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[pacovf]

How could anyone "love" Walled Village? Or "hate" it? Actually, how can anyone feel anything at all about Walled Village?

[werothegreat]

Dark Ages > Hinterlands > Seaside > Guilds = Intrigue > Cornucopia = Alchemy > Base > Prosperity

Seaside could be higher if it wasn't for Lighthouse.

What do you have against Lighthouse?

[TheOthin]

My feelings towards Walled Village are that it doesn't have its own space in the combo pack despite being included in it and forces me to make weird and annoying merged storage decisions to fit it. Same with a few other things, like the fact that the randomizer space isn't big enough to actually hold all the randomizer cards. How did this even happen?

[Awaclus]

Dark Ages > Hinterlands > Seaside > Guilds = Intrigue > Cornucopia = Alchemy > Base > Prosperity

Seaside could be higher if it wasn't for Lighthouse.

What do you have against Lighthouse?

It's stupid in games with Attacks. In games without Attacks, it's completely fine.

[jsh357]

How could anyone "love" Walled Village? Or "hate" it? Actually, how can anyone feel anything at all about Walled Village?

It's a village you can topdeck if you don't get a good combo going?  I dunno, it's not that strong but I think it's pretty cool.

[TheOthin]

Dark Ages > Hinterlands > Seaside > Guilds = Intrigue > Cornucopia = Alchemy > Base > Prosperity

Seaside could be higher if it wasn't for Lighthouse.

What do you have against Lighthouse?

It's stupid in games with Attacks. In games without Attacks, it's completely fine.

How do you figure?

[Awaclus]

Dark Ages > Hinterlands > Seaside > Guilds = Intrigue > Cornucopia = Alchemy > Base > Prosperity

Seaside could be higher if it wasn't for Lighthouse.

What do you have against Lighthouse?

It's stupid in games with Attacks. In games without Attacks, it's completely fine.

How do you figure?

It's an automatic buy in the presence of strong Attacks, it makes the Attacks more or less useless (unless they're also useful for other things besides attacking), and it's super swingy in a very un-fun way.

[Chris is me]

It's hard to rank them in order, so I grouped them into tiers. They're in a rough descending order of quality within the tiers, but they're more arguable.

• Prosperity, Seaside
• Guilds, Hinterlands, Cornucopia
• Dark Ages, Intrigue, Dominion
• Alchemy

Prosperity is the best expansion. It's just full of power cards, cards that work well together, cards that really define Dominion (King's Court, Mountebank, Bishop, Goons), and the set is pretty well balanced as a standalone or as part of the larger metagame. It's just the most polished set. Seaside is similarly up there; while it has more cards that I just hate (Ghost Ship, Sea Hag to an extent) and a few duds (Explorer), Duration cards are both really cool and incredibly strategic, and some of Dominion's best enablers are here, like Tactician, Wharf, Caravan, Fishing Village, Ambassador...

I like Guilds a lot, probably more than most people. Pretty much every Guilds card is one I'm happy to see in a random set, which says a lot. Lots of variants on existing themes with more choices and depth. It's just a really strategic / tactical set. Hinterlands wasn't initially one of my favorites, but its subtle power has grown on me. The game stays simple with Hinterlands but there's still plenty of neat tricks and variants. The attacks are a bit easier to swallow than other sets which I think helps for playing with less experienced players. Cornucopia is largely like Guilds - a small expansion where nearly every card adds some depth. It really plays well with other expansions, more than every other expansion I think.

Dark Ages is pretty good, it's just got so much going on. Rebuild isn't very fun, and the trash theme results in a lot of wasted potential when you don't have any Trashing cards to take advantage of it. Shelters are cool though and there's a lot of fun stuff. Intrigue has some cards that are absolutely essential (Masquerade, Bridge are the two biggest examples), and it's got some fun power cards (Torturer, Minion, Upgrade), but it's got a ton of niche gimmicks that don't work that often (Coppersmith, Scout) and it's just less consistent than other sets at being hella fun. Dominion itself (Base set) is alright, it's pretty tame and has some really awful cards, but as the first set someone plays with it's pretty important that its laid out the way it is, and it really is the best "starter pack" possible.

Alchemy isn't so bad it's not worth playing, it's got a lot of fun potential, but the Potion mechanics and Possession are both pretty unfortunate, and I don't like them that often.

[Jack Rudd]

How could anyone "love" Walled Village? Or "hate" it? Actually, how can anyone feel anything at all about Walled Village?

It is a village, and therefore I quite like it. I feel that sort of way about most villages (with perhaps more love for Border Village, City and University, which all have rather interesting effects added to their villaging.)

