Up - that knocks out the Tremere, too.
...and I have fun every time.
More power to you. But you're missing out on the best parts of Jyhad.
Unlike any other card game, Jyhad has a balance between its many facets built right into the cards themselves.
Yes indeedy. That's why you don't need limits.
Each discipline, clan, etc, has its function, and when properly played, is niether more nor less powerful than any other.
If you play Jyhad as per its design, which includes access to and use of arbitrary numbers of cards. If you throw in extraneous restriction, that's no longer necessarily true, as demonstrated by the Malk deck winning Gencon.
This balance is due in large part to the number of "built in duplicates", or varied cards that have roughly the same effect. There are many different cards that give stealth, or intercept, or whatever.
Your whatever list would be very short. The only others are Fortitude prevent damage and Dominate +bleed. Incidentally, you'll note that the need for multiple stealth and intercept comes from the fact that you can only use one of each modifier per action. So to make +5 stealth possible, you need 5 different stealth cards.
Those effects that can be achieved by only one specific card are rarely needed more than three or four times in any game.
bwaahh!!! Next contestant, please? There are many, many, unduplicated (and inadequately substitutable) cards desperately needed in quantity:
Each skill is strong inone aspect of the game, and weak in others. To play protean for stealth (with a deck full of Earth Controls) is to play protean ineffectively.
Not necessarily. That would be an exotic use, but I imagine there's something to be done with it, and I'd like to see it. (Hmm. Gangrel/Ventrue Seductive Bleed - hey, you may have something there! Isn't it great to play a game where even relatively exotic concepts can make workable decks?)
If my deck features the dominate skill, I have many cards that can modify my bleed, and I shouldn't need more than four of any one of them.
Yes, you can bleed adequately with Dominate (albeit with a very boring and predictable cardset). But when all bleed decks must have Dominate, the game gets pretty stereotyped. A great joy of Jyhad is that almost every clan or basic clan combination can bleed, vote, or fight, and every clan or clan combination can defend itself against all three strategies. Hence you don't see much of the Magic phenomena "Oh, you're playing a weenie deck. I don't have a chance against that".
Every skill has been given its fair share of these "built in duplicates", and playing without limits defeats the balance that is so fundamentally a part of Jyhad's design.
Really? What are the Presence and Animalism duplicates?
A four card limit is not a problem. When the balance that is part of Jyhad has been established, so many more options for style of play will be open to you, and each will have an equal chance of succeeding. Your games will become more interesting. You will build decks you never dared before. You will have more fun.
Jyhad has three basic strategies - bleed, combat, and vote. Since bleed doesn't require cards but the others do, with tight card limits, bleed becomes the only strategy. Likewise, of the three bleed tactics, Stealth and Tap require cards, so only Bruise, with combat equipment (read guns, read slow) remains. While my group had 4-card limits, we were eventually forced to bar Malk decks (they always won, unless the whole table ganged up), and that's exactly what the game degenerated into - lots of slow Bruise and Bleed decks.
By contrast, without limits, the game explodes into a kaleidoscopic variety of strategies and tactics. In my Strategies and Clans article I outlined 20 fundamentally different decks (none required lots of rares, natch). There are many more; I guesstimate just under 100 fundamentally different decks. Games go faster without limits, too.
In terms of fun, you haven't played CCGs until you've played CCGs without card limits. Card limits detract so from deckbuilding, deck tweaking, and (in Jyhad) strategy that even games that are broken without limits (Magic) are still a hoot played without limits. When the game works without limits, you really get to see the real fun of a CCG - trading, playing, and deckbuilding, all extensively, in a varied and ever-changing environment.