Dominion Strategy Forum
Dominion => Variants and Fan Cards => Topic started by: Neirai the Forgiven on May 10, 2018, 09:27:08 am
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Officially announced on reddit, here's essentially a crosspost:
You feel like you’ve really got the hang of this Emperor thing. Your holdings reach out in all directions and cover the whole world. That’s the problem, really. You are running out of directions to conquest; north, west, south, east, and florst, you rule them all. You’ve tried conquering in other directions, too: widdershins, reverse widdershins -- but eventually you realize you’re just trying to conquer from yourself. You can’t really go up, either, but you’ve got top men working on that. So you’ve settled with going down. As soon as you started going down, you found riches, but you also found old things, things from a time before when someone else was also going down, apparently. But unlike whoever this was, you are still alive and that makes all the difference.
Antiquities is a 27-pile (plus a promo) fanspansion built and tested by me, with a ton of helpful feedback from this community. My gratitude for the feedback is immense. This would have not been worth landing without it, it was lame at the start.
You've all seen the WIP thread, so I'll skip to the fun part, card art reveals. This was done using Violet's card renderer, with art from Jan Boruta (https://janboruta.deviantart.com).
You can find all the arts at the other end of this link. (https://imgur.com/a/VicUEEF)
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Sweet art! Will the rulebook have boxart on the front too?
I don't like the "it" wording on Stronghold though, I think it should follow Hermit's wording rather than Harbinger's.
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Yes! Although I don't have that art yet.
Also, seriously check Jan's art out. You can see a sample on his deviantart site, but also by looking at any of JFD's Civilization VI and V mods. The dude needs more views.
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Shipwreck might have accountability issues. If the finding of a treasure isn't optional, then the person would have to reveal their entire discard to prove there's no treasure in it. And if they do find a card, they should reveal it before putting it on the bottom of the draw pile.
Magic deals with similar things; if a card lets you search your library for any card and put it in your hand, then generally you don't have to reveal that card, and it's normally not optional. But if a card lets you search for something specific, like a land, then it always has you reveal the card you found, and finding it is always optional.
Same with Moundbuilder Village... it doesn't have accountability for finding the highest-cost card.
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Shipwreck might have accountability issues. If the finding of a treasure isn't optional, then the person would have to reveal their entire discard to prove there's no treasure in it. And if they do find a card, they should reveal it before putting it on the bottom of the draw pile
...
Same with Moundbuilder Village... it doesn't have accountability for finding the highest-cost card.
Gah, late-game issues!
Good catches, though. Shipwreck should be optional, and Moundbuilder Village could probably be changed to say "reveal your discard pile" since you'll have to show everyone all the card costs.
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I should also mention I'm revealing a card every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday on my twitter (https://twitter.com/Neiraiforgiven).
(It might be helpful if you take a look at them since apparently I still have some typos and rule misses!)
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Mound builder village is interesting, however once you start buying provinces it starts to become almost useless. And I think stronghold has to much text on the card, the action is kinda wonky. However i really love the reaction. It could be very useful against attacks like swindler, bandit, noble brigand, and giant. Ect. Also I have to say shipwreck is definitely my favorite of the 3. The fact that eventually a good card will end up in your hand is okay. And if you play it when you have a few cards in your deck at the time. You could have it in your hand or on that turn depending on what actions you have to work with. So it may be a weaker harbinger but the fact that it only costs 2 anyway might be worth buying. After all there’s other cards that give you the same benefit but different effects. Like peasant and herbalist. I think it’s better than herbalist. So you may just want to tweak the cost and action effect of stronghold. But you don’t have to it’s a pretty cool idea after you get past the wonky ness. Maybe just tweak the wording if you can.
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When I said card I meant treasure however why don’t you just make it any card. Like harbinger.
I mean if you look thru a shipwreck looking for treasure you might find an octopus instead. I don’t know about you but an octopus 🐙 just screams action. But just an idea. Either way it’s still pretty cool. And if it’s just treasure then it really is like an herbalist cause your usually aware of what treasures lurk in your discard pile. Sorry I couldn’t help it.
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set needs an octopus card.
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This looks amazing! Nice to see a completed fan expansion.
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set needs an octopus card.
Mistakes were made.
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Tomb raider is interesting. An attack card that removes attack cards from other hands. Someone who hates attack cards and never buys them themselves will buy as many of these as they can if there’s at least one other attack card pile. Also if the player doesn’t have an attack card. You can get a copy of a treasure in thier hand. Which would be more useful towards the middle to the end for a gold or other good treasure cards. And if the attack doesn’t work or you can’t copy a treasure worth coping at least you always have another action. And if you had 2 tomb raiders in your hand. You being player 1. Player 2 and 3 both the first time had to discard an attack. And player 4 didn’t so you got to gain a copy of his gold. Then the second time you played it player 2 had to discard another attack. Player 3 didn’t so you gained a copy of his harem. And another gold from player 4. In that way this could be too powerful for a card costing 3. 5 might be better all around so that it keeps you from getting too many of them. And by the time you have a couple of them. It will be more useful to you anyway. And if tomb raider is the only attack card in the game you could get 3 silvers or 3 golds each time you played it. So it’s already stronger than bandit. And bandit costs 5. So it costing 5 or 6 would be better. And the only way to weaken this card is to put bandit fort the landmark in the game. However if you want to keep it at 3. Why don’t you tweak it a little bit. Like for instance if someone can’t discard an attack cause they don’t have one, why don’t you gain a silver or +1💵treasure for each who can’t. This way you don’t end up depleting the gold pile before every other pile. Like I said just tweak a little and it would be perfect card. And if you don’t it won’t hurt my feelings. I would love to gain a few golds and discard other players attack cards in a singe turn, With still a lot more benefits in my turn.
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Riches is wonky. Yeah you could use it to get rid of all your coppers but then you would never buy silver or gold or any other treasure unless you didn’t play it when riches was being played. Like harem maybe. But everyone would buying riches. There wouldn’t be enough to go around for a for a 4 player game especially cause it would be worth buying other strong treasures like gold or platinum. In a two player game. All the provinces would be bought easily. Each 2 player game would only take like ten minutes and the game would be over. Especially if you have a lot of actions that give you extra treasure. The only way I could see it working. Is if you made it cost 7 instead and then made the trashing optional. Or must trash one other treasure per riches so that way damage to your deck can minimized. Because if you keep it the way it the way it is your only hurting yourself by buying it. So basically it’s a deadly version of rats. At least with rats you usually have other cards that can trash rats and sometimes fortress to keep rats in check. And in a 3 or 4 player game you would have to limit what other cards you buy to the the actions that give treasure. And assuming you are able to keep all your coppers. Having a few storytellers and a couple of riches and another card that you gives you a + 1 buy, you could buy multiple provinces in a singe turn almost every turn.
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Sarcophagus is definitely my favorite of the next 3 cards. It’s a procession and I’ll gotten gains variant. A little stronger but better. I don’t think it needs tweaking at all. I’ll gotten gains costed 5 but your benefit is a lot better. And just like I’ll gotten gains it’s got the same theme.
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Riches is wonky. Yeah you could use it to get rid of all your coppers but then you would never buy silver or gold or any other treasure unless you didn’t play it when riches was being played. Like harem maybe. But everyone would buying riches. There wouldn’t be enough to go around for a for a 4 player game especially cause it would be worth buying other strong treasures like gold or platinum. In a two player game. All the provinces would be bought easily. Each 2 player game would only take like ten minutes and the game would be over. Especially if you have a lot of actions that give you extra treasure. The only way I could see it working. Is if you made it cost 7 instead and then made the trashing optional. Or must trash one other treasure per riches so that way damage to your deck can minimized. Because if you keep it the way it the way it is your only hurting yourself by buying it. So basically it’s a deadly version of rats. At least with rats you usually have other cards that can trash rats and sometimes fortress to keep rats in check. And in a 3 or 4 player game you would have to limit what other cards you buy to the the actions that give treasure. And assuming you are able to keep all your coppers. Having a few storytellers and a couple of riches and another card that you gives you a + 1 buy, you could buy multiple provinces in a singe turn almost every turn.
Riches actually looks broken to me, it would still be a strong Copper trasher if it only gave +$1, but trashing ~2 Coppers at the same time as giving +$4 and letting you play the Coppers for money that turn too? Yeah that's clearly too much. And this can continue to be used as a +$4 treasure even after your Coppers are trashed if you refrain from picking up other treasures, most trashers just become useless cards once you're done trashing with them.
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Grave watcher where do I start? First of all it’s not much of an attack. Even tomb raider is more of an attack than this one. The problem is your not going to get to use it as an attack very often. Unless you gain most the curses and most of the grave watchers. And if that’s all the cards you had in your deck you might win. I sopose if you put this with riches you would have some strong turns. That’s only if there in the same game. And you would have to keep yourself limited to buying just grave watcher, riches, victories, and maybe an action with a +1 buy. But the problem is an action usually needs to be self sufficient. Grave watcher really isn’t. There would probably still need to be an attack card that gives out curses. So you can maybe have one when you first play this. Otherwise it’s the throne room dilemma all over again as an example. Now I do like the attack effect it’s pretty cool. But gaining curses is the wrong way to do it. You would be better off just making the attack work every time and giving grave watcher a -1 Victory as in making it a new type of curse.If you get past the occasional attack part. Gaining curses just so you make +3 treasure and +1 action. Is crazy. You might do it once or twice. And it will probably help with your buy. But it would be crazy to do any more than that. And you wouldn’t even think about doing it if there was no way to trash em. And of course it’s useless if all curses are depleted. So it comes down to a one time use with sarcophagus. And only if sarcophagus and a curse are already in your hand. Even saboteur would be better and it doesn’t have even have a gain. So grave watcher might need to be tweaked. Otherwise it’s almost always going to be one of those cards no one buys during the game. I think this is worse than riches. Cause your lowering your score for just 3 extra treasure. And maybe a cool attack later in the game. And 4 treasure (riches) is better than 3.
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Aquifer is okay. You might want to tweak it just a little bit. First of all make it a little bit more like tunnel. So that way margrave let’s gain another one as as oasis ect. Then make it cost like 3 or 4.
Like I said it’s so so. If you want to make it better than average, that’s a suggestion.
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Collector is a gamble. After you discard the card of course. Why don’t you just make the trashing optional or make it an attack so that everyone trashes too except they get down 1 you get 2 or 3 up.
I know the second idea isn’t much better. But at least everyone else will be in the same gamble boat with you. And of course you would have to make it an attack card too. And I know my ideas don’t really make this card any better than so so. It’s all I can think of. But something tells me the other members will have better ideas.
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So far sarcophagus and shipwreck are my favorites. If they were in the game as they were with no changes I would still play with them. Especially sarcophagus. You clearly have some cool cards I can’t wait to see them all. And aquifer and tomb raider well tomb raider is pretty powerful and I do like powerful cards but other players won’t. As for aquifer it’s just a little weak. I might still use it depending how often I can get strong buys in a game.
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Woo, I missed a bunch of the responses, sorry, will try to catch up. Thank you all for you comments!
I might need to do a "secret history of" at some point. It's been suggested, and I'm a narcissist, so why not?
First off let me clear up a misconception on Tomb Raider. Tomb Raider only ever lets you gain one card per turn. So in ClouduHieh's example of the double-Tomb Raider turn, on the second time your play Tomb Raider, when player 3 reveals Harem and player 4 reveals Gold, you are going to need to choose whether you want a Harem or a Gold, and pick that one. Perhaps I need to slightly adjust the text to make this more obvious (e.g., You gain a copy of one Treasure revealed this way.)
Grave Watcher, this is sort of a janky card for sure, but I do like it. If there was one thing I would change it would be to rethink the curse yourself, but really the set is done except for proofreading, plus if something is totally broken. I ran a WIP thread for months. That was the place to argue about design. But don't think I'm not listening and taking things to heart, even if I sound grumpy about it. Grave Watcher is all about presenting the player with a bad decision. Do you make it non-terminal? Do you move yourself from $7 in hand to $8? But don't let it go to your head, it's going to lose you the game if you're not careful. This thing could have been "mephistopheles" or "infernal contract" except then it was in too much danger of being clobbered by Nocturne (Nocturne was coming out when I was working on it.)
Then the attack; the attack was shoehorned in for two reasons. One, I realized I didn't have enough attacks in the game. Two, at one point this card was called "Pixiu", a Chinese dog/dragon thing that guards money and brings financial luck. So I gave it a financial luck attack. The attack rarely happens though, so it can be obnoxious but it isn't super obnoxious. As it is though, you never want to buy Grave Watchers for the attack, you buy them for the flexibility to make bad decisions. It turns out that Antiquities ends up having a whole bunch of attacks that can miss; it's almost worth saying that it's a theme of the set.
Collector, there's a weird thing that happens when you do designs. Sometimes a card that is bad gets popular with a certain segment of the fanbase. In this case, my fanbase is very small (20 people? that might be generous) and the segment of the fanbase is my wife. Since she is the person who I will play these cards with the most, her opinion matters. Anyways originally it had only the bottom rule, no looking at the top card. Also it would dump the gained card into your discard pile, so you'd really lose all the time, since you couldn't play it. So she would play this card every time she could and it would just tank her game. It was terrible. But she still used it every time. So eventually I buffed it to put the card back where you found it, which normally means you are at least breaking even every time you use it. Even then it still wasn't worth her focus. The randomness was just too, you know, random. At the same time I was reading every single entry in the Interview with Donald X for design insights to make the set better, plus more authentic, and realized I was lacking in "non-attack interactions" so I decided to add the top. If the testing still meant the card was bad all the time, I could increase the number of cards you scry before doing the random upgrade. But it appears that one is just fine. By the time I was doing all this, I had already ordered the art. If I hadn't, I would have renamed the card to "Gambler", since ClouduHieh is totally right, it's almost a total gamble.
Riches has a huge page of opinions (mostly that it is broken OP) in the WIP thread, but my testing didn't line up to the allegations that it is broken. I've never had it run away with a game yet. Eventually some players started pointing out that it's hard to use in a broken way. I'm not going to defend it though, just go read the WIP thread. But, again, like I said on reddit, the problem with my test group is that we're probably B or C-tier players. A and S tier players may be able to single-handedly use this card to go insane things. At least in Dominion a card is always available to everyone to use, as long as it doesn't become the only strategy that makes any sense every time it appears.
I am going to modify the rules to make it more obvious that having 2 Riches in play means you just blew up both Riches, though.
Thanks so much for the attention and respect you're giving this set, though! I always hope I don't sound too dismissive. I appreciate all of it, criticism included!
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Also to bring in more context for people, here are the cards revealed so far on my twitter.
(https://i.imgur.com/BZ3K5Gjl.png)(https://i.imgur.com/1RQrRs8l.png)(https://i.imgur.com/mvQSLuXl.png)(https://i.imgur.com/KmWf6E6l.png)(https://i.imgur.com/2PrD7B9l.png)(https://i.imgur.com/p07vlJul.png)(https://i.imgur.com/hwxwJlRl.png)
I totally made it unnecessary to go to my twitter. I suck at social media.
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Oh man, other secret history. Sarcophagus used to not have a limit on the cost of the card in the supply that you used it with. Then we tested it with Hunting Grounds.
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Recommend making smaller versions of the images for the purposes of posting online (and post just links to the high-res versions if people want to print them out). Not sure if it's because of Imgur's speed or what, but this thread is taking an extremely long time to load for me.
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I just switched them to imgur "Large Thumbnails". Let me know if that helped.
Edit: now when they expand they fit in your screen, too.
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I just switched them to imgur "Large Thumbnails". Let me know if that helped.
Edit: now when they expand they fit in your screen, too.
Much better!
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Thanks for these great cards. I'm planning to print out the whole set.
Will there eventually be a place where all the cards will be available in hi-res and with a consistent image size? That would make it much easier for me to combine the images and print them out on my printer.
Currently, most of the hi-res images from twitter are jpg with some as png (Shipwreck, Stronghold, Tomb Raider).
For Moundbuilder Village, I somehow managed to get it in both jpg and png (not sure how).
The image sizes are also not consistent:
Moundbuilder Village.jpg , Tomb Raider.png and the rest of the .jpgs are 1336x2048
Moundbuilder Village.png , Shipwreck.png and Stronghold.png are 1403x2151
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Thanar, thank you so much, that's incredible!
I'm interested in how you plan to print them; I'm also planning to print them out. Maybe we should compare notes.
The cards will all be available on my Imgur at some point. If that is not acceptable, PM me when I finish the reveals (when the rules + app are out) and I'll send you a zip with the originals.
I'm a bit worried about the size things. Maybe it's this forum vs Twitter that is the issue? Anyhow I'll do my best to make sure at some point they are consistent. When I link the full album for public consumption, let me know if they are inconsistent. I'll want to make sure they are as good as possible.
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Oh man, other secret history. Sarcophagus used to not have a limit on the cost of the card in the supply that you used it with. Then we tested it with Hunting Grounds.
It's still ultra broken. Playing Sarcophagus with 2 cost reduction active lets you gain and play the entire Sarcophagus pile, then a bunch of copies of whatever other actions. Even using it on a plain cantrip makes it Lost City. And it curses opponents?
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Yes, I noticed the Sarcophagus-pile-draining ability with $2 cost reduction as well. I think a good solution for that issue is to make Sarcophagus cost an appropriate amount of debt, instead of a coin cost, eliminating the possibility of playing 2 of itself, no matter what $ cost reduction is in effect.
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Yes, I noticed the pile-draining ability with $2 cost reduction as well. I think a good solution for it is to make Sarcophagus cost an appropriate amount of debt, instead of a coin cost, eliminating the possibility of gaining 2 of itself, no matter what $ cost reduction is in effect.
Yeah, either that, or go the Vampire route, and just have it specify non-Sarcophagus.
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Aquifer is a Peddler with a drawback (being that it's only non-terminal for other Aquifers) that comes with an extra benefit of a rarely relevant Reaction--especially since it can only be triggered during your turn which strongly limits the number of cards that can activate it.
Peddler is typically valued at about $4.5, and I think the drawback is significant enough to pull it down to $3-ish. That Reaction is not worth much. I'd guess Aquifer is weak.
Artifact gives a lot of really hard to math options since you have to think about the cost of the Treasure, the $ production of the Treasure, and that Artifact itself produces $1.
It's options come out to be: $1; or $2, gain a Copper; or if $>=$2 then $0, gain a Silver; or if $>=$5 -$2 gain a Gold; and I won't bother with what gaining additional Artifacts will look like since it puts you back in the loop. I don't think it's all that strong either, so I'm not sure it's worth the headache when you have the much more compelling Treasure Trove and Lucky Coin
Riches forced trash will typically be a huge benefit. Even just using it once with a bunch of Coppers to slim your deck down and never playing it again (as though it were Chapel) will probably make it really good, let alone that one could possibly play it with one or two Coppers to buy whatever you wanted and slim at the same time. It should probably cost $5, maybe even $6.
Whatever it's worth: I cannot imagine a Kingdom where I wouldn't open with Riches as written. Even if I got a 5\2 split, I'd probably only open favor strong junkers over Riches.
I would guess that Sarcophagus is overpowered. Multiplayer games will likely be miserably short with it between draining Action piles via Sarcophagi plays which will be common because of the on-buy that encourages Sarcophagi to be spam-bought. That on-buy is such a good effect that it takes a sub-$2 card into a $5 card in Ill-Gotten Gains.
I'd drop the on-buy and increase its cost to $7.
Collector, Grave Watcher, and Tomb Raider are cute and unique.
I like that Collector's benefit to all players works to enable other players' Collectors, while its one-card trashing is balanced by forcing to gain a card sharing a type with it (meaning that hitting an Estate turn 3\4 isn't a game-win). Could you name it Financier with that art? It might be a bit anachronistic.
Grave Watcher is a Copper junker, but is bounded by aligning it with a Curse which I think keeps it sufficiently in check.
Tomb Raider is probably more useful as a defense against other Attacks than a Treasure copier, but all its pieces come together nicely.
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Thanks for the feedback and interest, guys!
After careful consideration, I've decided to give some significant nerfs to Sarcophagus. Sarcophagus will now only play the targeted card once, and will only be able to target cards that cost "up to $2 less than it."
Overall, I realized that this makes Sarcophagus still better than Band of Misfits, a $5 card, as it will trigger on-gain and on-trash events, and retain its own on-buy Curse event. While this makes the Sarcophagus less attractive than when it was an OPAF throne, it's still a lot of power to pack into a mere $1 cost increase vs Band of Misfits.
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Thanks for the feedback and interest, guys!
After careful consideration, I've decided to give some significant nerfs to Sarcophagus. Sarcophagus will now only play the targeted card once, and will only be able to target cards that cost "up to $2 less than it."
Overall, I realized that this makes Sarcophagus still better than Band of Misfits, a $5 card, as it will trigger on-gain and on-trash events, and retain its own on-buy Curse event. While this makes the Sarcophagus less attractive than when it was an OPAF throne, it's still a lot of power to pack into a mere $1 cost increase vs Band of Misfits.
It's not always better than Band of Misfits though, as it loses any while-in-play abilities of cards. To me, the big questions is if it's different enough from Band of Misfits to be worth having. And I think the answer is "probably". But it's still best to think of it as a Band of Misfits variant. One that benefits from on-gain and on-trash, while not benefiting from while-in-play. And also has the interesting side effect of draining piles. Also, with things like Watchtower, you can keep the card, which sounds like a powerful combo. Oh, you also get to keep any Reserve cards you gain with it. That might be too good.
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Hmm, I just realized that there is no official ruling on what happens to the effect that occurs on your next turn if you trash a Duration card that is in play.
I would assume that there is a Variants and Fan Cards precedent, though. If so, can someone tell me what it is?
Otherwise I will have to make a ruling, which may very well be that Sarcophagus stays in play until the Duration card is finished, then trashes it.
Edit: Ignore me; Procession has the same quirks.
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Hmm, I just realized that there is no official ruling on what happens to the effect that occurs on your next turn if you trash a Duration card that is in play.
I would assume that there is a Variants and Fan Cards precedent, though. If so, can someone tell me what it is?
Otherwise I will have to make a ruling, which may very well be that Sarcophagus stays in play until the Duration card is finished, then trashes it.
Edit: Ignore me; Procession has the same quirks.
Yeah there's definitely official rules. Not just Procession (http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php/Procession), but Bonfire (http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php/Bonfire). Duration cards definitely don't have to do their normal thing next turn. The official rules would also cause Sarcophagus to stay in play until next turn.
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Yeah there's definitely official rules. Not just Procession (http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php/Procession), but Bonfire (http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php/Bonfire). Duration cards definitely don't have to do their normal thing next turn. The official rules would also cause Sarcophagus to stay in play until next turn.
Hmm, according to the Procession wiki article:
If you use Procession on a Duration card, Procession will be discarded in the same turn's Clean-up, since the Duration card will no longer be in play.
If I'm understanding this correctly, the Sarcophagused card will be trashed immediately after it is first played (before the 'next turn' is resolved) and Sarcophagus will be discarded. Then the next turn effect will trigger anyhow, but without the card being in play.
I dislike this a fair bit, but it is the official rules.
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Yeah there's definitely official rules. Not just Procession (http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php/Procession), but Bonfire (http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php/Bonfire). Duration cards definitely don't have to do their normal thing next turn. The official rules would also cause Sarcophagus to stay in play until next turn.
Hmm, according to the Procession wiki article:
If you use Procession on a Duration card, Procession will be discarded in the same turn's Clean-up, since the Duration card will no longer be in play.
If I'm understanding this correctly, the Sarcophagused card will be trashed immediately after it is first played (before the 'next turn' is resolved) and Sarcophagus will be discarded. Then the next turn effect will trigger anyhow, but without the card being in play.
I dislike this a fair bit, but it is the official rules.
Right, forgot that rule was actually changed. In the Seaside rules (first edition); cards that played Durations stayed in play until the Duration was done doing anything. But it was later errata'd to be discarded when the Duration is discarded.
Actually the new rule's wording seems inaccurate; it says they are discarded at the same time as the Duration card, but in the case of Procession; that Duration card is never discarded. It should say discarded during the cleanup phase of the turn that the Duration left play.
If you don't like the effect it has on Sarcophagus, there's 2 options...
1) Limit it to non-Duration cards.
2) Trash the card next turn instead of this one. But that's kind of terrible; you have to make Sarcophagus a Duration also, and then it only makes sense when playing other Durations.
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GendoIkari, thanks so much for your replies. Your insights and experience are super helpful.
I have a third option, which could be to say "when it [the played card] leaves play, trash it." This would fix the duration issue but I'd have to look at all the other odd cards to see what it would do with them.
