This time we have 18 submissions, so I went with a top 4. I went to labeling them 'Finalist's rather than 'Runner-up's since the winner is also among them.
 ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ | Jetty -- mandioca15
A lost City with a harsh penalty. Under normal circumstances, the upside is not big enough to justify buying this. I see two possible approaches to make it viable.
One: you play a deck that doesn't care about buying things. Occasionally, this is the optimal strategy anyway. In that case, Jetty becomes straight-forwardly powerful.
Two: attempt to minimize the downside. If you already own two Jetty's, you can dodge the penalty if you draw your entire deck. (Buy third Jetty -> take 3 tokens -> play your 3 Jetties -> get rid of all tokens -> profit). Having a Throne Room also helps.
My biggest criticism is that the second option seems too hard to pull off. If you can draw your deck every turn, skipping a single buy phase is likely to be too much of a penalty to justify buying the first Jetty, so even a normal Throne Room wouldn't suffice. If you can't draw your entire deck every turn, well then you can't guarantee playing Jetty, and the penalty increases. Either way, it seems extremely difficult to make it work, leaving us with another card that says 'play a deck that doesn't buy things', similar to Mission. Which is fine, but not breath-taking.
Also worth pointing out that this has more potential to hurt your opponent than any other card if you have ways of making them gain it. Pairing this with Ambassador could lead to very ugly situations.
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Incantation -- The Alchemist
Apologies for the harsh verdict, but I am almost certain that this card is busted. In particular, I'm pretty sure that the correct strategy will usually be to pile up expensive cards over and over again.
I think this is a case where intuitions about different rates of growth are important. The damage done from taking Ravens is linear. The benefit from taking good cards is exponential. (This is so because good cards produce resources, which helps you get more good cards that also produce resources and so on. Whenever you have a dynamic where the thing you get produces a fixed percentage of its own value every time step, that's exponential. Putting money onto a bank account works exactly like that. In Dominion, this applies in its purest form if you draw your deck every turn, but it's true to some extent even if you don't.) This means you want to make the 'take Ravens for cool cards' deal as often as possible, until you run against the time limit of 3-piling. Furthermore, the deal is better the earlier in the game you are, so you'll want to get this as early as possible and then use it to get the remaining Incantations so that you can take the deal as many times as possible as early as possible.
Less abstractly, suppose you have managed to draw your deck with two Incantations in your hand. Using the top-decking, you can now gain as many more Incantations as you want. However, no matter how many you get, it takes at most five turns to get rid of all of the Ravens. This is almost certainly what you'll want to do. Empty the pile on the spot.
Trading off VP against resources is tricky, and you'll notice that there's no official card that does it like this.
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Corruption -- faust
I think this is the most complex submission in terms of how it plays.
Let's first ignore the fact that Blight can hurt you. If you're intending to buy Provinces yourself but lose the split 5-3, you'll have to spend 3$ three times to net 4VP, which is not very good. So, the primary use case is to nuke a Victory card that you don't intend to get yourself.
Here's the abstract case, then. Suppose your opponent buys Provinces and you blight them. If you get no Provinces yourself, Blight is equivalent to a Victory card that gives 1 VP for each Provinces your opponent has. This means that they get better the more Provinces your opponent has. Starting out, your opponent has no Provinces and Blight is not worth it. Thus, the Equilibrium is reached when your opponent has enough Provinces to make Blight an ok investment. At that point, your opponent should stop buying Provinces, and you may or may not continue buying Blights.
Of course, this assumes that you can just transition from Provinces to something else, which is often not the case. So, suppose instead you have Monument + vanilla victory piles. If blight means that buying more than two Provinces isn't worth it (and Duchies and Estates are hit much worse still), then both players are committed to playing Monuments anyway, which means you don't want green cards at all.
The restriction of Blight to one buy per turn changes things yet again; if you can build a progressively more powerful deck, you may be able to empty the Province pile quickly. However, I'm worried about how optimal play looks like on boards without +buy. Also, if the effect is to make you green as late as possible, this is not that different from what many dominion boards look like already.
In conclusion, it's a very clever design, but I'm not convinced it would be fun to play with. But I could certainly be wrong.
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Fickle Festival -- NoMoreFun
With this one, I'm pretty sure you're supposed to avoid ever triggering the penalty since losing your 5$ is quite bad. This mostly means that you'll want to avoid playing too many of them.
This begs the question how the penalty restricts your play. The first part (the 4+ Villager clause) means you don't want to buy too many Fickle Festivals. The second part means you don't want to end your turn having played another Village. Broadly, both punish you for playing too many villages without Terminals. However, you're already incentivized to mix Villages with terminals, and drawing too many Villages in one hand is already bad luck. For this reason, I'm not sure what this adds in terms of strategy.
Another concern is that the powerlevel is quite low. The card doesn't seem to be strong even without the penalty.
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Disappearing Village -- mxdata
A snowy village variant! If you don't use the discarding effect, this card quickly becomes useless. This means you have to get rid of all snow you obtain eventually; if you don't, you shouldn't have bought the card in the first place. The only question left is when you discard.
Thus, I think the right way to think about this card is as a variant of "+1 Card, +3 Actions, discard an Action card" with upside -- the upside being that you can choose to discard later for the price of some Actions.
