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Hearthstone / Cards for dust speculation

« on: December 10, 2014, 03:01:42 pm »

Which cards do you guys think shouldn't be dusted in case they get nerfed? You can get a lot of extra dust if you make good guesses about what might not get nerfed. OTOH if you just never dust anything that isn't nerfed it can slow you down.

Some of my thoughts:

Don't dust, looks possibly kinda strong:
Feign Death
Dr. Boom
Troggzor
Zapomatic
Screwjank
Crackle (partly because of zapo)
Goblin Blastmage
Gallywix
Voljin

Don't dust, forward compatibility issues:
Hobgoblin
Feign Death
Sneed's Old Shredder
Shadowboxer
Velen's Chosen
Malganis

Don't dust because blizzard loves to nerf a peripheral card whenever Molten Giant does something good:
Tree of life
Antique Healbot
Coghammer
Echoes of mediv.

Hearthstone / Creature type based card design

« on: December 01, 2014, 10:11:09 am »

Creature type themes aren't new, they've been around since Magic. In both Magic and Hearthstone, I love them, and enjoy them, but I think they're bad design that dumbs down the game (wait, what?)

Creature type based decks are way too easy to tune and tweak, and in that way they remove a lot of deckbuilding skill from the game. Creatures are simply "tagged" for whether they will work in your deck and accept bonuses from your creature type enablers or not (in Magic they are sometimes colloquially called lords, in Hearthstone maybe we should call dudes that reward you for playing a creature type warleaders).

As an example, when players entered Managrind in October 2013 the game was nothing but mirrors, which makes for a good abstract example. Demonfire wasn't good at the moment so there was basically no creature types matters at all. There were tons of zoo decks, but one clever guy, Kistafer, cut a couple cards (probably Dark Iron Dwarf) to put Blood Knights in and snatch Squire shields in the mirror and he won. Most players didn't come up with that, or they made their own tweak that wasn't quite as good, like they might have tried Ironbeak Owl or MC tech instead. Every minion was a possible deck tweak. (This was the event where Blood Knight zoo was pretty much invented for the first time in public knowledge, so he wasn't copying anything)

If that same tournament was full of mech mirrors, Kistafer wouldn't be able to cut Piloted Shredder for Blood Knight because Piloted Shredder is a mech and Blood Knight isn't and that will usually outweigh anything a offtype creature brings. The players that think Ironbeak Owl has a little merit will also realize that Owl simply isn't a mech. So when Kistafer plays a mirror against this guy he doesn't get to show that he has a better perception of the game. What few unused mechs might exist will be exhaustively tested for merit easily. So it goes like 50/50.

Murlocs are really cool in Hearthstone because there aren't enough of them. Murloc decks have to run lots of nonMurloc slots because not enough differently named Murlocs exist. So those other slots show off player deckbuilding/tuning skill, and the murlocs are there to provide a unique mechanic, and everyone is happy.

I'm also somewhat placated by designs where all the creatures in a creature type are really weak on their own (murlocs are like this too, actually) but have unusually powerful lords available to make you want to play them. The deck is still really easy to tune, but at least the deck is doing something unique that you do that easily without the creature type based design.

So I'm kind of worried about mechs in the next set. So many of them are neutral so there's some amount of chance they permeate everything. Mechs are pretty much designed to stand on their own in power level (Harvest Golem is a mech!) so the creature type mechanics won't be adding the novelty I referred to in the previous paragraph, just restrictions on tuning for mech decks. I think a Tinkertown Technician that gains one health and draws a spare part if you control any other minion would be better for the game. I don't think having 4/4 Tinkertown Technician in my life will outweigh playing a meta where decks build themselves because so many choices are restricted by mechs-matter.

Players tend to really enjoy creature types matter. Easy deckbuilding is nice sometimes, especially in the short term. It's also flavorful, although mechs are nonliving so they picked like the worst creature type ever imo.

As a potent example of how creature type matters can lead to really canned decks, I have the kithkin story. Virtually all kithkin are only in the Lorwyn set where lots of powerful Kithkin lords are also available for the aggressively costed creatures. It was a pretty powerful deck to build in Standard, where only the most recent two sets are allowed.