Update: I've decided to just go with the official rules; and not try to tamper with it. If I chose "when it leaves play, trash it," then the card would be confusing in cases of the lose track of rule -- if the card leaves play for a reason other than Sarcophagus, players might interpret "when it leaves play, trash it" as interrupting that and trashing the card (it wouldn't.) Plus then you lose the cool interaction of the card not staying in play, making the card more of a Band of Misfits clone. But the real clincher is Cultist. If Sarcophagus trashes a Cultist during Clean-up, what happens? It's not worth the headache.
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I definitely don't like Sarcophagus with it only playing cards once plus the Ill-Gotten Gains clause.
It stomps all over Ill-Gotten Gains, is made incredibly similar to Band of Misfits, and doesn't resolve my biggest issue anyway: That multiplayer games are likely to end quickly by draining piles.
If you don't mind a crazy wholesale suggestion:
Sarcophagus
Types: Action
Cost: $6
Gain an Action other than Sarcophagus from the trash, playing it twice. When it leaves play, return it to the Supply.
Setup: Put one of each Action other than Sarcophagus into the trash per player.
This can double everything only once per player without extra trashing, but it can't end the game because it is putting cards back into the Supply (which lets it avert timing issues with trashing during Clean-Up while also avoiding the annoyance of Duration tracking).
You could also vary the setup clause to put different Actions into the trash, but with the limited number of plays and the loss of the Ill-Gotten Gains effect, I think playing anything will be okay.
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Option 1 for sarcophagus would be good. I’m creating my own enchantress variant. But I’m keeping all durations and reserves out of the equation. So you could do the same. My fan expansion is called snowline.
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And don’t forget lurker, and grave robber they can effect sarcophagus too. But don’t worry too much about. An expansion on its own doesn’t always have to work well with other expansions. Nocturne for instance.
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That’s why I liked it sarcophagus that is cause it was like I’ll gotten gains but better. It does cost 6 so it is a little harder to buy. I’m probably an A player but most of my friends are C players and maybe 2 of them are B players. So when making an expansion for you and your friends it’s okay to have a few powerful cards. C players aren’t really gonna pick up on the overpowering thing. And it ends the game a little earlier so what. Half of time we never finish the game anyway and see who had the most points at that point. One time we had game where player won with 12 points as the highest score and 2 players had a minus score. And we still had a blast! Cause in the end all that matters is if you and your friends had fun. So it doesn’t matter if some of your cards are overpowered, a gamble or like feast from the bace game (useless). And that was made by creator of dominion.
I love artifact! It’s the treasure variant of storyteller.
Looking forward to seeing the rest of your cards.
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Inspector isn’t horrible but it’s not much of an attack. Cause you have to hurt yourself in order to hurt them. Unless you play it and you end up with only good cards in your hand. Which in this case it’s better than embassy you could still have to discard a lot of good cards with that one. But with inspector if you have to discard some good cards they may also have to discard too. But that doesn’t happen to mid game before you start buying nothing but provinces. Also it doesn’t work too well with weak cards. Cause if you discard a copper and a estate. They can choose to discard the estate if they have it which they probably will. So you may have to discard 2 coppers which may not help you either. If you wanted to make it a slightly better attack. Why don’t you instead make it where you discard yours that you revealed. But instead of them discarding the card (estate) they topdeck it. That way it slightly ruins there next draw. And in this case they might go with copper more often. And in this case if you discarded 2 victory cards they would have to topdeck one. Which would make more like burrecrat an attack card that becomes more useful at the end of the game.
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Hi guys! Thanks again for the feedback and attention!
Fragasnap, while I'm unlikely to change the Sarcophagus much more than I already have (because of testing burden) I really, really like your idea, although it would lead to the game ending fast as well (4 player game? piles only have 6 cards!) so I'd probably do it as 2 of each action in the trash.
ClouduHieh, I do really like the idea of Inspectors putting cards on top of the deck. I'll try it out.
On other news, I am also trying out a version of Aquifer that replaces the reaction with just being able to choose to gain an Aquifer, and maybe costs $4.
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Sorry, everyone, I've been late in posting the new art reveals:
(https://i.imgur.com/JTEwpMUl.png)
This is a rules update to prevent the first-come-then-win exploitation of this card.
(https://i.imgur.com/dq31Bvcl.png)(https://i.imgur.com/sYssoBSl.png)(https://i.imgur.com/QNhjdBJl.png)(https://i.imgur.com/BUr4WoSl.png)(https://i.imgur.com/fVgG9uEl.png)(https://i.imgur.com/4AUiQT3l.png)
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So Sarcophagus is now a mixture between BoM and IGG. The previous double-play version was in my opinion more interesting and could have easily fixed via preventing the card from gaining, throning and trashing all cards but itself.
While similar to Festival and Conclave Agora looks sound.
Archaeologist is good but I would price it at $6 (better than Catacombs so it cannot cost $5).
Inspector is pretty bad. Like worse than +2 Cards. You want to discard junk anyway so the Attack doesn't really hurt unless it is multiplayer, you have 3 cards left in your hand after two previous Inspector attacks, you play Inspector and then have to discard something good.
Profiteer looks inflexible and bad compared to Bridge. The Reaction is pretty restrictive as it only does something in the presence of gainers. But even then, e.g. Workshop, gain $4, discard a Profiteer to exchange for Gold, discard a Profiteer to exchange for Province is not impressive.
Boulder Trap is a neat idea. I especially like that Indy is female now and would suggest to put a bit of the rules onto the card, kind of like with Changeling.
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Agora looks bad. Festival is already kinda meh, and this just seems like a worse version. Villages + Silver gainers don't usually go well together.
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With boulder trap, the issue becomes formatting; it theory it should be something like
Boulder Trap - Trap - $3
-1VP
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When you trash this, each other player gains a Curse.
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When you gain a card from the top of a Supply pile, if this is the next card, gain it.
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Setup: Shuffle one Boulder Trap into each Kingdom pile.
That gets a bit crazy. But I will definitely entertain any feedback on how to avoid having three horizontal lines on the card.
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You could get rid of one line via something like this:
In games using this, during Setup shuffle one Boulder Trap into each Kingdom Supply pile and put the piles face down with the top card face up. When you gain a card, if this is the next card, also gain it.
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Sarcophagus could say "Trash it when it leaves play". At least from my latest point of knowledge, a card is still in play while leaving play (Band of Misfits can do Hermit's discard stuff), so lose-track doesn't apply. Unless that has changed, too, by now. Lose-track applies to me.
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With boulder trap, the issue becomes formatting; it theory it should be something like
Boulder Trap - Trap - $3
-1VP
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When you trash this, each other player gains a Curse.
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When you gain a card from the top of a Supply pile, if this is the next card, gain it.
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Setup: Shuffle one Boulder Trap into each Kingdom pile.
That gets a bit crazy. But I will definitely entertain any feedback on how to avoid having three horizontal lines on the card.
I don't think you need to do this. If there are other Traps, printing all of the Trap rules on every card definitely seems like overkill. Also, the whole point of the weird border color is to tell people that they need to crack open the rulebook instead of wasting space on every card. It's not like Night Cards all say, "You can only play this after the Buy phase."
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With boulder trap, the issue becomes formatting; it theory it should be something like
Boulder Trap - Trap - $3
-1VP
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When you trash this, each other player gains a Curse.
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When you gain a card from the top of a Supply pile, if this is the next card, gain it.
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Setup: Shuffle one Boulder Trap into each Kingdom pile.
That gets a bit crazy. But I will definitely entertain any feedback on how to avoid having three horizontal lines on the card.
I don't think you need to do this. If there are other Traps, printing all of the Trap rules on every card definitely seems like overkill. Also, the whole point of the weird border color is to tell people that they need to crack open the rulebook instead of wasting space on every card. It's not like Night Cards all say, "You can only play this after the Buy phase."
^^This. In reality, I'll be distributing a rulebook.
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Looks like I've been breaking images by changing them, go figure. People keep asking me to make changes.
Here's a link to the final album. (https://imgur.com/a/VicUEEF) All art is final other than the Token, which is getting a bit of a facelift.
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Unlike Tunnel, Agora doesn't get covered up when you reveal it and gain a card, so I'm not sure whether you can technically reveal it unlimited times.
I think Artifact could be "pay any amount of (coins). You may gain...", although a "problem" there is that you may spend money and still get nothing.
I think I like Encroach (although I never heard that word before).
Trashing Graveyard with Watchtower in a Tomb game generates unbounded VP.
Prospector reminds me of something I tried to do once, but does it better. I might have mentioned this before.
Doesn't Riches make it awfully easy to buy Provinces? Buy Riches, buy Silver, trash all but Riches and buy Province, buy Riches, trash Riches and buy Province... I guess colliding two Riches isn't trivial, but even a single one is enough to get another Riches. I recommend trying out a stupid Riches-rush at least once to see where it gets you.
Sarcophagus' wording is unclear. I know this is dumb, but I genuinely misunderstood it at first, at least common sense tells me that I did.
Stronghold has too much text.
I assume discarding a Relic isn't revealing a Treasure for Tomb Hunter? As the revealing is an important part of the card, I wouldn't put it into parantheses here.
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Asper, I really appreciate your thoughts, especially Agora and Graveyard. I'll make sure Graveyards can't gain Graveyards from the trash and I'm going to get a migraine thinking about what to do to make sure Agora doesn't gain unlimited silvers to your hand.
I've done stupid Riches-rush before, it usually fizzles out before you win, although if you are the only one buying Riches you can get 5 Provinces with them if they all align nicely.
Discarding a Relic isn't revealing a Treasure. You would discard Relic, rather than reveal that you can't. I'll make a note to mention that in the rulebook.
I may massage Sarcophagus a bit to make it worded better. Its wording is a relic from when it was a Procession+Throne Room and might be better said.
Edit: I actually already have, just not uploaded it: "Gain an Action card costing up to $2 less than this and play it. When it leaves play, trash it."
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About Sarcophagus, if I remember correctly, Saboteur used the same wording. So it's not like it's actually wrong, more like, if you came to think of a better wording, that would be neat. "Up to X" stuff seems goofy, but maybe "that costs less than this by at least 2"? It's the best I can think of.
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Actually (despite vowing that I wasn't going to make design changes to any cards!) I've been trying a less complex version of Stronghold.
It seems balanced well at $5, but someone please point out where it's broken as hell:
Stronghold - Action-Reaction $5
Put your deck into your discard pile. Look through your discard pile, trash a card from it, and put a card from it into your hand.
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When you would trash a card, you may first reveal this from your hand, to instead discard the card.
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I love pharaoh! Now that’s an attack card! Powerful gain powerful attack and only if you gain 4 golds. It might be a little too powerful though. I didn’t bother to look what the others said about it. But maybe it would be better costing 9. Or make it give out something else that is -2 V. Meaning make a new card. That’s a minus score. I’ve done it! I’ve made at least 3 cards that are minus points. Like your boulder trap. And I have 2 cards that give out 2 different minus score cards. Avalanche gives out firn villages to each player a a snow shoes to the person who plays it. By the way Incase you didn’t know firn is what you call a ton compacted snow. So it’s definitely a theme to it. And firn villages are regular villages with a -2 V. And they can’t be trashed either. That’s where snow shoes comes in. It’s basically a masquerade. The only way to get rid of firn village. Cause it’s like fortress.
So try something like that maybe. But regardless awesome attack. 👍
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Snake charmer is awesome! Mostly just cause I like snakes. Most players won’t want a curse so they will trash. The beginning of the game it’s actually helping them. Cause it gets rid of most useless cards. Towards the end of the game it might hit them a few times. But in reality the problem is taking a curse is probably better than trashing a gold or a powerful 5 card. And the fact by then all the curses will probably be gone anyway. So the attack isn’t really much of an attack.
Why don’t you make so they have to trash an action in order to prevent getting a curse. That way it’s an attack either way. Either they lose an action which sets them back or they take a curse. And then of course they will be forced to buy snake charmer as well especially if it’s the only way to trash. Then it’s more useful to you throughout the game until you run out of curses anyway. And then this way if they want to avoid curses they may end up buying actions they don’t usually buy.
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Mendicant. First of all I must say I love copper strategies. But I’m not too big on gaining estates. Why don’t you make it a duchy instead. And make it cost 5. So it’s a little harder to get. And make it so you can only get one duchy per buy phase. Cause throne rooming or playing more than one might be chaotic it might get you a bunch of victory points but it would also ruin your deck too soon. Especially if it was multiple estates.
Here’s another idea.
Instead of a simple gain. Why don’t you make it like this.
+1 Card
+1 Action
Gain a copper to your hand.
———————————————
At the end of your buy phase if you have no other treasure besides copper in play. You may trash a victory card from your hand. And then gain a duchy.
This way you could still keep it at 4$ and you wouldn’t be able to gain to many duchies at once. Also you would have to buy extra estates if you wanted more than 3 duchies. And you wouldn’t probably get 3 duchies in a turn even if you 3 mendicants in play. Also it wouldn’t be quite like rebuild cause you could never go above a duchy. And also you could make it a little more interesting. Instead of saying duchy you could say a victory costing up to 6$. That would make it more useful if you were playing with other expansions. Like fairgrounds, Duke, Silk Road, tunnel, farmland would be epic!, the castles up to haunted castle, distant lands, island, nobles, harem, mill, feodum, gardens, Shepard and cemetary. And still keep out province, colony, some of the castles, and the one of kind vineyard.
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On the subject on Mendicant, I recently learned that I've been playing Dominion wrong all along in respect to Estates piles. I've always played with the whole stack of Estates, but it turns out that you only play with 8 extra Estates or 12 extra Estates, depending on number of players. So this makes Mendicant a lot weaker, since you can't go full Mendicant mode and run nothing but Mendicant turns for like 3 turns for many points. I may need to consider buffing this guy somehow. I think cantripping into Duchies is too strong though.
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On the subject on Mendicant, I recently learned that I've been playing Dominion wrong all along in respect to Estates piles. I've always played with the whole stack of Estates, but it turns out that you only play with 8 extra Estates or 12 extra Estates, depending on number of players. So this makes Mendicant a lot weaker, since you can't go full Mendicant mode and run nothing but Mendicant turns for like 3 turns for many points. I may need to consider buffing this guy somehow. I think cantripping into Duchies is too strong though.
Don't change your card, just change the game!
Mendicant
+1 Card
+1 Action
Gain a Copper to your hand.
At the start of your Clean-up phase this turn, if you have no non-Copper cards in play, you may gain an Estate.
------------------------------------------------------------
Setup: Add Estates to its pile until you have X Estates.
<OR>
Setup: Add X Estates to its pile per player.
Also, "the end" of a phase is hard to define. "At the start of" is much more clear.
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Or why don’t you create a new victory card that isn’t part of the supply that mendicant can give out. Like how urchin becomes mercenary. It can still have 1 V like estate but give it an action effect too. And you can still give out estates when run out of the other card.
Just a thought.
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Or why don’t you create a new victory card that isn’t part of the supply that mendicant can give out. Like how urchin becomes mercenary. It can still have 1 V like estate but give it an action effect too. And you can still give out estates when run out of the other card.
Just a thought.
Because you'd need a whole bunch of them and Estate already exists.
I like Kudasai's suggestion, although admittedly I have a hard time understanding what kind of play style Mendicant wants to enable...
Is it supposed to reward you most for a Treasure-less engine? In that case, why not give out a Curse for 2 VP? Curses scale with player count, and if you do your engine effectively, you can trash them again,furthering the theme.
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Mendicant is a classic example of a bottom up design making your head hurt. It's trying to work with Lore, not with Strategies! The problem with having bought art as well is, you can't change the card away from its lore too much, or else you have to buy more art!
In practice it's really only good in a totally slogging situation, when there's a lot of junk flying around already. The idea is that Mendicant is a holy man, like a friar or something. He begs (coppers) and if you reject worldly wealth (Treasures that are not copper) you will eventually be rewarded with heavenly rewards (VP.)
Except it turned out that he was actually OP if he gave out VP tokens, so I changed it to Estates. You want a bunch of Mendicants in a later turn, and then you get the Estates.
Kudasai's solution is pretty good, actually. I've also tampered with ideas like "In games using this, Estates are worth +1VP if you have more than 15 Coppers." but the test burden is hard.
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I was thinking you would only have to create 12 of the new victory card. But never mind.
You could also make mendicant worth victory points for the amount of coppers you have. Like 1 for every 5 coppers. It wouldn’t really change the theme. I mean if he really is sopose to be a holy man. He should be worth some victory points too. I mean nobles, duke and harem are people worth victory points so why isn’t a mendicant worth some victory points too.
I mean since you would gain a copper every time you play it. If you were playing a 4 player game. You would run risk of depleting the copper pile anyway so why not just make mendicant even more useful. If you played your cards right you could make mendicant worth more than a duchy at least.
And it’s not like a copper strategy is really such a bad way to play. Otherwise there wouldn’t already be so many cards that work with a copper strategy. My personal favorites being storyteller and apothecary. Like I said I love copper strategies. And you would be surprised how many games I have won with those cards as well as I’ll gotten gains. Playing online I’ve won almost every time with a copper strategy if at least 1 of those cards was in the game. And one time I even won when the only copper strategy was fountain. Everyone else trashed most of their coppers but I bought 3 more and got 15 extra victory points. Once I did that they weren’t able to catch up. One player even said if fountain is in the game he’s making sure not miss out on those points ever again. That’s worth more than 2 provinces and duchy. I think they forgot it was there, since there were so many ways to trash cards in that game. I mean bishop and forager was in the game.
I think it’s cool as it is I just don’t know if getting estates is the way to go.
Ooh how about the inheritance token from adventures. What if mendicant allowed you to put the inheritance token on the mendicant pile so that all your estates become the mendicant. You could do it as a reward.
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+1 card
+1 Action
Gain a copper to your hand.
—————————
During your buy phase if you have no other treasures in play besides copper. gain an estate, then you may discard 2 estates, if you did you may put your inheritance token on the mendicant pile.
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Ah, I forgot that Mendicant gained Copper to your hand. How about removing that and pushing the cards towards an engine in the way I suggested? For example:
+1 Card
+1 Action
(+1 Coin?)
When you discard this from play, if you have no Treasures in play, you may gain a Curse to take +2 (3?) VP.
You might want to look into the discussion my card Hospital stirred up ages ago. It was:
Hospital, Action, 4
+1 Card
+1 Action
Gain a Copper to your hand. If you do:+1VP
It was too good when trashing was around and too weak otherwise.
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I'm currently trying to test something like:
Mendicant $4.
+1 Card
+1 Action
Gain a copper to your hand.
You may return an Estate to the supply for +1 VP. If you don't, gain an Estate to your hand.
I'm not sure how stubborn I should be about the copper gain. However now it is like a cantrip baron of sorts.
I have no idea what the power level of the card is now.
Edit: Also, Mendicant seems to have swallowed up the Stronghold discussion. What did you all think of the Scavenger-like Stronghold I posted earlier?
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Agora - I'm not sure if cards like Tunnel could be revealed from the discard if not covered up. This does not conclusively prove anything, but when playing online, if you discard a Tunnel and then trash the gained Gold with Watchtower (revealing Tunnel in the discard) you are not allowed to further React with Tunnel. Is this because Tunnel is briefly covered up by the Gold or can Tunnel can only be revealed once per discard? Either way, if you're worrying about infinite Silver gaining, I think here lies your solution. Just make sure Agora gets covered up briefly.
(https://i.imgur.com/TY8kLtB.jpg)
Mendicant - I'm of little worth judging a card analytically, but I think your current test version looks exciting and fun to play with! The ability to "trash" Estates, gain VP tokens, cycle, and provide economy makes it a very powerful $4 to open with, but it's power mid to late game is probably board dependent, which I think is great. It's a very easy card to understand, but seems to offer a lot of diverse gameplay options. In regards to Copper gaining, this might be broken if it was optional. Very cool looking card!
Stronghold - I didn't even bother reading the previous Stronghold due to how wordy it was. Sorry! But it should say something positive that I read your newest version and found it very easy to understand. I think most Dominion player's are fans of reliability and not having their precious decks mangled by Knights and this helps with both of those.
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I'm not sure whether Tunnel would allow you to reveal it multiple times per discard. I just know that Reactions usually can be revealed unbounded times per trigger and that covering up any card for just a second makes a card expecting it to be the top card of the discard pile lose track of it. This was the reason for painful Watchtower/Border Village discussions. In short, you can never put the card gained with Border Village onto your deck and then Border Village on top. Now another question would be whether revealing a card is moving it,which is where lose track applies. Common sense says it is, for how would you show something to people that you can't get a hold of?
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Unlike Tunnel, Agora doesn't get covered up when you reveal it and gain a card, so I'm not sure whether you can technically reveal it unlimited times.
I feel like I'm missing a crucial detail in the Agora Silver gaining discussion. Was there a concern about this gaining unlimited Silvers to hand, or is Agora designed to do just that? This quote makes it seem like the latter.
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I like agora.
And as far as gaining too many silvers. It wouldn’t be the first card to deplete the silver pile. Trader did it a lot. Trash a silver gain 3 silvers, trash estate gain 2 silvers. And if everyone did that. 18 silvers would be taken from the pile just in estates alone. Many times when we played with trader especially if I’ll gotten gains or some other curse giving card was in the game. Silver would be the 2nd pile gone. With I’ll gotten gains first. So agora is not going to deplete it as fast. And don’t forget about conquest I did that once with trader. Trashed a province gained 8 silvers bought conquest gained 2 more silvers and got 10 victory tokens.
So agora shouldn’t deplete the pile nearly as fast. Tunnel would deplete the gold pile a lot faster since there’s less in the gold pile.
And the fact that you get to put a silver in your hand, when it’s discarded via militia it’s okay. Cause you may have to discard it anyway, unless you didn’t have a good hand anyway. And minion hits you it’s worse than tunnel. Cause tunnel costs 3 agora costs 5 tunnel gives you gold agora gives you silver to your hand. But remember minion makes you discard your entire hand. Your always better off with a tunnel than an agora during a minion attack. And if it’s like milita is it really worth discarding an action that gives you +2 actions and +2 treasure anyway. The only way I can see agora being worthwhile to discard is if you have the option to do that with navigator. Which forces you to discard a bunch of cards or put them all back. But if you were playing with cartographer and had another action that let draw a card. Would you really bother discarding it. Not likely. Unless you didn’t have another action to play. And needed the extra 2 treasure that a silver would provide.
So agora has its uses 50/50. Not so useful against an attack like milita, almost worthless against minion. Useful for cards like navigator. And useful 50% of the time with cards like cartographer. Although it would be a powerful card especially if you had more than one. When fortune teller attacked. It would be even better than tunnel against that attack card.
I still like it. Especially for its action.
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Unlike Tunnel, Agora doesn't get covered up when you reveal it and gain a card, so I'm not sure whether you can technically reveal it unlimited times.
I feel like I'm missing a crucial detail in the Agora Silver gaining discussion. Was there a concern about this gaining unlimited Silvers to hand, or is Agora designed to do just that? This quote makes it seem like the latter.
It was designed to gain a single Silver. But the card never gets covered up, thus never loses track of itself, thus may in its current form be revealable again and again from the discard pile, where it expects itself to be. The wording would technically have to be changed.
I mostly wrote the caveat of not being sure because no official card does this, so my reasoning is an amalgation and extrapolation from existing cards.
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Token is weird.
You can’t play treasures during your action phase.
So why draw a card and then discard a card during buy phase, unless your hoping to get a better treasure card to discard a victory or something.
Also it needs to be a Treasure-Reaction. Because your reacting when it gets discarded. To get that +1 treasure.
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Unlike Tunnel, Agora doesn't get covered up when you reveal it and gain a card, so I'm not sure whether you can technically reveal it unlimited times.
I feel like I'm missing a crucial detail in the Agora Silver gaining discussion. Was there a concern about this gaining unlimited Silvers to hand, or is Agora designed to do just that? This quote makes it seem like the latter.
It was designed to gain a single Silver. But the card never gets covered up, thus never loses track of itself, thus may in its current form be revealable again and again from the discard pile, where it expects itself to be. The wording would technically have to be changed.
I mostly wrote the caveat of not being sure because no official card does this, so my reasoning is an amalgation and extrapolation from existing cards.
Thanks for the clarification! I didn't expect it would be designed to draw the entire Silver deck, but for some reason felt compelled to check. My fix should solve any possible issues then. Breaking "Gain a Silver to your hand" into "Gain a Silver. If you did, put it into your hand." makes sure it has a brief stop in the discard to cover up Agora.
A card that could draw the entire Silver pile would be interesting though! ;P
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Token is weird.
You can’t play treasures during your action phase.
So why draw a card and then discard a card during buy phase, unless your hoping to get a better treasure card to discard a victory or something.
