Recruitment Exercise - Good for the Black Hand?

What identity did BH have before DM?

Art of Memory is recursion. Black Hand Ritual fends off Gehenna. Corporal Reservoir mostly got played with Descent into Darkness. Guarded Rubrics is significant bleed. Marijava Thuggee an Obfuscating, pingy ally. Ministry for intercept, though I've barely seen this played more than the virtually never seen Watch Commander. Reunion Kamut for uncontrolled action. Truth in Ink. Watchtower: The Wolves Feed for stealth bleed and annoyance combat. And, of course, a bunch of untappiness.

Where's the coherency there?

Sure, Guarded Rubrics works well with untapping, and it's a lot better to get bleeds through than not, so many successful BH decks already did stealth bleed with multiact uncontrolled stuff.

What would I see being BHy? Ministry seems BHy. The untap stuff is fine. Truth in Ink also has a touch of the togetherness I feel is thematic of BHness. Recruitment Exercise is reasonable "togetherness". Could it have been something else? Sure.

But, the call for doing more with combat runs into the fact that combat is such a bad way to win, which is not remotely BH specific, anymore than it's Assamite specific to where most successful Ass decks play up Obfuscate and bleeding to put counters on Alamut.

There are plenty of examples of deck elements not getting cards that help them do thematic things in a competitive environment. I'm not going to be bothered by this card, at least not to the level that I wonder where the relatively human friendly Camarilla keeps its ally cards or whatever.

I think it is a good card for black hand in that it makes me more likely to play them. Black hand can always use more utility cards.

I personally think that Lodin is quite an exceptional vampire. But the other two are fairly average sure.

Pure BlackHand crypt + Reunion Kamut/Recruitment Exercise means -when your vampires aren't torporized on the first few turns- that you won't need ANY disciplines at all (except for some inferior perhaps.

See M. Schumacher's BH-deck that won the Belgian NC a few weeks ago.
www.secretlibrary.info/index.php?deck=view&id=14494

you just rely on WT: the Wolves Feed (+1 stealth & 2R damage for BH-vampires) and the respective specials of the Vampires (Nicodemus's new hand, Sennadurek for the occasional untap+Deflection (the only discipline card in the entire deck!!!!) and the fact that RK & RE both lack 'younger' in their card text to move one or two blood to an uncontrolled -younger- vampire. 5-cap Banjoko as a Seraph is key on all levels. it's not really a fun deck to play against, trust me. three of four turns in the game (no more than 15 minutes in the game), you know you've either crushed the deck or it will crush everyone else with a much higher than normal degree of certainty. it's one of the most meta-game-changing decks of the last few years IMO (even on par with Girls) and we'll be seeing a lot more of it in the future even though the room for improvement is currently almost ridiculously small due to grouping/crypt limitations.

some Anti-BH-tech or specials would seem appropriate to be designed right about now .

porphyrion wrote: some Anti-BH-tech or specials would seem appropriate to be designed right about now .

Yeah, beacuase mid-high capacity black hand clan/discipline decks are soooooo powerful. NOT.

But back to the opening question, when i first seen the card i was thinking about how good it will be in nearly disciplineless black hand decks starring banjoko. And how unplayable it will be in say Black Hand lasombra starring Apius or BH Assamites g4-g5, as those don't really plan so many vampires in play in first place (especially if they want to do some combat).

Current black hand cards force meths to build mostly black hand crypts (with the exception of black hand emissary, with isn't good card to start with).

If game devs want to make black hand better for mixed black hand/regular sabbat crypts, there need to be incentive to do so. No other black hand (ok, i've heard you musta-useless-jib) even care if your other dudes are sabbat. They can be anything, even camarilla.

Example of such card is:

Black Hand Wake
Only usable by black hand vampire. Usual wake-effect for reacting bh OR give wake-effect to target other sabbat vampire.

It isn't card that bh need, just a template how a card can benefit mixed bh/regular sabbat crypts (mono bh crypts too, but not only).

Another template is

BH/Sabbat helper
Only usable by bh or sabbat vampire. Do stuff. Do more stuff if played by bh (or if you control bh or whatever).