It's kinda weird to talk about power levels in Innovation, Innovation is so weird, y'know. Innovation is not about being fair. It's about having about 7 legal actions, all the time, and usually about 3 of them being serious contenders for use and thus constantly presenting you with interesting choices that can test skill.
If there was an age one card called Revelry that had 3 copies of a seventh icon type, a "pop", and a dogma that said "Remove Revelry from the game. Draw 2 [1]'s. You may meld a card from your hand. You may take an additional action this turn", that card would overpowered in the sense that it definitely confers an advantage to the player that draws it or throws it on board after sailing. They would always net a draw. But it wouldn't actually be that damaging to Innovation. It trivializes at most a single action per game. It probably doesn't even trivialize that action since there's a lot of merit to delaying the activation. The player who drew Revelry is still making decisions. The player fighting Revelry is still making decisions, since Revelry is rarely powerful enough to drop his chance of winning to below 10% where things start to get grindy. Life is still good.
Consider instead an age 4 card called "Windup Toys", with 3 pops on it. It says "Draw 2 10's. If you draw Miniaturization and A.I., reveal them and you win the game. Shuffle them into the 10's and repeat this dogma effect (once only)". This card is horrible, the player who draws it or melds it is generally at a disadvantage against the other player, compared to as if he had drawn something else. However, the card is "overpowered" in the sense that it has much more potential for a caustic effect on the variety of decisions in the game. If the player with Wind Toys on his board gets in a sufficiently bad position, his choices can get trivialized to "spam Windup Toys for Hail Mary". The card doesn't compete with other top cards in his board in a fashion that is meaningful. The amount of dogma actions it can chew up is unlimited, it's more caustic than Revelry even if we add a rule to Revelry that says you have to use it right away.
Some people think gaining random access to power ruins a game, but it often doesn't. If it does any damage at all, that damage is minimal In Dominion, 5/2 Trading Post openings have great Councilroom stats and randomly confer a large benefit to one player, but no one ever wants to quit the game over that, because even though one player is behind he still has lots of decisions available and choices to make. 5/2 Witch is only a problem because it reduces choices as collateral damage, when you get the curses in your hand you literally can only buy silver, it becomes your only choice.
Almanac, Industrialization, and Watermill are not problems merely because they randomly confer advantage. They randomly confer advantage and also trivialize player decisions too frequently, and with no cap on their duration. Gunpowder probably confers more player advantage than Watermill, but Gunpowder has a finite number of possible trivialized choices that is restricted by the number of castle cards on the opponent's board. On the other hand, you can spend forever durdling with Watermill, activating it, getting rid of an echo, drawing an echo, activating it, getting rid of an echo, drawing an echo, it goes on and on. Industrialization trivializes choices for the rest of the game, which on a [6] is a little early and a little disappointing. We're ok with Bioengineering trivializing the rest of the game oftentimes because there's not that much game left.
Almanac is the grand behemoth, trivializing play for the rest of the game as early as Dice opener->Puppet-> meld Almanac.
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Topic: 90 Players left on the leaderboard. (Read 6941 times)