Also it needs to be a Treasure-Reaction. Because your reacting when it gets discarded. To get that +1 treasure.
I think you about summed it up. Seems kind of like a betting game. If you play Token and draw another Token, do you play it safe and discard it for +$1 Coin or risk it and play it. Seems decent on paper. Cheaper and thus a lot more spammable than Venture, but your deck needs to be much cleaner.
I also agree that this should be a Treasure-Reaction card.
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And I think you would be creating the first yellow-Blue card. Cause I don’t think there’s a treasure-reaction out there. Unless it’s in a fan based expansion I haven’t seen yet.
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Fool's Gold?
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Fool's Gold?
Yes, Fool's Gold is the only Treasure-Reaction and boy should there be more! Strictly speaking from a cool-banner point of view.
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Oh yeah I almost forgot about fools gold. They surely fooled me.
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Mission House is strictly better than Lost City.
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Mission House is strictly better than Lost City.
No, it isn't. Mission House only gives +2 Actions if you have at least 5 VP tokens. Otherwise, it's +2 Cards and +1 VP at best.
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Wow, this thread has exploded during my sick time away!
Couple of thoughts: First off as I near completion I am blown away by all of the support. At some point I have to "launch into space" and print physicals and say the set is done. Catching issues before that point is great. The worst thing (which is going to be inevitable) will be having a card that I can't play with because of something I missed. I'd like that to happen with as few cards as possible. Even if the set contains Boulder Traps ;)
I changed Agora to read "When you discard this other than during Clean-up, you may first reveal it from your hand to gain a Silver to your hand."
In my head it means when the reaction is triggered, you reveal the Agora from your hand and then discard it, which means that the next trigger for it, it's totally in the wrong place to gain you a Silver. Is this true?
Token is supposed to be a Treasure-Reaction. Somehow I didn't render it as such. Oh well, stay tuned to the album because I just received the updated art from Jan Boruta; I'll render it as a Treasure-Reaction this time.
Finally, Holunder9, I'm going to get all pointlessly semantic on you and say "Mission House" is not strictly better than Lost City because the meaning of the phrase strictly better than is that if you draw a Venn diagram of every balance benefit that Lost City offers and every benefit Mission House offers, Mission House totally eclipses Lost City. This simply isn't true. Lost City costs $5 and starts its lifetime as +2 Cards +2 Actions. Mission House costs $5 and starts out its life as some weird love child of Moat and Monument. So the diagrams overlap a lot but Lost City has things going for it that Mission House doesn't. Now, of course in a game with good VP generation -- say, one with positive Landmarks, or with Dig, Mission House does become strictly better than Lost City in a real hurry.
Besides that totally pointless semantics thing, again I really appreciate the feedback. Right now, I am pretty okay with the relative balance of MH vs LC. The question is whether LC is OP, I've seen some threads implying this. It's not a good idea to balance against an OP card if you can help it.
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Mission House is strictly better than Lost City.
No, it isn't. Mission House only gives +2 Actions if you have at least 5 VP tokens. Otherwise, it's +2 Cards and +1 VP at best.
True that, I misread the otherwise. Still looks too good though, as engine piece it is initially better than Monument and later it becomes better than Lost City. Perhaps changing the vanilla stuff, making it initially +2 Actions and +1 VP, would nerf it enough.
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I changed Agora to read "When you discard this other than during Clean-up, you may first reveal it from your hand to gain a Silver to your hand."
In my head it means when the reaction is triggered, you reveal the Agora from your hand and then discard it, which means that the next trigger for it, it's totally in the wrong place to gain you a Silver. Is this true?
No. In your new wording you could arguably gain infinite Silvers even if they went to your discard pile. You want to discard the card, so you reveal it. Now you want to discard the card, so you reveal it. The point is that you need to make sure that by resolving the reaction, it becomes either impossible or pointless to reveal it again.
Kudasai provided a great solution. The card will lose track of itself, and no player will ever have to think about it.
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I changed Agora to read "When you discard this other than during Clean-up, you may first reveal it from your hand to gain a Silver to your hand."
In my head it means when the reaction is triggered, you reveal the Agora from your hand and then discard it, which means that the next trigger for it, it's totally in the wrong place to gain you a Silver. Is this true?
No. In your new wording you could arguably gain infinite Silvers even if they went to your discard pile. You want to discard the card, so you reveal it. Now you want to discard the card, so you reveal it. The point is that you need to make sure that by resolving the reaction, it becomes either impossible or pointless to reveal it again.
Kudasai provided a great solution. The card will lose track of itself, and no player will ever have to think about it.
You're right. The issue is Token, which has the same problem, but is +$1 instead of gain a silver, so it's even worse! Technically based on the "reveal as many times as you want if it isn't covered" logic, Token is "if you discard this, get infinite money". :( Kudasai's solution doesn't work in that case.
I'd like to have the two have similar wordings if I can figure out how to word it.
Edit: how does Caravan Guard and Trader avoid this?
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I changed Agora to read "When you discard this other than during Clean-up, you may first reveal it from your hand to gain a Silver to your hand."
In my head it means when the reaction is triggered, you reveal the Agora from your hand and then discard it, which means that the next trigger for it, it's totally in the wrong place to gain you a Silver. Is this true?
No. In your new wording you could arguably gain infinite Silvers even if they went to your discard pile. You want to discard the card, so you reveal it. Now you want to discard the card, so you reveal it. The point is that you need to make sure that by resolving the reaction, it becomes either impossible or pointless to reveal it again.
Kudasai provided a great solution. The card will lose track of itself, and no player will ever have to think about it.
You're right. The issue is Token, which has the same problem, but is +$1 instead of gain a silver, so it's even worse! Technically based on the "reveal as many times as you want if it isn't covered" logic, Token is "if you discard this, get infinite money". :( Kudasai's solution doesn't work in that case.
I'd like to have the two have similar wordings if I can figure out how to word it.
Edit: how does Caravan Guard and Trader avoid this?
Caravan Guard is played from your hand, making it leave your hand and disabling you to play it from your hand again. Trader can be revealed infinite times, but as with Moat and Secret Chamber, that does nothing you don't get the first time.
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Is there, like, a place to see the latest texts? There doesn't seem to be a link in the first post or anything like that.
What's all this about an on-discard Reaction having infinite-reveal issues? How is it different from Tunnel?
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Hey, LastFootnote, I updated the OP with a link to the imgur album. (https://imgur.com/a/VicUEEF)
Of course, it would help if I did all of the updates that need to be done based on the feedback I've received via reddit.
Edit: I will endeavor to fix this after work. I'll let you know when the latest texts are done.
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Is there, like, a place to see the latest texts? There doesn't seem to be a link in the first post or anything like that.
What's all this about an on-discard Reaction having infinite-reveal issues? How is it different from Tunnel?
Short explanation: Tunnel gets covered up, so it loses track of itself.
Long explanation: One could argue that a reaction on discarding, similar to on-gain effects, happens when the card is in your discard pile, and as Reactions can be revealed any number of times on a trigger, a card could be revealed from your discard pile infinite times if its reaction effect doesn't keep you from doing that. Assuming that to reveal a card you have to move it, this is not possible for Tunnel as long as its Reaction has any effect.
Edit: Now that I think about it... Does the Gold land on top of Tunnel or is Tunnel "un-revealed" and returned to the pile only after that?
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That new Stronghold seems reasonable to me on first glance. I guess it comes down to how good putting any card in your deck into your hand is. It seems strong in money to me, so I guess it depends on how useful it is alongside Villages. Well my guess is that it's strong at least, if that makes any sense...
I'm not sure whether the reaction works with Remodelling though, I think because it prevents the trash you wouldn't gain a card? Not sure on that, or was that the intention?
Looking through the album there are a few things that stick out:
Inspector could/should say "discard 2 cards from your hand, revealing them." to match with Shepherds wording.
Pharaoh needs to specify where the cards are trashed from.
Riches is still giving $3 more than it should. Seriously, this a powerful Copper trasher, why is it giving +$4? Just compare it to Moneylender, it's basically better in every way?
Shipwreck's twin cost thing is probably confusing with a lot of cards. It could probably just ask you to pay an extra $2 when you buy it or something?
I'd suggest a different name for Token, just because Tokens are already things in Dominion. I guess it'd have to fit the art though.
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I'm not going to get to the new wording renders tonight, so instead I will give read-only access to the major design doc. (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ESek4B3GHApUmfTfPm_5F-DIlWe4wRv4TFoYHX26eDs/edit?usp=sharing) The tab you care about is called "Cheatsheet."
No, I'm not making Dominion: Invention any time soon. Or ever. I swear. Please, make this stop.
Edit: I'm not rebuilding Adventures, either. Seriously, if you look in other tabs other than Cheatsheet there's a good chance that you will see dark things in the recesses of my mind that scare me. And also some of the lifetimes of these cards that are downright hilarious.
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It goes against all other, official Reaction cards, but could you simply say the following?
Agora - "When you discard this other than during Clean-up, you may reveal it once to gain a Silver to your hand."
Token - "When you discard this during your turn, if it's not Clean-up, you may reveal it once for +1 Coin."
I don't see an issue with it, but I'm sure someone else will. :P
Is there, like, a place to see the latest texts? There doesn't seem to be a link in the first post or anything like that.
What's all this about an on-discard Reaction having infinite-reveal issues? How is it different from Tunnel?
Short explanation: Tunnel gets covered up, so it loses track of itself.
Long explanation: One could argue that a reaction on discarding, similar to on-gain effects, happens when the card is in your discard pile, and as Reactions can be revealed any number of times on a trigger, a card could be revealed from your discard pile infinite times if its reaction effect doesn't keep you from doing that. Assuming that to reveal a card you have to move it, this is not possible for Tunnel as long as its Reaction has any effect.
Edit: Now that I think about it... Does the Gold land on top of Tunnel or is Tunnel "un-revealed" and returned to the pile only after that?
This is the order in the online version:
(1) Play a card that discards
(2) Discard Tunnel
(3) React with Tunnel from the discard
(4) Tunnel returns to the discard
(5) Gain a Gold to your discard
In the end, Tunnel and Gold are in your discard with Gold being on top. I can't say for sure, but I believe Tunnel could be revealed infinitely if the Gold went straight into your hand.
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If you had an empty Gold pile then Tunnel wouldn't be covered up. Of course it wouldn't do anything then anyway so revealing infinitely would just be like revealing Moat infinitely to an attack. You could even get fancy and empty Silvers and then react to the Gold gain with Trader, that wouldn't cover up Tunnel either and could matter I guess if there was another card that reacted when you would gain something, which will never happen but still!
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If you had an empty Gold pile then Tunnel wouldn't be covered up. Of course it wouldn't do anything then anyway so revealing infinitely would just be like revealing Moat infinitely to an attack. You could even get fancy and empty Silvers and then react to the Gold gain with Trader, that wouldn't cover up Tunnel either and could matter I guess if there was another card that reacted when you would gain something, which will never happen but still!
I highly doubt there even is reasonable design space for a "would gain" without an "instead". Why would you not just make that on gain? And if the "instead" is there, that's how the infinite reveals end.
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Huh, wait. In a game with Possession, Tunnel never gets covered up because Possession is on would-gain...
I'm not sure whether that means my reasoning is off or whether this is just a "deal with it" rule (such as Transmute not costing - 1 coin and a Potion after Bridge, even though that's not less than 0 Coins). But yeah,apparently that's fine.
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I guess a wording that might work with both Agora and Token is "If you would discard this, you may [reveal it from your hand for +$1][reveal it from your to gain a Silver to your hand] instead. If you do, put this into your discard pile."
Wordy as heck.
Other way around (for Agora) would be "exchange this for a Silver, putting it in your hand. If you do, gain an Agora." but that's just crazy talk.
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I started a discussion on Tunnel's Reaction here: http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=18751.msg760375#msg760375
Might be interesting, although tangential.
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I started a discussion on Tunnel's Reaction here: http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=18751.msg760375#msg760375
Might be interesting, although tangential.
Asper, thanks for championing this. I'm going to try contribute what I can, because I think the result of that discussion will be the final word on Agora and Token.
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Okay, so I think the question I have to posit is this:
What about Diplomat?
If I currently have a hand with 10 cards in it (because reasons -- you can call me the Hound Mastaaa!) and someone attacks me, can I actually reveal the same Diplomat like, 5 times?
Also as per Donald's Secret History of Diplomat:
The bottom originally gave a Silver when you gained or trashed a card. You had to discard it, so you couldn't gain the pile instantly (a once-per-turn approach was another option).
This implies that discarding the card breaks the cycle.
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To answer my own question (yeah, I shouldn't soliloquize in the thread, sorry)
I believe based on the language of the Secret History of Diplomat, the following rules are in play:
1) Multiple Reactions can react to a single valid trigger;
2) Reaction cards that enter the hand (either by drawing or by "unrevealing" a card revealed from your hand) during or as a result of Reaction effects to a trigger can also React to that same trigger.
So in the case of Diplomat with 10 cards:
1) Diplomat reveals in response to Attack trigger.
2) Diplomat is resolved, you draw up to 12 cards and then discard down to 9.
3) Diplomat enters your hand.
4) Now you can react with Diplomat or any other copies of Diplomat or any other react-to-attack Reactions you drew as part of step 2.
LOOP)
Eventually you get out of the loop because you have only 4 cards in hand.
However, if this is the case, and my logic is good, Agora is fine and Token is fine.
Unfortunately while doing this research I found DXV saying that Stronghold's reaction is too weak to live on a $3 card and Stronghold is a $5. ARRGH.
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First, yes, you can totally reveal the same Diplomat any number of times as long as the condition is fulfilled.
Second, the discarding option mentioned in the secret history is clearly a mirror of e.g. Market Square (as somebody else mentioned in the other thread). You can not discard Market Square from your hand when it's not in your hand anymore.
The important thing is that Diplomat is not an infinite loop. Every time you reveal it, you lose a card, up to the point where you don't get anything out of it anymore.
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Anyhow, yes, it seems that Agora and Token are both fine. Apparently the ruling is that only reactions from spaces that are non-public can be revealed multiple times.
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The important thing is that Diplomat is not an infinite loop. Every time you reveal it, you lose a card, up to the point where you don't get anything out of it anymore.
That should mean it is the ultimate Tunnel/Faithful Hound enabler (from a standard hand size) with a search space of 15 cards, if I counted correctly. Of course this comes at the price of effectively missing your next turn.
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That settles it, Agora and Token can stay how they are.
Stronghold bottom..... ergh. I'm very tempted to make it play itself as a reaction to attacks, probably *after* the attack is resolved.
Edit: can scam the language off of Royal Carriage/Coin of the Realm like: "Directly after another player finishes playing an Attack card, you may play this from your hand."
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So the other thing I'm working on now is a version of Pyramids that no longer curses you but instead makes Victory cards worth -1 VP to a min of 0VP. I'm having challenges testing this for balance, though. It should be very powerful but not enough to take over the game completely, and it should make you lose if you can't trash it and invest into it too heavily.
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That sounds cool.
What if pyramids was a victory card worth a lot of points, but having it decreased the score on the provinces.
Like this.
Pyramid
8V
—————————
For each pyramid you have at the
End of the game province is worth
-1V less, but not less than 0V.
When You gain this each other
player takes 3 debt tokens.
Cost 9 Victory-Defeat
When those pyramids were built the Egyptians received all the glory. However the slaves received nothing but, lots of sweat. So shouldn’t pyramid be a card that creates more work for the other players. And pyramids take a lot of space up. Plus I noticed you didn’t have any victory cards.
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Now for shipwreck why didn’t you just do it similar to guilds. You may overpay for this, if you overpaid by 2 gain a gold, and a copper. Then you could just do cost 2+ (with the + on the top right of course)
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I like stoneworks
Trash provinces and duchies and gain victory tokens the same amount that those cards are worth.
I’m sure I mentioned this but I love snake charmer, a choice attack. Especially if they don’t have anything worthwhile to trash. And if you play it twice in a turn you get a big benefit.
The new stronghold is cool too. It gives more reasons for players to buy attack cards.
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I like mission house
Gain up to 6 victory tokens and then after that you can still play it as if it was a lost city.
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Pyramid
8V
—————————
For each pyramid you have at the
End of the game province is worth
-1V less, but not less than 0V.
When You gain this each other
player takes 3 debt tokens.
Cost 9 Victory-Defeat
This has A LOT of issues. First, the VP clause alters the value of another VP card, which Dominion cards never do (see Duke). A less wordy version would be:
Worth 8VP minus the number of Provinces in your deck, down to 0VP.
Second, what is that type for? It doesn't do anything, does it?
Third, the card is much, much better than Province, like Colony is, but emptying the pile does not end the game, unlike Colony. Even worse, it actually discourages ending the game, because Provinces now are worth barely any points. So, what do you do? You load up on Duchies and try to end the game on piles. Your opponent who got less Pyramids than you now is behind and also needs to load up on Duchies because they can't compete just with Provinces. Just that, damn, they got all that debt. The result: A player who leads on Pyramids more or less gets an insurmountable point difference (as you can't go for both Pyramids an Provinces effectively), but the game still drags on while people stuff their decks with even more dead cards. Yay.
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The Pyramid right now is being difficult to balance, lol.
It's
Pyramid - Action - $5
+$5
+1 Buy
You may trash 2 cards from your hand.
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At the end of the game, Victory cards are worth -1VP, but not less than 0VP.
Seems like a lot of power all in a $5 card. But in practice, it seems to not be powerful enough, although the test cases I've tried haven't all been good test cases.
I tried buffing it up to give $6 instead of $5. At that point it became hugely OP, I got 7 of the 8 provinces in a 2-player game where the other player was not allowed to buy Pyramids. Even with the drawback (I bought 4 Pyramids over the course of the game, but managed to trash down to 1 remaining, which is sort of the point) I had so many more points that I won. Even if I failed to trash any of the Pyramids I would have 14 VP vs 11VP (they still had Estates) so it was OP OP.
Back down to +$5 I am struggling to edge the VP pile. More tests are needed but I may need to price it at $4. Trying to keep it out of Death Cart's design space. Ofc it started out as a clone of Death Cart that gave you Curses instead of Ruins, so there's that problem.
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Update on Stronghold:
After thinking around "how do I make this card seem war-like enough to justify the art" I have hit on this disgusting essence of pure cancer:
Stronghold - Action - $5 or $7
Put your deck into your discard pile. Look through your discard pile, trash a card from it, and put a card from it into your hand.
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When you buy this for $7, +1 Buy, return to your Action phase, and replay each Attack card you have in play.
It's evil.
On that note, I've been adding the Variable Cost rule to a few cards; I will have to explain it in the rules.
The short version is something like this:
1) a card with multiple costs costs all of those costs for the purposes of targeting by other cards. i.e., a card costing $2 and $4 costs less than $3 and also costs more than $3. So Dame Natalie could gain a Shipwreck and also can trash Shipwreck.
2) If a card allows you to gain a card based on the cost of the variable cost card, you pick one card that satisfies the rule. So using Upgrade on Shipwreck allows you to gain either a card costing exactly $3 or one costing exactly $5. The player who makes the choice gets to decide what you're getting, so another player with Swindler can swindle Shipwreck into either a $2 or $4 cost card.
3) When you buy a card with variable costs, you get to choose which cost you're paying. Both cards with printed variable costs will have a "if you buy for $(more expensive cost)" rule.
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There are lots of victory cards in this game besides colony that are better than province. And I tend to like a longer game anyway. I dont play to Win. I play to have fun. Playing the cards is fun and I get carried away, in fact when the game ends abruptly that irks me. I don’t mind losing just as long as I enjoyed the cards I played with. So a long game is what I look forward to. And if I happen to win great. Anyways there are lots of victory cards that work with my style and tend to be better than province. Like fairgrounds, vineyard, and gardens. With tournament in the game I tend to get 8Vs from fairgrounds. And I’ve been known to get 10Vs from vineyard. So it doesn’t bug me if there was a victory that reduced province to dust.
Yeah I’m sure that version of pyramid would give one player a huge advantage. And maybe it needs to be tweaked too. That was just a rough draft out of the blue idea anyway.
Oh and defeat is my replacement for saying curse. I have come up with my own card ideas and have 3 different defeat cards. Defeat is opposite of victory. Curse is not opposite of victory.
And since there’s not really Cards you can buy other than curse out there, I figured I’d come up with my own. Now if you think no one would purposely buy a card with a minus score. There are definitely some who would if there was a huge benefit. Check out my alchemy ideas. On my alchemy idea forum thing. There you find the mad scientist. Is it worth buying judge for yourself. After all you could probably always trash it later anyway.
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Oh nerai,
I had a thought for stronghold. You said you wanted to make it more attack themed. And your recent idea may be evil. But it’s not the most evil.
You could always make it similar to possession!
Now that would be evil. Evil lol!
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Like for instance if you bought stronghold for 7$ then you could take control of the player to your lefts turn. Where you can’t play actions and must go to the buy phase (unlike the real possession where you can play their actions.) Buy a card for them you may gain a copy of it. So for instance they had a weak treasure hand. You could buy a curse for them and not gain it. Or if they had for instance 3 golds in their hand. You could buy them a province, and gain a province. And of course if you were lucky enough to have a treasure in their hand with an extra buy, like charm. You give em 2 curses. Now that would be evil. Maybe even worse than possession. Or get a good card and still give em a curse.
Like I said out of the blue idea.
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ClouduHieh, you might want to read the fan card creation guide and also Donald X' secret history of Dominion.
Neither Wineyard, nor Fairgrounds, nor Gardens, nor any other Victory card or even Landmark make Province worth less than it is by default. The major fact is, they don't keep the game from ending. And yeah, you can like any type of game you want, even games that require players to do pointless stuff for several rounds just to end it even though the winner is already clear. Your individual preference doesn't make this an enjoyable experience for the general public, though.
Anyhow, this is Nerai's thread, so I'd prefer discussing his cards here first and foremost.
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The only reason why I thought that I’d have a victory that made province worthless was nerai had an idea to make other victories worthless ( unless I think that’s what he meant) so I just picked on province in particular is all.
Like I said an out of the blue idea. Besides isn’t there a huge thread for really bad card ideas anyway. Which means people I have come up with bad card ideas on a multitude of threads.
No harm in adding a few. To the already hundreds.
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The only reason why I thought that I’d have a victory that made province worthless was nerai had an idea to make other victories worthless ( unless I think that’s what he meant) so I just picked on province in particular is all.
Like I said an out of the blue idea. Besides isn’t there a huge thread for really bad card ideas anyway. Which means people I have come up with bad card ideas on a multitude of threads.
No harm in adding a few. To the already hundreds.
Point taken. However, I don't see how Nerai implied that Pyramid would be a Victory card. I think what he had in mind was something like this:
Pyramid, Action, 5$
+5$
+1 Buy
---
At the end of the game, (however implemented), your VP cards are worth 1 VP less, down to 0 VP.
Regardless of how it's implemented, that version does NOT make Province skippable - Province is still the best Victory card to get and Pyramid is just a stepping stone there that you'd rather get rid of before the game ends. Which Pyramid itself helps you do, too.
So Nerai's Pyramid leads to the game ending condition, yours leads away from it. That's not to say the original concept doesn't have issues, like wording and the question of whether you need new types (personally I prefer negative VP being just "When you gain this, each other player gets +X VP", like on my card Minister).
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So Nerai's Pyramid leads to the game ending condition, yours leads away from it. That's not to say the original concept doesn't have issues, like wording and the question of whether you need new types (personally I prefer negative VP being just "When you gain this, each other player gets +X VP", like on my card Minister).
You know, Asper, my name has the letter i twice, NeIraI. :)
Jokes aside, this would have actually fixed the original Pyramid design, if it gave everyone else +2VP whenever you used it instead of gaining you two Curse cards. If I can't land this version I may go back to that. Balance would be different because it wouldn't junk you anymore but it also wouldn't have an upper cap on how bad things can get.
The same could be true of the other Curse gainer in the set, Grave Watcher, but that one I think is okay.
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So Nerai's Pyramid leads to the game ending condition, yours leads away from it. That's not to say the original concept doesn't have issues, like wording and the question of whether you need new types (personally I prefer negative VP being just "When you gain this, each other player gets +X VP", like on my card Minister).
You know, Asper, my name has the letter i twice, NeIraI. :)
Oopsy... Sorry about that.
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So Nerai's Pyramid leads to the game ending condition, yours leads away from it. That's not to say the original concept doesn't have issues, like wording and the question of whether you need new types (personally I prefer negative VP being just "When you gain this, each other player gets +X VP", like on my card Minister).
You know, Asper, my name has the letter i twice, NeIraI. :)
Oopsy... Sorry about that.
Lol no worries. This happens allll the time. Or people call me Neira.