There was a legacy tournament , where all the sets were allowed. Kithkin isn't considered strong enough for legacy, and generally it isn't but the point is that one guy entered a very big tournament and made fourth, and didn't modify the standard kithkin deck he had at all even though all sets the game had to offer were legal. He only put 3 Wraths of God in his sideboard, everything else was also standard legal and pretty much Lorwyn. Any other white creature he put in simply wouldn't be a kithkin.

Merfolk and Goblins are two other Legacy decks that don't change a lot between iterations, although they benefit from a large number of creatures printed in various sets to get some more variety, and Merfolk has some interesting choices in the spell department.

Anyway, I'm hoping this new set doesn't have 3 more mechwarpers and a harvest golem.

Goko Dominion Online / Will Dominion Online ever stop calling kingdoms "decks"?

« on: November 30, 2014, 07:25:50 pm »

Maybe it shouldn't get on my nerve as much as it does, but it just seems like such terrible nomenclature. "Deck" means something utterly and entirely different already and "Kingdom" is already established terminology used in the official rules.

I get a grating pet peeve from seeing new players creating games that say "All decks" or "Most decks" or "Special Prince deck".

It's just changing one string. What's the hangup?

General Discussion / War of Omens, flash CCG with deckbuilding elements

« on: July 28, 2014, 12:54:02 pm »

Stumbled upon this while I was bored today, just finished the tutorial. The core mechanic is that every turn you draw 3 randomly from a wad of cards that are all candlestick makers, you take one coin token. You buy cards like Market and Urchin (except like, an urchin that attacks creatures) using the coin tokens so they get shuffled in your deck and try to kill the other guy.

It seems cool so far, design wise. I might get disappointed by the stuff that tends to surround flash CCGs and their monetization though

Hearthstone / Results tracking

« on: July 21, 2014, 06:08:37 pm »

I've seen one or two softwares out there for tracking your HS results, since Blizz doesn't want to do much of that for us. I am trying out track-o-bot right now, it claims to work consistently by reading your screen rather than relying on manual entry.

Anything else out there?

Variants and Fan Cards / Signet

« on: July 18, 2014, 10:33:11 am »

Signet
2$ Treasure-Reaction
Worth 2$
_____________________
When you gain a card, you may reveal this from your hand. If you gain a card while this is in play, you must reveal this from play. If you do reveal this, put the gained card on your Signet mat.
_____________________
Whenever you shuffle, move the contents of the Signet mat to your discard pile.

Signet - Treasure - Reaction - 2$
Worth 2$
---
Whenever you gain a card, you may reveal this from your hand. If you did, or if it's in play, set aside the gained card and discard it when you shuffle your deck.

EDIT: Used silverspawn's improved wording.

Dominion General Discussion / Cache

« on: July 03, 2014, 11:24:32 am »

I put Cache out the other day, my girlfriend said it looked worthless. I was like, yeah.... it kind of is worthless.

I like cards positioned on a humble part of the power curve, but I struggle to find redeeming features to Cache. When I play it in a slog it often feels like a mistake, usually there is some other 5$ card that is motivating the slog, like a Garden's Market or a Duke's Duchy. Watchtower and Trader both make Cache useable, but they both do so in a way that's like, "ignore the inherent qualities of Cache because of this combo", it hardly makes the card feel well designed.

It's not to say I've never bought it, but I usually regret it.

When I try to think of things to try to do with it, the best idea I can come up with is Ambassadoring it in a Goons game where the treasure is like curses. But coming up with a way to make someone gain it as an attack doesn't make me feel like it's a well designed card.

What's good about Cache?

Dominion General Discussion / Is dominiondeck the best randomizer that can be mustered?

« on: July 01, 2014, 10:07:29 pm »

Dominiondeck doesn't allow for the possibility that you own some, but not all, promos. It also doesn't roll for colonies/shelters and doesn't have any obvious way for me to add custom cards. Oh, and it also doesn't sort the results by set to help you set things up.

Surely there is something better out there?

Variants and Fan Cards / Funky card idea

« on: June 18, 2014, 04:26:19 pm »

Pyramid
5$ Action-Victory
+1 Action
Trash a card from your hand. +1 VP if it costs more than 4$.
____________________________________________________
Worth 9VP. Worth -1 VP for each other victory card in your deck.

Dominion League / Season one - Questionable Results thread

« on: May 19, 2014, 02:14:57 am »

Um.. contest? Pretty sure I won four games..

Dominion General Discussion / Infatuated with Big Money

« on: March 30, 2014, 10:35:00 pm »

Every board I see, I try to see if it can be played Big Money. If it's close at all, I will play Big Money. Only when an engine is clearly and obviously very dominant will I play the engine.

