Harbingers of Skulls Strengths But Mostly Weaknesses

ICL wrote: The funny thing is that as much as ousting power is their problem, bleed boost is incredibly easy to find. Bleed equipment, bleed retainers, Computer Hacking, Leverage, Fiendish Tongue, Monkey Wrench, all options before you ever get to their disciplines, if not all in the same deck. Of course, they have an additional problem that, say, a clan with Obfuscate or Protean doesn't have, which is that they also aren't all that good at getting actions through. As has become noticed over time, Necromancy used to be an evasion discipline but doesn't really qualify as such anymore. Fine for inherently stealthy actions, fine with Dominate's support of Seduction/Bonding/whatever but hasn't kept up with the rise in intercept options, while Celerity and Thaumaturgy have closed the gap.

Necromancy has always been a problem. Recall that in Dark Sovereigns it had exactly one stealth card, strike: combat ends, and a bunch of awful other cards. The discipline effectively did nothing. Looking at the cards, I guess WotC intended for some Jar the Soul tap-and-bleed deck, but the card doesn't even appear in the TWDA! It wasn't until Final Nights that Shambling Hordes and Call of the Hungry Dead opened up viable deck types for the Giovanni, who can always fall back on Dominate to provide the ousting power and bleed defense.

So is Necromancy an "evasion" discipline? It's half evasion, half crazy actions that don't do much. Take a look at the list on secretlibrary and sort by card type:
21 actions (Most of them strange or terrible, one of them provides stealth and combat protection - Ex Nihilo)
8 action modifiers: 1 stealth, 1 block fails, 1 bleed modifier, 1 conditional stealth, 4 "other" (Shroudsight might be good though)
1 Shambling Hordes
8 combat cards: 2 avoidance, 2 unpreventable damage, 2 aggravated damage, 2 wtf

After shuffling through Necromancy cards, I see three possible way to give Herbinger an unique touch to harbinger :

* giving them a feasible option to burn vampires, so they can actually use all the card that key off burning another player vampire. Problem being that burning vampire is often either unplayable or too powerful, and in any case it's annoying to play against.

* giving them a card to burn a vampire in uncontrolled version that is considered burned from play (to play necromancy fancy stuff on it). There less potential annoyance for other player (not none, but if the card is well designed it could be bearable), and it can be a reasonably strong move by itself that give a lot of good thing to do with.

* giving them a free Freak drive for necromancy action, so that they can use all thoses way too much action-expensive necromancy card. Alternatively, do a second path for Harbinger that instead of lowering blood cost allow to untap after the first necromancy action.

Ohlmann wrote: After shuffling through Necromancy cards, I see three possible way to give Herbinger an unique touch to harbinger :

* giving them a feasible option to burn vampires, so they can actually use all the card that key off burning another player vampire. Problem being that burning vampire is often either unplayable or too powerful, and in any case it's annoying to play against.

* giving them a card to burn a vampire in uncontrolled version that is considered burned from play (to play necromancy fancy stuff on it). There less potential annoyance for other player (not none, but if the card is well designed it could be bearable), and it can be a reasonably strong move by itself that give a lot of good thing to do with.

It's funny you mention these two as I was commenting elsewhere about creating a card that reopened "since your last turn" targeting and then untapped you. It might reinvigorate those wacky NEC cards, or just end up wacky. But it's an interesting bit of kismet that the same design directions are bubbling up.

The other thing I think should be looked at is the sect or trait design templates for disciplines. Cards like Ancestor's Insight, or better yet Psychic Assault, show a way to create a discipline card while favoring an additional benefit to another group. That way aus/nec dual discipline templates are not the only design avenue.