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[werothegreat]

CARDS HAVE BEEN MODIFIED - SEE DISCUSSION.

So, I've tried my hand at creating fan cards before.  The first batch were kinda silly and filled with newbie mistakes, the next batch was a little better, but not overly remarkable.  So what I'm trying to do now is two things: 1) Try to make what the card does fit its name, and 2) Make a card that does something that hasn't been done before, would not be overpowered, and would be something you'd actually want to buy and play.  Please forgive the images - I don't seem to have the correct font for the cards, and don't know how to use MSE to change the font, and I don't know how to put in the little coin symbols into the text of the card.  Here we go:




$5 - Archery Range – +1 Action.  Look at the top five cards of your deck.  Put one in your hand.  Discard one.  Put the rest back on top of your deck in any order.


I wanted a card called "Archery Range," so I thought of what that would entail.  Well, archery means hitting a target at a distance, so that led to thinking of the distance into your deck.  So it would be like a mixture of Hunting Party and Scout, or rather, what you've always wanted Scout to be.  And it also lets you discard one card, so it works well with Tunnels.  Even without Tunnels, it lets you get rid of a card you don't want in your hand anytime soon.





$2 – Cadet – Action – Trash this card.  Gain an Action card costing $3 or $4 and put it on top of your deck.


Again, starting with the name.  What does a cadet do?  It gets promoted.  How can I get across an idea of promotion?  Well, we can make it trash itself and give you something better.  Hell, right away.  So it's an odd mixture of Feast and Golem.  Don't you hate those 5/2 splits sometimes?  Well, buy a Cadet, and you can pretend you got 5/4!  Also, Remodeling this card would be stupid.




$4 – Ballista – Action-Attack – Each other player reveals the top four cards of their deck.  They discard one card that you choose, and put the rest back in any order you choose.


Ballista!  Love these.  Being a weapon, I assume this would be an attack.  It's essentially a big bow and arrow, so it should work similarly to the Archery Range, just in someone else's deck.  So you spy at the top 4 cards of their deck, and discard one of the cards (selective oracle!).  But why let them choose the order it goes back?  Screw with them, and put the Coppers on top of the Gold, so their Laboratory won't find it this turn.  Should this have some effect for the player in case everyone reveals a Moat?  Or is this powerful enough in the vein of Thief and Sea Hag?

[Jimmmmm]

Cadet is crazy good I think. I can't think of any reason to buy a $3 or $4 action if you can buy a Cadet instead. Well okay, maybe you want to Throne Room a Moneylender, but you don't want two of them.

But normally, if you want to open with, say, two terminals, just open Cadet/Cadet. If you don't draw them together, sweet, all is good. You can even 'open' with two 4s. If you do draw them together, promote one to, say, a Worker's Village, the other to your favourite terminal, and buy two more Cadets.

I can imagine in many games, all players will open Cadet/Cadet. If you don't, anyone who does can respond much better to what you buy. So it will often result in simply a delayed decision for your first two 'buys', and allowing two 4s.

I can see the pile emptying in a lot of games, and it really messes with the opening, possibly more than some Hinterlands cards. Whether this is a good thing or not, I don't know.


I think Archery range is too similar to Cartographer and others to be that interesting. It helps more for this turn and less for next turn, but it uses very much the same mechanics.


I'm sure Ballista can be painful. But I'm a little sceptical that it compares to top-decking a Curse. Well, okay, it's clearly much stronger than Hag late game, as it never dies. I'm not sure. Only playtesting will tell.

[Elyv]

Archery range is really similar to Cartographer; I suspect it's slightly worse.

If I'm buying actions in my opening, I'll always buy cadets instead.

Ballista seems horrible; there is no way that effect is worth $4, a card, and an action.

[werothegreat]

What would make Archery Range better?  What would make Ballista better?  Does Cadet need to be nerfed somehow?

[chwhite]

What would make Archery Range better?  What would make Ballista better?  Does Cadet need to be nerfed somehow?

Ballista probably needs some sort of vanilla bonus, since right now it does nothing for you (and the attack doesn't measure up to Hag); +2 Cards seems like the sort of thing that might work but terminal silver is also an option.

Cadet might work if you top-decked the action it gives you instead of playing it immediately (basically delaying it a turn); that's a huge nerf and it would probably be on the weak side most of the time but I imagine it'd still get play, especially in 5/2 openings.

[Elyv]

I think Archery Range is pretty much perfect in terms of power level, actually; thinking about it a little more, it might be better than cartographer since you choose which card to draw. It is similar to cartographer, but that should be fine; cutpurse and militia are also very similar, for example.

