It’s too bad it didn’t see play as it would have been interesting to see how many Folderols went crosstable.  For the Harbingers’ deck, it meant a bunch of Telepathic Counters and Ancestor’s Insights …

… So, Laibon get a searching mechanic and searching is broken, so it would be kind of lame not to check out what it would mean to have easy search.  Top off with Motivated by Knowledge, yet another broken mechanic, and the synergy is all there.  Group 3/4 Harbingers have Laibon, two of three of those Laibon can play Ancestor’s Insight and TC for mucho bleed reduction.  Freak Drive is a natural complement to Perfectionist to maintain blood to burn for card draws while Mina’s special might go off.  While, Necromancy provides a means of recursing cards discarded in the pursuit of knowledge.

What was amazing, especially after playing a round, was how little people were interested in the Codex of the Edenic Groundskeepers.  I won off of the back of this one card, sweeping my first round game, coming back from 1 pool in my second, and getting the last two VPs in the finals because of numerous bleeds for 4 and 5.

Round 1:

Jeff (my Abomination deck) -> Ian -> Eric (Malk94) -> Andy (Guruhi rush)

With a ludicrous deck as my predator, I was never successfully bled the entire game by my predator.  With a huge table threat as my prey, Andy had no choice but to rush backwards all game.  What was amazing was how long it was before Eric started doing any pool damage.  A bit less pool and Andy would have been toast.  Instead, I got through Eric without having to expend too many resources and Heidelberging the Codex killed Andy and Jeff.

Round 2:

Brandyn (Lasombra bleed) -> Oliver (Lasombra vote) -> Brandon (Nos weenie Obf) -> Ian

This was a brutal game, especially for the typical NoCal environment where everyone would rather stop people from being ousted than oust folks.  Brandon hit on one of the ways I think the environment can be broken – weenies.  Oh wait, the normal game can be broken by that.  Well, he had Motivated by Jyhad to nearly double his bleed output.  Course, what he should have done was grab the Codex right away as that’s what I would build a weenie deck to do for this event.

Brandyn and Oliver contested a vampire for the second straight game, but it almost didn’t give me the table as I was being pounded.  On the other hand, I had the deck to deal with Brandon’s.  Bleed bounce wouldn’t have done much, but bleed reduction kept me alive.  What completed the keeping me alive was Oliver bouncing some bleeds into Brandon and then ousting him right before Brandon would oust me as I had burned through my reduction.  I dropped Brandyn with a Codex bleed on a Strange Day and the endgame was a tense affair with my finally being able to pay for Heidelberg and bleeding Oliver out with some bleeds of 2 and ending the game with zero blood on my four vampires.

This game really brought out how annoying Motivated by Knowledge is.  Oliver had gone with Presence for Voter Cap to pay for card drawing.  Fortunately for me, he also tried to shoehorn in Laibon, so his vampires weren’t natively Presencetastic.  Still, I couldn’t stop the votes, so he had a blood engine to dig for useful cards, which meant there was rarely a chance I wasn’t going to run into a wake for my bleeds at negative stealth.

Finals:

Eric -> Grant? (Giovanni bleed) -> Gerentt (Malk wall) -> Ian -> (Oliver)

Gerentt’s deck was truly a wall.  Oliver questioned my sitting in front of it, but he didn’t realize what a huge threat Eric was.  There were only two spots, in front of a wall that would mess with my tooling or in front of the only vote deck and behind the bleedmonster which would likely get a lot of pool before I’d get help from the table.  Gerentt never bled me, which was kind of annoying as I was choking on Eyes of Argus, TC, and TM.  I was afraid to discard bleed defense in case Eric’s bleeds or Grant’s got bounced around the table, but I don’t think Gerentt ever bounced a bleed.

I was yet again able to get the Codex, though Oliver at least argued that it was a bad idea.  Not sure why he cared so much since he had bounce.  I didn’t care if my predator got it, my prey got it, or my grandpredator (who I urged to take it) got it.  Eric getting it would have likely given him the game.  So, somebody needed to care.  I almost took it with a first turn Tupdog just to take it out of the game, but I figured I had a decent shot at it and my predator or grandpredator having it would have helped through bounce while my prey having it would have gotten the threat off the table.

As it was, Eric reasonably quickly got to the point of blowing his prey off the table, but as I hoped going into the finals, ran into the wall and sputtered while also keeping my predator busy enough to not block my actions.  This was hot for Oliver who had vote lock and a table without Delaying Tactics.  I went forward out of not drawing any toolup actions and Eric’s pool evaporated between Oliver and my bounced bleeds.  With Eric gone, Oliver was in a sick position for timing the game out.  Going forward, the wall stood fast and beat his guys down with Sniper Rifle.  Along with losing blood in combat, blood wasn’t coming back as none of Oliver’s vampires started with Presence, which was huge for preventing “I draw cards until I win.”  I kept swinging on Oliver, time was growing shorter, Gerentt couldn’t draw enough wakes to stay in the game.  Fortunately, there was still just enough time left as I figured Oliver couldn’t do much in his depleted state as his library was getting thin, partially from Zygodat milling, and his blood was thin, plus he couldn’t bounce in the endgame and had no intercept to stop mundane bleeds.  With about 5 minutes left, I finally ousted him.

Let me step aside and talk about winning since I never seem to get a chance to accurately explain my take on it.  Above, I say I was quite pleased and lots of folks would figure it was because I won.  And, yes, winning had something to do with it.  But, as I try to explain to people for why I could never be a great player of a competitive game, winning and losing, in and of themselves, do nothing for me.  Pleasure out of winning for me is derived from pleasure overcoming challenges.  It could be the deckbuilding challenge.  It could be the challenge of playing well.  It could be winning when winning is unlikely due to a sheer stubbornness to keep trying to win or, at least, not get ousted.  I don’t know that I played particularly well, oddly, my games, even with Motivated by Knowledge, weren’t that complicated for me most of the time.  I did survive and go on to victory in the second round through tight play, I guess.  The deckbuilding challenge was playing Harbingers and metagaming properly to the rules and what I expected out of opponents.  But, mostly, it was winning close games.  Winning easily is a complete bore, much like watching sporting events that are close are so much more entertaining than ones that aren’t.  On the other hand, if I’m going to lose, I’d rather get blown out than lose a game I think I can win.

I want to run another storyline.  I think there’s a lot of metagaming possibilities without too much obnoxious stuff to deal with.  I have some ideas for !Brujah decks, so maybe I’ll actually go through with that.  Still, really trying to abuse either the Laibon search of the Knowledge draw mechanics might be interesting.  Alternatively, blood denial might be cute in this format to screw with the Knowledge seekers.