How can I cure myself? How is my rating still above 5k? Why do I hang a poster of Mandarin on my ceiling and look at it at night as I fall asleep?

I need help.

Variants and Fan Cards / Fool lumberjack!

« on: March 29, 2014, 09:03:03 pm »

Fool lumberjack
2$ - Action

+2$. You may play a Fool lumberjack from your hand. If you do, +1 buy.

Goko Dominion Online / Isotropish ratings

« on: March 26, 2014, 07:00:50 pm »

where's the isotropish ratings?

General Discussion / I am retarded

« on: March 24, 2014, 11:32:49 pm »

I just now figured out that the moon in WanderingWinder's avatar is not Earth's moon. I always assumed it was Earth's moon. I can see Earth's moon. From my house.

I feel really really dumb.

Variants and Fan Cards / Patent

« on: March 22, 2014, 11:53:08 pm »

Patent
2$ Action-Duration
Reveal a card from your hand. If it is an Action, play it; if it would leave play during any cleanup, instead it doesn't.
___________________________________________________________________________
While this is in play, when another player plays a copy of the card you played with Patent, +1 Card.

If you procession a Patent, you could strand action cards in play indefinitely but wouldn't get the card bonuses. If you patent an Island, the Island doesn't get stranded in play and goes to its mat and all. Since the above the line text no longer is doing its thing it would get discarded at end of turn, just like Lighthouse gets discarded even if you want it to stay in play and provide attack immunity forever. If you patent a one-shot, same deal. If you Patent a duration card, the duration will stay in play but you won't get the effects turn after turn, because being in play has no bearing on actually getting the delayed effects, a-la-procession-wharf.

Dominion General Discussion / Ads on Goko

« on: March 21, 2014, 05:59:22 pm »

Never noticed an ad before, maybe I'm unobservant, but I see one on the menu now. Is this new?

I'm a freeloader player, are buyers immune?

EDIT: ugh, supposed to be online. Why can't I delete my own post?

Dominion Articles / Request: Workshop Gardens

« on: March 11, 2014, 09:10:13 pm »

I didn't think Workshop Gardens required an article, but apprently it does, because I lost while playing it in a nonmirror against a deck with multiple bureacrats. I see the counter relationship there, but I wonder if I was playing Workshop/Gardens suboptimally for a nonmirror scenario.

How many workshops? When do you start Gardens? If village is there, is it worth getting? Should you always pile Gardens/Estates/Workshops? Can you transition to slog in the nonmirror?

Goko Dominion Online / Rating display bug?

« on: March 10, 2014, 12:40:52 pm »

I'm playing from a different computer, and my rating is showing up as 2600, although it's in the 5k neighborhood when I play from home. What is causing this? Can I rectify it?

In between games when it shows the rating points I gained the rating is correct.

Goko Dominion Online / I hit 5k on Goko!!!

« on: March 05, 2014, 06:03:58 pm »

What's wrong with the rating system, that doesn't seem right.

Forum Games / Dungeon Crawl Tournament - dominificated - 1 Match complete!

« on: February 27, 2014, 01:40:36 am »

Dungeon Crawl is a roguelike game, a genre of single player PC games much like old school RPGs, except with an emphasis on randomly generated maps and the brutal finality of death. Several players in this forum have been playing it and discussing it.

Dominion challenges our concept of how fun a multiplayer game that easily divides into single player can actually be. As a result, I've designed a 1v1 competitive format for Crawl so that people in this forum can add some rivalry to the single player experience.

If you're reading this and you haven't played Crawl at all, you should know that:

1. Crawl is free to download.
2. Crawl is open source, free as in speech. This makes it incredibly unlikely that glitches are a gamebreaking aspect of competing.
3. There's a built in tutorial which is rather good
4. No one on this forum that we know of has beaten it yet. The game is designed around the risk that any attempt to beat the game could rather likely result in permanent failure.
5. There's lots of luck involved. Combined with 4, this means that if you download the game, play the tutorial and kick the tires around for a couple hours you stand a chance against anyone else.
6. It's totally turn based, you can step away from the game at any time
7. You can probably play from work or school if you want to, without downloading. The interface is slightly less friendly though

That's about as much space as I'd like to spend selling the game to people.
________________________________________________________________________________________

The format for matches in the tournament is based on drafting. It is analogous to choosing which type of engine or whether to go BM in a Dominion game. Unlike a dominion game, a game of crawl takes much longer than an hour, so mirror matches need be thrown out.

