[Submission] Parry

Lech wrote: Parry
Combat/Reflex
Burn Option
Require a melee weapon.
[Combat] Prevent up to 3 damage from the opposing minion melee weapon or hand strike. If this minion have celerity, may prevent from others weapons too.
[Reflex] Cancel grapple card as is played.

Pepper a deck with a few of these and some Weighted Walking Sticks (which you will probably never strike with, so they're essentially permanent), and you now have a handy dandy way of playing Majesty when faced with Grapples, while also getting some mild defence from hand damage, aggro-poke etc. Not 100% sure that this would boost melee weapons for their own sake.

I think it potentially does a lot of damage to Immortal Grapple decks, and not in a way that makes melee weapons better for their own sake.

Lech wrote: Yeah, it's tutor card, so what ? There are no melee weapons that deal agg damage with such cost so getting

Wooden Stake can, and the required extra damage isn't that hard to find - +strength on a minion, Target Wotsit, Undead Strength (obf/pot for the Nosferatu) etc.

That may be fine balance-wise, overall - but it's worth knowing what we're doing before we do it.

Good ideas, thanks guys!

Design team are you listening?

jamesatzephyr wrote: Pepper a deck with a few of these and some Weighted Walking Sticks (which you will probably never strike with, so they're essentially permanent), and you now have a handy dandy way of playing Majesty when faced with Grapples, while also getting some mild defence from hand damage, aggro-poke etc. Not 100% sure that this would boost melee weapons for their own sake.

I think it potentially does a lot of damage to Immortal Grapple decks, and not in a way that makes melee weapons better for their own sake.

To make it reasonable, PRE weenies would have to include that 5 WWS, then few those and then Majesties. Doable, but worth the investment ? Only when facing grapple-heavy meta. Otherwise, you'd rather just play majesty when you don't want be combaty.

I'm for Immoral Grapple hoser, this card ruined the game already.

jamesatzephyr wrote: Wooden Stake can, and the required extra damage isn't that hard to find - +strength on a minion, Target Wotsit, Undead Strength (obf/pot for the Nosferatu) etc.

That may be fine balance-wise, overall - but it's worth knowing what we're doing before we do it.

You can do it with concealed weapon nowadays (7-7) without obfuscate, because if you run stakes, you run a lot of them. This card is rather for deck that don't use many melee weapons,like 5 those and 3-4 weapons to fish for

Lech wrote: To make it reasonable, PRE weenies would have to include that 5 WWS, then few those and then Majesties. Doable, but worth the investment ? Only when facing grapple-heavy meta. Otherwise, you'd rather just play majesty when you don't want be combaty.

I was thinking less of the PRE weenies, and more of decks like large-ish VEntrue (Law Firm, Arika etc.) that you sometimes see including a clutch of Fortitude and a clutch of Majesty/other S:CE. Because you get a little reasonably-weak-but-okay prevent from Parry, you can probably swap out a little of the Fortitude. Then because of the Fortitude they have, they can - and often do - multi-act a fair amount, meaning they cycle cards reasonably quickly.

You might also reasonably do something similar with some Protean/Gangrel decks, where you see a fair amount of Earth Meld/Form of Mist but also a bunch of Protean/Fortitude prevent.

I'm not suggesting that you'd be able to do this all game, every combat - that would likely be silly - but even two or three foiled combats across the game could be quite a swing in favour of the Ventrue deck, compared to what currently happens.

Lech wrote: I'm for Immoral Grapple hoser, this card ruined the game already.

Ruined? Really? Yes, it can make a variety of situations un-fun, but decks being able to play Earth Meld and Majesty over and over is also seriously un-fun. Immortal Grapple's been in the game for its entire life (and hasn't shifted text significantly), and was exploited fairly early on to combat Majesty, and reprinted regularly in non-rare slots to facilitate that - so I can't quite square the game having been ruined for its entire life against reality.

Lech wrote: You can do it with concealed weapon nowadays (7-7) without obfuscate, because if you run stakes, you run a lot of them. This card is rather for deck that don't use many melee weapons,like 5 those and 3-4 weapons to fish for

As you say, you can do that if you want, but it uses up a lot of card slots. Being able to employ a similar strategy with a bunch fewer slots used (because of the tutoring) is typically a boost in power for a deck - so people may want to think more carefully about it.