1
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.
« on: November 08, 2023, 08:24:53 pm »
Didn't know this thread existed 
Some questions, feel free to redirect me if you've answered them before:
Some questions, feel free to redirect me if you've answered them before:
- What's your approach for designing a cardpool? Does it differ between mixes and expansions? Do you do any math to figure out how often you expect Kingdoms to have e.g. an attack? Or do you just playtest a ton to see how a sufficient number of Kingdoms feel?
- Do you have an opinion on how the full random cardpool currently is? Do you ever wish you could, for example, dump 30 villages into the pot?
- Taking a longer view: there're two interesting trends I've seen over the last few years with the full cardpool. One, we've been trending towards faster and faster games turns-wise across all skill levels. Two, individual cards and pairings of cards (from combos such as Donate/MS, to interesting in-set interactions such as Silver Mine/Rope, to card+archetype such as Proc/Horse) become less and less frequent as time goes on. Do either of those matter to you?
- Have you played many other deckbuilders? And if so, are you willing to comment on their design decisions or things they've changed? As one example, I've been having a lot of fun playing Astrea, a dice-focused deckbuilder (5 second pitch: StS but with dice instead of cards, so something like a grandkid of Dominion), and find it really funny how it inherited the whole "discard your hand at end of turn" thing from StS, which explicitly chose to follow the Dominion rather than Magic paradigm there.