Given that we have 25 submissions, I decided to have exactly 5 Runner-Ups (among them the Winner), which leaves a lot of good cards that didn't get there.
 ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ | Toady -- Fragasnap
I immediately liked this card when I first saw it. It looks clever. Terminal draw is also something lacking from potion cards.
However, I don't think it would work out in practice. I open x/potion and buy x/Toady on the second shuffle. My deck is 7*Copper, 2*X, 1*Potion, 1*Toady, 3*Shelter/Estates. That means, if I play Toady naming Copper, we have 8 hits out of 13 cards. The probability of not hitting with two revealed cards is ~13%. Point being, you have a decent chance to draw your entire deck if you play this early, even without smart predictions or cards that give information about your deck. This seems pretty swingy, very powerful, and it has the familiar issue of the 3$P cost.
I still like the idea. Maybe if it cost 2$P and you couldn't name Copper?
|  | Appraiser -- Gubump
This starts off being a cantrip silver gainer. The second is a lab silver gainer. The third a double-lab. On the other hand, chaining them is difficult in a deck full of silver.
You can also combo it with other cards. Most card that gain during the Action phase are terminal, so this takes some setting up.
Hard to say how this plays out, but the powerlevel seems extremely high. Compare it to Explorer. If not-activated, it's 'gain a silver onto your deck, +1 Card'. This is almost that but non-terminal and with the ability to scale, for 4$. However, being extremely strong isn't necessarily a bad thing, and this could lead to fun decks. Maybe. It definitely fits the 'innocent-looking but secretly complex' criterion. It also gets bonkers if you can return to your Action phase...
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Capital City -- X-tra
The raw power on this card is very high. Village and Smithy both have 3 Vanilla effects each. This has four. The upshot: if you play four of these in a row, you get four more cards (+8 cards total) than if you play Villlage->Smithy->Villlage->Smithy (which nets +4 cards total). Of course, this costs 5$ and is arguably harder to use. Particularly problematic is the +4 Action in the beginning, since that's a dud if you're unable to use them (and +4 Actions is also the weakest effect). Also, if you play a large deck, you'll get past 4 Actions quickly and won't be happy about all of your Hunting Grounds spontaneously transforming into Sacred Groves.
So, this looks to be a possible trap, which was one of the ways to fit the theme. Scheme or other ways of topdecking it would help.
Finally, we have the part below the horizontal line, which doesn't go with the top all that well since this card doesn't like large decks. Overall, interesting design.
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Prophet/Messiah -- mathdude
The Ceiling of this is a Terminal Silver with Cellar-for-Treasure-Cards for 2$ and a Gold for 5$. That doesn't strike me as very good. It seems worse than Cellar for Engines and a Gold for 5$ is not exciting. Compare Messiah to Plunder, which everyone treats as better than gold (I never see someone buy gold for 6$ if Plunder is available). And that's assuming you always connect them and get rid of your sins automatically. In practice, you would probably never get to Messiah because Prophet isn't good enough to be emptied.
I think the idea is not bad, but you undershot the power level.
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Chamberlain -- spineflu
Even the updated version of this card is extremely powerful. Spacing out effects over several turns does make them weaker, but not by that much, and I'm afraid there's just too many effects on this card.
Practically speaking, I open with this, and turn 3 is like I played Steward and Enchantress in one card. By the time I draw the Copper, it's turn 7. I think this should cost 5$.
An unrelated thing I worry about is that this won't be all that difficult to use. You usually trash first, then draw, then make coins, then get the Copper. This is also the reason why it being strong is more of an issue than with Appraiser. Either way, nice art.
Also, I do quite like the idea of one card that gives a bunch of different effects over time.
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Revolution -- faust
I'm a bit late to realize that a consequence of this theme is to make judging unusually hard. I'm supposed to know how this plays out, right?
The ceiling here is bonkers. Even if you only get five triggers, you can get more VP than you can get through Victory cards. Exile all of your Aciton Cards after one big turn, and every subsequent 6$ is worth 15VP. On the other hand, if you do nuke your deck, getting to 6$ may not be trivial. The Event does not allow you to leave some of the cards in your deck (although you can choose to discard those from Exile if you gain copies). It's also worth pointing out that you can buy this more than once in a turn.
