I think the overarching issue is: Does relying on any sort of tier system to make in-game decisions actually make you a better player? I don't think I've made a single in-game decision by comparing cards' Qvist rankings. I make all my decisions based on intuition and experience, and I think all the top players do as well.
I think somebody actually pointed out on the Qvist ranking thread that the rankings are mostly just made for fun. There's just so much information that a ranking can't tell you: How many copies of a card to buy, at what stage of the game to buy a card, how your opponent's strategy affects things, niche cases that make a weak card good, etc. Looking at a list and seeing that a card you were ignoring is actually really good might be helpful to a beginner, but I'm not sure it's actually THAT helpful. A player could buy Governor solely because of its high ranking and still lose because they don't know how to play a Governor deck. It's not enough to know a card is good; you have to know WHY it's good.
Yes, I agree completely. I however, don't know all the ins and outs of card interaction, nor even their over all power. I think it could actually help someone like me. Yeah, I'll eventually outgrow it's usefulness, but I'm not at that point yet.
It would also be a good way to see where different types of cards rate in the overall META. Are gainers mostly rated as B's? Are attacks mostly rated as A's. What about sifters? Are they mostly rated as C? Are alternate treasures all over the board for ratings, or are they mostly A's? It would be a good way to be able to compile a bunch of data quickly.
(Emphasis added)
Other, better players can feel free to chime in, but in general,
all types of cards are all over the board. There are powerful and weak attacks, villages, sifters, alternate treasures, trash for benefit, throne rooms, remodelers, gainers, pseudo-attackers, durations, reactions, etc. Part of what has given Dominion so much longevity is that Donald X has done a great job at throwing wrenches in any rules of thumb. Each new expansion not only adds new mechanics, it adds some cards which incentivize certain behaviors that would previously be losing strategies, or deincentivizes the common winning strategies.
To get to intermediate level play, rather than trying to worry about which cards tend to be the best
most often, I feel that your best bet is to learn what mechanics each card plays nicely with. Knowing what to look for to see if you can make your Tunnels trigger, or to make your Gardens work, or to build that Poor House strategy, is going to be far more beneficial (and a more efficient use of your time) than learning/compiling a tier list so you can buy the card that has the highest tier. In each game, you have to be able to look at each card and try to find all of its supporters and counters. Once you've done that for all 10 Kingdom cards, you'll end up seeing a handful of approaches you could take. It's then your job to try and figure out which of those will work best. And when you're new to the game, you're going to make the wrong choice
a lot. That's just how we learn.
I love analysis, and I love that you want to analyze the cards, but I think that the vast majority of Dominion cards are in a huge middle tier- one which is highly situational as to whether the card is good or bad. It's just not the type of game that lends itself well to this specific type of analysis. I think that's what some here are trying to explain to you.
If you're mostly just looking for a beginner overview of what cards are generally very good and which ones aren't, you really are best off following the Qvist rankings. I don't see what you have to gain by trying to reinvent the wheel there. And that's not to say that we
couldn't use a different type of ranking. But it sounds to me like the thing you're aiming for has already been done well enough. When you're in 100% doubt on what to do, feel free to pick the highest rated card on the Qvist rankings, try it out, and if you lose, then you've learned a lesson in one of the thousands of exceptions that Dominion has to offer.
That's just the best way to learn right now. Read articles, try to find cards that play nicely together in the Kingdom (just based off of their language), play a lot of games, and pay attention to the advice of people like Mic Qsenoch (currently the 2nd highest on the Dominion Online Leaderboards), who handed you his personal list of rankings for Base Set on a silver platter based on his years of experience. No need to split hairs over whether or not he gave too many cards the S rank. If he tells you that Chapel, Throne Room, Sentry, Witch, and Artisan are all top-tier, I would take his word for it