Uh. I'm confused here. If you are pinned, you are not free to pursue a mirror strategy. You start each turn with no cards in hand. Are we using the same meaning of pin here?
Okay, so we're both setting up the same Vampire pin. You get me first, and take a thousand turns of me not being able to have a hand, and get so many points. Eventually, you start doing other stuff to end the game, but look! I still have the pin in my deck, and now you have no hand for TWO thousand turns. It's not like Masquerade pins where getting the pin first means you make the other guy lose the cards.
I thought about this. For this to be an issue, the vampire stack would have to not be out yet, which is unlikely. In the event that there are still vampire cards left and both players are capable of full pins, one player would have to go from a fully pinned state, then set up a pin in a partially pinned state as the first pinning player dilutes his deck. He would have to do this before the first player to pin can buy out what few Vampires are left, or in worst case scenario 8 estates (which he can trash to reduce the dilution, otherwise there's little way he could have been pinning in the first place.) If the first pinning player can buy 8 2$ cards before the guy with 2-3 card hands can fully pin him, he still wins, because he has a thousand turns to buy out the coppers and curses before he loses his VP lead.
I might test out to be wrong and you might test out to be right.
Bishop in any game can have the monument problem - you somehow get down to a deck that is only a bishop, you basically already do have the monument problem.
Ah, point. Didn't think of that. By the way, great to see you back in the forums.
It's unacceptably long. That's not really different from infinite in terms of the impact on casual play.
It kind of is, although to a point it's nitpicky of me to say so: If you have a degenerate Bishop game where all players find themselves trashing Golds every turn, it's possible for the players to come to the mutual agreement, "Well, obviously we're going to trash these Golds till the pile depletes, so let's just count how many Golds are left, give ourselves the right number of tokens, and play on from there." I'm not saying that's an acceptable game state, but I am saying that if a card that allows an "unacceptably long" game has one strike against it, a card that allows an "infinitely long" game has a tangibly greater strike against it. In both cases, the relative severity of those two situations must be multiplied by the risk that that situation might occur. Then see if that result exceeds some threshold of acceptability.
The reason I objected to your original post is that you seemed to be implicitly equating the severity of a long Bishop-Golds game with the severity of an infinite Vampire game, AND equating the risk of falling into a degenerate Bishop game with the risk of falling into a degenerate Vampire game. If I'm wrong about that, I'll withdraw from this debate. But in addressing the technicality that Bishop can result in a degenerate game and not the qualities of the Vampire card that make it a greater risk for a worse degenerate state, the implication that Vampire should be unassailable on these grounds seemed clear to me.
The severity of a Gold trashing mirror = the severity of a hard Vampire pin. In both cases, shortcuts/resignation can solve the problem.
The severity of a Monument loop mirror = the severity of a Vampire halfpin. In both cases, both players will decline to break the loop, the only reasonable conclusion is a draw, and at a casual level that wasn't very fun and at a tournament level that was not convenient.
I probably was equating bishops to halfpins at one point, if only because annoying people on isotropic won't concede to my double gold trashing Bishops in a timely manner. But yeah, both cases vampire presents are things official cards also do, though the official cards do them less. And vampire probably does them too much.
