Theorycrafting: What would be the effects of banning Govern

So, after our weekly games in Stockholm we go drink beers and theorycraft. This weeks topic was, What would be the effect to the game if Govern the Unaligned was banned? There would still be Scouting mission to replace it, but ousting power of dominate decks would be lessened, also early game would be hampered with slower influencing of minions and increased investments in minions, deflection would still be there but less since bleeds are less powerful. Read more on the discussion here: stockholmjyhad.blogspot.se/2012/05/pub-talks.html And I'm interested in what the community would think the effects would be. Ivan - Maybe this?

I don't think it would make a huge difference. Sure, ousting would be a bit slower, but Dominate (SM+Cond.) would still have the Edge over Dementation (KS+EoC). And if your keen on bleeding you still change some of the Governs to Slaughtering the Herd instead of Scouting Mission (losing some flexibilty in the process). Crypt acceleration would be a bit slowed down, but only by a small bit. And in terms of bloating, it does only make a marginal difference. Scouting Mission let's you keep a blood (which might be preferable in the mid-/end-game), and more often than not you can only transfer back one blood anyhow. Banning Deflection would be an entirely different matter, since the replacement cards don't let you stay untapped and is restricted to superior DOM and/or has some restriction (only against younger vampires).

Dominate would lack the +2bleed action for 1 blood, which presence has a plethora of. While presence lacks a conditioning that isn't clan based it would be more in line with presence bleed decks as they look now, they bleed for 5 which feels alot less than 6 for some reason. Also adding an extra actiontype to bleed harder with would clog some of the streamlining of current builds. While small changes can feel inconsequential I'm considering building a dominate bleed deck without Govern just to get a feel for it. How would lack of Govern effect the Stickmen archetype? govern down and bringing up a 7-cap (Blackhorse Tanner) as a second vampire might not be an option anymore because of the lack of transfers. Ivan - Maybe this?

I rank Govern the best card of the game. It works as amazing bleed card, "building up" card, crypt influence speeding card and even as a bloat card. Banning it would make dominate quite much weaker. It would be replaced by Scouting Mission but Enchant Kindred is played actually surprising rarely in many copies. I agree with extrala that Deflection is a different story. I rate that card the best defense card in the game and it goes also to my top 5 best cards.

> Myrdin wrote: > How would lack of Govern effect the Stickmen archetype? govern down and bringing up a 7-cap (Blackhorse Tanner) as a second vampire might not be an option anymore because of the lack of transfers. > That only happens if you start with 0 blood on Blackhorse Tanner at the start of your turn. If you know you play only Scouting Mission, you will use an extra transfer (if you have it) to put it on Blackhorse in the round before. So again, yes there are situations where crypt acc. is slowed downed, but I doubt this will significantly hamper decks like stickmen.

TWDA Entries since April 1, 2010 (after HttB): TOTAL: 473 Deflection: 172 Conditioning: 128 Govern the Unaligned: 125 Deflection & Conditioning: 114 Deflection & Govern the Unaligned: 111 Conditioning & Govern the Unaligned: 103 Murmur of the False Will: 24 Redirection: 21 Scouting Mission: 19 Threats: 13 Mind Rape: 12 Slaughtering the Herd: 7 This is consistent with my other data mining based on post-KoT TWDs. Govern the Unaligned is a great card, but removing it from the game would not have a huge impact. People play with Dominate for bounce first and foremost. The huge dropoff in number of TWDs with Deflection & something else demonstrates this very clearly. When you are anvil, be patient; when a hammer, strike. pckvtes.wordpress.com @pckvtes

If Govern were banned, every deck that doesn't use Govern would obviously be the same. Every deck that uses Govern would be less good, based on the assumptions that a) Govern the Unaligned is one of the best cards in the game and b) it is put in the deck for a reason (the former being quite a good reason). Scouting Mission just isn't as good a card. It typically only sees play in decks that want to use both Govern and Scouting at superior with an untap in between. Actually I think the gap between Govern and Scouting sets kind of a bad precedent in card design. One extra blood off a vampire gives you an extra pool damage to your prey or one extra pool down. Now who wouldn't pay that? What about a 3 cost card that gives you 5 down or 5 forward? Balanced? I don't think so. A more interesting question might be what if Govern had never been born at all? Govern makes 3 down the gold standard for acceleration and 3 forward the gold standard for bleeding with a card. How different would the game be if Govern had never existed? Josh Duffin explored some of these kinds of questions a few years ago: groups.google.com/d/msg/rec.games.trading-cards.jyhad/13ze5eQ4H4k/aJpsxbMK0KgJ