I am happy to hear of the possibly +VP solution for Pyramids, will see if I can land the current idea, though.
Edit: the good news is I can test both versions at the same time, by having users get the +2VP and set them aside in a special place, then at the end of the game evaluate the overall effect on score of the VPs vs the -VP penalty. For sake of completeness I can also try +1VP and "at the end of the game, VP cards are worth -1VP but not less than 1VP" which may be a direction I go even though it actually then rewards buying VP cards that are otherwise useless. But not much.
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By the way, complaining about that Tunnel thing, I totally forgot to remark on Agora itself. It's basically a Festival that traded its buy for a Reaction which allows you to discard it for benefit while losing no more than 1 Action (compared to playing Agora over that Silver). It also allows you to gain Silver to discard attacks or other interactions that discard cards, but this immediately poses the question why you would want larger amounts of Silvers in an engine deck - or a Village in a deck full of Silvers.
My gut feeling is that this is in general weaker than Festival. Festival's unique effect helps building an engine. Agora's unique effect jinders an engine. I don't really see it being good outside of discard-for-benefit strategies.
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Yeah, Asper, I agree that it's probably weaker than Festival. The $5 cost might be a mistake vs. $4. It's a throwback to the silver being a "good idea" and existing as a defense vs attacks.
I *could* try throw in a bonus for silvers, like if it gave you +$2, and +$1 to the first Silver you play, like Merchant.
Also, I decided to rework Profiteer, since I found the Reaction part clunky. I tried Choose One, and that was even worse. So right now I'm trying this out:
Profiteer - Action $4
+1 Action
+1 Buy
Trash a non-Victory card from the Supply. Cards with the same name as that one cost $1 less this turn (but not less than $0.)
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When this is in play, cards in your hand and deck cost $0 or $1 more.
Two things to point out: one, "Cards in your hand and deck" means specifically if you play a trash-for-benefit card, or say a Patrician, the cards in your deck count as more expensive. Screws up Sages, though.
However, this also makes use of my variable cost mechanic to make the cards in your deck and hand have multiple costs, so you can break the game with upgrades.
Time's running short for testing, though, so please give me feedback, especially feedback of the "this will break the game because _____" kind.
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Okay, now Agora's probably OP, but I'm going to try:
Agora - Action $5
+2 Actions
+$2
The first time you play a Silver this turn, +1 Card
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When you discard this other than during Clean-up, you may reveal it to gain a Silver into your hand.
So now it's Grand Market strong, but only if you play a Silver. If you don't, it's probably somewhere around $3.5. If you discard it, it's still the bad option, but maybe you'll be excited about it a little.
This is still pending tests.
Edit: Wow I must have been tired when I said that... nobody wants cards in their buy phase, Token (now Gamepiece) not withstanding.
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Hmm not really like grand market. After all you are drawing a card during your buy phase. Unless it’s a treasure it’s useless also, It could be hurting your next turn. What if it’s an action then you an action card that you could of played on your next turn.
If you really want it to be useful, why don’t you make it like villa.
When you buy a villa it lets you go back to your action phase with an action. And with villa going into your hand. You then can play it.
Why don’t you have agora do this. When you play a silver during your buy phase go back to your action phase and +1 Card. Then this way you go back to your action phase you’ll have an extra action and another card in your hand. Which may be an action which you’ll now be able to play, and then if it was treasure you can go back to your buy phase with a treasure to add.
How about that?
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You could just make Agora give +1 Card if you reveal a Silver from your hand. Obviously it's a bit different because you can't draw the Silver later and still get +1 card but I think it does the job well enough? It's also nice because the reaction puts the Silver into hand, so it has an aesthetic thing going for it too.
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I'm actually toying with making the Silver rule "Discard a Silver from your hand for +2 Cards." It makes it like a Lost City, which I don't want too many of, but the net power level is less. It makes you have to gamble, do you want a silver bird in the hand, or two in the bush?
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I'm actually toying with making the Silver rule "Discard a Silver from your hand for +2 Cards." It makes it like a Lost City, which I don't want too many of, but the net power level is less. It makes you have to gamble, do you want a silver bird in the hand, or two in the bush?
It still isn't increasing hand size, so I wouldn't say it's a Lost City. Also means you can't just get +1 Card from all the Agora's once you draw a Silver so should be more interesting?
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I've tested this, the +2 Cards if you discard a Silver. It seems decent but because you don't normally get cards from Agora it's hard to pull off without a lot of Silver.
Overall I like it.
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So, basically cards are finished now, since I'm in talks with a printer to create a few physicals. What's done is done!
You can see the current versions on the gallery now.
Speak up in the next 24 hours or so if you spot any game-breaking bugs! The most recent changes are Stronghold and Profiteer.
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Fan cards are never finished!
For better or worse, they will never feel the sweet, sweet release of death.
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Speak up in the next 24 hours or so if you spot any game-breaking bugs!
Great cards! I didn't find anything I'd consider game-breaking, but I did go overthem with a "fine-toothed comb" and found the following typos, wording improvement suggestions:
Discovery - "When you flip this face-up" There is no mention of ever putting the card face down. Is that somewhere in additional rules? I'm not sure whether it should be put in the card text itself.
Gamepiece – Possible wording improvement: "When you discard this on your turn, and not during Clean-up"
Inspector – For accountability the other players need to reveal the card from their hand before putting it on their deck. (See Bureaucrat: "Each other player reveals a Victory card from their hand and puts it onto their deck (or reveals a hand with no Victory cards).") The word reveal also makes it more clear that the card is coming from their hand. Also, instead of using "copy of that card", I'd suggest using "matches". (See Doctor: "Name a card. Reveal the top 3 cards of your deck. Trash the matches.")
Suggested text: "Reveal 2 cards from your hand, then discard them. Each other player with 4 or more cards in hand reveals one that matches one of your revealed cards and puts it onto their deck (or reveals they can't)."
Moundbuilder Village - Since all cards in play can be discarded at once, I think this means you can set aside a card that was just played this turn and during Clean-up was discarded at the same time as Moundbuilder Village. This may be a point to make in any additional printed rules/explanation for the card.
Profiteer - The phrase "cards in your hand and deck cost 0 or 1 more" might be more clear if you add the word "all" before "cards".
Riches - The period should be placed outside the final parenthesis "(including other Riches)."
Shipwreck - Incorrect word order in last sentence. Should be "When you buy this for 4…"
Stronghold - The text is missing a word. It should say: "return to your Action phase first."
Tomb Raider - The period should be placed outside the final parenthesis "(or reveals they can't)."
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Wow, Thanar, good eye. I must have been panicking or something when I did that last render of Shipwreck and Stronghold.
Discovery's additional rules are part of the "Shuffle Into" rules.
Gamepiece I'll take into consideration. It's true that Clean-up isn't a single instant in time.
Inspector - good eye. I missed this when I converted it from discard to put on top.
Moundbuilder - I just double-checked, it's there.
Profiteer - possibly, I'll think about it, look at it, see what feels best.
Riches and Tomb Raider -- NO! I'm an MLA snob! Okay, I'll sleep on it.
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Riches and Tomb Raider -- NO! I'm an MLA snob! Okay, I'll sleep on it.
To be consistent with existing cards the period should be outside, see Bureaucrat or Gardens for reference. Inspector, Moundbuilder Village, Profiteer and maybe more I missed should be changed too.
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Riches and Tomb Raider -- NO! I'm an MLA snob! Okay, I'll sleep on it.
To be consistent with existing cards the period should be outside, see Bureaucrat or Gardens for reference. Inspector, Moundbuilder Village, Profiteer and maybe more I missed should be changed too.
Fun fact, to be consistent with official cards, the period should be outside if the sentence is not the last sentence on the card, but inside if it is -- see Events cards, or Not In Supply cards.
I thought this was something that changed over time (older cards, outside; new ones, inside) but sets like Dark Ages have both insides and outsides.
In that case, Moundbuilder Village and Tomb Raider changes but the other cards stay the same.
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It is my (likely naive) belief that I will no longer be changing these cards. (https://imgur.com/a/VicUEEF)
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You are free to not change them anymore, but that doesn't mean they are finished 😛
Gamepiece for instance is really weird and I have a hard time imagining a deck you want it in. For Artifact, what's the difference between paying and not paying 0? Graveyard still leads to infinite points with Watchtower, Tomb and Inheritance (suggestion: "a card costing more than it" - anyhow, this is the most nit-picky one). If the number of Curses is too low, Pharaoh will give the second-to-last player two Curses, and none to the last. Prospector and Profiteer are very similar in both art and name. If I play several Profiteers, how do they stack? And so on...
The main question however is: How thoroughly did you test these?
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You are free to not change them anymore, but that doesn't mean they are finished 😛
Gamepiece for instance is really weird and I have a hard time imagining a deck you want it in. For Artifact, what's the difference between paying and not paying 0? Graveyard still leads to infinite points with Watchtower, Tomb and Inheritance (suggestion: "a card costing more than it" - anyhow, this is the most nit-picky one). If the number of Curses is too low, Pharaoh will give the second-to-last player two Curses, and none to the last. Prospector and Profiteer are very similar in both art and name. If I play several Profiteers, how do they stack? And so on...
The main question however is: How thoroughly did you test these?
Gamepiece, I've played with and have had some success with it, but then again I'm at my (relatively low) play level.
Paying zero with Artifact nets you a Copper, which you can put into play. Not paying doesn't.
Graveyard can no longer gain Graveyards.
You're right about Pharaoh. I'm okay with that.
I'm not too worried about the art and name similarity.
The way that Profiteers stack is detailed in the rulebook. It's why I detailed that the cards cost both $0 more and $1 more; two profiteers cause the cards to cost $0 more and $1 more and $2 more, etc.
I'm aware that I could spend the rest of my life refining the cards, trust me! But at some point I need to commit to the project being finished. This was supposed to be a 1-year project. It's already in the third quarter of its second year!
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Sorry, to respond to the actual question:
I've played probably a thousand games with my testgroup over the last 19 months. I'd like more testing on Profiteer, since the idea works in my head but it's a fairly recent idea, and I've only had a half-dozen games with it since adding the passive clause. It seems good, but I'm not in the loop with extremely high-calibre players.
BTW, when I said I was probably not changing the cards anymore, I meant "before printing them" and not as a response to your earlier statement, Asper :) It totally looks like it, though.
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Gamepiece for instance is really weird and I have a hard time imagining a deck you want it in.
Of course, no sooner do I say that I'm not going to change it, then I find myself toying with this improvement:
Gamepiece - Treasure Reaction - $3
Reveal the top card of your deck. If it's a Treasure, draw it and discard a card.
Otherwise, discard it or put it back.
$1
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When you discard this on your turn other than during Clean-up, reveal it for $1.
I think this lives up to the goal "A lesser version of Venture that goes will with Tactician and works as a sifter in the Buy phase" a bit better.
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Is it too late for suggestions?
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Is it too late for suggestions?
No, it's not too late for suggestions. I will take them all into consideration for sure, since I haven't ordered the physical copies yet.
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You are free to not change them anymore, but that doesn't mean they are finished 😛
Gamepiece for instance is really weird and I have a hard time imagining a deck you want it in. For Artifact, what's the difference between paying and not paying 0? Graveyard still leads to infinite points with Watchtower, Tomb and Inheritance (suggestion: "a card costing more than it" - anyhow, this is the most nit-picky one). If the number of Curses is too low, Pharaoh will give the second-to-last player two Curses, and none to the last. Prospector and Profiteer are very similar in both art and name. If I play several Profiteers, how do they stack? And so on...
The main question however is: How thoroughly did you test these?
Gamepiece, I've played with and have had some success with it, but then again I'm at my (relatively low) play level.
Paying zero with Artifact nets you a Copper, which you can put into play. Not paying doesn't.
Graveyard can no longer gain Graveyards.
You're right about Pharaoh. I'm okay with that.
I'm not too worried about the art and name similarity.
The way that Profiteers stack is detailed in the rulebook. It's why I detailed that the cards cost both $0 more and $1 more; two profiteers cause the cards to cost $0 more and $1 more and $2 more, etc.
I'm aware that I could spend the rest of my life refining the cards, trust me! But at some point I need to commit to the project being finished. This was supposed to be a 1-year project. It's already in the third quarter of its second year!
One might argue that there is no difference between paying and not paying 0$, given that you can't overpay 0$ for Ruins, either. I already gave my suggestion of "pay any amount of $. You may gain..." to fix this.
Graveyard can gain Estates and Estates can gain Graveyards. With Tomb, Watchtower and Inheritance, you can trash one, then trash the other to get infinite points.
Anyhow, I wasn't aware of how long you have been working on this. That said, I definitely see that these are not just some throw-away ideas, but that you put quite a bit of thought into it. I guess it's mostly the way you present this, with your official unofficial twitter and all, that makes it seem like you were a tiny bit too optimistic about the state of your cards.
Your Gamepiece change for example is a huge improvement in my book, although I'd probably make it peek at the card and then just giving you the choice to put it in your hand (not draw it) at the cost of discarding a card, regardless of type. But that's really minimal (except the "put in hand" thing, that's standard rules).
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You are free to not change them anymore, but that doesn't mean they are finished 😛
Gamepiece for instance is really weird and I have a hard time imagining a deck you want it in. For Artifact, what's the difference between paying and not paying 0? Graveyard still leads to infinite points with Watchtower, Tomb and Inheritance (suggestion: "a card costing more than it" - anyhow, this is the most nit-picky one). If the number of Curses is too low, Pharaoh will give the second-to-last player two Curses, and none to the last. Prospector and Profiteer are very similar in both art and name. If I play several Profiteers, how do they stack? And so on...
The main question however is: How thoroughly did you test these?
Gamepiece, I've played with and have had some success with it, but then again I'm at my (relatively low) play level.
Paying zero with Artifact nets you a Copper, which you can put into play. Not paying doesn't.
Graveyard can no longer gain Graveyards.
You're right about Pharaoh. I'm okay with that.
I'm not too worried about the art and name similarity.
The way that Profiteers stack is detailed in the rulebook. It's why I detailed that the cards cost both $0 more and $1 more; two profiteers cause the cards to cost $0 more and $1 more and $2 more, etc.
I'm aware that I could spend the rest of my life refining the cards, trust me! But at some point I need to commit to the project being finished. This was supposed to be a 1-year project. It's already in the third quarter of its second year!
One might argue that there is no difference between paying and not paying 0$, given that you can't overpay 0$ for Ruins, either. I already gave my suggestion of "pay any amount of $. You may gain..." to fix this.
Graveyard can gain Estates and Estates can gain Graveyards. With Tomb, Watchtower and Inheritance, you can trash one, then trash the other to get infinite points.
Anyhow, I wasn't aware of how long you have been working on this. That said, I definitely see that these are not just some throw-away ideas, but that you put quite a bit of thought into it. I guess it's mostly the way you present this, with your official unofficial twitter and all, that makes it seem like you were a tiny bit too optimistic about the state of your cards.
Your Gamepiece change for example is a huge improvement in my book, although I'd probably make it peek at the card and then just giving you the choice to put it in your hand (not draw it) at the cost of discarding a card, regardless of type. But that's really minimal (except the "put in hand" thing, that's standard rules).
You're right about Graveyard, I will change it to prevent shenanigans.
You're likely also right about Gamepiece, look at is mostly worthwhile for the simplicity, and people can self-regulate. If they want to discard coppers, then they only get $1 from Gamepiece. That's likely okay.
I left the (including $0) on Artifact because my playtesters kept not understanding that they could gain Coppers with it without paying money, or that they could *not* gain Coppers with it. I'd rather it not say that, since it's more awkward than just "any amount of..."
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I left the (including $0) on Artifact because my playtesters kept not understanding that they could gain Coppers with it without paying money, or that they could *not* gain Coppers with it. I'd rather it not say that, since it's more awkward than just "any amount of..."
Hum, I understand that that's an issue... In the end I guess it's fine.
Also, your rules sheet kind of makes me want to do one, myself. :) I'll try to give some feedback on it soon.
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Perfect, thank you!
Also I'd love to know how all this time I've had Gamepiece's rules text above its value and not noticed ;)
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Am I right to believe that after playing Profiteer, I can gain the entire Border Village pile at once?
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Am I right to believe that after playing Profiteer, I can gain the entire Border Village pile at once?
I *knew* there was a reason I originally restricted it to cards in your hand and deck. Back it goes!
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Am I right to believe that after playing Profiteer, I can gain the entire Border Village pile at once?
I *knew* there was a reason I originally restricted it to cards in your hand and deck. Back it goes!
Hum. If I prefer to do Watchtower's on-gain reaction before Border Village's effect, can I still check the card's cost? Considering this never lead to issues in the past, I guess I can?
However, this is already a three-card combo and not soooooooo immensely oppressive that it breaks the game, so don't worry about that.
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Fun fact, to be consistent with official cards, the period should be outside if the sentence is not the last sentence on the card, but inside if it is -- see Events cards, or Not In Supply cards.
You put a period inside parentheses only if the entire sentence is in parenthesis. (Ferry, Plan, Seaway, Training, Inheritance, Pathfinding and Lost Arts as well as this sentence do this.)
If only a part of the sentence is in parentheses, you put the period after it (as is the case for Save, Pilgrimage, all those "or reveals they can't" cards and this section of the sentence).
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Gamepiece update:
There's a reason I made you discard a card with Gamepiece, it's to keep the power level down vs. Venture's.
So a more accurate ruling would be:
Gamepiece Treasure - Reaction - $3
$1
Look at the top card of your deck. Put it into your hand, discard it, or put it back. If you put it in your hand, discard a card.
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When you discard this on your turn other than during Clean-up, reveal it for + $1.
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Gamepiece update:
There's a reason I made you discard a card with Gamepiece, it's to keep the power level down vs. Venture's.
So a more accurate ruling would be:
Gamepiece Treasure - Reaction - $3
$1
Look at the top card of your deck. Put it into your hand, discard it, or put it back. If you put it in your hand, discard a card.
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When you discard this on your turn other than during Clean-up, reveal it for + $1.
This can be shortened to:
Gamepiece Treasure - Reaction - $3
$1
Look at the top card of your deck. You may put it in your hand. If you do, discard a card.
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When you discard this on your turn other than during Clean-up, reveal it for + $1.
Looked-at cards, like revealed cards, always go back to where they were (see Perl Diver). Putting it in your hand allows you both to keep it for another card or discard the looked-at card itself.
You might consider to just state "during your Action or Buy phase" instead of "your turn other than during cleanup". Technically, the +1$ only does things during your own turn, anyway, and you can't use it after the buy phase anyhow (given how no Night card cares about the coins you have left). But, eh, I guess that's preference.
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Gamepiece update:
There's a reason I made you discard a card with Gamepiece, it's to keep the power level down vs. Venture's.
So a more accurate ruling would be:
Gamepiece Treasure - Reaction - $3
$1
Look at the top card of your deck. Put it into your hand, discard it, or put it back. If you put it in your hand, discard a card.
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When you discard this on your turn other than during Clean-up, reveal it for + $1.
This can be shortened to:
Gamepiece Treasure - Reaction - $3
$1
Look at the top card of your deck. You may put it in your hand. If you do, discard a card.
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When you discard this on your turn other than during Clean-up, reveal it for + $1.
Looked-at cards, like revealed cards, always go back to where they were (see Perl Diver). Putting it in your hand allows you both to keep it for another card or discard the looked-at card itself.
You might consider to just state "during your Action or Buy phase" instead of "your turn other than during cleanup". Technically, the +1$ only does things during your own turn, anyway, and you can't use it after the buy phase anyhow (given how no Night card cares about the coins you have left). But, eh, I guess that's preference.
The pre-shortened and shortened version don't do the same thing; also there's a long precedent of "Look at" rules explicitly stating that you can put the card back, Using "may" works as an equivalent, but printing it with a choice, people may get confused between whether they must choose clause B if they didn't choose clause A:
Look at the top card of your deck. You may put it into your hand or discard it. If you put it into your hand, discard a card.
Arguably I could shorten it by saying:
Look at the top card of your deck. Put it into your hand and discard a card, discard it, or put it back.
but that's also super confusing to read.
Look at the top card of your deck. Put it into your hand and discard a card, put it back, or discard it.
is an option but as far as I know, official cards always list the options in the "put into hand, discard, put back" order.
Edit: actually, there's a good argument that "put it ..." always comes last, so I could do something like:
Discard it, put it back, or put it into your hand and discard a card.
On the other hand, I totally agree with you about "Action and Buy phase". It looks better on the card, too, which is something I'm always going for.
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More straightforward (but complex nonetheless) Stronghold:
Stronghold - $5 or $7 - Action
Put your deck into your discard pile. Look through your discard pile, trash a card from it, and put a card from it into your hand.
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When you buy this for $7, play it as an Attack from the Supply. It's that card until it leaves play. You may choose to be unaffected by it.
Imagine that you have a moat that you used to react to yourself playing an attack. It would block the beneficial part of the attack while still hitting everyone else in the face.
The problem with playing an attack action in the buy phase is, you draw 3 cards. Great. What now. Giving you a Buy and pushing yourself back into the Action phase was a way of saying, you can use those cards so no big deal. But then it felt awkward; what if the attack I play gives me a Buy, then I have two. Maybe I draw a lot of actions, do I get +1 Action, too? Also, you're buying Stronghold late, when you have $7 and maybe are already buying provinces. You probably don't want to gain a Silver with Bureaucrat, either. But you still would love to wreck your opponent's plan by putting a Victory card into his next turn. So I was toying around with ways of making Stronghold's payoff ability do "just the attack part of an attack" but that gets messy, especially with conditional attacks like Replace.
So my solution is to put a big may() clause around the parts of the attack that you have to do. Don't want to draw the cards? you don't have to. Of course, if you want to, go for it.
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In which case would my wording not do the same thing?
You look at the card.
A) You decide to put it in your hand. You discard another card. Check.
B) You decide to put it in your hand. You discard the card itself. This is the identical outcome to discarding it from the top of your deck. Check.
C) You decide to not put it in your hand. By default, all cards that you look at are returned to where they came from if not explicitly moved. The card goes back on top. Check.
Look-at and reveal wordings state that you may return a card to where it was only if that is absolutely necessary. It's not necessary in any context where the card will go back to where it was anyways, such as with Reactions, Legionary's Gold, or Chariot Race. For cases where it may not stay there, it still is only specified if there isn't a simple binary decision between the card staying or the card going somewhere else. For instance, all of Ironmonger, Pearl Diver, Duchess, Jack-of-All-Trades, Magpie, Patrician and Wishing Well do NOT specify that the card is returned to the deck if it is not moved somewhere else.
It IS specified if the card is an attack (such as Scrying Pool), as the attacker's ability to choose where the card goes is meant to be underlined. It also is specified if the decision is non-binary, such as with Lookout or Doctor, or re-ordering cards like Cartographer.
Gamepiece is neither of those card types.
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Haha, you're absolutely right. I missed the logical leap that you could always discard the card you just put in your hand, therefore the rules are equivalent.
Funny thing is it's not like I want you to have to discard a different card.
You've convinced me, I'll make both changes. And the card is cleaner, which is always a good thing.
Obviously I'll have to specify in the rules that the card you discard can be one that was in your hand before or the one you just put there, but that's standard across all official discard card rules.
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Sorry for coming around the corner with this just now, but revealing the card for a coin should be optional. As players will want to reveal them anyhow, making it mandatory adds nothing, gameplay-wise. However, when discarding multiple cards at once, you run into the same accountability problem 1st edition's Throne Room's had.
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You are right. I am honestly unsure why anyone would pass up the $1 (except I think there's a possible threat of a Landmark for precision golding) but it would save on rules fights if someone doesn't.
Thanks, Asper!
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You can thank me by checking out my post on that parenthesis thing. Trust me, I wouldn't make that up. It's easy to confirm the rules I lined out both from comparing them with official Dominion cards and looking it up online.
Maybe this is just due to me being a programmer, but I find it logically forcing: If you only want to incapsulate part of a sentence, that happens inside the sentence. If you want to encapsulate an entire sentence, put all of its parts in that encapsulation. In general, removing the part in parentheses must not create grammar mistakes (which using it like this does.) Oops, where did the period go?*
*Insert pregnancy joke here.
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About that line on Profiteer, it should be "While this is in play". Then it should also stay below the line. Probably I would consider dropping the effect entirely, though. For instance, if I trash a card with Bishop, do I get VP for the altered cost? Official rulings on e.g. Transmute/Inheritence imply no.
For a similar reason, I think both Stronghold and Shipwreck should just use a "When you buy this, you may pay 2, to do X." wording. The additional interaction with e.g. trash for benefit doesn't add anything new that on-gain/on-buy or on-trash effects didn't already add, but opens up a huge can of worms, rules-wise.
