I’ve long been an advocate of trying to make powerful decks from a limited selection of cards. Such “commons” decks thwart the argument that a given CCG is merely the realm of the those who want to invest large amounts of money into it if they can do reasonably well against such decks. This was the reasoning behind my Barbed Wire decks that I made and still sell that mostly use Jyhad card stock.
Another VTES player, perhaps inspired by my Barbed Wire decks, made his own limited card selection challenge: Atom Weaver’s “Deck Bashing Challenge.” This challenge revolves around making as competitive a deck as possible by combining two starter decks of your choosing. While I like the idea, I do have a few reservations about the idea.
For one, starter decks in VTES are much like Magic: the Gathering and are set specific. If one were to find a great combination of starter decks to make an excellent general purpose deck, the starters you were using might be out of stock two years down the road and simply be of little use to the proposed newbie who needed it. Secondly, the starter decks all revolve around a certain strategy; by combining two of them, all you are really going to be able to do is refine that strategy a bit. The starter decks themselves are not toolboxy enough to really serve as the blank slate that I like as a deck constructor. Of course, one could combine two separate starters, but that runs into it’s own problems. Lastly, VTES is a game that has always favored certain strategies such as sneak and bleed or vote and cap. Starter decks, such as the Malkavian or Venture starters from Keepers of Tradition, will be quite competitive whereas working with the other starters from that set means that you will be building a deck that will simply never be as competitive. That’s just the nature of VTES and CCGs in general.
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Atom Weaver's Deck Bashing Challenge, Barbed Wire Project, Magic:, Vampire: the Eternal Struggle
aka Another Reason for a Unified Magic System
I’ve never liked the Arcane/Divine divide in magic in what is now Pathfinder. It worked OK in first first and second edition D&D because there were really only two spell-casting classes, but as third edition D&D attempted to take the classes and make them into certain metrics such as Base Attack Bonus and Reflex Save bonus that are additive, the divide became increasingly wonky. For one, now that we had a skill system that was the same across classes, you had skills for sneaking around. If you multiclassed between different classes, your ability to sneak was related to how many skill points you continued to put into your stealth skills. Thus skills of the traditional Thief class from prior editions of D&D were now nicely delineated and could be treated as discrete parts of a greater whole.
The skill system attempted to do that with magic by giving one Spellcraft skill that related to your ability to determine magic regardless of it’s source, but in so doing they created a wonky element to their magic system because the skill itself was not, in any way, related to the actual working of magic. One could be a completely proficient high level wizard or cleric and not have a single rank in Spellcraft. So it was really just a knowledge skill, but why have one knowledge skill that represents two very different forms of magic when you have other knowledge skills that represent the different between knowledge of local events and knowledge of which crest belongs to the local noble? Read the rest of this entry »
Arcana Unearthed, Craft Games, Fantasycraft, Monte Cooke, Pathfinder RPG, Use Magic Device
An interesting series of hands happened today that culminated in one of my opponents making a laydown I just couldn’t believe. The opponent in this question is another house player named Mary Sue. She doesn’t seem to have a lot of No Limit experience and, in my estimation, she tends to make a lot of bet sizing errors by making her average bet too large.
Here are a few hands we played together to give you some context for our big hand. All hands were played with a big blind of $5 and a small blind of $2. Hand 1: She started with about $150 and I had her covered. I raised it to $12 with AK off suit and she called out of the big blind. Flop comes KQ7 rainbow. She bets $30 into me and I call. Turn comes another spade to give two spades on the board and she goes all in for $100 more with JT of spades. I call and she misses her draw.
Hand #2: She and a couple of other players limp in. I’m on the button and limp with K4 of hearts. Flop comes Jh 10c 6h. Checks to her and she bets $60 into a $20 pot. I fold my hand, but she does get one caller. She puts him all in on the turn for another $100 and wins with a set of sixes.
Hand #3: She has about $600 in front of her and I have her covered. It folds down to her on the button and she raises it to $15. The small blind calls and I raise it to $45 with Ad Ks. Both players call. Flop comes: As 7s 5h. I check to her because I feel she tends to bet too large and will freely commit more chips to the pot than I would in the same round of betting and I want her to continue to make that error. Surprisingly, she bets a rather rational amount of $70 into a pot of $135. The small blind folds and I call.
The turn comes the 10h to make two separate flush draws on the board. I check and she tanks for a good minute. I’m trying to put her on a hand and her general uncertainty tells me she doesn’t have a monster. She bets $100 into a pot of $275, since that will leave her only with a pot sized bet of $350 or so, and since I feel I have the best hand, I put her all in. She thinks and thinks about this for a couple of minutes and then folds, face up, pocket 7s! She said she was sure I had a set of Aces or I wouldn’t have checked the flop with a flush draw out. All I had to say was, “Wow.”