At the very least, Ballista needs to be a terminal silver, although I don't think I'd usually buy it even if it was. The effect feels really weak to me.

I do think Cadet needs a nerf, there's no reason to buy a 3 or 4 action instead of a cadet when they're in the kingdom.

[werothegreat]

For Cadet: I could either have the gained card go into your hand, so it's only useful if you've got extra Actions, or onto the deck.

For Archery Range: If it were two cards put in hand, it would be strictly better than Lab, and would need a raise in price.  I could add a +$1 as a bonus to help distinguish it from Cartographer, and remove the optional discard?

For Ballista: How about +2 Actions?  I don't think there's an Attack Village at all yet.  It would make them easy to spam, and be better than Shanty Town at least.  Would spammability make it too strong, or would that justify buying it?

[HiveMindEmulator]

I think archery range is okay if you take away the ability to discard. Then it's not really so similar to cartographer, and still maybe good enough to be a 5...
Cadet gaining on top deck or hand is probably a good fix.
Ballista I think is not as bad as Elyv suggests. When your deck has few key cards amid mostly coppers and estates, sniping out one can be pretty strong. +2 Actions seems like a strange thing to add, since you want this to be a kind of card that is good at opening, since that's when its attack is good. A village ability early is pretty useless. Also, there is nothing village-like about a ballista. I think +2 cards is probably the way to go.

[yuma]

Even just making Ballista apply to yourself as well with the cavat of "you may" to yourself with just +1 action. Kind of combining Spy and Navigator. That said unless I saw it work really well I doubt I would buy it often as is, and probably would only buy it in certain situations the same way I only buy Navigator or Spy in rare situations.

[rinkworks]

I think people covered this batch pretty well before I got to this thread.

I'm not too concerned about Archery Range's similarity to Cartographer, because the card-in-hand makes a huge difference, I think.  I might remove the optionality of the discard, though, just for simplicity.  Make people do it.  It will be unusual that the discard option won't be chosen anyway, but making it mandatory -- besides simplifying the card -- will require players to be more discriminating about buying/playing it.  That is, it would add to the strategy of the game.

For Cadet, I agree with the Cadet/Cadet opening problem.  chwhite's suggestion about top-decking the gained action is brilliant.  That's just what the card needs.  Otherwise, the card is essentially strictly superior to every $3 and $4 action in the game.  By top-decking the gained action, delaying it for a turn, you avoid that problem while still keeping it a useful card in two ways:  (1) it allows you to get a $3 or $4 action you want when you don't have enough; (2) it allows you to delay the decision about what to buy, either to keep that information from your opponent or to wait until later in the game when you might know better what your deck needs.

Of the various suggestions for Ballista's vanilla bonus, I probably prefer +$2 to +2 Cards just to differentiate the card a little more from Oracle and Rabble, which it is somewhat similar to.  I considered recommending costing it at $3, too, but maybe not:  it's a more powerful attack than I think we realize.  Consider how decisive it can be when your Sea Hag discards your opponents' Sea Hag.  That's a brutal thing but hard to do on purpose.  But this card offers a huge chance to skip over one of your opponents' opening buys when you play it on turn 3 or 4.  I actually think the card is possibly too swingy, as the winner may be whichever player gets to play his opening Ballista first.  Certainly it amps up the first-turn advantage.  So I'm a little concerned about that, but maybe it's okay anyway.

If playtesting shows it to be too much of a lottery card, you could reduce the card draw from 4 to 2 (which, in turn, would circumvent the messiness of the order to return the remaining cards in) and price the card at $3.  In that case, you'd definitely not want the vanilla bonus to be +2 Cards, as it would be even more similar to Oracle.

[werothegreat]

Archery Range: I think I'll make the discard mandatory and leave it at that.

Cadet: Top-decking sounds good.

Ballista: I don't really want to make it a terminal silver because EVERYTHING'S a terminal silver.  I don't want to make it only two cards, because that kinda undermines the whole purpose.  I'm thinking either +1 Action, so it can chain itself (would cantrip status be too good?), or turn it into an unfriendly Lookout - each other player reveals three, trashes one you choose, discards one you choose, puts back the other - would this last require an up in cost?

[Deadlock39]

Forcing your opponent to trash a card you choose is not okay.  It could be mean towards the end of the game (as Lookout can sometimes be) even if they got to choose, but it would probably be a bad card like that.  I would just stay away from trashing their cards.