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About that line on Profiteer, it should be "While this is in play". Then it should also stay below the line. Probably I would consider dropping the effect entirely, though. For instance, if I trash a card with Bishop, do I get VP for the altered cost? Official rulings on e.g. Transmute/Inheritence imply no.
For a similar reason, I think both Stronghold and Shipwreck should just use a "When you buy this, you may pay 2, to do X." wording. The additional interaction with e.g. trash for benefit doesn't add anything new that on-gain/on-buy or on-trash effects didn't already add, but opens up a huge can of worms, rules-wise.
I second all of this, the rules issues don't seem worth the trouble.
Stronghold and Shipwreck could just be overpay. "When you buy this you may overpay for it. If you overpaid by $2 do X."
Also obligatory why is Riches randomly so broken comment.
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Yeah, I went with a non-overpay wording because Donald once mentioned he wanted overpay to scale with the amount paid, but that's neither a real rule nor would it really confuse people to have cards that do it differently. No need to introduce another almost equivalent rule. Overpay in the way Gazbag lined out seems like the way to go.
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Random question about Moundbuilder Village:
I assume it's intended that you have to put a Province into your hand if you have any, right? So, is this intended as a nerf? Because it is pretty bad to have to put a Province into your hand instead of, let's say, a Lab, if you have not gone through your entire pile; however, if you draw your deck, you can discard the cards in play and from your hand in any order, basically allowing you to use it on ANY card (that doesn't cost less than Moundbuilder Village). For instance, if you draw your deck, you can always discard Moundbuilder Village first, making it function as an ongoing +1 Action for the rest of the game.
My problem is what a weird, hidden way this is to get there. It seems like you need to know all too many rules, and basically like you're tricking the card.
So, my suggestion would be to make it a free choice which card to put into your hand, or whether to put one into your hand at all. If you want to avoid Moundbuilder Village to become "+1 Action at the start of each of your turns for the rest of the game", you could only allow cards costing more than it. Like:
When you discard this from play, look through your discard pile. You may reveal a card costing less more than this from it and put it into your hand after you draw your new hand.
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How many cards exist that are shuffled into supply piles? Just two, right? Boulder Trap and Discovery. I realize I'm nagging about yet another of the original concepts of this expansion here, but sadly I think the issues with these are twofold.
One is the fact that it's again an immense number of rules, that I admit I haven't fully understood even after reading your rules sheet, and all of that again for a very small number of cards that actually use those rules. I mean, only a single card has the trap type, because even those two cards don't work the same.
The other is the fact that I simply don't see the cards making the game more fun. It's random bonuses or negative effects that hit you, which is what makes Boons and Hexes such sub-par mechanics in my book. Here it's even worse, because at least with Boons and Hexes you know that one is supposed to help you and the other to harm you (although of course it's not too well implemented for some of them, e.g. Locusts). Here you just randomly receive a dead card with - 3 VP. Sure, in some games you can trash it, but in those where you can't your economy and score just took a decisive hit.
It just seems like a whole lot of complexity for very little fun to me 😕
Another thing: I think Snake Charmer should lose the entire attack portion. Early on it's likely to give your opponents a huge boost, but again whether it helps or hurts the other players is pretty random. Such trash-from-hand attacks come up here so often, and this is maybe a tad better than most of them, but still weird.
Is there a reason Stoneworks doesn't just do "When you gain this, +1VP per card you gained this turn"? As long as you can decide the order of the cards you gain yourself, it's absolutely identical, yet much simpler.
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An idea for making Boulder Trap/Discovery less random would be to have them effect everyone. So Boulder Trap could be something like:
"When this is uncovered, each player gains a Curse." and the Boulder Trap card itself is just something that you shuffle into a pile as a marker. Discovery could gain a Gold, you could do a few of them really. There would still be the mystery of when/where the trap is but now it isn't just screwing one person up.
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So, I have been complaining so much about elemental aspects of this expansion, I gigured it was time to give a bit of praise for a change - before I start sounding too much like a grumpy old man who hates everything:
I like how Agora is now a mix of Money enabler and engine component. I wonder if it would be better being able to discard just any card (possibly still only giving the bonus for Silver) to combo with itself. But perhaps the card as it is on Imgur is nicer, as it's less obvious.
Aquifier feels like it could screw you over a bit, so I'm curious whether it actually is worth 4$. Maybe it needs a steeper base bonus? Apart from that, it's a neat idea.
I wonder whether Archeologist is really worth 7$. It only cycles two more cards than Hunting Grounds, but also draws one less. Catacombs is another obvious comparison. Unlike either of those, it also does nothing when trashed for benefit. I also assume that usually you'll discard the two cards you don't put in your hand, either way, so maybe this could be a 6$? I like how straightforward it is.
I like Collector's friendly interaction, and how it subtly sets up its main effect. This effect is annoying in multiples, so putting it on a terminal is the right thing to do.
Encroach reminds me of something I tried to do back in the day, with a card called Vizier. It did the opposite, though, discarding a Victory card to gain a Treasure card costing up to 1$ more. Maybe I should revive that. I like how Encroach has a fixed draw, to make the card a bit more interesting.
New Gamepiece seems like a cute mini-Venture.
Inspector first had me worry that you would sometimes discard good cards to spite your opponents, but then find they didn't have such cards in hand. Then I realized that, as the cards go onto their deck, you usually want to discard junk to this, either way. With that in mind, It's actually a clever concept. I like it!
I like Pharaoh's theme, but isn't it too late usually when you get it? I assume that if you get a really early spike (as e.g. Coppersmith or Death Cart provide), then it's brilliant, but apart from that it seems like it'd be a bit late to the party. I'm not usually a fan of split piles, but maybe you could have this be one, with the first half being something similar to Death Cart / Mining Village? You don't need 10 Pharaohs, either way.
I already talked about the under-the-line effect of Profiteer and why I'd remove it, but the effect you get on play is actually not a bad idea at all :)
The parentheses, though :P
Profitee... Erm, Inspect... erm... Pro-spector. Ah, yes. That's my Vizier, except that I think my version topdecked it. I killed it a while ago, because it made getting Provinces early incredibly good, but perhaps I should have just lost the top-decking, like this one. It also costed 3$, by the way. The fact that you have those 3 cards with such similar names really confuses me, though. I'll add that I'm not a native English speaker, but also two of the guys start with P and wear identical hats... They actually look like the same guy with a sliiightly different beard. But I already mentioned that. Anyhow, looks not too bad.
I think Shipwreck is nice, but I suggest you just make it a 3$ and always give that on-gain bonus.
I kind of like Stoneworks, but isn't it a bit too good at preserving the VP from Victory cards?
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Lots of things to comment on.
I of course announced variable costs, now I'm thinking of getting rid of them, go figure. This happens.
Where to start? I'm just going to spam thoughts and we'll see where it goes.
Let's start with (). I'm making those changes internally, haven't rendered them yet.
Moundbuilder Village; the intent is that yes, it self-nerfs (unless you're playing with a select number of cards in which case it's great) once you get a Province. Someone convinced me that there was no hard in making it trigger whenever you discard it. Now I see there's a lot of harm. I'm going to go back to "at the end of your Clean-up (before drawing)". Some shenanigans are intended, of course, but not the kind where the card rewards Rules Lawyers to the point of being OP but everyone else can't use it.
Internally I've changed Profiteer to be much more simple, I realized I was overthinking it still. Now when it trashes a card you choose one, make the cards in that pile cost -$1 or make them cost +$1. Normally you'd never choose +$1 unless you have shenanigans to play with it. It still meets the profiteer's fantasy though.
I like the multicost in Shipwreck, but maybe changing it to an overpay or a "you can pay" would be good. Still, I could hit the same niche by making it trigger at a set time, like, if it's during the early turns. I have to think about it.
Stronghold is actually a bit OP at $5. I could make it cost $6 or $7 instead, and always trigger an attack; if I do that, though, then people might expect it to always come with an attack.
I didn't think about the effect of Prospector's name on non-native English speakers. I might rename it to something like Miner or Excavator, just to make it easier (Digger?)
The issue with Split piles is that while the art is a decent price, it's not cheap. I'll test Pharaoh below Pyramid, though. Pharaoh could arguably cost less there, too.
Shuffle into is a bigger conversation. In the case of Discovery it's a lot like a Gathering pile, except money instead of VPs. If I didn't have a self-imposed ban on using the Coffer mechanic, it *would* be Coffers.
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More random thoughts:
Stoneworks once had the rule the way it was to make it better for gain-during-action phase, something I'm admittedly a bit too obsessed with. But in reality I think it makes much more sense the way you've written it, other than that it should not trigger for itself, for balance reasons. So, "When you gain this, +1VP for each other card you've gained this turn." If you buy more than one, the second one will key off the first, which is intended.
Boulder Trap hasn't had the refinement that other cards have, largely because people (in my playtesting group) either think it's really fun or wonder why anyone would ever make a card like that. I'm tempted to give it the Rocks rules for meme fun, also to make it a bit nicer to the player; it costs $4 and gives you a silver when you find it, plus a bit more if you can get rid of it. I'd appreciate any feedback I can get for how a card like this should work, besides just "git rid of it". It's going to be an optional card in either case, as it's in the Colony/Shelter type of thing. I agree right off the top that if you get Boulder trap in your first turn, it can be a very bad thing, and that there's no guarantee that trashing will be in the game at all, both of which are strong design flaws. Some defense against the dark arts help would be very appreciated.
Note that that paragraph sounds a lot more bitter than I actually am. The stubborn answer is, the set will ship with Boulder Trap as an optional rule and they're pretty raw cards. I'd love them to be more polished if I can. I should also assure Gazbag, I'm not ignoring you, I'm just thinking about it. Giving everyone curses is the same as just putting an empty card in everyone's deck, unless they can trash them. If they can't then they're almost in the same state as they are now, just all of them at the same time. It's sort of bad to make a card that's trash dependent if there's no way to trash.
Also Asper, the card is -1VP, not -3VP, although I could see it being very unfun if one person got three of them.
Fun fact: at one point, Boulder Trap had a terminal Action that let you give it to the person to your right. I switched that out for the trash-to-curse thing.
I like Snake Charmer's attack. When I've tested it it's always been a good addition to the game, even though -- or especially because -- it's a double-edged sword.
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The issue I'm having with the multiple costs in games is that nobody wants to buy the low cost version, even if it's a really good idea. Go figure.
There's a psychological aspect to cards. Stronghold was popular at $5, but at $5 or $7, people ignore the $5 and hold out for the $7. It's weird.
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The issue I'm having with the multiple costs in games is that nobody wants to buy the low cost version, even if it's a really good idea. Go figure.
There's a psychological aspect to cards. Stronghold was popular at $5, but at $5 or $7, people ignore the $5 and hold out for the $7. It's weird.
I'll gladly be accused of being a jerk, but are the players you're testing with... actually good at the game?
Not that you have to ignore feedback of subpar players (they deserve fun, too), but for balance questions it seems unhelpful.
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Jerk!
No really, I don't mind much and it's a valid question. You're also not going to like my answer, though.
My playgroup is not *that* good. In fact, they're probably bad-on-average. I'm probably the worst of the lot, to be honest. Some are stronger than others, but none are high level. It's why I'm here in the variants and fan cards forum; playtesting can only net me so much information. Theorycrafting and knowledge of high-level exploits are something my test group doesn't have. Your responses have been the lighthouse helping steer the ship away from the rocks.
That said, I am building the set for my test group. I can't understate that. I'm very unlikely to suddenly score a license from DXV and RGG, because I'm not the guy. So my end goal is to have something that my friends and I enjoy. That said, I also don't want to print cards that my playgroup likes now, but later realizes are basically unplayably bad. I'd rather not print physicals of 27 cards only to find out that in one year the set will only 'really be' 20 cards because 7 cards are garbage. Permanent garbage, since I'm unlikely to make second or third editions once I've printed it.
So where am I at at the moment?
I'm trying out Stronghold as always costing $7 and always playing itself as an attack; this brings in the question of "but what if there are no attacks"? Maybe it needs to add an attack pile at setup, but then that's crazy amounts of text.
I'm trying out the following for Shipwreck:
[Shipwreck - Action -$?
+1 Buy
+ $1
If your discard pile is empty, gain a Gold and a Copper onto the bottom of your deck in any order. Otherwise, look through your discard pile. You may reveal a Treasure card from it and put it on the bottom of your deck.
The main issue I've had so far with Shipwreck is that if you don't have good Treasures in your deck, the card is probably worth $1. Then, if you *have* good Treasures in your deck but they're not in your discard pile, it's still worth $1. Or maybe $-1. On the other hand if you use it to gain a Gold and Copper, it's worth maybe $4 or $5 (see Cache or Skulk) but that also depends on which turn it is. Getting it for $4 with the multiple costs system, and then getting the Gold on turn 3 and then the Shipwreck on turn 4 so you get the Gold on turn 5 is pretty damn good. So if someone gets that lucky set of events but the other player(s) get an unlucky set of events, like only getting the Shipwreck when their discard pile is empty, it's pretty unbalanced.
This change may normalize the value more, but I have no idea what it should be priced at. It also may make it worse in practice, since now it might have just reversed what's lucky and what's not.
Boulder Trap, I'm trying this out but have no commitment to it yet:
Boulder Trap - Trap - $4
-1 VP
When you discard this, the player to your left gains it.
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When you gain this from the Supply, gain a Silver onto your deck.
Hot potato? Maybe a better idea. Maybe horrid.
Oh yes, and then there's this guy,
Profiteer - Action - $3
+1 Action
+1 Buy
Trash a non-Victory card from the Supply. Choose one: cards with the same name cost $1 less this turn (but not less than $0); or cards with the same name cost $1 more this turn.
Still has a the hokey "make action gains better" idea, but in a way that makes much more sense to the player.
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at the moment?
I'm trying out Stronghold as always costing $7 and always playing itself as an attack; this brings in the question of "but what if there are no attacks"? Maybe it needs to add an attack pile at setup, but then that's crazy amounts of text.
You could make a new card type. One that when played with requires a random Attack Supply pile to be added. Sort of like Looter adding Ruins.
I'd suggest having cards that can hold their own without an Attack card. Stronghold probably does, but Tomb Raider is about 100% unusable without one (otherwise a cool card with a cool theme).
Anyways, just a thought if you wanna go this direction. A new type adds zero new text also!
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I'll swing this idea I had by. When I first saw Shipwreck here I felt gaining a Spoils to the bottom could fit well. It almost simulates delayed +$, and you can control how big that delay is, and it's thematic too. You would lose the discard theme you've got going on though.
Just for discussion, I don't expect you to go with it. You probably aren't including Spoils in this set.
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Tomb Raider is about 100% unusable without one (otherwise a cool card with a cool theme).
I'm confused. Playing Tomb Raider without attacks in the game makes your opponents reveal their hands and you gain a copy of a revealed Treasure.
Tomb Raider is also an attack, so it can always defend against other Tomb Raiders.
Adding a keyword ("War" or something - "Muster"?) isn't a bad way to do it, but then I'd likely need to add the keyword to three or so cards. The problem is that none of the other cards interact with Attack cards. Graveyard could have it just for funs, but the third card is a mystery. (Edit: says the guy with Trap cards on only one card.)
Aquila, I've had the same thought. But you're right, I'm not including Spoils in the set. Although it's maybe tempting to add a similar card into the set; or even explore having Shipwreck gain Discoveries regardless of whether they are or aren't in the game.
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Well if you want to make it shipwreck gain discoveries then why don’t you add it as special setup similar to young witch. That way you will always have discoveries in every game with shipwreck. Just as an 11th kingdom supply pile.
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Jerk!
No really, I don't mind much and it's a valid question. You're also not going to like my answer, though.
My playgroup is not *that* good. In fact, they're probably bad-on-average. I'm probably the worst of the lot, to be honest. Some are stronger than others, but none are high level. It's why I'm here in the variants and fan cards forum; playtesting can only net me so much information. Theorycrafting and knowledge of high-level exploits are something my test group doesn't have. Your responses have been the lighthouse helping steer the ship away from the rocks.
That said, I am building the set for my test group. I can't understate that. I'm very unlikely to suddenly score a license from DXV and RGG, because I'm not the guy. So my end goal is to have something that my friends and I enjoy. That said, I also don't want to print cards that my playgroup likes now, but later realizes are basically unplayably bad. I'd rather not print physicals of 27 cards only to find out that in one year the set will only 'really be' 20 cards because 7 cards are garbage. Permanent garbage, since I'm unlikely to make second or third editions once I've printed it.
The concrete reason why I asked this question was this statement of yours:
I like Snake Charmer's attack. When I've tested it it's always been a good addition to the game, even though -- or especially because -- it's a double-edged sword.
My worry is that your playgroup might be underestimating how useful trashing those Estates and Coppers is to your opponents, similar to how players of first edition Dominion underestimated how much they helped other players by playing Thief. It might be that, if you don't take a lot of care to balance this well, in half a year nobody will ever want to get this card early on, because it helps opponents too much. So one outcome could be, if there's no other trasher, you will never get it, as it helps your opponents trash down for free, and if there is one, do you really want to use Snake Charmer if there's another trasher that helps you trash down without helping your ooponents, too? And if there's another Curser, of course I want to curse opponents as early as I can, so I'd never use Snake Charmer to do this, as it will help my opponents at first - and after Curses are gone due to the other Curser, there's no reason to get Snake Charmer, either. The obvious comparison to this card is Torturer, which never just turns out useful for the other players. Snake Charmer is bad at the beginning, good for a short time, and then bad again (once Curses run out). This might make it a high skill card, or a high luck card, or unuseable in general, and I really don't know which exactly it is. I just know that if you make your attacks be actually harmful and friendly interactions to be useful, you end up with things easier to wrap your head around and/or balance. Not to say you can't have this puzzler, but make sure to playtest it plenty.
Going to reply to the others soonish.
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I have to say, based on the existence of Riches I can only assume they are seeing trashing starting Coppers as a downside? I can't think of any other possible justification to that card...
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Yeah, Riches is absurdly good. Two Riches are a Province, one Riches is a Riches. There are 10 Riches, and you need no more than 6 (possibly 5) to get the majority of Provinces just by buying Riches. One thing they suck at is picking up Golds, but who needs 'em anyway?
Suggestion: Cost it at 5 and make it give 4 or cost it at 6 and make it give 5. This way one Riches can' t buy another.
Edit: Probably I'd like it best at 6$, just because 5$ makes getting it early so great. Even then it could still just give 4$, not 5$.
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Yeah, Riches is absurdly good. Two Riches are a Province, one Riches is a Riches. There are 10 Riches, and you need no more than 6 (possibly 5) to get the majority of Provinces just by buying Riches. One thing they suck at is picking up Golds, but who needs 'em anyway?
Suggestion: Cost it at 5 and make it give 4 or cost it at 6 and make it give 5. This way one Riches can' t buy another.
That's not even really the big problem though, or well I guess it's more a symptom of the big problem? (The problem of it being completely absurd!!!) But like, you can just open with it and when you draw it you'll be able to afford literally anything you'd be interested in buying, apart from Platinum I guess, but a turn 3/4 inheritance wouldn't be particularly unlikely, to pick out the most absurd situation. But yeah it's like the single best card to bootstrap your deck and hit an early price point, oh and it trashes Coppers too? Yeah... It might be worth mentioning that the only other cards that can trash more than 2 Coppers per play and cost less than $5 are Chapel, Monastery and Doctor (Cemetery can trash 4, but on-gain makes it pretty different) .
I disagree about them being bad with Gold, or well, my quick non-optimised testing showed that Riches Big Money, which was basically 2 Riches+Silvers/Golds curb-stomps Smithy BM. So err Riches+Gold seems pretty viable to me basically, given that the bare-bones baseline of it is reasonable by itself and adding Actions to make it better is easy given its treasuriness. Well I guess it's more Riches+Gold is probably better than whatever non-Riches thing and Riches+not Gold is probably better than Riches+Gold, on average. Which I guess is what you were saying now that I reread what you said.
At $4 it would have to give +$1 and it's still be a great trasher, at +$2 it would basically still just be Moneylender but better so yeah +$1. I do think the below the line should make for a nice Copper trashing Treasure, but yeah giving +$4 too, absurd is a great word to describe it.
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I just realized that two Riches in play trash each other. Oops. I misunderstood that up to now.
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Tomb Raider is about 100% unusable without one (otherwise a cool card with a cool theme).
I'm confused. Playing Tomb Raider without attacks in the game makes your opponents reveal their hands and you gain a copy of a revealed Treasure.
Tomb Raider is also an attack, so it can always defend against other Tomb Raiders.
Adding a keyword ("War" or something - "Muster"?) isn't a bad way to do it, but then I'd likely need to add the keyword to three or so cards. The problem is that none of the other cards interact with Attack cards. Graveyard could have it just for funs, but the third card is a mystery. (Edit: says the guy with Trap cards on only one card.)
Tomb Raider - Oops, you are correct! There goes all credibility on my future critiques. Now that I actually understand the card, it seems very interesting. Nice thematic choice too with the only two Treasure-Attacks in the game (Relic and Idol) being "Tomb Raider" like. Now it makes me wish your Artifact card was also an Attack purely for flavor. :)
War/Muster - Both cool names that fit the theme. I can see Graveyard having small, cool interactions with some different Attack cards. I think Tomb Raider is fine alone , but would be more interesting with other Attacks on the board. So that could be your three cards right there (including Stronghold). I'm still only loosely behind the idea for a new type that adds Attacks. Just brainstorming here in case you wanna go this route.
Riches - Hands down, this will be the best $4 cost on any board by a lot. If you don't incorporate it into your strategy some how I think you will loose 100% of the time. Beyond that though, if every player goes Riches, I think this could still reward smart play. Decisions like how many Riches to buy and when it is worth trashing a Riches for a Province are probably not that trivial. So if you're okay disregarding the play of most of the other Kingdom cards to keep Riches as is, I guess your only problem might be someone in your play group "solving/perfecting" their Riches strategy. As I believe most people enjoy Dominion for it's diversity of play, this may lead to some very disappointing games down the road.
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Well if wanted snake charmer to be more useful what if it it gave out cards worse than curse.
You would have to create a whole new card of course.
Like infested estate.
-4V
This is worth +1V for
Every estate you have but
Not more than 0V.
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If this is trashed gain 3 coppers.
I know truly evil card.
I guess we can add it to the bad idea section.
But hey want to make snake charmer more useful. They won’t at least want to trash those estates. And if they trash this they must gain 3 coppers. So they will be back to square one.
But at least they won’t lose any points as long as they have 4 estates they can all 12 infested estates and not lose a single point. But it would definitely slow down the game.
I don’t except anyone to like this card idea but me of course.
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Well if wanted snake charmer to be more useful what if it it gave out cards worse than curse.
You would have to create a whole new card of course.
Like infested estate.
-4V
This is worth +1V for
Every estate you have but
Not more than 0V.
———————————
If this is trashed gain 3 coppers.
I know truly evil card.
I guess we can add it to the bad idea section.
But hey want to make snake charmer more useful. They won’t at least want to trash those estates. And if they trash this they must gain 3 coppers. So they will be back to square one.
But at least they won’t lose any points as long as they have 4 estates they can all 12 infested estates and not lose a single point. But it would definitely slow down the game.
I don’t except anyone to like this card idea but me of course.
Making the attack portion of a card that sometimes attacks and often helps other players more brutal does not remove the issue of the card often helping other players. It just makes the different outcomes of the same card more different.
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So where am I at at the moment?
I'm trying out Stronghold as always costing $7 and always playing itself as an attack; this brings in the question of "but what if there are no attacks"? Maybe it needs to add an attack pile at setup, but then that's crazy amounts of text.
Why don' t you just give it a fixed attack effect on gain? Saves a lot of rules trouble and is so much easier to balance.
Also, I will reiterate that this isn't a strong card, particularly not at 7. Sure, it can trash a card, but how often do you have meaningful amounts of junk in your deck when you reach 7? And now you can put any card in your hand - terminally. Need a Village? Well then, better play a Village first to play this and put a Village in your hand to not gain a single additional Action. Need terminal draw? Still play a Village first, or rather, play 2, so you can lose 2 Actions on that draw card. Yaay. So what are you going to grab with this, actually? The answer is: Treasure, preferably Gold. So, you pay 7 for a card that, under the right circumstances, terminally gives +3 and trashes a card. Maybe it should be called "Trade Route" :P
Seriously though, this is really not that good. How about adding +1 Action? Sure, that's a steep step, but 7 is also a proud cost. And it's still "just" a cantrip trasher where you can choose both the card drawn and the card trashed.
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There's a lot of good thoughts coming out here, some of them require extra thought.
Stronghold is probably best losing its play an Attack and going back to $5, unless I can find a good attack rule that's worth $7.
