Alternative Grouping Rules

LivesByProxy wrote: @skimflux: I was not suggesting we remove or change the Grouping Rule. I was suggesting there be additional Grouping Rules for the benefit of new and/or returning players. Maybe my suggestions could be tweaked, but the goal was to provide interesting alternative Crypt options, not make existing Crypts suboptimal.

New players would likely have to use Consecutive Pairs, but returning players could opt for Evens / Odds - you could've used your Group 2 and Group 4 vamps together albeit some restriction (like the number of copies of each individual vamp you could include.) Players like myself, who have mostly singles and two-of vampires, could use the All Numbers option. None of these should be strictly better than any other, only different.

The grouping rule is a restriction on legal crypts - adding more options is a change on those restrictions. If one of those additional options is strictly better than the existing ones, then the existing Crypts become suboptimal because there is now a better option. This could have a huge impact in the existing balance and it would probably reduce the number of competitive tournament decks.

The grouping rule was designed so that existing crypts at the time would remain optimal - it added new options in a controlled way, without removing existing ones.

Current cards are balanced on consecutive groups - most clans have a large group/small group pattern, where even numbers are the big group and odd numbers are small (for original Camarilla clans the pattern is reversed). This is why IMO your even/odd suggestion would be terrible for the existing balance - any change that allows for more than one odd or even group in the same crypt will severely change the existing balance, because there will be many more options for those crypts compared to current pairings.

So if you really want to try changing/adding to the grouping rule, I would sugest removing the consecutive numbers rule but keeping the odd-even pairing. Only a few new options appear under this rule: 1+4, 1+6, 2+5, and 3+6, and since the G1 and G6 groups are much smaller than the remaining groups some of these would not be very significant.

Because not all clans are present in all groups this is a very simplistic counting, but it should still be enough to give you a hint of how potentially balanced/unbalanced each pairing is:

Groups	Nr. of cards
1+2	520
2+3	661
3+4	695
4+5	660
5+6	302
Odd+even
1+4	554
1+6	196
2+5	626
3+6	337
All odd | all even
2+4+6	913
1+3+5	604

@skimflux: The odd-even pairing would be interesting.

@Timo:

But I don't see how it improves the game in any way...

Different crypt groupings could allow for new / fun / interesting combos and strategies?

Like ultra optimized AUS, DOM or ANI weenies? Yep, interesting strategies indeed.

Actually, looking at the odd / even groupings Skimflux listed, all those weenie strategies look comparable or worse.

Obviously(?) my desire is to enable mid-caps and larger vamps that previously couldn't be used together.

Look at single vampire crypts for weenie mono disciplines.