What optimal play does this incentivize? I'm leaning toward one Mega turn rather than a few value buys. If all the tools are present, you can set up your deck such that you end up with, say, 2 Copper, 2 Silver, a lot of Action cards, and nothing else. Play everything and buy Revolution. Gain a Ruins. Your new deck is Silver, Silver, Copper, Copper, Ruins. Play Ruins, Play Treasures, buy Revolution. Repeat 3 times. Each Revolution gives 1 more VP than the previous one. Your opponent needs to buy 8 provinces to outrace you (rather than 4 or 5), which is not very realistic. Will this be fun? Who knows.
It looks like a good design. It may be a bit too powerful in that it dominates the game most of the time rather than some of the time. I think you tend to want cards that force a very specific strategy to only be used occasionally. On the other hand, executing the Mega turn is certainly a good deal harder than playing something like Rebuild.
This was the last card I kicked out of the Runner-Ups to limit them to five.
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Penglai Medicine -- majiponi
This provides 1$ + 1$ per Treasure on your deck. It also discards all treasures. This can be nice, but also means the card strongly anti-synergizes with itself; if you have two in hand, the second is just a Copper. Worth noting that non-Treasure is not Victory. If a Victory card is on top, there is no compensation.
Thus, this appears to be quite weak on first glance -- it's expensive, unreliable, and doesn't stack. However, the ceiling is giving you an instant province. This card wants to be played in a deck that almost entirely consists of Treasure cards. Suppose you open Hermit, Replace your Estates with Silvers, and then buy these. The first one you play will flip about half of your deck. If you then buy a province, the next one will flip about a third; if you buy another, it's a forth, and so on. Probability theory right there. And while the card anti-synergizes with itself if you have two in-hand, it synergizes with itself if it's flipped over.
The card this rescinds me of the most is Counting House. One big variable money effect that goes from nothing (or in this case, 1$) to way more than you can use. This should be somewhat more playable, though it still looks weak-ish. But a clever design.
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Monkey's Paw -- LibraryAdventurer
Complexity aside, the base effect is gaining a Curse and a Wish. My guess is that this effect is quite weak. People open Leprechaun sometimes, but I think it's almost always a mistake. A wish is better than a Gold, but a Curse is worse than Hex, so this should be similar.
Then, there's the passing. If you buy this, you want to play it, so you're not interested in passing it. Near the end, you want to pass it because it prevents your -2VP. But it does so at the cost of giving your opponent 1VP, so it's only 1VP difference (or 0 if you're playing 3p and the player in question is not your competitor).
Seems like an ok effect, but probably too weak to be bought in the first place. And faust is right about the tracking issues (although they're rare).
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Ancient Ruins -- Aquila
The floor of this card is +2 VP, since you can choose to gain $ equal to the card's cost and simply rebuy it. Of course, cards are generally better than $, so the other option should be an improvement, but requires lining it up with Villages.
I think the wrong way to play this is to trash whatever comes up -- good cards costing 5$ should be better than terminal 2VP. I'm not sure what the right way is, though, given that you can't usually control what you trash. But Apprentice effect is powerful, and coupled with +2 VP and a phantom card (because trashing doesn't decrease your hand size), the raw power is there. You probably just want to buy them later in the game to get extra value out of your good cards.
Seems solid, albeit swingy.
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Musketeer -- gambit05
Okay, so the main comparison here is Wild Hunt. Unlike Wild Hunt, you have several accumulating piles (the mat is communal but has three areas), so playing this is less all-or-nothing -- if you're getting to the point that Taking > Peddler, this should be about equally true for all three areas of the mat (otherwise your opponent made a mistake). You could take all of them in one turn, but this is not very likely since taking is a terminal action.
I think Coffers are generally the weakest of the three. But I also think it doesn't matter that much since the effect should be self-regulating. If there are three Coffers, three Villagers, and three Horses and I think Coffers are weakest and don't want to help my opponent, I'll add another Coffer.
The exception to this is if you prioritize one mat with the intention of reaping the benefits in the same turn, which is also what you want to do with Wild Hunt.
So in summary, this seems like a nicer version of the Wild Hunt idea, with the added quirk of allowing you to get different things. I like it a lot. No complaints.
Runner-Up
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Ravaged Throne Room -- fika monster
Playing an Action card from play is better than playing it from hand, since it comes with a phantom Card. This makes the effect stronger than Throne Room, but the penalty is that it gets trashed.