I'm seeing the logic on Snake Charmer, although I ask that you consider that Snake Charmer is intended to be played in batches of more than one, if you need to choose 2-3 cards to trash, is that more of a thing? Alternatively, I could make Snake Charmer make you choose between Actions and Curses. But that might not be enough.
Riches... gee.
I'd like to see a game with a few much stronger players than I playing Riches. Asper and I have been trying to coordinate some TTS but my schedule (and timezones) haven't made it possible yet.
For the record, my playtesters aren't *that* bad as to not know the value of shedding the starting cards; it's just that Riches tend to stop you from effectively getting an economy going if you're not careful. But perhaps the rest of you are so much better than we are that the card goes nuts. If that's the case I might consider making itself trash itself, too.
Edit: for the record, I'm not as whiny and wounded as that previous statement makes me sound :)
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For the record, my playtesters aren't *that* bad as to not know the value of shedding the starting cards; it's just that Riches tend to stop you from effectively getting an economy going if you're not careful. But perhaps the rest of you are so much better than we are that the card goes nuts. If that's the case I might consider making itself trash itself, too.
As a baseline of economy with Riches, you can play one to pick up another. Pick up a third one. Collide two of them to buy a Province. Repeat. And that's just what a lousy player like me can think of, no engines or anything.
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I'll trial out Riches as a $6. Based on performance I may buff it if $6 makes it too weak.
Edit: Like, I get the problem with being able to run a deck that's just "collide Riches for the win". I'm not entirely sure that that strategy is too fast, but it works with a very, very predictable time, if your strat is just "buy all the Riches up, then collide them to get Provinces". If nobody else buys Riches you can get 5 provinces in a very predictable number of turns.
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Riches - What's the goal of the Treasure trashing portion of Riches? Is it a punishment to keep players from mass-buying Riches or is it to reward players with good, early Copper trashing? If it's the former, you can make it so you can't trash Copper and then maybe it's fine at $4 or $5. If it's the latter, well I'm not sure. :)
Fun Fact: Mint's on-buy, Treasure trashing is meant to be a penalty, but I think it is often regarded as a huge bonus to the card.
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Riches - What's the goal of the Treasure trashing portion of Riches? Is it a punishment to keep players from mass-buying Riches or is it to reward players with good, early Copper trashing? If it's the former, you can make it so you can't trash Copper and then maybe it's fine at $4 or $5. If it's the latter, well I'm not sure. :)
Fun Fact: Mint's on-buy, Treasure trashing is meant to be a penalty, but I think it is often regarded as a huge bonus to the card.
It's not regarded as a penalty on Mint. In the Secret History, Donald makes pretty clear that it's a penalty by first perception only.
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Riches - What's the goal of the Treasure trashing portion of Riches? Is it a punishment to keep players from mass-buying Riches or is it to reward players with good, early Copper trashing? If it's the former, you can make it so you can't trash Copper and then maybe it's fine at $4 or $5. If it's the latter, well I'm not sure. :)
Fun Fact: Mint's on-buy, Treasure trashing is meant to be a penalty, but I think it is often regarded as a huge bonus to the card.
So the actual goal is to make a Treasure that "is so good that it devalues all other money." It's based on the story of Mansa Musa, the king of Mali, who was so rich that he couldn't fathom his wealth. He went on a pilgrimage through Northern Africa giving away gifts of money to all the people he met, in reverse amount to their wordly wealth. In some cases he gave beggars more wealth than the gross national product of the country he was in. Consequently he devastated North Africa's economy singlehandedly. He's pictured on the card; it so happens that the artist on my cards is also the artist that did Mansa Musa as a mod in Civ V.
I am aware that Mint was originally planned as a penalty but is actually a bonus. It's actually something that has salvaged the card which is actually pretty weak if you don't use it as a trasher.
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A Treasure that "is so good that it devalues all other money"
This immediately made me think that Riches should make all non-Riches worth 0. Then I realized it couldn't do that, but it could give - 1 coin per Treasure in play. From there I arrived at Poor House...
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A Treasure that "is so good that it devalues all other money"
This immediately made me think that Riches should make all non-Riches worth 0. Then I realized it couldn't do that, but it could give - 1 coin per Treasure in play. From there I arrived at Poor House...
Exactly. Arguably Riches and Pyramid are very close to each other's design space, too :(
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My current thinking on Snake Charmer is that perhaps the attack should be "trashes a card costing $1 or more" or maybe "$3 or more".
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Back on the subject of Riches, I've been thinking of running simulations* on it. It's slow as just a "Buy nothing but Riches and Provinces" strategy (17-26 turns to get 5 Provinces,) but then maybe there are cases where, say, maybe Workshop + Riches (Edit: it's faster, about 13ish) is broken OP. Also I found that if you introduce Platinums and Colonies, it's pretty easy to collide two Riches and at least one Copper or +$1 Action to get a Platinum while simultaneously removing lesser Treasures from the mix.
I've also tested Riches at $6, that makes it almost too slow to use; the only major benefit here is the aforementioned Platinum strategy.
Bear in mind as well that the thing with Riches is that you can't play it on the same turn as you play any treasures (Golds, Platinums) that you might actually want to keep.
In practice, though, the main feedback I've got with it recently is that it sort of feels like a Chapel that you can later get rid of by buying a Province. Possibly this is super strong.
*Note, these are manual simulations using python code, not the cool automated "play 10,000 games" simulations. I'm looking into how to set up Riches as a card on one of those.
I haven't yet tried the "cost it at 6 and make it give $5" angle yet, that might be better.
In other news, I'm trying the following crazy ideas:
Shipwreck - Action - $2
+2 Cards
+1 Buy
Gain a Discovery onto the bottom of your deck. If you can't, trash this and gain a Treasure onto the bottom of your deck.
Setup: Add the Discovery Kingdom pile to the Supply
I'm also testing replacing "gain a Treasure" with "gain a non-Victory card" or "a card costing $6 or less." This also might need to cost $3.
Boulder Trap - Trap - $4
-1 VP
When you discard this, the player to your left gains it.
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When you gain this from the Supply, gain a Silver onto your deck.
The "gain a Silver onto your deck" all but fixes the drawback of randomly finding early Boulder Traps. This version also rewards you for building engines to help give it away more effectively. Antiquities as a whole tends to play towards some sort of Big Money ("Green and Gold") strategies so I'm fairly okay with this.
The method of giving it away seems to be lacking somewhat, although it works. One of the cool things about this version is it's better to give away the trap than to trash it; we had some fun coming up with strategies to most effectively pin the trap on the other player. The best, of course, is to make sure that you pick up your whole deck on the final turn :P.
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So 26 turns for 5 provs might not sound too impressive, but a strategy just buying Moneylenders or Spice Merchants will never actually hit $8. So it's actually kind of unheard of for such a good trasher to be able to put up those kinds of results. You kind of have to frame these speed tests in the context of what other utility the card provides I guess, or something like that. I mean they aren't exactly representative of a real game of Dominion.
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So, Renaissance was just announced... This might change everything again.
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So, Renaissance was just announced... This might change everything again.
Yeah, you should probably rename Artifact.
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So, Renaissance was just announced... This might change everything again.
Yeah, you should probably rename Artifact.
Just call it Artefact, boom problem solved.
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Yes, the Artifact thing has come to mind.
Unless there's some cute thing I can do to hook them in. Probably not.
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So, Renaissance was just announced... This might change everything again.
Yeah, you should probably rename Artifact.
Just call it Artefact, boom problem solved.
Do you know how hard I had to fight in order to get Donald X. to not name Pixie "Fairy", in order to avoid confusion with Ferry? Really damn hard. I thought it was a no-brainer, but opinions differ I guess.
Which is to say, NO NO NO NO NO NO NO DO NOT NAME IT "ARTEFACT".
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So the problem of course is Art.
I'll rename it to a synonym, though, like.... ummm... Heirloom!
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No joke aside it's probably going to be "Curio" or something; the idea was that you dig up an Artifact, then trade it for money. So it's really what a Profiteer does.
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LastFootnote, while I have you here, (assuming I do...) what's your opinion on Riches? Is it broke OP?
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LastFootnote, while I have you here, (assuming I do...) what's your opinion on Riches? Is it broke OP?
It looks very strong. Of course it depends a lot on the board, but I would guess it's too strong for $4.
If you have two Riches in play, they trash each other, right? I think that's how it would end up working.
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No joke aside it's probably going to be "Curio" or something; the idea was that you dig up an Artifact, then trade it for money. So it's really what a Profiteer does.
I also like "Curio".
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LastFootnote, while I have you here, (assuming I do...) what's your opinion on Riches? Is it broke OP?
It looks very strong. Of course it depends a lot on the board, but I would guess it's too strong for $4.
If you have two Riches in play, they trash each other, right? I think that's how it would end up working.
Yes, they do trash each other.
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LastFootnote, while I have you here, (assuming I do...) what's your opinion on Riches? Is it broke OP?
It looks very strong. Of course it depends a lot on the board, but I would guess it's too strong for $4.
If you have two Riches in play, they trash each other, right? I think that's how it would end up working.
Yes, they do trash each other.
Yeah, the more I think about it, Riches is just too crazy on way too many boards. I mean it's a great single Treasure to have in your deck. And it trashes all your Coppers in one of the strongest ways possible (from play). It also trashes them really fast, and you can always open with it. It's a must-buy in any game that provides basically any +$ from Actions. I think it's probably too strong at any price, though you could try it at e.g. $7.
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Alright, I think at this point I say, the time for being stubborn is at an end. I'll replace the card with something that uses the same art, probably an Action.
Very very early idea is something like:
Financier - Action - $5
+ $1
Double your $ if you haven't yet this turn.
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At the end of your Buy Phase, if you don't have at least $2 unspent, trash this.
It's worth a fortune!
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Alright, I think at this point I say, the time for being stubborn is at an end. I'll replace the card with something that uses the same art, probably an Action.
Very very early idea is something like:
Financier - Action - $5
+ $1
Double your $ if you haven't yet this turn.
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At the end of your Buy Phase, if you don't have at least $2 unspent, trash this.
It's worth a fortune!
That....seems too strong. like, even the $1, you can always reliably use it for (2x-2) money, where x is total money without it. And in any reasonable engine, that's just overpowering.
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Alright, I think at this point I say, the time for being stubborn is at an end. I'll replace the card with something that uses the same art, probably an Action.
Very very early idea is something like:
Financier - Action - $5
+ $1
Double your $ if you haven't yet this turn.
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At the end of your Buy Phase, if you don't have at least $2 unspent, trash this.
It's worth a fortune!
That....seems too strong. like, even the $1, you can always reliably use it for (2x-2) money, where x is total money without it. And in any reasonable engine, that's just overpowering.
I agree.
On a tangent, there was a Nocturne outtake that's briefly mentioned in the secret history. It was a Treasure called Abundance, and it was half a Fortune. It still had +1 Buy, and you could stack them (unlike Fortune), but it only gave you +$1 per $2 you had, rounded down. Guess how much it cost before it was cut?
It cost $3. Originally it cost $5, but it was so weak. Eventually it got cut for being too weak and situational, I think. It's just amazing to me the power difference between a Treasure that doubles your money ($8 and 8 Debt) and one that only multiplies it by 1.5 ($3). That rounding down is a killer, as it turns out.
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Fanancier is an action if people didn't notice. So I think it's going to be pretty weak on average but very good with support?
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How about something with player interaction, similar to Counterfeit?
Riches, 5, Treasure
3 coins
+1 Buy
At the start of this turn's cleanup the player to your left may name another Treasure you have in play. Trash it.
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Fanancier is an action if people didn't notice. So I think it's going to be pretty weak on average but very good with support?
Yes, he is intended to double your money before you can play any treasures. But perhaps he's too weak on average, and too strong with support.
The idea that I'm running with is, here's Financier. He evaluates your company's worth and if he likes it, he gives you a bomb of money. But he wants to make sure he gets a return on investment. If he doesn't, he walks.
He's "really temporary money", in that he lets you spend more than you have but then he's gone if you don't get a reward for it.
I'm definitely going to test him with different costs for how much you have to not spend to keep him, as well as with a "may" for when he doubles your cash, so that getting multiple Financiers is good?
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So here's some theorycrafting:
Fortune is worth roughly $16.
But this trashes itself if you spent all that $16 worth, so maybe it's worth, I don't know, $14? $12?. Unless you didn't care about him trashing because you just bought two Provinces? And you figure it was worth it.
Of course, this is not going to give you the return that Fortune did because 1) it's an Action and 2) it's Terminal. Unless of course the money you have is from 8 Peddlers or Conspirators or something. At which point it's still giving you $16 of value for a $5 card. Of course, you can say that about quite a few payoff cards, Counting House could give you $16 of value for a $5 if you somehow played it after having gained a ton of Copper and dumping your deck into the discard pile.
I like the underlying idea of someone floating you money and then demanding a payback or else. In some ways that's just Capital though.
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Maybe it could be a choose 1, double money or +1 Buy, so it has a small chance of seeing play with no other source of action coins? I guess that depends on much +buy is in the set already.
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I should also mention that I'm going to wait for Renaissance before finalizing, I'm very interesting in what new techs I can use to make cards.
But getting in front of Financier before that happens is probably a good idea.
Alternatives to Financier's concept would be some sort of "Wealthy Merchant" or a card for a split pile that sits under Tomb Raider. Financier could be that card but then it should sort of make sense there.
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On a tangent, there was a Nocturne outtake that's briefly mentioned in the secret history. It was a Treasure called Abundance, and it was half a Fortune. It still had +1 Buy, and you could stack them (unlike Fortune), but it only gave you +$1 per $2 you had, rounded down. Guess how much it cost before it was cut?
I would have guessed $6-$7 purely because they can stack.
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As a probably ridiculously powerful alternative:
Mastermind - Action -$5
+1 Buy
Reveal the top 4 cards of your deck, discard any number, and put the rest back in any order, then get...
+ $1 per Treasure revealed,
+1 Action if you revealed an Action,
+1 Card if your revealed a Victory card.
I think I would put this under Tomb Raider as a split card, since it might be very powerful in a 5/2 start.
Otherwise it's at best a form of Grand Market with a bit of Cartographer thrown in, if the star align or you play them back to back or KC them.
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On a totally different thought, would Riches be more balanced if it trashed all the Treasures you have in play including itself? In that case it's still very powerful and a good removal, but also removes itself.
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As a probably ridiculously powerful alternative:
Mastermind - Action -$5
+1 Buy
Reveal the top 4 cards of your deck, discard any number, and put the rest back in any order, then get...
+ $1 per Treasure revealed,
+1 Action if you revealed an Action,
+1 Card if your revealed a Victory card.
I think I would put this under Tomb Raider as a split card, since it might be very powerful in a 5/2 start.
Otherwise it's at best a form of Grand Market with a bit of Cartographer thrown in, if the star align or you play them back to back or KC them.
You'd probably get the bonuses for each card you reveal, then discard or put them back. It's easier to track that way. In terms of strength, it certainly looks the right decision to put it under a split pile or cost it more, payload that can do almost everything it needs to in a 'good stuff' deck. Fits right in your set.
Split piles in the set are either going to be interesting or uninteresting with Discoveries and Boulder Traps, I would call it uninteresting for the chance element it introduces to shuffle the piles but of course that's the intended spirit of those cards. Then suppose you go with it, would Tomb Raider be the best top? There isn't much synergy there.
Tomb Raider could make a good split pile though, to include an Attack or Treasure for it to target.
On a totally different thought, would Riches be more balanced if it trashed all the Treasures you have in play including itself? In that case it's still very powerful and a good removal, but also removes itself.
This will remove its function of single Treasure payload with +$ on Actions and make it a one-shot that both trashes and builds the deck. Self removal is an advantage for a trasher, you don't like the Chapel that hangs around after it's done its thing. At $4 cost I couldn't see this giving any more than $1, even at $5 cost $2 could be too much. Loan is another comparison.
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As a probably ridiculously powerful alternative:
Mastermind - Action -$5
+1 Buy
Reveal the top 4 cards of your deck...
+ $1 per Treasure revealed,
+1 Action if you revealed an Action,
+1 Card if your revealed a Victory card.
Then discard any number of cards, and put the rest back.
I'm not sure how powerful this is, but it does a couple of things I'm not a fan of. You don't know whether it's going to be terminal or non-terminal when you play it, which I always disliked about Tribute and don't think I'd enjoy here. It also has you revealing cards and then drawing before you put the revealed cards back which I don't think happens ever apart from odd interactions like Lookout+Overgrown Estate, just seems like something a card shouldn't do by itself? It's also strange that it's +$1 for each treasure,but the other 2 are just for having 1. I don't know, I guess it could do with some refining?
On a totally different thought, would Riches be more balanced if it trashed all the Treasures you have in play including itself? In that case it's still very powerful and a good removal, but also removes itself.
It would certainly be more balanced, I'm not sure whether it would be actually balanced though... It's just a very strong effect to have access to on the 1st reshuffle. Trashing 2ish Coppers and being able to spike basically any price point is just insane.
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Split piles in the set are either going to be interesting or uninteresting with Discoveries and Boulder Traps, I would call it uninteresting for the chance element it introduces to shuffle the piles but of course that's the intended spirit of those cards. Then suppose you go with it, would Tomb Raider be the best top? There isn't much synergy there.
Tomb Raider could make a good split pile though, to include an Attack or Treasure for it to target.
There's actually rules for that case; you treat the splits as separate piles. So if you have say, Patrician/Emporium, you shuffle into Patrician if there are any, and Emporium otherwise. It's not perfect but it doesn't "ruin" the split.
It totally ruins Castles. At one point I had a rule where any ordered pile was exempt, but it seemed weird not being able to use Discoveries properly.
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Warning: this will be a big post. I'm using it to think outside of my head (I'm an extrovert.)
What can Mastermind be? If so, how powerful is it?
Let me start with the extreme cases:
+4 Cards, +1 Buy: basically Council Room without the drawback. So probably about $6 or $7 worth.
+$4, +1 Buy: again, basically Wine Merchant with no drawback. So again in the $6 or $7 likely.
+4 Actions, +1 Buy: Maybe crazy but probably not. Without Actions to go with it, 4 Actions is iffy.
+3 Cards, +$1, +1 Buy: The most similar card is, I think, Tragic Hero. so this is probably actually very close to $5 since it replaces Tragic Hero's payoff with a standard +$1.
+3 Cards, +1 Action, +1 Buy: The most similar card is still Tragic Hero, but this is non-terminal so it's around that $6 or $7 mark if not higher.
+$3, +1 Action, +1 Buy: The most similar card is probably Countraband, more or less. $5? $6?
+$3, +1 Card, +1 Buy:
+3 Actions, +$1, +1 Buy
+3 Actions, +1 Card, +1 Buy
+2 Cards, +$2. +1 Buy
+2 Cards, +2 Actions, +1 Buy: almost a final-form city.
+2 Cards, +1 Action, +$1, +1 Buy: OP Laboratory?
+$2, +2 Actions, +1 Buy: Festival
+$2, +1 Card, +1 Action, +1 Buy: Hey look it's Grand Market.
+2 Actions, +1 Card, +$1, +1 Buy: Really Good Village
I got bored of this before I finished the list but I think we can agree that this card either needs to cost $6 or $7, or have an additional drawback, or lose the +1 Buy.
A fun little drawback if this is to go under Tomb Raider would be "at the end of your turn, if you didn't gain a Treasure this turn, trash this"; or maybe "You can't gain this if you didn't gain a Treasure this turn."
The card also has a baked-in drawback, which is that the first time you play it each turn, it's going to be random. But it's going to be a random really good card, most of the time.
For now I'm going to test it at no +1 Buy, with the "if you didn't gain a Treasure this turn, trash this" and it being underneath Tomb Raider. It may need to cost $4 at that point, in which case then maybe it'll get the +1 Buy back, or lose the additional drawback.
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I'm actually strongly considering simplifying the Mastermind into a doublePawn of sorts.
The question is whether 2x Pawn is a good $5 Action. I'd like to target it at $5 because I feel the set needs some more $5s.
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I'm actually strongly considering simplifying the Mastermind into a doublePawn of sorts.
The question is whether 2x Pawn is a good $5 Action. I'd like to target it at $5 because I feel the set needs some more $5s.
Something like this?
Mastermind Action, (http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/images/thumb/7/7d/Coin5.png/16px-Coin5.png)
Choose three: +1 Card; +(http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/images/thumb/f/f7/Coin1.png/16px-Coin1.png); or +1 Buy.
The choices may be the same.
If you add Actions to the choices, it just becomes way too powerful.
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I'm actually strongly considering simplifying the Mastermind into a doublePawn of sorts.
The question is whether 2x Pawn is a good $5 Action. I'd like to target it at $5 because I feel the set needs some more $5s.
Do you mean like: Do this twice: Choose two: +1 Card; +1 Action; +1 Buy; +$1.
This would be strictly better than a bunch of stuff like Lab, Market, Lost City and such, so a lot more that $5. Kru5h's card is more in-line with existing $5s like Wild Hunt or Werewolf, Smithies with different options.
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I'm actually strongly considering simplifying the Mastermind into a doublePawn of sorts.
The question is whether 2x Pawn is a good $5 Action. I'd like to target it at $5 because I feel the set needs some more $5s.
Do you mean like: Do this twice: Choose two: +1 Card; +1 Action; +1 Buy; +$1.
This would be strictly better than a bunch of stuff like Lab, Market, Lost City and such, so a lot more that $5. Kru5h's card is more in-line with existing $5s like Wild Hunt or Werewolf, Smithies with different options.
I was thinking along the lines of what you said, Choose two from the pawn list, then choose two from the pawn list again. The big headache is how to say "the first two choices must be different; the second two choices must be different as well but you can choose options that you picked the first time." I would then need to put a drawback of some sort on the card to bring it down to the $5 level.
That said, Kru5h's Mastermind is pretty good. I might add trash a card to the list to make it a bit more like Steward if I go that direction. It certainly would be easier to balance that a straight double-pawn (in fact, I think it's pretty balanced already.)
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That said, Kru5h's Mastermind is pretty good. I might add trash a card to the list to make it a bit more like Steward if I go that direction. It certainly would be easier to balance that a straight double-pawn (in fact, I think it's pretty balanced already.)
Be warned that trashing up to 3 cards (Plus the other option value of this card) would make it extremely powerful. A card that starts off trashing 3, then turns into a Smithy or terminal Gold after you're done trashing is probably a $6 card.
On the other hand, without the trashing, it's slightly weak.
The card is simple enough that you could add a little bonus to it. "While this is in play..." (Insert something interesting.)
Example: While this is in play, Masterminds cost (http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/images/thumb/f/f7/Coin1.png/16px-Coin1.png) less, but not less than (http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/images/thumb/5/5d/Coin0.png/16px-Coin0.png).
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Tried out my Mastermind a few times over the last few days. It seems pretty good as a card underneath Tomb Raider that is the OP DoublePawn version but also requires you to have gained a Treasure before you can buy it.
The logic here is something like this:
If you spend $5 and two buys for Mastermind and a Copper, well, you just bought a Copper. Have fun with that; it should counterbalance Mastermind.
If you spend $8 and two buys for Mastermind and a Silver, well, you could have bought a Province. Did you really want to do that? (in practice, the answer may very well be yes, yes I did.)
If you spend $11 and two buys for Mastermind and a Gold, see above but substitute Colony for Province.
If you gained a Treasure using a gainer and buy Mastermind, then probably it's preeetty good.
Mastermind sits under Tomb Raider because there is an art link between the two and because this always means that there's a method that allows you to buy Mastermind.
I will be trying out Kru5h's version over the next few days. It looks incredibly solid, but I think I'll go with the version I find the most fun.
I'll also try out my modified version of Kru5h's Mastermind (add trashing, put it below Tomb Raider and/or make you have to gain a Treasure first) and see what's the best variant.
On a side note, I'm trying to decide whether Tomb Raider should be immune to other Tomb Raiders.
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One other thing I noticed with Tomb Raider is that, if it gets blocked by a moat, it does absolutely nothing.
I'm not sure I that I like this. On the other hand I'm not sure how to fix this without making it more expensive (unless I make it terminal?).
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Mastermind Action, (http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/images/thumb/7/7d/Coin5.png/16px-Coin5.png)
Choose three: +1 Card; +(http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/images/thumb/f/f7/Coin1.png/16px-Coin1.png); or +1 Buy.
The choices may be the same.
If you add Actions to the choices, it just becomes way too powerful.
I think it is mechanically sound but most of the times this will be used as Smithy, +2 Cards +1 Buy or as Woodcutter which is perhaps a bit bland.
Then again the card can become funky. like a Mastermind attracting 3 Peddlers.