Removing a good discipline's best card(s) is not a good way to do balancing, if that's the point. A more cautious and likely more functional approach would be to do small incremental changes, i.e. removing the good-but-not-best cards and see how it affects the game. Seeing how GTU or deflections are likely the most common discipline cards in the game, they have innumerable interactions in VTES games. It would be completely impossible to determine what removing a card like that would do to the game (except, possibly, the result that DOM would be less good). If you want dominate less good I would recommend removing the less prevalent cards, say obedience, seduction or bonding, and see how that works out. I, for one, do not agree that removing GTU and using scouting mission would be "almost the same". One transfer is quite regularly the tipping point between one extra action or not, which in turn can mean a huge difference. Four sup GTU means four extra transfers and that's something that can quite easily win games. GTU is 50% more powerful than scouting mission, 50% is a lot. Adam Esbjörnsson, Prince of Örebro

> Jeff wrote: > This is consistent with my other data mining based on post-KoT TWDs. Govern the Unaligned is a great card, but removing it from the game would not have a huge impact. People play with Dominate for bounce first and foremost. The huge dropoff in number of TWDs with Deflection & something else demonstrates this very clearly. > This might be a problem of definition. What do you call "play Dominate"? 3 Keith Moody and 6 Deflection can be fit into pretty much any deck, but I wouldn't say that makes it a Dominate deck. Govern is not a card that can be splashed because it is not card efficient for bleed only (modifiers such as Conditioning are better) and the superior must be played by the bigger caps in the crypt. Also both Deflection and Conditioning provide most of their effect at whereas the power of Govern is its versatility that needs to be exploited. Your data pretty much show that is more played than , which is not surprising since => .

EDIT Boris the Blade already said almost everything I was gonna say. Just reason why Govern is not played more is because it truly shines with . When Deflection and Conditioning are good with also so they can go to more decks.

Hijecking the thread for just a second, though in a related extension of Jeffs point. > Jeff wrote: > TWDA Entries since April 1, 2010 (after HttB): > > TOTAL: 473 > Deflection: 172 > > ...People play with Dominate for bounce first and foremost. > I agree completely. I've seen tons of people staple [dom] on things like [CEL] guns just to Deflect. One discipline having transient bleed cards and bleed redirection was a design flaw, even without considering Deflection's ludicrous free "don't tap" clause at superior. As an aside 473 post HttB Decks 172 (36%) had Deflection 144 (30%) Telepathic Misdirection [Full disclosure] I didn't cut the comments in the search, so that number might be high if people included the full card name text as commentary. There were some decks that had copies of both, but I didn't try to count them. Regardless, "About 2/3's of tournament-winning decks redirect bleeds" seems like a reasonably accurate take-home message. I doubt losing GtA would significantly change the bounce dynamic......a bleed doesn't have to be "Arika Governs with Conditioning" to be worth redirecting.

> Non-existant user wrote: > What do you call "play Dominate"? 3 Keith Moody and 6 Deflection can be fit into pretty much any deck, but I wouldn't say that makes it a Dominate deck. Govern is not a card that can be splashed because it is not card efficient for bleed only (modifiers such as Conditioning are better) and the superior must be played by the bigger caps in the crypt. Also both Deflection and Conditioning provide most of their effect at whereas the power of Govern is its versatility that needs to be exploited. > > Your data pretty much show that is more played than , which is not surprising since => . > I 100% agree with your analysis. I think that your conclusion (people splash more than design for ) only reinforces the idea that banning Govern the Unaligned would not have a huge impact on the game. Scouting mission is a reasonable replacement for Dominate decks without Presence. Enchant Kindred will show up more in typical Ventrue Law Firm decks to provide an alternate route for acceleration. From Day 1, Dominate has always had the best actions, action modifiers, and reactions. The only way that discipline will ever be brought into line power wise (a debatable point) is if one of those three legs is completely taken out. I don't see it happening, though I don't really mind the discipline as it is. When you are anvil, be patient; when a hammer, strike. pckvtes.wordpress.com @pckvtes

If anything I'd say it might be worth testing how the game would play out if Govern, Enchant, Reunion Kamut and the like would start at 0 stealth instead of +1.