[markusin]

Dark Ages > Hinterlands > Seaside > Guilds = Intrigue > Cornucopia = Alchemy > Base > Prosperity

Seaside could be higher if it wasn't for Lighthouse.

What do you have against Lighthouse?

It's stupid in games with Attacks. In games without Attacks, it's completely fine.

How do you figure?

It's an automatic buy in the presence of strong Attacks, it makes the Attacks more or less useless (unless they're also useful for other things besides attacking), and it's super swingy in a very un-fun way.

Finally, FINALLY I know what you have against Lighthouse. I kind of agree with what you're saying, but I guess I never felt too strongly about it to actively bash the card.

Okay, on to the thread topic. I still say my favourite expansion is Dark Ages. It's basically the wombo-combo expansion where many cards become way stronger as part of a combo than when used individually. Can you empty the supply in 4 turns without DA, or even in 5 turns? The whole idea of messing around with your deck and trashing lots of stuff to fuel your turns is very exciting for me.

Now Prosperity, its cards tend to either lengthen the game ("gotta keep building that Goons engine, yo"), or else are kind of meh, like the 5$ kingdom treasures in the set. The 7$ cost cards and a few others often feel ill-suited for non-Colony games, and I don't always want to play Colony games. Still, the existence of Colonies in the Dominion world has got to be overall positive.

So after Dark Ages, I like Intrigue, Guilds, and Hinterlands. My opinion on Hinterlands has changed the most since last time I rated the expansions, going from dead last to one of my favourites. The cards are simple enough to be understood by new players, but the set lets you gain cards in bursts. Cards are good to have right? Theme wise it used to feel strange to me, but now I understand it as Marco Polo's adventures or something.

I'm not big fans of Seaside and Alchemy. Seaside has some pretty oppressive cards (Ghost Ship, Ambassador), but not known for its duds at least. Alchemy's potion cards typically need to be strong on their own to justify getting a potion for them, but when multiple potion cards are in the kingdom their abilities either overlap or their combination dominates. I don't hate on Possession, but I don't have a good grasp of how its edge cases work. Like, I was totally surprised when having my Outpost played while possessed lead me to have a 3-card hand normal turn after the possession ended but no extra turn after that.

Promos? I don't really see them as an expansion. I generally like them, but I haven't played many Stash and Prince games though.

[LibraryAdventurer]

Seaside and Dark Ages are my favorites. Alchemy is my least favorite (but still very cool). All the others are in the middle. I don't want to do an individual ranking. I like all of them and it would depend on what mood I'm in.

When I first heard of dominion, the first set I played with was Intrigue. The people who introduced it to me said you can start with either base or Intrigue, but Intrigue is more intriguing (actually they said 'interesting'). That's true enough, but what they didn't seem to know is that the base set is best set to learn the game with. It has a lot of basic cards that are good at introducing their mechanics and still among the best cards with those mechanics/concepts (Chapel, Remodel, Cellar, Gardens, Witch...).
The only promo I have online is Black market (which I love). I've only played with the others a couple times each if that.

[popsofctown]

Colony is a really cool Dominion card.  I think a lot of the best variation in Dominion kingdoms comes from the wincon changing.
I really wish there was a chance to play Colony without Plat and Plat without Colony and more kingdom VP cards that cost more than Province or had an anti-3-pile clause to extend the game.

[enfynet]

Colony is a really cool Dominion card.  I think a lot of the best variation in Dominion kingdoms comes from the wincon changing.
I really wish there was a chance to play Colony without Plat and Plat without Colony and more kingdom VP cards that cost more than Province or had an anti-3-pile clause to extend the game.

Why stop there? Play with Colony and Hovel, but not Platinum or Shelters? Include Ruins without a Looter? What's stopping you?

[Jimmmmm]

Here's roughly how I think I rate the expansions:

 1. Prosperity
 2. Dark Ages
 3. Guilds
 4. Intrigue
 5. Cornucopia
 6. Seaside
 7. Alchemy
 8. Hinterlands
 9. Promos
10. Base

But I gave each card a rating out of 10, and found my average per expansion, which really quite surprised me.

1.	Guilds	6.62	(up 2)
2.	Prosperity	6.24	(down 1)
3.	Cornucopia	6.15	(up 2)
4.	Dark Ages	6.11	(down 2)
5.	Promos	6.00	(up 4)
6.	Seaside	5.65	(same)
8.	Base	5.52	(up 3)
7.	Alchemy	5.50	(down 1)
9.	Intrigue	5.28	(down 5)
10.	Hinterlands	5.12	(down 2)

So apparently Guilds is easily my favourite expansion, Cornucopia and Promos are pretty sweet, and I like Alchemy, Intrigue and Hinterlands less than Base??