I'm actually strongly considering simplifying the Mastermind into a doublePawn of sorts.
The question is whether 2x Pawn is a good $5 Action. I'd like to target it at $5 because I feel the set needs some more $5s.
Do you mean like: Do this twice: Choose two: +1 Card; +1 Action; +1 Buy; +$1.
This would be strictly better than a bunch of stuff like Lab, Market, Lost City and such, so a lot more that $5. Kru5h's card is more in-line with existing $5s like Wild Hunt or Werewolf, Smithies with different options.
I was thinking along the lines of what you said, Choose two from the pawn list, then choose two from the pawn list again. The big headache is how to say "the first two choices must be different; the second two choices must be different as well but you can choose options that you picked the first time." I would then need to put a drawback of some sort on the card to bring it down to the $5 level.
Hyperflexibility does not lead to a good card (monostrategy) and it is a mess to track. Also, powerwise this is just off the charts. Here is what will most often be chosen IMO, Labs with a cherry on top:
+2 Card +2 Actions
+2 Cards +1 Action +1 Buy
+2 Cards +1 Action +1 Coin
So even if you include some serious liability, like gaining some junk when you gain the card or whatever, it will be boring. Normally you need several different cards in an engine (even a deck with 10 Minions wants some other stuff thrown into the mix) whereas here only Megapawns and some payload cards suffice.
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I am quite concerned about the hyperflexibility, however I'm hoping that throwing the card down a well (okay, under 5 other cards) and then putting the gate of "also you need to have gained a treasure) will make it so that other strategies get a head start.
In practice, I'm not sure how real that expectation is.
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I'm not dead yet, I swear!
While waiting on life to be unbusy enough to test Mastermind I've been playing around with a less crazy variant of Shipwreck:
Shipwreck - Action - $3:
+2 Cards
+1 Buy
Gain a card costing up to $3 onto the bottom of your deck.
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When you trash this, gain a Treasure onto the bottom of your deck.
The problem here is I haven't tested it yet to know what power level the top half is. The bottom half is quite powerful, and may need to be capped at $6. But it should be noted that like Squire, it can't trash itself.
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"Onto the bottom of your deck" is actually a mechanic I should try to do more of.
It's less powerful than "On the top of your deck" in small doses, but if you can do it enough times before your deck runs out, it lets you set up a super-turn, albeit with difficulty.
Right now the only card that does "onto the bottom of your deck" is Shipwreck. Maybe I need to think about revisiting a few of the weaker cards to give them this mechanic.
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"Onto the bottom of your deck" is actually a mechanic I should try to do more of.
It's less powerful than "On the top of your deck" in small doses, but if you can do it enough times before your deck runs out, it lets you set up a super-turn, albeit with difficulty.
Right now the only card that does "onto the bottom of your deck" is Shipwreck. Maybe I need to think about revisiting a few of the weaker cards to give them this mechanic.
I'm not really sure gaining to the bottom is that interesting. The discard pile already basically functions as the bottom of your deck. You're always drawing your payload before the green goes in your discard, so it doesn't matter whether your payload was in your discard or on the bottom. Also, IRL having to lift up your whole deck to put a card under it is a pain.
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I'm not really sure gaining to the bottom is that interesting. The discard pile already basically functions as the bottom of your deck. You're always drawing your payload before the green goes in your discard, so it doesn't matter whether your payload was in your discard or on the bottom. Also, IRL having to lift up your whole deck to put a card under it is a pain.
The major difference between bottom, top, and discard pile is that bottom lets you specify an order. It's sort of like doing that to the top of your deck but it saves between turns... at least until your deck runs out. So unlike "reorder the top of your deck" which is immediately consumed on your next turn/few draws, reordering the bottom of your deck is consumed a little while later, allowing you to do it more than once before consuming the cards, especially in a larger deck. In theory, it can allow you to create one or two really advantageous turns sometime in the future.
The nuance is small, but for instance even using Shipwreck, if you play 4 shipwrecks and gain or move 4 silvers to the bottom of your deck, that's a province when you get there. Assuming you draw all of those cards.
I played a game with a version of Mastermind that could put two of any card onto the bottom of your deck, and it was pretty good at setting up future turns.
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I agree with the Commodore, I'm afraid. Putting cards at the bottom of your deck isn't uninteresting. It's just not interesting and colorful enough to warrant doing more than one or maybe two cards about. Pearl Diver is one card, Shipwreck is a second. This is covered.
It's a bit like how Imp and Conclave don't cover all the ground that "play what you didn't play yet" cards could cover. But they cover enough for it to make the remaining space less interesting than something else in comparison.
Also in general, if one card does something, it's unique. If a second card does it, it' s not only the second one which isn't unique now. Neither is.
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Yes, I should maybe clarify; I'm maybe planning to do it with a second card, that would be it. I'd argue that Pearl Diver isn't quite the same since it pulls cards from the bottom to the top.
At the same time, perhaps the mechanic is best kept to Shipwreck with the knowledge that Shipwreck gets pretty good if Throned.
I have a Very Wacky mastermind I'm trying that puts cards in play onto the bottom of the deck, among other choices. That would be as much as I'd ever want to do.
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Putting stuff at the bottom of the deck is only interesting in combination with a card like Pearl Diver.
For example a very simple split pile off the top of my hat:
$4
Action
+2 Actions
Look at the bottom card of your deck. You may put it into your hand. If you do not, +1 Card.
$5
Action
+3 Cards
When you gain or discard this, put it at the bottom of your deck.
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I've mentioned the Very Wacky Mastermind a few times, so here it is in its WIP glory. It may not last long enough to waste brain power on, and it likely should be posted on the "bad card ideas" thread, but here it is:
Mastermind - Action - $5
+1 Action
Choose one: put your hand on the bottom of your deck and +4 cards; or, put 2 cards from play onto the bottom of your deck; or, gain a copy of a non-Mastermind card in play to your hand.
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You can play this by discarding another card from your hand.
In some ways it's a worse Minion; in some ways it's a different Scheme; in some ways it's a Village that you can play with a dead hand; in some ways it might just be a broken Action gainer.
I have not given much thought to the balance between the three options.
Or whether one or all of the three options are OP.
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Looks broken, mainly due to the last option. Cantrip gaining / non-terminal hand-gaining is pretty good, only Ironworks+Mill and Cobbler do that and perhaps not conincidentally with $4s, whereas this can gain also gain better cards.
If there are any Peddler variants and you can overdraw the Scheme option might also be good. Suppose you can bottom-deck 2 Conspirators, then Mastermind boils down to a non-terminal 4 Coins. Or, perhaps even better, Scheme and replay terminal payload cards which might be feasible due to Mastermind's village option.
Overall I like it, it is a versatile card and the bottom-decking from play is quite innovative. Just has to be nerfed some.
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Yep, it's the last clause that is very likely very broken; I'm actually thinking of dropping it altogether and leaving the card as a Minion/Schemer, since the Village part of the card is already very useful.
Edit: I probably need to make it so that it can't affect Duration cards, since I don't want to enable Hireling stacking.
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Unfortunately, it's still broken: there's an instant win combo if you have the following:
1 Mastermind
1 King's Court
1-2 of any card giving +Action, +$ (or Coffers), +Buy
and no other cards in your deck (I assume that the only reliable way to get here is Donate. But if Donate is in the game it's extremely reliable.
What you do is this: first, play your Market-like. Then, play King's Court, targeting Mastermind. With mastermind, do the following:
Put the Market-like or Market-likes on the bottom of your deck.
Put the Mastermind and King's Court on the bottom of your deck.
Choose to put your hand (which is now empty) on the bottom of your deck, and draw 4 cards.
Repeat.
Unless there is some sort of interaction with the "Lose track of" rule -- which if I understand it properly, there won't be -- you will now be able to gain unlimited money and buys, then pay off Donate, and buy everything on the table.
The winner of this is simply the first person to buy the requisite cards and use them, which with Donate isn't very hard.
I think the solution would be to gate the Mastermind on first play, like:
Maybe not broken Mastermind - Action -$5
+1 Action
If this is the first time you played a Mastermind this turn, choose one: put your hand on the bottom of your deck and +4 cards; or, put 2 non-Duration cards from play onto the bottom of your deck. Otherwise, +1 Card, +1 Buy.
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You can play this by discarding another card from your hand.
For the record, +1 Card +1 Buy makes second+ Masterminds into slightly weirdly time-spliced Worker's Villages.
Well, only if you use them to restart dead turns. If not, then it's a slightly worse Market Square.
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My suggestion
Mastermind
Action - $5
Do this 3 times:
Choose one: +1 Card; Trash a card from your hand; discard the top card of your deck and gain a Silver onto your deck
A lot of interesting options but none of them would be $5 on a standalone card
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My suggestion
Mastermind
Action - $5
Do this 3 times:
Choose one: +1 Card; Trash a card from your hand; discard the top card of your deck and gain a Silver onto your deck
A lot of interesting options but none of them would be $5 on a standalone card
Doesn't look all that interesting to me. It is basically just a better version of Count.
Or from another perspective it is a strong, probably overpowered (I am pretty sure that "+3 Cards or trash 3 cards from your hand would be balanced at $5") Smithy+ that you can use early on for trashing. Not sure that the Bureaucrat option will be often used.
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After playing with "Maybe not broken Mastermind", above, I came to the conclusion that it has an identity crisis: You either want to play it to restart dead hands, or to move cards from play onto the bottom of your deck or to restart your hand.
You often truly do not want to do both, although it's sort of nice when it happens.
So now I'm trying out this somewhat more straightforward Mastermind:
Somewhat more straightforward Mastermind - Action - $5
+1 Action
+1 Card
+1 Buy
You may put 2 non-Duration cards from play onto the bottom of your deck in any order.
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You may play this by discarding or trashing another card from your hand.
It loses its minion-y element, which is sort of sad but also makes it a safer card to print.
The big part here is that if you play it straight from you hand and don't put cards on the bottom of your deck, it's a pretty bad card, roughly $2.
But if you use it at full power, say, trashing a crappy (or payoff) card, putting a payload and some sort of village on the bottom of your deck, and getting value for the +Buy, then I'm hoping it's in the $5 realm. Testing will be needed.
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In other news, I noticed that Tomb Raider becomes a very bad card if it is blocked by a Moat or Lighthouse, and so I'm thinking of buffing it a bit, like so:
Resilient Tomb Raider - Action - Attack - $3
+1 Action
Each other player discards an Attack card (or reveals they can't).
You may gain a copy of a Treasure revealed this way.
If you didn't, +1 Card.
This makes it a bit better if 1) it's blocked, or 2) your opponents are plebs and they only have Coppers, or 3) your opponents are warmongers (dammit, Gandhi!).
It still makes it a bad card (Cantrip nothing!) when blocked but not so bad that it's a risk to play it at all.
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Moving cards from play back to your deck is a very dangerous ability, you don't really need anything too uncommon to make infinite loops. E.g. Somewhat more straightforward Mastermind and a couple of Peddlers can produce unlimited +Buy and +$ after deck is drawn. So you need to at least stop Mastermind from putting Masterminds on the bottom of your deck.
I wouldn't worry too much about an attack being bad vs Moat or Lighthouse/Guardian. That's just 3 cards out of all the dominion cards and also most attacks are weak if they're being blocked, that's kind of the point of Moat/Lighthouse?
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Hehe, good point -- I somehow didn't notice that it was far more easy to accomplish the loop with Somewhat more Straightforward Mastermind than with Very Wacky Mastermind.
A solution, although less fun and glitzy, is to steal some lingo from Scheme:
Somewhat less Straightforward Mastermind - Action - $5
+1 Action
+1 Card
+1 Buy
At the start of Clean-up this turn, you may choose two cards you have in play. If you discard them from play this turn, put them on the bottom of your deck in any order.
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You may play this by discarding or trashing another card from your hand.
This version can move non-Actions as well... which makes it more powerful.
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This doesn't look all th atexciting. Scheme is so good because it reduces risk whereas this doesn't. It is really more of a Market Square with some cherry on top.
I don't get the below-the-line stuff, it indicates that this card allows you to trash/discard a card to play it which would make it far too strong (cantrip trasher).
When one of your cards is trashed or discarded, you may play this from your hand.
This might be the wording you are looking for and it is simply a mess rule-wise due to the discard phase and due to trashing out of your turn.
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This doesn't look all th atexciting. Scheme is so good because it reduces risk whereas this doesn't. It is really more of a Market Square with some cherry on top.
I don't get the below-the-line stuff, it indicates that this card allows you to trash/discard a card to play it which would make it far too strong (cantrip trasher).
When one of your cards is trashed or discarded, you may play this from your hand.
This might be the wording you are looking for and it is simply a mess rule-wise due to the discard phase and due to trashing out of your turn.
I agree to most of what you said, but this isn't unsolvable. You could do something like just adding "during your Action phase" and probably specifying that the card has to be discarded/trashed from your hand. Yes, it allows drawing a card and getting an Action in the middle of another card, but the draw at least isn't worse than e.g. Overgrown Estate. I think the fact that the card itself is nonterminal introduces tracking annoyances, though. Somehow I'd like it better terminal. Drawing also has the issue of drawing further Masterminds and using them on the same trigger. Here's my (not so great) attempt at a version:
Mastermind, Action - Reaction
+3$
You may put one of the cards you discard from play this turn onto your deck when you do.
---
When you trash a card from your hand during your Action phase, you may play this from your hand.
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When you trash a card from your hand during your Action phase, you may play this from your hand.
This wording works but I feel like Neirai is not really sure what he actually wants. If that is really what he is after it feels pretty weird, play from your hand triggers feel like they belong on terminals and Somewhat less Straightforward Mastermind seems to be now more about being a conditional Working Village than that Pearl-Diver-Scheming thingy.
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I feel like Neirai is not really sure what he actually wants.
You're not wrong!
I mean, I'm in the discovery phase for this card. I feel like it accidentally became a restart village and I like it in that spot, but I also like the idea of it being the scheme thing. For the time being I'm probably posting too much about it in its nascent form, since it's still evolving a lot, but I'd like to know about the pitfalls in it before going too much further down that road.
it indicates that this card allows you to trash/discard a card to play it which would make it far too strong (cantrip trasher).
Good point, it shouldn't be a cantrip trasher.
The intention of the bottom half is to let you play it from a dead hand. I'm thinking it makes more sense to steal text from Royal Carriage to make it more straightforward (wait I used that word already.)
Still evolving Mastermind - Action - $5
+1 Action
+1 Card
+1 Buy
At the start of Clean-up this turn, you may choose two cards you have in play. If you discard them from play this turn, put them on the bottom of your deck in any order.
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Directly after resolving an Action, you may discard a card to play this.
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Still evolving Mastermind - Action - $5
+1 Action
+1 Card
+1 Buy
At the start of Clean-up this turn, you may choose two cards you have in play. If you discard them from play this turn, put them on the bottom of your deck in any order.
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Directly after resolving an Action, you may discard a card to play this.
The village effect looks like Hamlet at the first glance but it is much stronger, has similarities with the upcoming Action tokens and like with Sauna you can now play terminal draw before the village.
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Holunder9, you bring up a very good point. I should treat this card lightly given the upcoming expansion; it's possible that I think it has a cool gimmick now but it gets very lame when Renaissance comes out. Once Action tokens are in, the benefit of a discard-to-start-again card is questionable.
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More blathering:
What I like about this is that it feels interesting as part of the same "Directly after resolving an Action" mechanical set as Coin of the Realm and Royal Carriage. But those cards are both Reserve cards, for a reason. Royal Carriage is entirely set up to be a card that you can only "play" as "Directly after resolving an Action" by having a top that is just +1 Action, put this on your Tavern mat.
I purposely chose not to include Durations and Reserves in Antiquities. Sometimes I realize I'm designing them anyhow.
I haven't had a chance to play with Still evolving Mastermind yet, I think it's probably overpowered (more like a $6 than a $5) but I'm not sure yet. Comparing it to Hamlet and Sauna are both rather enlightening.
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I don't think that one shouldn't do something just because it might be remotely similar to cards that come up in Renaissance.
I also don't think that this is too pricey for $5.
It is worse than Working Village as you gotta discard a card, it is better due to the Sauna effect and it is better due to the Pearl Diver Scheme thingy.
No idea which of these 3 effects outweighs which but $5 seems to be roughly right.
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Still evolving Mastermind - Action - $5
+1 Action
+1 Card
+1 Buy
At the start of Clean-up this turn, you may choose two cards you have in play. If you discard them from play this turn, put them on the bottom of your deck in any order.
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Directly after resolving an Action, you may discard a card to play this.
This is pretty similar to
Still evolving Mastermind - Action - $5
+1 Action
+1 Card
+1 Buy
You may discard a card for +1 Action.
At the start of Clean-up this turn, you may choose two cards you have in play. If you discard them from play this turn, put them on the bottom of your deck in any order.
Not the same, but not all that different, either.
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Still evolving Mastermind - Action - $5
+1 Action
+1 Card
+1 Buy
At the start of Clean-up this turn, you may choose two cards you have in play. If you discard them from play this turn, put them on the bottom of your deck in any order.
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Directly after resolving an Action, you may discard a card to play this.
This is pretty similar to
Still evolving Mastermind - Action - $5
+1 Action
+1 Card
+1 Buy
You may discard a card for +1 Action.
At the start of Clean-up this turn, you may choose two cards you have in play. If you discard them from play this turn, put them on the bottom of your deck in any order.
Not the same, but not all that different, either.
If I'm catching your meaning, it's true that the card is a lot like "Worker's Village +1 Buy but only if you discard a card, + double sort of bad scheme" so the pricing question really rests on how good the scheming part is.
Further musing: it's both worse than scheme, since scheme controls when you're going to get the card back, and better, since it's more persistent so you can combo it, and also better because this can target any card that's in play, not just actions.
I have played around with leaving the wording as is, so that you can move any card you played all turn, and changing it so that you can only move cards you already had in play when you play Mastermind. The latter is weaker but has fun highlights when you play Mastermind during a different phase, something that you can do.
Of course there's the danger of a card that only shines if you know and can replicate weird edge cases.
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I played Still evolving Mastermind last night, it seemed to be in a pretty good place; I played it in a kingdom with a number of other villages (Bustling, Blessed, and Cursed, as well as Conclave -- random kingdoms are fun) and it seemed to be a good contender -- not a card you'd never buy against those cards, nor one you'd always buy against those cards, but one you'd buy a few of as well as more standard villages.
The set didn't have a lot of good payload cards, though, and in either case one game does not an adequate test make. But for now I'm pretty happy with it.
Edit: this was Still evolving Mastermind that chooses cards at Clean-up, rather than the idea of choosing cards immediately and then moving them at Clean-up. This was the more powerful version, and I think it felt okay that way.
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Today I received the (unbranded) cover art image. This basically means that, once Renaissance launches and I assess the damage, I'll be releasing the final version.
So, like, one last chance to rip apart the cards :)
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Looks like Moundbuilder Village just got clobbered. I'll have to try some variants on the design.
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The current idea looks something like this:
Moundbuilder Village - Action - $4
+1 Action
Look through your discard pile and reveal a Moundbuilder Village. If you did, return it to the Supply for + $3.
Otherwise, +1 Card, +1 Action.
So it's either an action Gold or a Village. When it functions as a Gold, it has a high maintenance cost.
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Looks like $4 for cost is too steep, since it's definitely worse than Mining Village and arguably worse than Village, or about on par.
Update:
It looks like it might be better at $4 if I make it a Bazaar with a Spoils effect if another one is found in the discard pile. This gives you some incentive if you're clever and keep them alive for multiple turns ($4 for a $5.) But now the concern is that losing them is still too weak. I may consider swapping the payoff to something like 3 cards.
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Much more complex Moundbuilder Village that is also a lot cheaper:
Moundbuilder Village - Action - $3
+1 Action
Look through your discard pile. Return a Moundbuilder Village from it to the Supply for + $3 (or reveal you can't); if you can't, +1 Card, +1 Action.
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In games using this, when you gain a Silver during your Action phase, you may exchange it for a Moundbuilder Village.
Before someone says it's "strictly better than Village," it's not.
It feels very good in the $3 slot, but that might be because it's OP in the $3 slot. Further testing is needed.
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Still evolving Mastermind - Action - $5
+1 Action
+1 Card
+1 Buy
At the start of Clean-up this turn, you may choose two cards you have in play. If you discard them from play this turn, put them on the bottom of your deck in any order.
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Directly after resolving an Action, you may discard a card to play this.
This is pretty similar to
Still evolving Mastermind - Action - $5
+1 Action
+1 Card
+1 Buy
You may discard a card for +1 Action.
At the start of Clean-up this turn, you may choose two cards you have in play. If you discard them from play this turn, put them on the bottom of your deck in any order.
Not the same, but not all that different, either.
If I'm catching your meaning, it's true that the card is a lot like "Worker's Village +1 Buy but only if you discard a card, + double sort of bad scheme" so the pricing question really rests on how good the scheming part is.
Further musing: it's both worse than scheme, since scheme controls when you're going to get the card back, and better, since it's more persistent so you can combo it, and also better because this can target any card that's in play, not just actions.
I have played around with leaving the wording as is, so that you can move any card you played all turn, and changing it so that you can only move cards you already had in play when you play Mastermind. The latter is weaker but has fun highlights when you play Mastermind during a different phase, something that you can do.
Of course there's the danger of a card that only shines if you know and can replicate weird edge cases.
Wording suggestion to match scheme:
'This turn, you may put two of your cards on the bottom of your deck when you discard it from play.'
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Much more complex Moundbuilder Village that is also a lot cheaper:
Moundbuilder Village - Action - $3
+1 Action
Look through your discard pile. Return a Moundbuilder Village from it to the Supply for + $3 (or reveal you can't); if you can't, +1 Card, +1 Action.
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In games using this, when you gain a Silver during your Action phase, you may exchange it for a Moundbuilder Village.
Before someone says it's "strictly better than Village," it's not.
It feels very good in the $3 slot, but that might be because it's OP in the $3 slot. Further testing is needed.
That's neat! Reminds me of Mining Village somehow.
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Archaeologist wording suggestion: Look at the top 6 cards of your deck. Put 3 in your hand. Either discard the rest, or put them back in any order.
Based off of Navigator. It's not a big deal, but it doesn't seem necessary to say Choose one.
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You could change Boulder trap to this: When you discard this, you may put it in the discard pile of the player to your left. When you gain this, gain a Silver onto your deck.
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For Pyramid, unless you mean that if I play Pyramid and have 1 card left in my hand that I cannot trash it, then you could remove the word exactly. Also, if you always need to trash 2 cards, I'm not sure it also needs to be -VP. If you get yourself cleaned up, you don't need to trash anymore and it becomes harder to play Pyramid. Maybe instead have it come with junk a la death cart.
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Sarcophagus could be: Play an action card from the Supply costing up to $2 less than this. As a matter of fact, this seems to be basically the same as Band of Misfits when you think about, besides the cursing thing and the fact that you can throne it to play 2 different cards.
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Boy, it's taken me a long time to figure out what to write here, here goes!
Fly-Eagles-Fly, thanks so much for your interest. Archaeologist and Mastermind will use your suggested wording!
Boulder Trap I'm still pondering the wording on. I basically want the rule to be "you pass this around whenever you discard it, but if you forget, you can't go back and change it." Fun...
On Pyramid, the exactly 2 is to remind people that they need to trash 2 cards; trashing 1 card is not allowed. I do feel that the -VP is needed, first to counterbalance it (it's quite powerful) and to make it interesting, since you have to trash it before the end of the game or suffer the penalty. I also think that the Pyramid is probably the most risky design left in the set.
Sarcophagus differs from Band of Misfits in that it triggers the on-gain and on-trash effects of the targeted cards, and runs down the Supply piles. Originally played the card multiple times (like a Procession that targeted the supply) until someone here pointed out that it was far too strong. So I hit it with the nerf-bat a lot of times, and now it gets rather close to Band of Misfits. Seeing as I have a bit more time waiting for Renaissance to launch, I might take it back to its roots and try variants on it.
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Boy, it's taken me a long time to figure out what to write here, here goes!
Fly-Eagles-Fly, thanks so much for your interest. Archaeologist and Mastermind will use your suggested wording!
Boulder Trap I'm still pondering the wording on. I basically want the rule to be "you pass this around whenever you discard it, but if you forget, you can't go back and change it." Fun...
On Pyramid, the exactly 2 is to remind people that they need to trash 2 cards; trashing 1 card is not allowed. I do feel that the -VP is needed, first to counterbalance it (it's quite powerful) and to make it interesting, since you have to trash it before the end of the game or suffer the penalty. I also think that the Pyramid is probably the most risky design left in the set.
