Hello! This is my first ever fan expansion for Dominion. Its primary theme is action enabling; many cards in this set synergize with Action cards and give you new ways to set off and set up Actions. Its secondary theme is a new mechanic: payment. Any card that says "you may pay" allows you to use money to improve the card's capabilities. You may play coffers, spend Treasures (in which case you lose any money produced by it you don't use), or use the money already given to you by other Action cards in play. You are permitted to immediately pay multiple times for an effect on a payment card unless otherwise stated.
This expansion is technically "done," purely in the sense that I've printed all of the cards. Nonetheless, I am still 100% receptive to feedback and improvements, because I am going to keep making more cards and still enjoy thinking about these ones. These cards were made over the course of a little over a year, so the quality varies between my earliest cards and most recent. Here are the cards, which I will explain in more detail below:
Almoner: Gives you what you don't have. This was hard to balance and hard to make concise (some of the wording suffers), but it gives a nice mixture of effects, imo.
Assassin: This is the end result of trying to create an Attack card that uses payment. The idea that you have to save money from your buy phase to use it is sort of interesting imo, but it's so wordy, potentially political, and swingy that I think it's one of the worse cards in the set.
Audience: A distant relative of Raze, this card makes up for its lack of power in its choices of how to use it. Get 1 coin, or make it a cantrip, or sift through your deck, or potentially make this a lab (or even more) by paying a lot.
Burgrave: A comparatively simple card that fills a lot of niches. There are two attack-reactions in this expansion because there are quite a few nasty attacks in here, and I personally like attack-reactions best. I tried a lot of under-the-line effects, but I like this version most, and it's a nice bonus that this fills the gainer role in the expansion.
Camarilla: One of a few cards in this expansion that's powerful with a drawback. When I was playtesting it, the player interaction was fun.
Castle Grounds: This was made before Renaissance happened. It is meant to give leave you with 1 Action if you play it when you have 0, but there was no easy way I could find to write that out without cluttering up the card.
City State: The VP for this will vary from board to board, but the nice thing is that if you're on a board with no villages, you'll probably find this more valuable. "+Actions" means count the number of Actions written on the card. Fishing village would be 3, for example.
Dictator: I like the effect of Saboteur, so here's my attempt to implement its mechanic in a less punishing way. While it's situation-dependent, its effects end up balancing out most of the time.
Diviner: Slightly better than a cantrip, but very good if you manage to fulfill the under-the-line text. I think it's very thematically appropriate too.
Endowment: One of the stranger cards that requires you to think about how to time things.
Frankincense: A Villa inside a Treasure. It was tested producing $1 for a while (some iterations with extra effects), but losing all your money while waiting for the cooler effect was enough of a drawback for it to be $2. It can lead to some interesting turns where you have to decide if a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
General: A Farming Village-esque card that gives you a lot of freedom in what you dig for. Having two separate success conditions can create some interesting dynamics when choosing what card to name, given the makeup of your deck.
Guillotine: An attack that is fairly overpowered early on, but gets much worse over the course of the game. Well, worse as long as you're not relying on one card for your engine.
Heir: A very early card, "inheritances" probably should have been renamed after I played Adventures. The player interaction is interesting in this as you decide if the village is worth potentially giving your opponent a chance to steal an inheritance, and the fact that its effects can be different every game keeps it fresh (although some setups are better than others).
High Throne: I still agonize over whether the discard pile clause is necessary to make this worth a $5 or if it makes it too overpowered. Either way, here's a throne room variant that turns your cards into durations. (Cards that are durations themselves play out their next-turn effects on the next turn along with their normal text, and then next turn effects only the turn after that.)
King's Festival: The first payment card that was made. Its wording is overwhelming and not-regulation for the sake of space. "With Actions" means that you discard an Action card and get half its worth in coin, but that didn't fit on the card. It's very clunky, but the options it can provide, if you can get past that, can be useful.
King: A pretty simple engine piece that gives you a massive benefit if it gives you a card that will potentially end your Action streak.
Landlord: My favorite card, although I'm sure its bizarre nature isn't for everyone. The app it refers to is here:
https://output.jsbin.com/kugayow (JSbin graciously implemented by reddit user dbclick, from my god-awful original). The app uses a crude but semi-accurate formula I designed to calculate the cost of a card. It's far from perfect, because the power of Dominion cards is so multi-faceted, but it can often ballpark fairly well, and it feels cool to have a unique card. The strategy of figuring out when to buy it and for how much is interesting as well.
Pretender: My attempt at a tamer Black Market. Originally it didn't give a Hex, but having someone get a Pearl Diver from this and another a Goons is just too swingy.
Pursuivant: Just as the pursuivant is a rank under a herald in medieval nobility, Pursuivant is a weaker Herald. I have other versions where the options from a non-hit are "discard or put back" and "trash or put back." I'm still not convinced that this version is the best of the three, but it's fun to play with.
Queen: A more strategic card that, admittedly, gets insanely powerful in engines that easily draw your whole deck. In tamer games, though, the cost-benefit of bricking Coppers and improving Silvers makes for interesting decisions. Was originally "discard Treasures costing $6 or more" but Potions and alt-treasures broke that very quickly.
Royal Guard: My attempt at making a card synergetic with the greens: a conditional village that loves Victory cards. Its reaction seems very powerful, but having to get it with a Victory card makes hitting it much less likely.
Serf: A no-frills card that works well when you can pull off playing it in multiples.
Sibyl: I'm obsessed with the idea of being able to change what a card does, but actually implementing that without breaking some cards can be hard. This is my best attempt at that; a powerful card that will make another card quantifiably worse. Player interaction can be interesting when there are several choices on the next card.
Suitors: A weak card that lets you make it better by paying. The fact that you can choose based on the situation whether to take an action or a card makes it surprisingly flexible. This card doesn't work on every board, though, so it has the bottom text to make it potentially better in other situations.
Troubadour: A potentially heavy junking attack that lets you thin your deck to mitigate its own effects.
Thanks for reading!! Again, any comments are appreciated. This is my first set and I hope to make many more and improve from here!
[EDIT: Entirely forgot to put General in. Oops.]
[EDIT 2: Aaaand I forgot High Throne!! This proves I have to organize my computer's folder's better.]