I guess when thinking about which expansions are the best, we (or at least I) tend to think mostly about the best cards from each expansion. So I like nearly all of the cards from Guilds (all except Doctor, Masterpiece and Taxman scored 6 or higher), but not many of them really stand out to me, whereas for example from Prosperity I love King's Court, Goons, Grand Market etc, but am kind of meh on most of the Kingdom treasures.

I was particularly surprised that Hinterlands scored so poorly, since the general opinion seems to be it's a very solid expansion.

Maybe I'll double check all my ratings at some point to see if I actually agree with what I've put down.

[Beyond Awesome]

I wish colonies showed up more on goko. They really change the game. Plus prosperity has vp chips and kc. I think it changes the game more than any expansion.

[Awaclus]

But I gave each card a rating out of 10, and found my average per expansion, which really quite surprised me.

I tried doing this, but it turned out that the longer I kept rating cards, the higher the ratings got for some weird reason. I gave up at the point when I caught myself outright giving higher ratings to cards that I didn't like as much as cards that I had rated lower earlier. 

[AdamH]

It's stupid in games with Attacks. In games without Attacks, it's completely fine.

How do you figure?

It's an automatic buy in the presence of strong Attacks, it makes the Attacks more or less useless (unless they're also useful for other things besides attacking), and it's super swingy in a very un-fun way.

Moat is swingy because you don't want to buy a lot of them, that way your coverage has holes in it and blocking attacks comes down to luck. Lighthouse is non-terminal so you just buy a bunch of them instead of Silver and you don't get hit by attacks. It's enough coverage that your opponent will probably not even go for the attacks, so it's not swingy at all.

What am I missing?

[Awaclus]

It's stupid in games with Attacks. In games without Attacks, it's completely fine.

How do you figure?

It's an automatic buy in the presence of strong Attacks, it makes the Attacks more or less useless (unless they're also useful for other things besides attacking), and it's super swingy in a very un-fun way.

Moat is swingy because you don't want to buy a lot of them, that way your coverage has holes in it and blocking attacks comes down to luck. Lighthouse is non-terminal so you just buy a bunch of them instead of Silver and you don't get hit by attacks. It's enough coverage that your opponent will probably not even go for the attacks, so it's not swingy at all.

What am I missing?

Moat is swingy in a fun way. It's a weak card, so even when you buy a Moat, you're expecting to get hit by most attacks, so it's fun when the unexpected thing happens and you manage to block one instead. But it's extremely frustrating when you have 5 Lighthouses and you're still hit by your opponent's Mountebank every time he plays it.

[AdamH]

Moat is swingy in a fun way. It's a weak card, so even when you buy a Moat, you're expecting to get hit by most attacks, so it's fun when the unexpected thing happens and you manage to block one instead. But it's extremely frustrating when you have 5 Lighthouses and you're still hit by your opponent's Mountebank every time he plays it.

I see. We just have completely different definitions of "fun" then. I bet you like Black Market, don't you?

[WanderingWinder]

It's stupid in games with Attacks. In games without Attacks, it's completely fine.

How do you figure?

It's an automatic buy in the presence of strong Attacks, it makes the Attacks more or less useless (unless they're also useful for other things besides attacking), and it's super swingy in a very un-fun way.

Moat is swingy because you don't want to buy a lot of them, that way your coverage has holes in it and blocking attacks comes down to luck. Lighthouse is non-terminal so you just buy a bunch of them instead of Silver and you don't get hit by attacks. It's enough coverage that your opponent will probably not even go for the attacks, so it's not swingy at all.

What am I missing?

Moat is swingy in a fun way. It's a weak card, so even when you buy a Moat, you're expecting to get hit by most attacks, so it's fun when the unexpected thing happens and you manage to block one instead. But it's extremely frustrating when you have 5 Lighthouses and you're still hit by your opponent's Mountebank every time he plays it.

Sounds like a mindset problem. You should expect to get unlucky a reasonably large percentage of the time.

[Awaclus]

Moat is swingy in a fun way. It's a weak card, so even when you buy a Moat, you're expecting to get hit by most attacks, so it's fun when the unexpected thing happens and you manage to block one instead. But it's extremely frustrating when you have 5 Lighthouses and you're still hit by your opponent's Mountebank every time he plays it.

I see. We just have completely different definitions of "fun" then. I bet you like Black Market, don't you?

Well, I don't particularly dislike it. It doesn't really stand out in a positive way for me either, though. But if I have to choose between "like" and "not like", then yeah, I like it. I like Tournament a lot more though.

Sounds like a mindset problem. You should expect to get unlucky a reasonably large percentage of the time.

I know, but I prefer cards that don't cause mindset problems. A part of the reason why it's annoying is also that going for, say, Sea Hag should usually be a mistake when Lighthouse is on the board, and then I feel like my opponent is winning because he's playing badly.