This should be correct to buy in most games near the end, and perhaps earlier as well. I think the design is solid. However, as-is the under-the-line effect allows you to get back Colonies, which seems pretty silly and I suspect is not intended. You probably want to limit it to Action cards.
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Exhaust -- alion8me
This looks like a lot of fun. I used to think that making things too 'easy' was a problem, but then we got Villa and everyone seems to like it. Replaying an Action card for free is often quite good, even if you need to trash it afterward. The only giving you back a buy once thing is neat. It makes mega-turns harder.
Runner-Up
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Birthright/Legacy -- emtzalex
With this card, we have an effect that would be ludicrously overpowered if not for the fact that all players get it.
Since all players do get it (and your opponent(s) even get it first), it requires some kind of asymmetry to be good. This strikes me as fairly hard to achieve. Say you want to go for the super strong deck and your opponent races provinces. If you put a smithy onto the mat, your opponent starts every turn with 8 cards. So do you, but I'm just saying, your clock has just been reduced dramatically. Ditto with most other effects.
In general, static improvements help the weaker deck more, not less, than the stronger deck. (For example, if you play the powerful engine vs. the racing deck, you'd probably be happy if everyone starts their turn with 3 cards. You may be half as likely to draw your deck; your opponent is much less than half as likely to get to 8$.) This would imply that you want to buy this as the racing player. This may work in principle, but it probably takes too long to set up.
Then there's Legacy. Legacy seems to help the big engine deck rather than the racing deck. However, I suspect it doesn't help either deck that much since you would have to buy 5 Birthrights to get there, and that sounds crazy difficult to make work usefully. It should rarely be the case that both players go for Birthright, and by the time you have 5, the game ought to be very close to over.
I think the idea is quite good, but doesn't this want to be an event that triggers instantly? Buying a card for 6$ and playing it is probably too much to exploit an asymmetry, especially if you also have to compensate for the fact that your opponent gets the effect first, and if I'm right that it's generally better for greening decks.
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Corrupt Village -- Rhodos
Plus for simplicity. My problem here is that I suspect it's correct to trigger this effect all/most of the time. If 1VP were worth more than +1$ and +1 buy, then Monument would be weaker as a +3$, +1buy, which I don't think it is. The fact that you can discard & trash the curses changes the calculation, but only in the direction of making triggering it even better. The floor is -1 VP token, except if Coven is on the board.
This doesn't mean it's bad by any means. Even if the effect were mandatory, I think it would still be an okay design.
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Omniscience -- Mahowrath
Omniscience effectively gives you perfect luck. Whatever card you want on top at any time can be on time. Writing about Omniscience does not give you perfect luck, since I just closed my browser with some keyboard shortcut and now have to write this again. On the other hand, saving progress in a text file is excellent.
Anyway. Perfect luck affects cards unequally. Solid effects like Laboratory stay the same, while high-variance effects like Vagrant or Scrying pool become a lot better. You know what else is now good? Scout! If you have four victory cards in your deck, Scout will now inevitably draw four cards. I thus conclude that Mahowrath is Robz in disguise.
In 2p, the person buying this first gets 2 Curses, the person buying it second none. However, the effect is so powerful that getting it one turn earlier is probably worth 2 Curses (which are always at the bottom of your deck anyway).
My honest take here is that this is too extreme for Dominion, and even compared to stuff like Donate. Way of the Chameleon and the Traveler lines are extreme, but this is another level.
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Jewelry -- Carline
One can imagine an Action card that says 'gain a card costing exactly 1$ per Action card in play'. This is a powerful workshop, it can gain Gold and 5$'s, but it will also often be dead if you have too many cards in play.
Jewelry solves this in a pretty clever way: by being playable as a Treasure card instead. With Treasures, you can usually choose the order freely, so the ceiling is usually not too low. The card is on the powerful side for sure, it's not hard to make it a non-terminal 5$ gainer.
Given this, I don't think the second part of the effect is needed. Gaining the card in hand is quite good, and you don't have to shed too many tears for a 4$ that you lose to do it. You won't trigger this all the time, but will do it occasionally and always in the late game, and it should be pretty strong.
Other than the latter part, I like this a lot. It's clever.
Runner-Up
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Cavalcade -- anordinaryman
Another extreme effect: all of your Action cards get throned for the rest of the game, with the catch that they also get trashed. Will it be fun? Judging from other extreme effects, it probably will be.
