First of all, I would like to give a big thanks to Qvist for coordinating all of the effort that goes into compiling these lists!! I am looking forward to seeing the final results. I am new to this forum, and relatively new to Dominion. I discovered the physical card game a couple years ago, but only began playing online about a year ago at Goko, and unfortunately never had the experience of playing on Isotropic. I can tell you that as a new player working my way up through first the Adventures and then Multiplayer to learn all the expansions, the information on the Qvist rankings and all of the great strategy descriptions on the cards were absolutely invaluable to me. They have made the game much more interesting and fun, and have made me a better player...although I still have a long way to go to match some of the senior level players on this forum!
So I was happy to be able to participate in giving input for this ranking. I found that the exercise of evaluating the relative worth of the cards really made me think, and more importantly caused me to re-evalutate some of the cards I don't use as often. Overall it was fun and illuminating!!
A couple questions I have are:
1) Will the 2014 rankings just be published by card cost, or will there also be a summary ranking of All Cards as there was in the entry list? I'm not sure how many people actually took the time to rank all the cards independent of cost. I myself did that, but found it a challenging task which took many hours of consideration and rethinking. If I could choose how I would like to see the final result, it would be something like a spreadsheet where you could choose to filter and sort the cards ranked by various attributes such as: Card Cost, All Cards, Expansion Set, etc...and maybe even more discrete attributes like Victory Cards, Attack Cards etc...
2) Will I be able to access my final lists and print or save them after the compilation is complete?
And finally, here are a few of my random thoughts and observations from the ranking process:
- The duel method didn't work as well as I hoped. I went through it all, and the next day I looked at it again and realized many of the rankings didn't make sense. It was not possible to use the duel to get them in the order I felt they belonged, so I went back to manual method, and found that I was waking up with fresh ideas every day that caused me to tweak the order for about 5 days or so.
- Also, during the duels, I found the site was painfully slow (as in minutes) to respond, and I had to reload the page about every 2 or 3 duels. When I did the manual ranking it was not as much of an issue.
- Overall I found most of my rankings to be similar to what had been done in the past, but I had a lot of fun considering where the Guilds cards belong... I love the flexibility of spending coin tokens on future turns when needed, and I think that there are a number of Guilds cards which should rank pretty high. And probably some of the more esoteric Dark Ages cards may move up as well.
But there were a few areas where I probably diverged from the crowd...
- Maybe I'm still too new a player, but overall I have always found the villages to be underrated. Sure, they are not the top ranked cards, but when I consider how many of my top ranked cards are terminal actions, I realized that I would never be able to play more than one of those in a turn if it was not for villages or variants which supply +2 Actions. This resulted in me bumping up the most of the Villages a bit...not to the top, but mostly above the middle of the pack.
- Likewise, although I will often buy a curser or witch variant as soon as possible (because they definitely can be powerful), I sometimes think they are just a little overrated. Too many times I have seen Montebank just become a terminal silver because someone can discard a curse (especially in 3 or 4 person games). I'm just not a fan of Young Witch much at all since often there is a valuable Bane which protects, and sometimes I won't even buy a single one if there is Remake or another trasher in the mix. And Sea Hag is never worth more than one for me unless I have a trasher to get rid of it later. For me, I have found my highest win rates among cursers usually occur with Ill Gotten Gains because of the ability to give out a curse almost every turn as opposed to every deck cycle with a Witch type card. But then I may still have more to learn ; )
- It was hard to rank gainer type cards like Stonemason which may not do a lot during mid-game except perhaps trashing curses, but allow for a quick way to gain 2 cards costing $4 or $5 early in the game, and are very strong end game for trashing Golds to get 2 Duchies. Similar thoughts apply to several of the Hinterlands cards with on-gain effects.
- I probably struggled the most with some of the exotic cards from Dark Ages which I have not played as much. It caused me to go back and rethink whether I should more often be buying cards like Count, Hermit, Procession, Rats etc...
- My personal favorite card? I thought it would be King's Court or Goons or Grand Market, but as of this moment I'm leaning towards Governor...even if perhaps the others may be ranked higher. Yes it gives the opponent a benefit, but the versatility and power of the card is pretty awesome...especially if chained together with some buys.
P.S. In addition to thanking Qvist for his efforts, I would like very much to thank all the good folks on this forum who have contributed to the write-ups and strategy articles for the individual cards. They have been an amazing help to me!