When your match starts with another player, I will generate two random "character configurations". A character configuration includes a starting species, the background (class) to choose, the starting weapon to select, and what religions the character is allowed to worship. Everything but the last is a natural part of creating a new character, the last is an external rule to add more strategy to the competition: the character will be prohibited from worshipping gods besides the 1, 2, or 3 randomly selected.

You and your opponent will each secretly decide which character configuration you consider more powerful and PM the choice to me. If your choices match, those two configs are thrown out and a new pair is used and the process repeats. Eventually, you and your opponent will select different configs as being more powerful.

Once that happens, you are assigned the configuration you chose. You get to do exactly 3 runs with that configuration. You have ten days (tentative deadline), can do it whenever you like, and simply report your results by PM honestly. Only the most successful run counts. Whichever player has the most successful run wins the match.

The successfulness of a run is defined as follows:
A run that wins the game is always more successful than one that doesn't.
A run that ends with more runes collected is more successful than one that ends with fewer.
Runs that end with the same number of runes, but different types of runes, may take priority over eachother, roughly based on difficulty. As follows:

Icy
Obsidian
Iron
Bone
Golden
Dark
Glowing
Magical
Fiery
Demonic
Slimy***
Silver
Barnacled or Gossamer or Decaying or Serpentine

***If one of the gods in your configuration is Jivya, who allows you to take the Slimy rune without combat, then the Slimy rune is treated as having less priority than Barnacled. It still counts as a rune though, so 4 runes including slimy beats 3 runes no matter what those three are.

If things are still tied, the deepest floor of the main dungeon/zot reached breaks the tie, for failure runs, and lower turns taken breaks the tie for successful runs.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________

I'm aiming to get 4 people for round robin, who's in?
____________________________________________________________________________________________________

I found a download link here: the official site seems to be down, but since it's an open source game it's naturally easy to find a copy anyplace. http://sourceforge.net/projects/crawl-ref/

General Discussion / Dominification of DCSS?

« on: February 17, 2014, 07:02:30 pm »

I decided to make this a separate thread since it's more dominion related and people might be interested in the design concepts without a specific interest in Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.

Both DCSS and Dominion are games that you can play solitaire, and it functions just fine for that. Dominion has a great way of combining the solitaire experiences to make things more interesting, even if there are no attack cards.

DCSS currently has no multiplayer functionality at all. They frequently mention tournaments, but if you look and find out how the "tournament was structured", it was largely a competition of who sat in front of a pc the longest to grind the most wins within two weeks.

The only easy way of adding interactivity I can think of would be to replicate the "strategy selection" phase of Dominion.

Two players go into a chatroom, where a script is running. The script repeatedly offers pairs of initial settings, along with monotheistic or duotheistic god restrictions.

Each player secretly messages the script which of those options it finds better. In the likely event they choose the same thing, the pair is thrown away and a new pair is generated, until the players disagree.

Once the players disagree, each player gets the settings he chose and gets a small finite number of attempts at a high rune count (I'm thinking 3). Only the best run counts, and whoever got the most runes wins (with some kind of tiebreaker).

The reason I don't think you should count the weak runs is that it would over-emphasize consistency. Consistency is already inherently emphasized, if you consistently get to Lair you have 3 times the chance to get a unique weapon in Lair that carries you to a high runecount win than if you didn't.

It would go something like:

Human Fighter who only worships Cherybdas or Xom OR Naga Venom Mage who only worships The Shining One

Feedback / Would it be possible to make only non-RSP posts listed as "most recent thread"

« on: January 15, 2014, 04:00:38 pm »

Sometimes I just want to come to the site and talk about Dominion and mint candies and how awesome monopoly is. It ruins the light feel the forum when some edgy sociopolitical thing pops up as most recent in GD as I'm scanning for stuff to read. It's usually the reason I had just logged off of facebook a half second before.

This isn't really a legitimate or justified complaint at all, I guess, technically it is categorically a subset of nondominion general discussion, unless they are discussing some fusion of sex dice and dominion, but the only time anyone ever posted that was in the variants forum actually. Wish I could un-read that one... anyway maybe the same thing might be a decent idea for "Dominion discussion" too, since Dominion Online discussion is often most recent. New players who have not yet dived all the way in could get intimidated by "I played three games today one was afk one was dc why didn't my trueskill go down? rotflmso".