One thing worth pointing out here is that this makes it unusually easy to win in one turn, if the board is such that building while playing is already feasible. Usually, if you have something like Procession/Workshop/Smithy, you will produce resources slightly slower than you use them. If everything is throned, I imagine it could be faster, although I haven't worked out any concrete scenario. Also worth noting (and a possible counter point) is that this does not double the effect of Throne Rooms. If I play TR -> Village, the effect should trigger after I play Village the first time, at which point Cavalcade trashes and plays it from the Trash. Then, Throne room plays it again, and Cavalcade does not play it a forth time because it is already in the trash. Of course, Throne Room will then be trashed, and I get to play that a second time. However, that still means Throne Room becomes double KC, which is plenty good.
This card is similar though by no means identical to Exhaust. I come out somewhat more favorable on Exhaust, in part since it has no wording issues.
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Coffeehouse -- Xen3k
Coffeehouse is a powerful Sifter&Drawer, with the important downside that it has the anti-Chancellor effect. It will set your Draw Pile to the maximum size as supposed to 0. Then, it lets the opponent cycle a card, but with the same downside.
I think this is pretty clever. Hard to say how strong it is -- a sifter that grows your handsize is very powerful, but the penalty is no joke. Hard to know when it's good, too. This is very much in the spirit of the contest.
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Delegate -- D782802859
Another extreme effect: you start every turn with two buys and two Actions, which is the effect of Barracks and the 4$ Event that gives +buy combined, but only four cards.
In general, this is bad. But there are certainly exceptions -- an easy one is a powerful engine deck without +buy. Deciding if and when to buy this sure sound tricky, which again is a good thing.
I like it.
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Celebrate -- pubby
Improve in Event form. This is perfectly fine, minus the stuff Gubump said. If this were an official card with (with the proper fixes), probably no-one would bat an eye.
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Secluded Village -- Timinou
A Necropolis that will rarely be a Lost City. Anything with +2 Actions is, of course, playable, and with proper support, you can trigger this fairly often. One way to support it is Cellar-type cards, another drawing your entire deck and then playing workshop. I like it, including the cost. Again, no complaints.
Runner-Up
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Old Throne Room -- Commodore Chuckles
This card is to King's Court what Lion's Eye Diamond is to Black Lotus. If an effect is too powerful, simply add 'discard your hand' to it... except that this also draws 2 cards since otherwise Throning would have questionable utility.
With any support, I imagine this could be a lot of fun. Discarding your hand is not as bad as it sounds if you then get to play Smithy three times. Without support, it's a hard sell. If you're relying on situations where you know what's on top of your deck, then by the time you get to play it, your hand may be too large for it to be worth it.
So it's situational. Is it too situational? I'm not sure. It's not that rare for other cards to enable this (even Pearl Diver would sometimes do the job), so it may be fine. Overall, it's a pretty cool idea.
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Armada -- mandioca15
This effect is similar to Secret Plot, although it has some differences. One is that cards are removed from your deck, so it can act as a pseudo-trasher. Another is that you only get to draw once.
The proper way to play this could be in two phases. Phase one, put useful cards on your deck. Intermediate: have one powerful turn. Phase 2: Exile your Victory cards. Alternatively, if the board supports it, skip phase 2 and win with the mega turn. Alternatively still, skip phase 2 and only Exile, if that's profitable on the board. In this case, it is like a nicer Cathedral, that is much more supportive of greening.
I initially felt this was too similar to Secret Plot, but I like it much more after giving it some thought. Good design.
Runner-Up
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Billet -- ConMan
This card is similar to the 8$ Event that Thrones your first card (Citadel?). Instead of playing your first Action card again, it plays a specific card -- probably a weaker one since it costs at most 3$. In exchange, it costs 5$ rather than 8$. Another card where I don't think anyone would be surprised if it were official. A smaller Citadel sounds perfectly reasonable.
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Customs Shed -- infangthief
This effectively doubles all of your engine purchases, at the cost of a 1 turn delay. That should be quite strong. Having a Lab a turn later is a big deal, but not as big as getting a second lab for free. I imagine you want this in most games and use it regularly. Which is fine, but doesn't seem that exciting.
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Final Verdict:
#5: Secluded Village by Timinou
#4: Jewelry by Carline
#3: Armada by mandioca15
#2: Exhaust by alion8me
#1: Musketeer by gambit05
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Author
Topic: Weekly Design Contest #104: Raise the Ceiling (Read 22370 times)