It is appropriate from a canon perspective that Dominate be the most powerful discipline in the game. The two Methuselahs in the Chicago by Night* books used Dominate as their principal tool to manipulate events around them, followed by Auspex. I know that the Dominate cards will never get rewritten, but I think the most appropriate way to have tempered the power of Dominate would have been to strictly enforce the limitation from the RPG that says Dominate may never be used on a lower-generation vampire (older vampire in VTES). Examples: Deflection would only be useable on allies and vampires of the same age or younger. Redirection and Seduction would affect allies, but their superior version would only include vampires of the same age, not any vampire. With the idea, any bleed action or bleed modifier with Dominate would have the clause "if more pool is burned during this action than the number of this vampire's capacity, ignore the difference". *(In case you haven't read one of the Chicago by Night books, it's like a game of VTES put into a narrative form for an RPG. Two Methuselahs, Helena and Menele, are in a jyahd against each other, each controlling other influential vampires using Dominate.)

IMHO, if we are picking a card to get banned, it would be Deflection. I can't really think of another card that deserves to either edited harshly or turned into recycled paper more. People graft or crypt-select secondary vampires specifically to access that card. If that isn't a sign its distorting the metagame (and has done for a LONG time) then I don't think anything could be considered to 'distort the metagame'. Retired Baron of Sydney, Australia, 418

With respect to your OP, on which I don't have a comment other than to agree with what Ralf said, I think that changing Deflection's and Govern's 1 to 1 would go a LONG way to bringing these cards' power level back into line with their peers. Kevin M., Prince of Las Vegas "Know your enemy and know yourself; in one-thousand battles you shall never be in peril." -- Sun Tzu, *The Art of War* "Contentment...Complacency...Catastrophe!" -- Joseph Chevalier Please visit VTESville daily! vtesville.myminicity.com/ Facebook: www.facebook.com/groups/129744447064017

> Myrdin wrote: > So, after our weekly games in Stockholm we go drink beers and theorycraft. > > This weeks topic was, What would be the effect to the game if Govern the Unaligned was banned? There would still be Scouting mission to replace it, but ousting power of dominate decks would be lessened, also early game would be hampered with slower influencing of minions and increased investments in minions, deflection would still be there but less since bleeds are less powerful. > I don't want slower games and lower ousting power, unless blood-to-pool cards (Minion Tap, Villein, Blood Doll, Vessel etc.) are also banned. And if you ban Govern, tables will be full of vote decks because KRC will become the replacing damaging card, or Presence deck because Legal Manipulation does bleed for 3. Prince of Paris, France Ratings Coordinator, Rules Director

I think we need to enable other things to be as good as Govern. Disabling things is bad design and makes games slower.

> johannes wrote: > I think we need to enable other things to be as good as Govern. Disabling things is bad design and makes games slower. > I agree with this, it´s probably the best way to go. But also the hardest. Deep Song comes to mind. Fleetness does not "My strategy? Luck is my strategy, of course."

I agree. Slowly introduce other cards on the level of Deep Song / Govern. Entracement strikes me as another comparable card - versatile as well as with some sort of outsting power.

If you want to slow down the power bleeding of dominate, especially weenies, then the best card to ban would be conditioning. There is still several alternatives to that (Bonding, Foreshadowing Destruction, Threats) so it wouldn't be too disabling overall but it would slow down those weenie bleed decks considerably.

Would an extra blood cost work towards balancing out Deflection? Inferior seems fine to me, but what if, say, it merely costed an extra blood at superior? Would that be enough?

> LunaSlave wrote: > Would an extra blood cost work towards balancing out Deflection? Inferior seems fine to me, but what if, say, it merely costed an extra blood at superior? Would that be enough? > I'm a bit curious about this. A lot of people think that the superior effect of deflection is great. It could be that my playgroup packs a lot of euro-stealth or tap out but the general consensus here is that AUS-bounce is better since it grants flexibility and 'you'll be tapped and need a wake regardless'. Lidingö Scourge

Same here. The reason Deflection sees so much play (especially when splashed in in a non deck) is its inferior, not the superior: it is the only unconstrained bounce playable at inferior.

True, I think my meta's just really heavily skewed toward big vamps, so we see a lot of it at superior here.