Hearthstone / Hearthstone puzzles

« on: December 18, 2013, 02:30:42 am »

I know I could find a Hearthstone forum and put my musings there, but Dominion players chew puzzles up and spit them out. I think there's enough of you guys playing Hearthstone to answer one or two of these. I'm interested in the best answers.

1. What's the earliest kill moment for each of the 9 classes, assuming the opponent doesn't do anything at all. (Earliest kill moment means earliest turn of the game, a Player 1 turn 4 kill is better than a Player 2 turn 4 kill)
2. Same question for priest, except assuming the opponent's deck contains nothing but Core Hounds and similarly useless cards. (using the priests own cards to kill, essentially).
3. Which classes can kill on the second turn of the game against an opponent who starts with Innervate Innervate Coldlight Oracle Millhouse Manastorm? (about as good helpmate as you can get.)

I will do a couple class kills.
With Paladin I think the earliest kill moment is Player 1's 3rd turn
To achieve this Turn 1 Young Dragonhawk, Turn 2 Double Hand of Might, fourteen damage. Turn 3, Two Abusive Sergeants and a Light's Justice, 23 damage.

Feedback / Discrete polls

« on: September 25, 2013, 09:05:35 pm »

I fully support polls with countably many choices and countably few votes submitted. However, I am confused about its relation to the ability of regular users to see votes.

Other Games / Buying stuff with VP

« on: September 12, 2013, 06:22:17 pm »

I played Seasons the other night, and it was yet another time I saw this recurring mechanic in non-Dominion games, that you spend the resource that directly determines who wins and loses in order to get stuff, generally stuff that will get you more of that resource than you invested.

In Terra Mystica you kinda do that with power gains. Sometimes that turned things into calculations where you could turn around and reclaim the VP right back somehow, but most of the time it is a pretty abstract investment. In seasons the investment was not really that abstract at all. The game lasts 12 seasons, and I had this one card that said, "Pay 3 VP chips to use this. Every time the seasons change, steal 1 VP chip from your opponent. Worth 7 VP" It takes up a slot, which is somewhat of a strategic choice thing going on, you might want to save your slots for other ongoing things like this. But overall it just kinda seemed like 24+7-3, ok yeah, I wanna play this at some point in the game, probably sooner rather than later. Later in the game it's worth less, so maybe I want the slot for something else. But overall it's mostly a calculation thing. It could say "Worth 4 VP, gain 2 VP chips for each season left to go this game", and it would be the same thing, but it feints this whole illusion of depth.

I don't have an issue with Seasons in particular, Terra Mystica does this too, somewhat, and Smallworld does it, it's just phrased in a positive way instead of a negative way when you pick a race that doesn't have some bonus VPs on it. What tends to be the biggest downer is that these games all had fixed lengths, which simplified the calculation when you deal with that stuff. Seasons, Terra Mystica, and Smallworld all last X number of turns. Which I guess is important to some people, but it's like, man maybe these are the people that are the reason I go to a movie and it cuts off after 2 hours and 10 minutes with a rapidly hustled climax and epilogue I have to leave disappointed. How long it takes is how long it takes. The chick who had Seasons had quoted the amount of time all of her games are supposed to take as if that might be the most pivotal factor in how I choose which one to play with her, so maybe it's just that brand of people. A lot of my favorite games like MtG, Dominion, and League of Legends take however long they take.

When games take however long they take, the spend-VP mechanic works quite a bit better, because there's this counterplay where the opposing player can push the game to its conclusion before you reclaim the lost ground. You can spend life in MtG but it's risky, there's a delay before you can turn that into an equal life loss for your opponent. Painlands were a cool popular thing in MtG, for the uninitiated those are cards that are not aligned with your chosen team, but let you use effects from another team (color) for a small life penalty.

That wasn't very focused. Stuff on my mind. I think fixed length games really really pay a premium in terms of design freedom. MtG games regularly go to time because of their poor length control, though. That's why computerized implementations of games are pretty awesome, you can set up a timer, and players can adjust their play so that they think faster when the game is going mechanically slow, and think slower when the game is going mechanically fast, and be on time for the next step of their tournament or whatever.

Making VP spends interesting is really important. I think games that use it should be careful.