It occurred to me that I have never really took a crack at designing Events for Dominion.
My focus mainly goes toward Kingdom cards, probably because I prefer designing these. Oddly enough though, I woke up this morning with a headful of ideas to fulfil that Event gap in my life. Lots of the ideas portrayed below were juggling in my head for a long time, but have been nothing more than rough sketches. This sudden desire to put on paper the new Event ideas I’ve had pushed me to finally clean up these drafts and to compile everything into a nifty little 10 pack.
On the Dominion Discord server, I have posted a few (4) Events, some of which already got their wording tweaked. It would be a little too much of an attention hog to post and ask for feedback for all 10 of them over there... so instead, I’m doing the same, but here!
The testing has been minimal for these (as in, there hasn’t been any testing, whoopsy daisy). This isn’t normally how I go about things, but eeeeh. I’m going to do a leap of faith here! Hopefully, the ideas aren’t too abysmal, or worse of all, too unbalanced/broken. If you’d like to pool in to give me some pointers about these 10 Events, feel free (and welcomed) to do so!
| We start this journey with the wackiest of the wack-Os. It’s a communal Event! It joins the likes of Trade Route, Forager and Lurker as an effect shared between the players. A downside I could see to Brewery is that there is kind of a first player disadvantage. The more players invest in Brewery together, the bigger the payoff. But… it has to start somewhere. And the player who does so before the others will reap less benefits than the others will with their subsequent plays. Then again, stuff like Flag Bearer exists, so that’s not a never seen before problem. Anyway, Brewery could explode with Buys, but there’s a condition to fulfill for you to get there. “I’ll just buy more Coppers with Brewery’s extra Buys to keep it going!” Okay. Well enjoy your 5+ Coppers in your deck then, I suppose. Stuff in Dominion relying on Coppers is always so strong, as we all know. Coppersmith and Counting House are top tier cards, after all.
Edit: Changed the wording slightly ("onto" → "on"). Turns out I changed my mind and now prefer the word "on", since Brewery acts more like a pseudo Tavern mat than a deck.
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| Cute little thing going on here. You gain more and more expensive cards the more you buy Loot in a turn, starting with . ‘Course, this is heavily reliant on extra Buys. Otherwise, it’s uh… It’s probably just going to sit there. I mean, it can give your 5/2 opening a small kicker... and you can “Delve” a Silver with Loot. But truthfully, it wants +Buys. With 6 Buys and , you can reach for a Province with Loot, and each extra Buy and after that is another Province. How neat would it be to pull that one off?
Edit: Changed the wording slightly ("+" → "plus"). Thanks based Butcher for the wording! And thank you Bbobb for the suggestion!
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| I once made a card with that exact same name and picture as an entry for a weekly contest. It didn’t win and I totally agree with that: it kind of sucked. So here’s Bifurcation, the Event. It tries to do an Annex thingy where you shuffle stuff into your deck. Except here, it’s shuffled onto your deck. And hey, you can bottom deck 3 crappy cards, which is where Secret Passage stuffs crap sometimes too. You’ll see these 3 unwanted cards at once though, for your deck will be weirdly layered with Bifurcation. The fact that you must bottom deck at least 1 card means that you can’t buy something really good and topdeck it with Bifurcation thereafter. Overall, I suspect Bifurcation to be pretty situational (and probably not very good?), but that’s okay. They can’t all be top tier Events.
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| Guide, but it’s an Event. You can control what you discard with this, though. But, uh, it costs you a Buy to do so. It may draw more than Expedition, but unlike Expedition, you don’t know until you have your new hand whether Refurbish was a worthy investment or not. If the risk of losing your Buy for a dud doesn’t seem worth it, perhaps Scouting Party’s effects are more desirable to you? I thought it’d be a reasonable thing to price this in the same range as Expedition.
Edit: Simply changed the formatting, 'cuz it looks better this way. The number '5' is now on the next line... that's all!
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| Next, we move to a Cavalry/Villa hybrid. An Event that makes you return to your Action phase! People tend to like these kinds of things. Once per turn though, let’s not get crazy! So here, maybe two terminal drawing cards collided. In this case, you pick Travel’s Village option. Or perhaps you had the Actions to spare, but were out of draw (ex: you drew payload cards). In this situation, Travel’s Smithy option becomes pretty sexy. It’s versatile. Its mere presence in a given Kingdom should proooobably not go unnoticed.
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| I once made a card that was pretty much this. It was called Printing Press. It revealed the card from your hand, gained a copy of it and *smooch* voilà! No topdecking and upper bound either. I much prefer this Event variant. Printing Press was erm, boring, I guess? Collect is cooler in my opinion. It even Discards the card you want to gain a copy of, so you don’t topdeck too many of them. Why the limit? Well. I don’t want this to print Platinums. Or King’s Courts too, for that matter.
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| We continue the trend of comparing these Events to existing Dominion cards. Here, the comparison is, of course, Scheme. But Herbalist says hi too! With the whole “topdecking when discarded” biz. Here, you’re forced to do so. But you bought Tactics, so of course you wanted to do that. What you maaaay not have wanted to do is to topdeck that Copper or that Silver alongside your awesome Action card. Too bad! It’s Tactics. The topdecked cards come in duo. Unless you have no Treasures in play. In which case you’re no fun.
Edit: Man, that's weaksauce. I normally try not to go there, but this could really benefit from a +1 Buy. And voilà, there's one now! I'm nooot going to fluctuate Tactics' cost just quite yet. Picture this: Topdecking a Mountebank and a Silver every turn. Yikes. And now that you have the extra Buy to do other stuff on top of the topdecking thingy, that's an even more dangerous game to play. Leeeet's just keep this at for the time being.
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| Well. A pure vanilla Event. No official Events even do that. That’s cool, that’s simple. However, pure vanilla makes Citizenship way easier to evaluate than some of the crazy stuff here like, say, Brewery. And as such, this is the one that will probably get my head ripped off the most. When I made this, I thought was reasonable to add 2 Coffers and 2 Villagers onto your mats. Time will tell if I’m bad at pricing stuff.
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| Well, this definitely has a Count-esque approach to it. You can even save stuff from your hand before the fire trashes it all, just like Count does. A good question would be: “How does this fare against that other trashing Event?” The Event being Trade. Trade gives you back Economy via Silver. Not what you’d like the most added to you deck, but hey, “trash 2; gain 2” is pretty sweet overall. Meanwhile, Forest Fire cleans up your hand full stop. So you get to trash more, huzzah! But uh, don’t draw too much before you plan on unleashing flames to your hand. And late into the game, remember that you can only save 2 Provinces. The others will have to burn. And the 2 saved Provinces? They’ll clog up your next hand. Careful when playing with fire!
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| Kay. So why does this super Mine costs ? I original priced this at , but it somehow felt… off. It’s not that far away from Gold and man, why wouldn’t you take this over Gold if you hit ? At , it competes with Province, so now the interesting thinking game is afoot. Yeah yeah, Reap is in the same boat. Nyeh. Excavation is pretty simple. Engine users will probably hate this. Let the hate flow, I say, for this doesn’t invalidate Excavation’s right to exist.
Edit: Gave this more thoughts and weeeell, I bit the bullet and decreased Excavation's cost back to . Now it's really in love with Platinum. And it's not too bad of a deal if you seek to buy Golds. Yes, these kind of games exist. Oh I also changed the formatting so that the "Gain a Treasure" sentence appears on one line instead. Sexier that way.
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