Had the same bottom 11, except Miser switched with Bureaucrat. I probably overrated Bureaucrat, but it has its uses in the right situations. And I'm sure Miser is coming up in the next section.
Taxman should be ahead of Talisman, but we're looking at some pretty fringe-use cards here and splitting hairs.
Taxman is generally better than talisman but when either of them are good talisman is a rockstar and taxman is meh.
Yes, I was thinking of this. This tends to be the crux of a lot of variation in people's rankings, whether you think being generally okay is more important than being occasionally very good.
Every card has its place. Thief is good in some games with strong trashing but no virtual money. I think Rats is more situational than Thief, it is generally weaker and shines on a smaller amount of boards. I don't think I've actually bought Rats more than a couple of times in my life, and I don't think I've EVER been glad about buying it, nor have I regretted not buying it (then again, of course I didn't play Dark Ages half as much as Base...).
Before people come out and show me games where they dominated with Rats: I know they exist, I just acknowledged every card has its place, I'm just saying that Rats is worse than almost all other cards in general.
The thing with Rats is it really only needs one enabler card (a trasher that can make use of the fact that it costs 4, like Apprentice or Bishop) to be a useful part of a strategy. When it's the wrong choice it's a big mistake, but you'll find plenty of boards that have Rats and one other card like that.
Thief requires the perfect
situation to develop, which is to say that there's no virtual coin (rare), no strategy that can outrace the Thief attacks (rarer), and the ability to play it enough times to get the value you need out of stopping to pick it up. That's not just one card that affects the value of Thief, but the entire other 9 cards. And yeah, I'm sure there are some other situations that can make Thief useful, but they are so uncommon to be almost negligible. If I'm ranking every card 1-237, Thief is only above Scout.