Sarcophagus differs from Band of Misfits in that it triggers the on-gain and on-trash effects of the targeted cards, and runs down the Supply piles. Originally played the card multiple times (like a Procession that targeted the supply) until someone here pointed out that it was far too strong. So I hit it with the nerf-bat a lot of times, and now it gets rather close to Band of Misfits. Seeing as I have a bit more time waiting for Renaissance to launch, I might take it back to its roots and try variants on it.
Glad to help. For Boulder Trap (which I really like by the way) my wording was just so you could remove the 'from the supply' wording in the bottom half, since the player would no longer be gaining it, like with Masquerade. It would also mean that things like Watchtower would not affect it.
For Pyramid I missed the you may. Oops. and for Sarcophagus I didn't think about on-gain and on-trash abilities. I do think you should maybe try to make it less like BoM.
Also, you have both the old and new Archaeologists in the post now. Just thought you ought to now.
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Okay, so here's a crazy idea for Sarcophagus:
Memorial - Action - $6
Play and trash an Action card from your hand. Gain a card that costs less than it. If it's an...a
Action card, play it twice;
Treasure card, play it twice at the start of your next Buy phase;
Night card, play it twice at the start of your next Night phase.
So it's basically King's Court with a built-in Crown, but the Crown is Crowning a crappier card.
Oh, and it can gain (cheaper) Victory cards.
OP? Not sure. Do I like it more than Sarcophagus? Maybe.
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Okay, so here's a crazy idea for Sarcophagus:
Memorial - Action - $6
Play and trash an Action card from your hand. Gain a card that costs less than it. If it's an...a
Action card, play it twice;
Treasure card, play it twice at the start of your next Buy phase;
Night card, play it twice at the start of your next Night phase.
So it's basically King's Court with a built-in Crown, but the Crown is Crowning a crappier card.
Oh, and it can gain (cheaper) Victory cards.
OP? Not sure. Do I like it more than Sarcophagus? Maybe.
I like it. Definitely more unique than Sarcophagus.
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Boulder Trap I'm still pondering the wording on. I basically want the rule to be "you pass this around whenever you discard it, but if you forget, you can't go back and change it." Fun...
Because giving the player to your left a Boulder Trap is optional, this is in line with punishing players who forget to do so. It's as if they made the choice to keep it, even though they likely didn't. Players gotta get good. :P If you really wanna hit home that it is a choice, you could try this wording:
"When you discard this, the player to your left may gain this, your choice."
Having the word "choice" might help and this is more in line with official Dominion lingo (see Scrying Pool).
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Shouldn't having the word may already indicate that it's optional? If you do use the 'your choice' wording, it should say something like 'or not, your choice,' but I think the word may covers that.
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Shouldn't having the word may already indicate that it's optional? If you do use the 'your choice' wording, it should say something like 'or not, your choice,' but I think the word may covers that.
Without it, it sounds like the player to your left chooses.
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Okay, so here's a crazy idea for Sarcophagus:
Memorial - Action - $6
Play and trash an Action card from your hand. Gain a card that costs less than it. If it's an...
Action card, play it twice;
Treasure card, play it twice at the start of your next Buy phase;
Night card, play it twice at the start of your next Night phase.
So it's basically King's Court with a built-in Crown, but the Crown is Crowning a crappier card.
Oh, and it can gain (cheaper) Victory cards.
OP? Not sure. Do I like it more than Sarcophagus? Maybe.
I like it. Definitely more unique than Sarcophagus.
Couple of quick comments:
1) it's a bit awkward when you gain a card, but then don't play it until your Buy / Night phase. I need to add a set-aside to prevent the card from being covered up by intervening actions: "Play and trash an Action card from your hand. Gain a card that costs less than it, setting it aside until Clean-up. If it's an.."
2) This actually feels a bit weak, since you are downgrading a card and playing the weaker version twice. I'm contemplating making it play the card from your hand twice, trash it and gain a cheaper card, play that twice. This might be too strong, though. Another counterbalance idea would be to not trash the original card but to gain 2 copies of the lesser card and play them twice if they are an action, otherwise they go to your hand. At that point it probably shouldn't be allowed to get 2 duchies if you trash a 6-cost Action using it, otherwise the only thing people will do with Memorials is use them to trash Memorials for 2 Duchies.
3) Another stranger element (that I'm keeping for now) is that currently if you gain a Werewolf with a Memorial, you play it four times (twice as an Action, twice as a Night card.) The same is true for Crown. However, I'm keeping it that way.
and finally 4) If you Memorial a Memorial you get these weird action chains where you play Memorial on Memorial, the second Memorial plays another card, trashes that card, gains a card and sets it aside to play it later, then trashes itself, gains a card and sets it aside to play later, then plays set aside cards or waits till the appropriate phase.
One thing I could do is just make you play the Night cards and Treasure immediately, but that is a bit weird (a *bit*) and Night cards generally are much less powerful if you play them too soon.
Edit: actually, the only Night card that really suffers a lot from being played in this manner is Crypt. And technically if you played Treasures in your Action phase before playing Crypt in your Action phase, then you could use Crypt on the Treasures.
Another idea that's totally different would be to have memorial function as a King's Court that can only play one thing; the way it works would be like this:
Actually Remembering Something Memorial - Action - $6
If a card is on your Memory mat, play it three times, then return it. Otherwise, put a card from your hand onto your Memory mat.
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Memorial has the card types of the card on your Memory mat.
If Memorial is a Victory card, it's worth 3VP at the end of game.
Edit: updated for better wording.
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So the problem with "Actually Remembering Something Memorial" is that it can consistently target Gold. Then it becomes a Treasure worth $9. That costs $6.
Right now in the game you can King's Court say a Legionary to get an Action worth $9. But to do that you have to collide King's Court and Legionary and you can't do that every game, just games with Legionary. You also have to collide it every time you want the $9.
Now, ARS Memorial needs you to collide the card once, the first time. If you collide with something else, you lose the ability to collide so I'm expecting it to take a bit of time before you collide with the right thing. However, I feel like the basic strategy for ARS Memorial will be, figure out the fastest way to get multiple Golds, then buy a Memorial and collide them, then buy Memorials. After that, have Memorials (which are a Treasure) and cruise home to Victory.
Of course, testing is needed. But I have two ideas:
1) Make ARS Memorial only play the card twice. Balance its cost around this fact. I'm not worried as much about people using it on Platinums since that's more of a drawn-out process -- you can't just invest in a Platinum gainer like you can a Gold gainer.
2) Make ARS Memorial only able to target Kingdom cards. This gives you all the shenanigans of ARS Memorial but removes the most obvious abuses.
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So the problem with "Actually Remembering Something Memorial" is that it can consistently target Gold. Then it becomes a Treasure worth $9. That costs $6.
Right now in the game you can King's Court say a Legionary to get an Action worth $9. But to do that you have to collide King's Court and Legionary and you can't do that every game, just games with Legionary. You also have to collide it every time you want the $9.
Now, ARS Memorial needs you to collide the card once, the first time. If you collide with something else, you lose the ability to collide so I'm expecting it to take a bit of time before you collide with the right thing. However, I feel like the basic strategy for ARS Memorial will be, figure out the fastest way to get multiple Golds, then buy a Memorial and collide them, then buy Memorials. After that, have Memorials (which are a Treasure) and cruise home to Victory.
Of course, testing is needed. But I have two ideas:
1) Make ARS Memorial only play the card twice. Balance its cost around this fact. I'm not worried as much about people using it on Platinums since that's more of a drawn-out process -- you can't just invest in a Platinum gainer like you can a Gold gainer.
2) Make ARS Memorial only able to target Kingdom cards. This gives you all the shenanigans of ARS Memorial but removes the most obvious abuses.
This sounds a lot like Inheritance. It could maybe be:
If this is your first Memorial this game, set aside a non-Victory Action card from the Supply costing up to $4. Move your Memorial token to it. (Your Memorials gain the abilities and types of that card.) Otherwise play this twice.
I'm not quite sure this would actually work. Obviously the main difference here is that the 'in-play' effects of cards will actually take place. The cost restriction and non-victory clause can be removed, but I think there should maybe be some sort of cost restriction (maybe 'set aside a card costing less than this?). Also I think it should not be able to be a Victory card for simplicity.
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How about something simpler? Like:
Memorial, Action, 5$
You may play an Action card from your hand twice. You may play it a third time. If you do, trash it and gain an Action card costing less than it.
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That sounds very similar to another card I've seen on here where you also had the option of playing it only once to gain a copy of it, and did not gain a card if you played it three times and trashed it.
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That sounds very similar to another card I've seen on here where you also had the option of playing it only once to gain a copy of it, and did not gain a card if you played it three times and trashed it.
Oh, right! So that's why it seemed so familiar.
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That sounds very similar to another card I've seen on here where you also had the option of playing it only once to gain a copy of it, and did not gain a card if you played it three times and trashed it.
Oh, right! So that's why it seemed so familiar.
Whose card was that, do you know?
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That sounds very similar to another card I've seen on here where you also had the option of playing it only once to gain a copy of it, and did not gain a card if you played it three times and trashed it.
Oh, right! So that's why it seemed so familiar.
Whose card was that, do you know?
Kru5h's Scepter.
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I'm also trying out this idea, but the balance level on it is mindboggling:
Memorial Splitter - Action - $6?
+2 Cards
You may name an Action card. Reveal any number of matching cards from your hand. Play them or set them aside.
Then, you may play all the matching cards that were set aside with Memorial.
The issue here is you can use it as some sort of Village, kind of like a Lost City or something, where it says "+2 Cards, play any number of cards with the same name from your hand."
On the other hand, you can set aside the cards and play them with a different Memorial, to get a Throne room effect; but to do that, you need to remove the cards from circulation, which could be very bad, this would drive down the cost compared to it being a Lost City variant.
Finally, you can also use it to remove Actions from your deck permanently, like a Trash effect.
I'm guessing this clocks in at $6 (~$7 for +2 cards +2 actions, -2 for removing Actions from circulation, +1 because that could be a good thing as a trasher move) but it could be a lot weaker or a lot stronger.
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Here's a card from the Weekly Challenges thread that appears to be inspired by a version of Memorial (or at any rate is very similar):
(https://i.imgur.com/ZDRm3Hi.png)
Clarification: Cost reduction effects such as Bridge and Highway will make General cost fewer Debt during your Buy phase.
It would appear that Memorial is a pretty good idea, if someone else also has that idea or uses it as inspiration.
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Here's a card from the Weekly Challenges thread that appears to be inspired by a version of Memorial (or at any rate is very similar):
(https://i.imgur.com/ZDRm3Hi.png)
Clarification: Cost reduction effects such as Bridge and Highway will make General cost fewer Debt during your Buy phase.
It would appear that Memorial is a pretty good idea, if someone else also has that idea or uses it as inspiration.
How does General look like it was inspired by Memorial? The only commonality that I see is they're both Throne Room variants.
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How does the card interact with Quarry?
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Here's a card from the Weekly Challenges thread that appears to be inspired by a version of Memorial (or at any rate is very similar):
(https://i.imgur.com/ZDRm3Hi.png)
Clarification: Cost reduction effects such as Bridge and Highway will make General cost fewer Debt during your Buy phase.
It would appear that Memorial is a pretty good idea, if someone else also has that idea or uses it as inspiration.
How does General look like it was inspired by Memorial? The only commonality that I see is they're both Throne Room variants.
Sorry, I meant Actually Remembering Something Memorial:
Actually Remembering Something Memorial - Action - $6
If a card is on your Memory mat, play it three times, then return it. Otherwise, put a card from your hand onto your Memory mat.
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Memorial has the card types of the card on your Memory mat.
If Memorial is a Victory card, it's worth 3VP at the end of game.
How does the card interact with Quarry?
I think that Quarry would decrease the cost in coins, thereby decreasing the cost in debt.
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Yeah, when I look at General I think it's more like Necromancer-as-a-Throne room than Actually Remembering Something Memorial; they could be connected, but ARS Memorial's uniqueness was that it could only effect one card type in a game -- if I saw that on General I might think that they were directly inspired.
It's a cool card idea, though.
Edit: I'd probably borrow the Necromancer-like language if I end up going with ARS Memorial.
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How does the card interact with Quarry?
I think that Quarry would decrease the cost in coins, thereby decreasing the cost in debt.
But during your Buy phase, isn't the card's cost in coins zero?
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How does the card interact with Quarry?
I think that Quarry would decrease the cost in coins, thereby decreasing the cost in debt.
But during your Buy phase, isn't the card's cost in coins zero?
Oh. Yeah, I guess Quarry doesn't affect it then?
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So based on my own testing I'm pretty happy with this:
Memorial - Action - $6
+2 Cards
You may name an Action card. If you did, reveal your hand and play the matches or set them aside.
Then, you may play all the matching cards that were set aside with Memorial.
However, it definitely needs tighter wording. And possibly a Mat.
Any thoughts? As far as I can tell it's balanced fairly well, but I'm sure there are some edge cases I've neglected.
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Looks good. I guess it "fails" some time and is just a Village instead of a Lost City. Obviously it incentivizes monocard strategies like e.g. a lot of Peddlers or villages or Bridges. I guess Bridge will be especially good due to the megaturn potential if you leave them set aside.
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Yes, there is the question of "do we really need to further incentivize monocard strategies?" However I'm not sure one card to incentivize them would be bad.
When it fails, it's actually more a Laboratory than a Village.
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Yeah, that was a dumb mistake on my part.
About the monocard thing, given that Nocturne had some cards that reward variety I don't think that a card that does the opposite of that is bad.
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Sorry, I should make a better comment than "I'm not sure one card to incentivize them would be bad".
I'm actually not sure about whether it's bad or not.
There are many, many cards in Dominion that incentivize strategies that are not monocard; Holunder9, you mentioned Nocturne; Cornucopia is the other obvious example, but also the entire concept of Remodelers push towards a diverse deck. On the other hand, except maybe Journey token cards, there don't seem to be any cards that explicitly incentivize multiple copies of the same card. Is that because it's a mechanic that DXV has not used yet, or is it because it's a mechanic that he looked at and decided was bad for the game?
In either case I'm happy with it, especially given that it has some specifically limiting behavior, like preventing groups of King's Courts that you set aside from playing each other, so it's not just a card that lets you build insane combos and pull them off effortlessly. It *is* a card that lets you play 4 Smithies without spending more than 1 Action, if you're able to take the time to set that up.
Wording is a bit of a concern, as matching cards could mean any cards at all that are the same, vs cards that have the same name as the card you named. "Matches" appears on one card, Doctor, whereas all other "Name a card" cards use something like "named card". Also "were set aside with Memorial" is sort of ambiguous. I mean "were ever set aside with Memorial" but people might think "were set aside with Memorial this turn". But that's what the rulebook is for.
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I'm actually not sure about whether it's bad or not.
There are many, many cards in Dominion that incentivize strategies that are not monocard; Holunder9, you mentioned Nocturne; Cornucopia is the other obvious example, but also the entire concept of Remodelers push towards a diverse deck. On the other hand, except maybe Journey token cards, there don't seem to be any cards that explicitly incentivize multiple copies of the same card. Is that because it's a mechanic that DXV has not used yet, or is it because it's a mechanic that he looked at and decided was bad for the game?
*cough* Cultist *cough*
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Also, I'm still confused about what exactly this one does.
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I'm actually not sure about whether it's bad or not.
There are many, many cards in Dominion that incentivize strategies that are not monocard; Holunder9, you mentioned Nocturne; Cornucopia is the other obvious example, but also the entire concept of Remodelers push towards a diverse deck. On the other hand, except maybe Journey token cards, there don't seem to be any cards that explicitly incentivize multiple copies of the same card. Is that because it's a mechanic that DXV has not used yet, or is it because it's a mechanic that he looked at and decided was bad for the game?
*cough* Cultist *cough*
Or Minion. Or Torturer. Or (almost) all Potion cards.
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Also, I'm still confused about what exactly this one does.
This is great feedback! It tells me that there's some vagueness that I need to overcome.
I don't know if it's a good idea to clarify here though; maybe I should refine the card. On the flip side I could also write up the rulebook excerpt and post it and you could tell me if you understand it now. If you don't, something needs to get more clear.
Many of the set's players (if I'm egotistical enough to assume that there will be any) won't have the benefit of me sitting across from them saying, no, do it this way.
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On the other hand, except maybe Journey token cards, there don't seem to be any cards that explicitly incentivize multiple copies of the same card. Is that because it's a mechanic that DXV has not used yet, or is it because it's a mechanic that he looked at and decided was bad for the game?
Something that happens quite commonly in games of Dominion is that there are multiple Kingdom cards that are simply irrelevant to the strategy of the Kingdom. It makes sense that this would happen, since a deck with more copies of card-A is more likely to draw card-A when it needs it (Magic: The Gathering notably limits the number of copies of non-basic Lands you can put into your Library precisely because a smaller deck with more copies of ideal cards is preferred to a larger deck of merely good cards). Since this deck construction rule-of-thumb exists, Kingdom cards should endeavor to incentivize breaking said rule, since the rule will exist whether we try to instill it or not. Consider how many beginning players will mock shock at the play of a useful\valuable card that you, of course, have three-to-five copies in your deck so that you are certain to be able to play it each turn.
With all this theory in mind, there do exist cards that primarily incentivize pile-driving: Alchemist, Cultist, Governor, and Minion jump to mind immediately, while the Adventures Tokens seen in Lost Arts, Pathfinding, Plan, and Training also encourage gaining many of a singular cheap, spammable Action.
One should consider with great trepidation whether or not to create a card that combos explicitly (or implicitly) with itself (and I think doubly-so if it costs less than $5, as $5 cards are at least expensive enough to already require another plan), and should almost certainly explore any fashion in which the idea can be more Kingdom dependent. The more mono-card strategies that exist, the greater the chance that a Kingdom devolves into a race for a single pile. Designers should work to minimize such an un-fun game state.
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One should consider with great trepidation whether or not to create a card that combos explicitly (or implicitly) with itself (and I think doubly-so if it costs less than $5, as $5 cards are at least expensive enough to already require another plan), and should almost certainly explore any fashion in which the idea can be more Kingdom dependent. The more mono-card strategies that exist, the greater the chance that a Kingdom devolves into a race for a single pile. Designers should work to minimize such an un-fun game state.
Yes, this was my thinking. I think this is okay because the card doesn't combo explicitly with itself per se, rather allowing other terminals to chain with themselves, costs $6, and suspends cards outside of your hand, which prevents them from playing each other (i.e., setting aside 4 King's Courts and then playing them with Memorial will prevent them from playing each other -- they need to target other cards in your hand.)
Fly-Eagles-Fly, I don't think it's QUITE a solution for me to say "I'll post the rulebook snippet", since it wouldn't be right to make a card with gibberish and a rulebook entry to explain how to use it in a different way. What do you think the card is support to do?
The short version is, after drawing 2 cards, either play all of the copies of a single Action from your hand, or set them aside. Then, play any number of the same Action that were set aside (including ones set aside from this Memorials, or from previous Memorials, whether on this turn or previous turns).
So, example one, my hand is 2 smithies, 1 Memorial, some other cards; I play Memorial, I name Smithy, I play Smithy + Smithy.
Example two, my hand is 2 smithies, 1 Memorial, etc; I play Memorial, I name Smithy, I set the Smithies aside. A few turns later, my hand is junk and Memorial, I play Memorial, I name Smithy, I play those two Smithies I set aside last time.
Example three is the same, except I have two Smithies set aside and two in my hand. I play Memorial, I name Smithy, I play 4 Smithies!
There's some extra complications, in that, you have to play or set aside all of the copies, you can't have 3 Smithies and then play one and set aside two. It's all or nothing. Likewise, if you choose to play Smithies from being set aside, you have to play all of them. You can't keep some set aside and play a few.
Additionally, you can have multiple different piles of set aside cards; you could set 3 Smithies aside, and 2 Native Villages, and 2 Witches. But you can only name one card for BOTH setting aside and playing, so each Memorial will only access one set of "Memories."
Also as I mentioned before, the cards you set aside aren't in your hand, so they don't have as much ability to interact with each other.
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I'm trying out this wording, it borrows a bit from Magic and may make the card make more sense:
Memorial - Action - $6
+2 Cards
You may name an Action card. If you did, choose one or both: Reveal your hand and set the matches aside; or play all the copies of the named card that were set aside.
It's a little awkward in that it switches between "the matches" and "copies of the named card" but I think it makes more sense. I could also use a mat (Memory mat) instead.
As for the name, I'm not sure that I've settled on "Memorial" vs "Sarcophagus", but I'll let Renaissance come out before I nail it down.
Update:
+2 Cards
You may name an Action card. If you did, choose one or both: Reveal your hand and put the matches on your Memory mat; or play all the matches from your mat.
I think this is closer to Native Village and may work better.
Technically, I could also make the wording as mandatory ("Name an Action card. Choose one or both:...") since you can always name Gerbil and do nothing.
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As you work on an expack like this, whenever you think you're done, your subconscious points out a card as being the worst card. So you put some work into it. Then your brain taps you on the shoulder and says, 'that card, there? that's the worst card in the set." It was Sarcophagus. Before that, it was Boulder Trap. Before that, it was Shipwreck or Gamepiece, I forget. Now it's Snake Charmer.
Here's the current Snake Charmer:
Current Snake Charmer - Action-Attack - $4
+1 Action
+$1
You may trash a card from your hand. If you've trashed 2 or more cards this turn, +$3.
Each other player may trash a card costing $2 or more from their hand. If they don't they gain a Curse.
This has three problems. One, even though it really isn't a Priest clone, it sort of feels like a Priest clone. Two, the attack sort of feels like Villain even though, again, it's different. Ish.
Third, the clause about "if you've trashed 2 or more cards this turn" is rather awkward. Do you get this if you didn't trash a card this time? Yes, you do, so basically this is $4 with no trashing if you have trashed 2 cards already, if you want it that way. Plus it's hard to track if you bounce between trashing and not trashing.
So, more refined Snake Charmer:
Snake Charmer - Action-Attack - $4
+1 Action
If you trashed a card this turn, + $4. Otherwise, + $1.
You may trash a card from your hand.
Each other player may trash a card from their hand. If they didn't trash an Action or Victory card, they gain a Curse to the bottom of their deck.
This solves all of the things. Sort of. Also, it's a third card referencing the bottom of your deck! Because it can, and it's sort of like poison, kills you later. It's a hard counter for Pearl Diver, because Pearl Diver really could use being worse /s. If you don't cycle your deck fast enough, Curses on the bottom of your deck can pile up.
The two top halves are not equivalent, but this one is closer to how I wanted the card to work in the first place.
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The one question, of course, is "Is Snake Charmer 2.0 worth more than $4"?
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I've placed an order for physicals!
I made a last-minute (a dangerous idea, I know) revision to Snake Charmer:
Snake Charmer - Action-Attack - $4
+1 Action
If you've trashed a card this turn, $4. Otherwise, +$1 and you may trash a card from your hand.
Each other player may trash a card from their hand. If they didn't trash an Action or Victory card, they gain a Curse to the bottom of their deck.
This eliminates the powerful splitter + Priest + Snake Charmer = $8 combo.
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So are all the cards at the page linked to in the first post the final versions of the cards (now that all the card names for Dominion: Renaissance have been revealed)?
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So are all the cards at the page linked to in the first post the final versions of the cards (now that all the card names for Dominion: Renaissance have been revealed)?
Yes, they are. Slightly awkward Stoneworks language and all.
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Here's a link to the rulebook (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FU_lzof4OAjrce5XO7StzY_VJ77sDaRm1Ec1OupBtvg/edit?usp=sharing).
At some point I'll make a new thread that's, you know, more officially launched looking.
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Here's a link to the rulebook (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FU_lzof4OAjrce5XO7StzY_VJ77sDaRm1Ec1OupBtvg/edit?usp=sharing).
At some point I'll make a new thread that's, you know, more officially launched looking.
Very good and official looking. Can you still make changes, or is this completely final? I just think it might look better with a background, even if it's just a simple blue instead of the weird design official ones have.
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Here's a link to the rulebook (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FU_lzof4OAjrce5XO7StzY_VJ77sDaRm1Ec1OupBtvg/edit?usp=sharing).
At some point I'll make a new thread that's, you know, more officially launched looking.
Very good and official looking. Can you still make changes, or is this completely final? I just think it might look better with a background, even if it's just a simple blue instead of the weird design official ones have.
I don't know that I have any control over the background, unfortunately.
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Renaissance is here, and with it, Capitalism!
Capitalism doesn't have a HUGE effect on Antiquities, except .... Dig.
Every action with a +$ component is now an Action and a non-Copper Treasure, which is worth 3VP to Dig.
Wow.
It's not "broken" but it's very strong.
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Capitalism is totally broken.
Feel free to quote me out of context.