i'll take that chance....there are enough things like palace fountains, the conscriptor guys (and the bearer of the light) the streets, the 2 for 2s that I could in theory kneel one before every draw w/ val that i'll get more cards reduced then not.

yeah she can have a drawback, but I think its one that is pretty easy to not only get around, but to also ignore.

Yeah - but how bad would that suck to burn a Sea and Val into a refugee? I don't knwo if you can say that you can "ignore" the drawback. If you are building that weenie heavy deck you are talking about - it seems like you may well waste reducers adn resources.

I'll reserve judgmant until i see her in play. On one hand, she looks like pretty amazing draw for any house - on the other I think Ktom is right and a lot of stuff is going to get tossed into discard. Not sure yet - like dormouse, i really want to try to try her out before I get giddy.

Stag Lord said:

We've been playing with her since she got spoiled in this thread a couple weeks ago. She is truly sick. Combo her with Dolorous Edd (in a deck running several North Agendas) and things get crazy fast.

I think Val will be an all-star. I plan to run her in all my Targ decks, along with recursion. Players take a lot of risks just to draw one extra card in this game...for example, playing the summer agenda and/or OOH draw. Compared with those, I think Val's "downside" is extremely minor.

I look forward to trying her. Haven't received any of the CPs yet. Its hard to gauge on paper - i need to see her in action. Dobbler'ss points have me excited for this CP though - even if Val turns out to be mroe sizzle than steak.

Stag Lord said:

Since you are a Bara player, I think you will love her. First, she is draw, something severely lacking in Bara. Second, Bara has a ton of cards that can be flipped for free in the right builds (Bodyguards, Loyal Guards, Seat of Power, duplicates of in-play characters).

ktom said:

I think this is a key element that I missed so far. The fact that you HAVE to play the cards you draw if you can. That does limit her use more than anything else for me. Simply because you won't have the same control of your marshalling phase as before. If i draw a character that costs more gold, I'll be forced to play it, thus screwing up my plans for the rest of the marshalling phase. If I play what I want to play first and then use her, I might not have that much gold left and I'll end up discarding cards and reaching the draw cap. And I do agree that discarding a sea and praying for a higher cost character doesn't sound like a good plan. Maybe kneeling reducers such as fiefdoms or streets won't hurt as much if you're done with the rest of your marshalling.

I still think she's a solid character, just not as amazing as I thought her ability was.

One of the natural evolutions brought on by the meta-game adjusting to Fear of Winter, namely including more weenies in your deck and reducing your gold curve, serves to enables Val quite nicely. Hitting an event or character you can't play only hurts because you're not actually gaining board advantage but still filling up your draw cap, but the discarded cards don't actually end up hurting you unless you deck yourself before you've won, recursion or not. So in that sense, it is a no-brainer to try for it unless you have other draw on the board.

So while she certainly infuses an element of randomness to your marshalling phase, she can seriously speed up your deck, your hand advantage, and your board position, not to mention synergize even further with certain decks as has been mentioned like Targ and NW. I've never regretted running her, even if she hits on only 1/3 chances, since in those cases it's one more card than I would have gotten without her, or the equivalent of the Summer agenda. Usually she's a lot more than that.

longclaw said:

I'm really not on board with that analysis. If she hits on 1/3 chances, sure that's 1 more card than you would have gotten without her, but 2 more cards you will never get (without recursion). At what point are you frustrated by the fact that your Red Vengeance and Blood for Blood are in the discard pile instead of being in your hand next round? I mean, if you could selectively thin your deck, that's one thing, but there are precious few effects that give you control over what is on the top of your deck at any given time.

Seriously, if an effect said "draw the top 3 cards of your deck; play one of those cards now and discard the other 2" what would you think of it? Your post says you would never regret running that effect.

She encourages you not to play with events. In a lot of ways, she encourages you not to play with attachments, either.

In the right deck, sure, she's a beast. But she is not universally useful or, by any means, something that should be considered a generic, neutral solution to draw in the majority of decks. She's going to be a key part of the decks she's in, and pretty much absent from everything else. I'm not saying she isn't a strong card. I'm just saying she's not something you put into any deck you have so that you can "reach your draw cap every round."

