Point of View: 10 Things I Hate About Imbued

While I enjoyed playing and watching an Imbued deck when the VtES expansion "Nights of Reckoning" was fresh out the print machine, I now detest seeing an Imbued deck in a VtES game. You might ask "Why?" and I will give you 10 good reasons why I hate the Imbued:

1. Imbued decks slow down the game
• Explanation: This often not because the Imbued player himself how to play Imbued cards, but the other players are often not very accustomed to the Imbued specifics. So they need constantly to ask what a specific card does or need to examine the numerous cards the Imbued player controls.


2. Imbued do not interact well with other players, for example
• Explanation/Examples:
  
  • Imbued cannot rescue vampires from torpor.
  • Imbued cannot perform political actions, e.g. voting down an "Anarch Revolt" or removing "Year of Fortune".
  • They cannot remove cards like "Smiling Jack" or take control of "Powerbase: Montreal"


3. Other players do not interact well with Imbued.
• Explanation/Examples: This is not a problem with ally-based decks in general, since it usually affects only a portion of the controlled minions, but when cards don't affect all minions of a particular deck, this deficit matters.
  
  • You cannot move an incapitated Imbued to the ready region if you play a regular vampire based deck.
  • Several cards a regular vampired based deck features, simply don't work against allies/Imbued. E.g. "Obedience", "Seduction" or "Disarm" only work against vampires.


4. Imbued are (too) predictable.
   
• Explanation/Examples:
  
  • More often than not you can calculate how much stealth or intercept an Imbued will have, when looking at the cards on the table.
  • .. but it takes time and experience to calculate this quickly.


5. Imbued have an extra role when compared with other allies.
• Explanation/Examples:
  
  • An Imbued does not die when he lost his last life.
  • There are several ways of regaining life for an Imbued.
  • An Imbued is considerably harder to steal when protected by "React with Conviction".


6. Imbued have defacto-permanent resources, to which other decks have only very limited access to.
• Explanation: Each and every Imbued can easily have (semi-)permanent +1 stealth or +1 intercept by using "Second Sight" or +1 bleed or +1 strength by using "Strike with Conviction". Through the recursion of the Convictions in the untap phase (or other means), this is a defacto permanent effect.


7. The distinct feel of vampires & their clans is missing.
• Explanation: There are no clans, no bloodlines, only creeds. But still you don't play "Avengers" or "Judges" creeds, you just play "Imbued".


8. There's little to no variation in an Imbued crypt.
• Explanation: Due to small number of Imbued (20 in total), there are too few variations in the crypt. Each and every Imbued deck worth its salt includes "Travis 'Traveler72' Miller" and "Jennie 'Cassie247' Orne", but I have yet to see an Imbued deck that features "Pedro Cortez" or "Francois 'Warder' Loehr" or "Xian 'DziDzati55' Quan".


9. Imbued need two discard piles.
• Explanation: For ease of play, Imbued players need two ash heaps, one for the regular cards and one for Convictions, since they need to move back Convictions very frequently. Otherwise it just takes too much time for the Imbued player to sift through his ashheap each untap phase to search for Convictions.


10. The disabling Gehenna events are just too good for the Imbued (or too bad for the other players using regular vampire crypts).
• Explanation: The Imbued can efficiently use disabling Events which screw all vampired-based decks, but not the Imbued, especially "Blood Weakens", "Veil of Darkness", "Slow Withering" and "Wormwood" are greatly diminishing the play of players relying on a regular vampire crypt.

Luckily the Imbued got a little bit powered down with the ban of "Memories of Mortality" and even more important with the ban of "Edge Explosion". But still the main problems with the Imbued, comprehension and interaction as explained above exist.

Hopefully there will never be a (standalone) expansion (for Werewolves/Mages/Wraiths/Changelings) that introduces the same kind of mechanism set.

Point of View: Candidates for Card Bans 2009

After playing in the EC tournament (without much success though) I believe I've found some candidates which are in my humble opinion have a good chance of making it to the list of banned cards for the VtES tournament season 2009. The candidates of which I think one or two will be banned in 2009:

• The Unmasking
  
• Heart of Nizchetus
  
• Anthelios, the Red Star

What makes a card getting banned? The simple answer is the card is overpowered or, to use another commonly used term, broken .. but really means broken? The best explanation what defines a broken card (in any card game that uses individual deck building) I found on the internet is the following:

"A card can be considered as broken, when every deck (in a particular format) is either running the card, or is having to prepare to deal with the card."

Let's have a look at the three cards that I think have a rather high probablity of being banned next year. I am not advocating the ban actively, I merely observe that these cards fit the description or have led to severe abuse in the past.

• "Heart of Nizchetus"
  The "Heart of Cheating" (as it is called in some places) fits the first part of the above definition perfectly. It makes just any VtES deck better, so it's an auto-include in my humble opinion. There are three steps that lead to the "disaster" of being overpowered:
  
  • first drawing (up to) three cards,
    
  • then deciding which cards to keep,
    
  • and finally not wasting them by placing them under your library.
  And all this for one equip action (truly good when using "Magic of the Smith") and the expense of only one pool.
  Former Pro player and Magic the Gathering writer Zvi Mowshowitz has declared "Black Lotus" as the best artifact of all time, claiming every deck in the history of Magic is better with a "Black Lotus" in it. So you can rightfully say "Heart of Nizchetus" is the "Black Lotus" of VtES; although "Heart of Nizchetus" is not nearly as costly as "Black Lotus".
  


• "The Unmasking"
  This card fits the second part of the above definition for broken cards. When building any deck you always have to consider that there will be an "Unmasking" on the table. So you always need to include cards that either provide you with actions at +2 stealth (in total) or means to handle allies (i.e. kill or steal them). For example the Ventrue Law Firm" deck in its classic form is nearly unplayable in a major tournament, since it cannot overcome the +1 intercept on a regular basis. "Seduction" and "Dawn Operation" this decktype uses are also not applicable, since "Seduction" does not help against a horde of allies which all have +1 intercept, and "Dawn Operation" does not work at all against allies.
  
  Compare it with any other cards that gives permanent intercept. Either these cards
  
  • need to be tapped (e.g. the media locations) for use or
    
  • they are attached to a specific minion (e.g. "Sport Bike" or "Anima Gathering") or
    
  • if the cards also untaps/or let's you block as if untapped, they is either removed when the block fails or it costs a blood (e.g. "Eternal Vigilance" or "No Secrets from the Magji").
  
  "The Unmasking" is way more powerful than these cards:
  
  • it's not tapped for use,
    
  • it applies to all allies at the table,
    
  • it does not cost anything when played (neither pool nor any virtual cost like handsize reduction),
    
  • it does not cost anything used.
  
  
• "Anthelios, the Red Star"
  Another favourite during the EC 2008. Pack an "Anthelios" and a "Parthenon" or two and you have an powerful recursion engine. And a dreadful one too, you can recycle (and play later) a "Direct Intervention" each and every turn, or retrieve a "Toreador Grandball" that has just been removed and played it in the same turn. The problem with the card is that (together with the second master phase) it offers too easy and too powerful a recursion engine. The problem here is not "Direct Intervention" (or any other master card) that can be recycled, it is the card that powers the engine.
  

But maybe I am totally mistaken, and no card is banned in 2009, or maybe "Shoulder Drop".

Further readings

• The Top 50 Artifacts of All Time by Zvi Mowshowitz
  
• The Leader of the Banned by Michael G. Ryan
  
• Skullclamp, We Hardly Knew Ye by Aaron Forsythe