I kind of regret that apparently a lot of one-shots were thrown out of the line-up of official cards. While presumably the most interesting one-shots nevertheless survive, it seems like there is a lot of fertile ground that the official cards aren't going to cover. That makes it perfect for fan cards to explore.
Some really good ideas in here, starting with...
Missionary
Types: Action – Reaction
Cost: 2
+1 Coin. Draw until you have 5 cards in hand.
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When another player plays an Attack card, you may reveal this from your hand. If you do, trash down to 3 cards in your hand.
...this one. What a great reaction ability! Often with Militia you're discarding stuff you'd rather not have in your deck in the first place. This reaction provides a great opportunity to slim down. Ironically, however, by using this reaction, you're setting up your deck in such a way that future Militia attacks will hurt more, or at least seem to. Cursing attacks will hurt more too, because those Curses come up more often in a slim deck. But at least this card provides a way to maybe trash those Curses. It's a really interesting balancing act here.
Also, I like how the action component complements the reaction component. Trash down to 3, then draw back up to 5. As with Watchtower, you have to eat an action to do it, but in a hand of 3 cards, Missionary becomes a Smithy and a coin. Actually, when I put it like that, I wonder if the card is too strong. "Up to 5 and +$1" is not substantially different from "up to 6" in terms of power level. In some decks, it's stronger; in others, weaker. Is the reaction component enough weaker than Watchtower's to warrant a cheaper cost? Tough to say, but the fact that it's tough to say makes me wonder if $3 would be a better price.
Tinker
Types: Action
Cost: 3
Reveal the top card of your deck. Choose one: Trash the revealed card and gain a card costing exactly 1 Coin less than it, putting it on top of your deck; or trash the revealed card and gain a card costing up to 2 Coins more than it, then trash this card. +1 Card. +1 Action.
Suggested rewording:
Reveal the top card of your deck and trash it. You may trash this card; if you do, gain a card costing up to $2 more than the revealed card; otherwise, gain a card costing exactly $1 less than the revealed card.
This is a hard one to envision, but I really don't like how it always trashes the top card of your deck. True, a number of cards let you know what that top card is, or purposely place a particular card there, but most of the time you'll be trashing blind. It just seems like a royally bad idea, although it's made much better by the fact that unless the supply pile is empty, you can trash the Tinker to replace your lost card with a copy of it.
But if you do that, you're essentially acknowledging that buying the Tinker in the first place was a mistake, because playing it didn't really do much for you. So you have to want to use its Remodelling capability. If you can turn a Gold into a Province in the end-game, great. But what are the chances you can coordinate that? Far far less than you could with an actual Remodel, which you can reuse over and over again and only costs $1 more. And Remodel is ultimately kind of a weak $4 card.
So you
also need to use the "exactly $1 less" feature of Tinker in order to get your money's worth out of it. That feature of the card seems pretty good. It can trash Coppers and Estates slowly but without consuming an action and leaving you with a 5-card hand after the fact. It's pretty comparable with Loan, I guess, which can be thought of as doing that same thing, but only working on Coppers and mandating that one of your five cards is a pseudo-Copper.
But Tinker has a huge drawback in that, when it fails -- when it turns up your opening Silver buy or a Gold or an important $5 card -- it's kind of a really big deal. You trash the Tinker to escape the damage that would otherwise be wrought on the deck, but now your Copper-and-Estate trashing has come to an end. Against a luckier opponent, is that game over? Or might you still buy another Tinker and resume your deck-thinning without too much of a tempo-loss?
Despite how my thoughts here sound, I think I'm talking myself into really liking the card, or at least really wanting to try it. Because although I keep trying to compare this to Loan or a one-shot Remodel, I think it's clear that it is neither. $3 does seem like the right price, by the way, insofar as I can envision how this will play.
Prospector
Types: Action
Cost: 3
+2 Coins.
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If this is in play at the start of Clean-up, you may reveal a Duchy from your hand. If you do, trash this and gain a Gold.
Not excited about this. I think it's balanced, probably, but the card mandates a weird strategy to be useful. Usually you don't want to buy Duchies until you're buying nothing but green cards. So yeah, if your strategy is one of those exceptions, like Duchy/Duke, it's a great fit. Otherwise, the window of opportunity where you'd want this in your deck is excessively tiny: basically, it would be on the shuffle where you want Duchies but don't yet want Estates. How much of the game is left after that? Maybe enough to use the card once, but not twice. So you get one Gold out of it, and almost certainly the game ends before you get to use the Gold.
So the question becomes, might the card be its own strategy, rather than something you slip into some other strategy? That is, buy this and a Duchy early on, for the purpose of trying to collide them? Well, let's compare to Tournament. Tournament (1) is a non-terminal and often a cantrip, so a Tournament that fails to activate isn't as big a deal, (2) activating it means buying a card you almost certainly want anyway, (3) usually offers a better reward, and (4) the reward goes on top of the deck.
Compared to Treasure Map? Treasure Map (1) is more useless until it activates, (2) is activated with a less desirable card to have in your deck anyway [another Treasure Map], but (3) gets rid of both cards when it activates, not just one, and (4) offers a way way better prize.
Prospector is cheaper than both Tournament and Treasure Map, so it makes sense that it's weaker than both of those. But the difference between $3 and $4 is pretty small, and Prospector really seems
so much weaker. Unless you're pursuing a Duchy-based strategy anyway. But there really aren't too many of those.