[rinkworks]

Ballista: I don't really want to make it a terminal silver because EVERYTHING'S a terminal silver.  I don't want to make it only two cards, because that kinda undermines the whole purpose.  I'm thinking either +1 Action, so it can chain itself (would cantrip status be too good?), or turn it into an unfriendly Lookout - each other player reveals three, trashes one you choose, discards one you choose, puts back the other - would this last require an up in cost?

Trash one you choose?  You could zero in on people's Provinces pretty easily, and that would be that.  Compare with other trashing attacks:  Swindler and Saboteur are difficult to aim, and the opponent gets compensation proportional to the trashed card.  Making it chainable turns this already broken card into a nuclear blast.

I really think that even the earlier non-trashing version of the card is too strong to chain.  It would be kind of like chaining Torturers:  whoever pulls off the chain first wins.  Because, let's say you play three copies on a single turn.  That makes you look through a huge chunk of your opponents' deck, discarding his best three cards (including his own Ballistas, so he won't be able to return fire) and leaving junk for his next turn.  By the time his skipped cards come around again, there's a great chance you'll be able to skip them again.

The thing about Torturer chains is (1) Torturer costs $5, making them harder to amass; (2) they're terminals, so chaining them requires external support.  True, the lack of draw on Ballista is its own barrier to chaining them, and you couldn't do it reliably every turn without support.  Still, I go back to how a single lucky Sea Hag can decide a game.   With Ballista, you don't really have to get lucky, because looking at the top four cards means the odds actually favor you hitting a key card.  So making Ballista non-terminal would really put it over the top in terms of swingy power.

Certainly I can sympathize with you not wanting to make it a terminal silver, because indeed it does seem that there are a lot of those.  But they are necessary cards to have in the mix -- and at only 1.83 per full set they are less common than one might think.

But if you're dead set against +$2, that's fine.  You just might have to get more creative to come up with a decent buff.  yuma's suggestion of allowing you to inspect your own deck in some way is a good one.  If you can mini-Cartographer yourself in addition to reverse-Cartographering your opponents, that's probably enough to make the card worthwhile.

[WanderingWinder]

Re Ballista:
I think non-terminal and 4 is the way to go. The thing is, it doesn't give you any benefit. So if you play 3, you've maybe knocked out 3 nice cards for a reshuffle (maybe), but you only have 2 other cards to do something with. Cantrip would indeed be too much.

[werothegreat]

Ok - for Ballista - we can add a terminal Silver, or have it be "each player (including yourself)," making it a really dickish terminal Spy, or... what if you had to trash a card from your hand first?  Or would that just be silly?  And for playtesting, is there a way to do it online, or am I forced to use my blank cards and coerce my friends to use it in person?

[LastFootnote]

Certainly I can sympathize with you not wanting to make it a terminal silver, because indeed it does seem that there are a lot of those.  But they are necessary cards to have in the mix -- and at only 1.83 per full set they are less common than one might think.

Well, this statistic isn't quite accurate. When compiling it, you left out Attacks. Since Ballista is an Attack, it makes more sense to include them. By my count, there are about 2.85 terminal Silver cards per full set.

Base Set: 4 (Chancellor, Woodcutter, Militia, Moneylender)
Intrigue: 3 (Steward, Swindler, Bridge)
Seaside: 4 (Embargo, Cutpurse, Merchant Ship, Navigator)
Alchemy: 0
Prosperity: 2 (Monument, Mountebank)
Cornucopia: 2 (Fortune Teller, Jester)
Hinterlands: 3 (Duchess, Nomad Camp, Haggler)

Still, +2 Coins is a valid and necessary bonus to have on cards, as you've said.

[Taco Lobster]

What if Ballista trashed a card?  That could represent the ammunition used to fire it and would provide an additional marginal benefit on par with a terminal silver or +2 cards.  If that's too powerful, you could limit the type of card being trashed (trashing a Treasure would let you get rid of coppers; trashing an Estate would be an interesting way of fueling it, but would limit the opportunities to use the card pretty dramatically).

Edit:  I see that you proposed a similar idea.  Great minds think alike!

[werothegreat]

What if Ballista trashed a card?  That could represent the ammunition used to fire it and would provide an additional marginal benefit on par with a terminal silver or +2 cards.  If that's too powerful, you could limit the type of card being trashed (trashing a Treasure would let you get rid of coppers; trashing an Estate would be an interesting way of fueling it, but would limit the opportunities to use the card pretty dramatically).

Edit:  I see that you proposed a similar idea.  Great minds think alike!

How about trash a Treasure or Curse card?

[HiveMindEmulator]

or have it be "each player (including yourself),"

I like this idea, it goes cleanly with the card, and the self-scout is a decent benefit.