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Author Topic: Livery + Hypothetical Cost-Increaser  (Read 2000 times)

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mxdata

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Livery + Hypothetical Cost-Increaser
« on: August 05, 2020, 08:20:07 pm »
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It's been pointed out that Livery would be broken if there were ever a cost-increaser, since gaining a Horse with Livery would trigger another Horse, which in turn would trigger another and so on until the whole pile was gained

But I just recently realized that if you also had a Trader in hand, it would be even more broken - because you could reveal the Trader to gain a Silver instead, which would also now be $4 (or more if there were multiple increasers in play), which would trigger the gain of another Horse that you could reveal Trader for and so on, ending up gaining both the entire Silver pile and the entire Horse pile.  Changeling would have a similar broken interaction

Now, I'm wondering - would there be a way to fix that if a cost-increaser existed (let's call it Anti-Bridge)?  One option to resolve the "gain the Horse pile" problem would be to put an Experiment-style clause on Livery "gain another Horse, which does not come with another Horse", but that would just look weird in the vast majority of games without Anti-Bridge (especially bad if Menagerie itself didn't have Anti-Bridge).  Another interesting possibility would be to make Horse effectively the opposite of the variable-cost cards - there'd be a below-the-line clause stating something like "this card's cost cannot be changed", so that both conventional cost-decreasers and Anti-Bridge would leave it unaffected, which could have an odd interaction with Remodel-type cards - Remodeling a Horse would get you increasingly expensive cards the more cost-decreasers you have in play.  This would also automatically solve the Changeling interaction, since Changeling is only exchanged for, not gained

However, that would still leave the broken combination with Trader unaffected.  The new version that was announced a while back that uses the exchange mechanism instead of would-gain would resolve the Trader interaction, which is a bit ironic since obviously that change had nothing to do with this hypothetical problem.  But even then, anyone playing with a pre-errata version would still have the same problem.  But, since it would require three different cards (Livery, Trader, Anti-Bridge), it would almost never actually happen
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Isis

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Re: Livery + Hypothetical Cost-Increaser
« Reply #1 on: August 06, 2020, 08:53:48 am »
+1

My idea:
"When you gain a card that costs 4$ or more, gain a Horse that costs less than the card you gained."

Then what you do is, you change the Horsepile, make it 29 Lab Horses and a 30th Horse, that still has the name "Horse", but its cost is 5$ and it says "If you would gain this card, instead gain a card that costs less (or instead gain a silver or instead gain a Duchy however you want to do this vision of a minigame for City Stacking the Horse pile).  So then it doesn't feel like the wording on Livery is pointless when it's separated from cost increaserss, usually it's for that fat horse, and the fat horse is clearly there because failing to gain a Horse feels bad, so we fixed that.

Obviously this has some creative liberty here it's not an unintentional design that the current state is, "if the Horse pile is empty, well that's that then isn't it you won't gain a horse"
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X-tra

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Re: Livery + Hypothetical Cost-Increaser
« Reply #2 on: August 06, 2020, 11:25:28 am »
+1

I pondered upon that idea for a while too. While a cost increasing effect seems like a cool idea, it’s not without its shortcomings and it perhaps is a path worth avoiding. But let’s suppose we want to make this work just for the sake of it. Like you said, we need to avoid instant pile-outs. For now, you’ve targeted Horses. But there’s also Silver with the weird Trader game loop. So to take care of both these cases, how about:

“This turn, Action Supply piles costs more.”

Horses are out-of-Supply. Silvers are not Action cards. So this could work, I think? This simple wording can make for a potential Attack against your opponents (such as with the Attack – Duration saying “Until your next turn, Action Supply piles costs more”, or whatever). This does not cover every case, such as Treasure and Victory Supply piles whom remain unaffected. But it is simple to read and comprehend, doesn’t seem overly broken at first and becomes an effect that can be mixed with other card effects.

Likewise, this can be made to only target cards in one’s hand. That way, the gained cards remain unchanged in their cost and Livery stays unbroken. Like:

“This turn, cards in your hand costs more.”

On its own, not so great. But tied with a remodel-ish bonus on the same card, it becomes more interesting. And it has the potential to really boom if you’d play multiple of these cards-in-hand-cost-increaser in one turn. Maybe even turning a Copper to a Duchy, I dunnno, lol.


Anyway, these are merely suggestion to solve OP’s dilemma and they have no value outside of that. And if I thought of stuff like that, then it’s been thought of before. And if it was disregarded before, well, there’s probably been good reasons for it to be. Cost increasing cards are somewhat counter intuitive and I suspect it’s harder to future proof these lil’ fellas. So, after 13 expansions, I think it’s safe to say that we won’t find this kind of card in Dominion. :)
« Last Edit: August 06, 2020, 12:06:33 pm by X-tra »
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Donald X.

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Re: Livery + Hypothetical Cost-Increaser
« Reply #3 on: August 06, 2020, 01:33:14 pm »
+8

Now, I'm wondering - would there be a way to fix that if a cost-increaser existed (let's call it Anti-Bridge)?
There was an easy fix actually, which I think Sir Martin suggested. "This turn, when you gain a card costing more than Horse, gain a Horse." However this doesn't deal with Trader in situations where you affect the Silver and Horse piles differently (i.e. you have Quarry in play). "This turn, when you gain a card costing more than Horse and Silver, gain a Horse" goes the distance. But well. Yuck.

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