I'd want to see a prettier reward for activating this (such as, at minimum, putting the Gold on top of the deck) and probably a nicer action piece as well. Then again, terminal Silvers at the $3 level tend not to be very good, so you couldn't beef it up very much without necessitating a price increase. But as-is, I think I'd buy Prospector a whole lot less than Woodcutter and Chancellor, which is saying something.
Then again, maybe I'm missing something important about how to use the card. If you had any specific application in mind that I haven't touched upon here, by all means, say on.
Fund
Types: Treasure
Cost: 4
Worth 2 Coins. +1 Buy. When you play this, discard your hand.
You may trash this card immediately. If you do, all cards cost 1 Coin less this turn, but not less than 0 Coins.
Interesting. A tough one to envision how it will play. The "discard your hand" penalty very cleverly limits you to playing just one Fund per turn. That's probably all it does, since it's very rare that this can't be played last without consequence. But it means you can't accumulate these and build up to a mega-turn. If you could, the self-trashing penalty wouldn't matter at all, because you'd just wait for the megaturn, buy out the Provinces, and call it a day. You're very smart to have designed a penalty that precludes this possibility.
Nevertheless, I think this needs to be a $5 card. The reason is just that Silver is supposed to be competitive at $4, and so Silver-with-a-small-bonus cards get placed in the $5 tier (Royal Seal, Stash), even if the bonus is weak. This card doesn't
quite fall into that category, since it has a nominal penalty and therefore isn't strictly subject to that de facto rule. But the penalty is essentially zero if you only have one copy to play. And because the card can't be played in multiples, you probably don't want to buy more than one in the first place.
Besides, although I probably underrate Royal Seal, I see myself buying this more often than it or Stash. The ability to strategically time when you activate it is pretty potent.
Anyway, I really admire the cohesive design of this card. The various pieces complement each other really well. I keep thinking there should be a hole I can poke in it, but I can't find one.
Mercenaries
Types: Action – Attack
Cost: 4
+2 Cards. +1 Action. Each player (including you) reveals the top card of his deck and either discards it or puts it back, your choice.
You may discard a Treasure card from your hand. If you don't, trash this card.
Spy : Mercenaries :: Laboratory : Stables?
I think that analogy holds well enough to justify the card's utility and power level. One big difference, though, is that the discard happens after the card draw, and moreover that it's optional. That might turn out to be a big deal.
I don't think I'd
like the card as well if the discard happened first, unless that discard was mandatory (otherwise you'd have a lot of AP from players trying to guess what their next two cards would be and estimating the non-trivial ramifications of the various possibilities). But with it after, I have a small worry that the card is a touch overpowered.
Mill Town
Types: Action
Cost: 4
+2 Actions. You may reveal 2 or more Coppers from your hand. If you do, gain a card costing exactly 1 Coin per Copper card revealed.
I don't like this at all. With Mill Town and four Coppers, you basically get a Throne Roomed Workshop, and that's it. With MT+3C, you get a Silver and the actions you need to use your fifth card, if that happens to be an action. With MT+2C, you get a $2 -- if there's even one you want -- which is a pretty tiny consolation prize for having a turn that isn't very good. And you still probably won't need the Village-effect. That's the other problem: the two effects anti-synergize. If your deck is full of Copper, it's probably not also full of Actions, and vice versa.
Coppersmith usually always going to be preferable. The one time it's clearly inferior is when you can get a lot of Copper into your hand AND you don't have an outside source of +Buy. Then you could double-Province, in theory. But Coppersmith in a small hand is usually better, and Coppersmith plus +Buy in a large hand is usually better. Considering how situational Coppersmith already is, that makes this card even more so. You can't even stack these very well, because MT+MT+MT+Copper+Copper just buys you four Pearl Divers. I guess it's good for running out the Estates, but if you have a deck full of Mill Towns and Coppers, you're probably never going to find yourself needing to.
Aqueduct
Types: Victory
Cost: 5
Worth 2 VP.
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When you gain this, reveal the top 5 cards of your deck. Discard all revealed Victory and Curse cards and put the rest back on top in any order.
Was it you that posted this exact card in the thread where we were talking about what cards might be in Hinterlands? I spotted it there and played several games with it. I really really like it. The only thing is, I'm not sure that $5 is the right cost. I tried it there, and I tried it at $4. As much as I like the Aqueduct-or-Duchy decision it forces at $5, I think I prefer it at the cheaper price. But I'm not super confident about that conclusion.
Anyway, this is a great buy in the endgame and works exactly as you'd think. Sometimes it whiffs and discards nothing, but I've saved whole turns with it. Most likely it gets rid of 1-2 green cards, and that in itself makes it worth the purchase.
As an experiment, I tried opening with a rush of these. I bought nothing but Aqueducts when I could and Silver when I couldn't. I was amazed at how easily I could maintain my momentum and clean out the Aqueducts -- twelve of them, in fact, not eight -- without slowing down. But then, of course, I ground to a halt and couldn't do anything. Obviously that's not a good strategy, not that I thought it would be. I just wanted to get a feel for the card.
After you've already got a pile of Provinces, racing Aqueducts isn't quite as assured, even at $4. They're good buys, but I didn't often get more than 2-4 before the game ended. Anyway, it's a lot of fun.
I'll look at the rest of your cards in a later post.
Author
Topic: Enterprise: A One-Shot Expansion (Alpha) (Read 8103 times)