I should probably preface this by saying that I'm a little out of my element when it comes to throwing out numbers and probability, so if in doubt, defer to ktom, for those of you watching at home.

I felt the same way when I saw her, ktom, so I do know where you're coming from. However, I don't think we can play the "what if" game in this case. I could just as easily say, "What if she discards the next two cards which allows me to draw into my ( fill in the blank ) which really helps me win the game?" It's the same reasoning one might play CS Hound and not really worry about the consequences, because practically speaking, there are none if you don't deck yourself. You just draw different cards. In the 1/3 scenario, you'll see 2 more cards than you otherwise would have - just not those two particular cards. I would imagine in most cases, since card advantage is so good, the extra card you get to play will outweigh losing random cards which could have just as easily been at the bottom of your deck. As I said before though, her overall percentage is typically much higher than 1/3. Whether that's mainly because of the current meta-game full of weenies, I don't know. I also felt like Val would steer one away from events and attachments, and maybe that is going to be the case for those who like to play her, but I don't necessarily know that running some events and attachments should be a huge concern because of my reasoning above.

Now, if your deck is centered around a combo or really needs a certain card in a particular matchup, I agree with you. She becomes a calculated risk at that point, one which you'll simply avoid, either by not running her in the first case or not triggering her in the latter, so yeah, she's not the ultimate answer to neutral draw (which, depending on your perspective, is either a good thing or a bad thing).

ktom said:

Well, this is actually much worse than Val, since you can only ever play one of those and with Val, you may be able to play all three. If this effect were changed to "reveal" instead of draw, then we'd have something. ...Although three CS Barristan Selmys would be a must in that deck! But to answer your question, yeah, if the effect you describe were on a character or location, depending on its cost, I would certainly play it in a deck that was hard up for draw.

longclaw said:

Exactly, this is why a greyjoy mill deck is crap - that is unless you get more benefits from discarding (like Fishmonger square). There's no disadvantage from getting cards milled from the top of your deck. So while the GJ player happily mills away your deck, you can safely proceed to sodomize his units and board position.

For Val however, she doesn't discard random cards. She usually discard events and cards you can't pay for. So that changes the equation a bit.

I'm just curious how folks in the USA have been playing with these cards for a week or more when they aren't even released yet. FFG's site even says "available soon".

Do you guys have some sort of supplier from Europe? I know they tend to get cards earlier than us over here in the States.

They might just be using proxies for the new cards (to get an early start on preparation for GenCon).

Yep, we just use proxies. Soon after the card was spoiled on this thread, I went to my old WInter Edition cards and pulled several copies of Dalla. She has the same stats and traits as Val, so I simply use that.

As I said - I ahven't had ANy opporunity to play with her yet. all my comments are assumptions based on her stats and other folks' comments. I can see her as a good draw engine - biut in the rigth deck.

For instance: was thinking about this last night. she couldn't fit into my Greyjoy winter deck becuase although teh draw woul be nice - i have six to eight slots committed to surpsise events - Risen, Seductive, a couple of tohers - and it would cripple the deck if i couldn't get these off. But - as dobbler points out - she could go into my regionals deck today and make it degrees of magnitude more realible - i would just need to be careful about reducers and when to use them.

Oh, OK. I've never used proxies myself, but I guess that's one way to start using a spoiled card right away so one is ready to incorporate new cards into their decks upon release, and they are already play-tested by then.

Makes sense.

Yep, I have a Word document that makes nice little boxes that I put the text into, cut it up, and put it in sleeves w/ a card in the back. Presto!

To be honest, I rarely do it anymore - but it is close to GenCon and I am thinking of heading down to Mizzou next weekend.

on ccgarmory cp is finally available... next week i'll upload octg2 plugin

Out of curiosity, how is it that spoilers for this CP were known three weeks ago? They were posted June 15, and I've been salivating over them for weeks, but my local store probably won't have the cards until next week at the earliest. The anticipation is slowly killing me, I think.

jmccarthy said:

Lars said:

In fact lots of them were spoiled thx to regionals prizes... today I posted plugin of OCTG2 (I waited FFG official release, but since lots of shops have it both in europe and USA) I posted it today to help people preparing for Gencon.