[brokoli]

Third Inn posting here.
My rating would be, more or less (favorite cards in parenthesis) :
1. Cornucopia (Menagerie, Horn of plenty, Harvest, Young Witch)
2. Hinterlands (Develop, Mandarin, Farmland, Tunnel, Border Village)
3. Seaside (Embargo, Outpost, Tactician, Island)
4. Dark Ages (Procession, Procession again, Beggar, Rats)
5. Guilds (Butcher, Stonemason, Merchant Guild)
6. Intrigue (Coppersmith, Duke, Baron)
7. Prosperity (Forge, Contraband)
8. Base (Remodel, Library)
9. Alchemy (Apprentice)
10. Promos (Prince)

I really don't get the Prosperity love. I mean, it's a cool set like the others, but the balance is weird. Goons, King's court, Mountebank and Grand Market are game changers, they are very powerful. Then you have Loan, Talisman, Mine (trolol), Royal Seal, Counting house…
And I find way more satisfactions playing a strategy using bad cards (like Mandarin in Hinterlands) than using monstrous powerful cards like Mountebank or Grand Market.

[Asper]

Third Inn posting here.
My rating would be, more or less (favorite cards in parenthesis) :
1. Cornucopia (Menagerie, Horn of plenty, Harvest, Young Witch)
2. Hinterlands (Develop, Mandarin, Farmland, Tunnel, Border Village)
3. Seaside (Embargo, Outpost, Tactician, Island)
4. Dark Ages (Procession, Procession again, Beggar, Rats)
5. Guilds (Butcher, Stonemason, Merchant Guild)
6. Intrigue (Coppersmith, Duke, Baron)
7. Prosperity (Forge, Contraband)
8. Base (Remodel, Library)
9. Alchemy (Apprentice)
10. Promos (Prince)

I really don't get the Prosperity love. I mean, it's a cool set like the others, but the balance is weird. Goons, King's court, Mountebank and Grand Market are game changers, they are very powerful. Then you have Loan, Talisman, Mine (trolol), Royal Seal, Counting house…
And I find way more satisfactions playing a strategy using bad cards (like Mandarin in Hinterlands) than using monstrous powerful cards like Mountebank or Grand Market.

I feel like you do, just about Dark Ages. Prosperity has a good share of non-attack player interaction, which many like, a few weak-but-sometimes-good cards like Counting House, which some like, and - as you said - power creeps for those that like power creeps. At least none of them is Rebuild or IGG and totally degenerates the game.

[theblankman]

I play pretty much exclusively all cards random, so like some others here I don't really distinguish expansions, it's all just Dominion.  So I'll rate the expansions by how many cards each one contains that often make me want to ragequit a game...

Tied for 1st (no ragequit cards): Base, Alchemy, Prosperity, Cornucopia, Guilds, Promos
Tied for 7th (one): Intrigue (Minion), Seaside (Ambassador), Hinterlands (IGG)
Dead last (three): Dark Ages (Urchin, Cultist, Knights)

[enfynet]

Here's roughly how I think I rate the expansions:

 1. Prosperity
 2. Dark Ages
 3. Guilds
 4. Intrigue
 5. Cornucopia
 6. Seaside
 7. Alchemy
 8. Hinterlands
 9. Promos
10. Base

But I gave each card a rating out of 10, and found my average per expansion, which really quite surprised me.

1.	Guilds	6.62	(up 2)
2.	Prosperity	6.24	(down 1)
3.	Cornucopia	6.15	(up 2)
4.	Dark Ages	6.11	(down 2)
5.	Promos	6.00	(up 4)
6.	Seaside	5.65	(same)
8.	Base	5.52	(up 3)
7.	Alchemy	5.50	(down 1)
9.	Intrigue	5.28	(down 5)
10.	Hinterlands	5.12	(down 2)

So apparently Guilds is easily my favourite expansion, Cornucopia and Promos are pretty sweet, and I like Alchemy, Intrigue and Hinterlands less than Base??

I guess when thinking about which expansions are the best, we (or at least I) tend to think mostly about the best cards from each expansion. So I like nearly all of the cards from Guilds (all except Doctor, Masterpiece and Taxman scored 6 or higher), but not many of them really stand out to me, whereas for example from Prosperity I love King's Court, Goons, Grand Market etc, but am kind of meh on most of the Kingdom treasures.

I was particularly surprised that Hinterlands scored so poorly, since the general opinion seems to be it's a very solid expansion.

Maybe I'll double check all my ratings at some point to see if I actually agree with what I've put down.

I think I may try doing this by simply sorting the Randomizers and assigning arbitrary values 1-10 based on where they end up.