I think this is a really cool idea. It's quite weak, but that's not really a problem on a village since everything with +2 Actions is frequently playable. Also, since this gives +3 Actions, it's less card-disadvantage than a Shanty Town that you reliably fail to draw with. I like that the ability to choose between discarding now and later avoids frustrations (like drawing this together with only one Hunting Grounds).
Finalist
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Chainsmith -- Mahowrath
A Smithy variant that stays in play for a turn (downside) but can be cast from your hand without an Action (upside) if you pay the cost.
An important aspect of this design is that the pain tokens don't go away by themselves. This means that using the upside requires you to have discarded one card per Chainsmith played up to that point, making them all only net +1 card rather than net +2 cards, which is a big deal. However, the upside of not having a dead turn is huge.
In practice, the hardest decision to make here may be whether to discard cards from functioning hands to prepare for future potential Village-less hands. At some point in most games, you'll probably want to stop doing it and just play Chainsmith as weaker Smithies, unless the game is such that you have the junk anyway.
I think this is a pretty cute design. Like a weaker smithy that comes with some added Insurance. Narrowly misses Finalist status.
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Coronation -- spineflu
A card with a Mining Village-type one-shot effect. The effect is very powerful, whereas the penalty can range from irrelevant to devastating.
If the penalty hurts (if you rely a lot on provinces), then the card is quite weak, given that the top half is just a Silk Merchant for 5$. (Although you'll buy it sometimes just because of the +buy.) In such a case, you would at most have a few, and then you may or may not use the ability near the end of the game.
On the other hand, you can also play such that the penalty doesn't hurt much, like if you have one Province and otherwise Fairgrounds. I feel like in such a case, the card is supposed to be strong -- however, I'm not sure it is, and that feels like a design flaw to me. The card should at least have some boards where it shines. Throning after drawing cards is very good, but losing a 5$ is a big deal. Although, you certainly wouldn't feel too bad to use the effect to save a dead turn.
My secondary complaint is that the effects seem a bit disjointed to me (as in, I don't get how the different pieces fit together). Of course, this is highly subjective.
I do think the penalty itself is pretty cool.
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Loki's Bargain -- emtzalex
I think the idea of this is quite cool, but you seem to have undershot the powerlevel by quite a bit. Suppose I play three in a row. The first is a Forum that discards one fewer card. The second is a Forum. And the third does nothing at all. This means that, after all three, my handsize is unchanged and I have lost an Action. (And if you choose not to play the third for -2 Tricks, the overall tally becomes quite a bit worse.) This compares very poorly to Forum. I think it could easily cost 3$.
Aside from that, my other complaint is that not playing it for -2 Tricks is a very hard sell, since the alternative is to decrease your handsize anyway and make the next two plays significantly weaker. Which is to say, I don't think this really gives you much of a choice, most of the time.
However, like I said, I think the idea is good, just not the specific numbers.
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Sea-Dasher Octopus I mean Way of the Octopus -- Timinou
Cool idea. I think the biggest thing to understand here is that the penalty is much to harsh to make using this regularly profitable, so using the Octopus is very much situational. I think that's a good thing; an effect that's as flexible as this one shouldn't be your default strategy. Of course, if my hand is Smithy-Smithy-Smithy-Gold-Province, I'll take 4 Debt to play a Worker's Village from the supply any day. And there are many other edge cases where this could come in relevant. Being very edge-casy may be a problem for an Action card, but it's a good place to be for a Way. I also like that it's limited to once per turn.
Being powerful but highly situational seems just about perfect for a Way. And I foresee some difficult decisions here -- do you play an early Witch if there's no way to get rid of the curse, thereby nuking your entire turn and maybe weakening your next one?
I'm not sure the wording is optimal. It does address the recursion thing, but it seems a bit lengthy, and I think you could misunderstand this as allowing you to play a 3$P card for 3 debt. I'm also not sure that the 'up to 5$' limitation is needed, given that the penalty is as harsh as it is.
Finalist
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Wicked Village -- pubby
Very cool! I like that the penalty is 'discard your hand' rather than 'end your turn'; this makes it more reasonable to use in normal decks.
One thing that makes this hard to use is that the number is 7. This means you can't get into a stable mode of 'draw your deck every turn, play 6 sins during the draw phase, play the final sin after the payoff', unless you really get seven of them or have Throne Rooms. You can't even play the same number of sins every turn since 7 is a prime number. How Wicked!
I'd really like to try this. It sounds super fun. It also scores high on the elegant-o-meter.
(PS: I wrote all the above before reading that it was 'end your turn' initially. Good change.)
Finalist
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Seedy Village -- Xen3k
This is somewhat similar to Fickle Festival, but I like the execution more.
To avoid the penalty, you will have to play exactly two terminals per Seedy Village (plus one for your initial Action; spending or keeping Villagers won't help you. If you fail to do that, the penalty is no joke. This triggers for each village separately, so if you play three, you get three ruins.
I think it's pretty cool, but also very swingy, and it's your bad luck that I'm generally not a fan of super swingy cards. However, do I think it's very elegant, and it's another card that narrowly misses Finalist.
As far as powerlevel goes, it's definitely high upside and high downside. Overall probably quite strong; the upper part is just so so good. It's a nice touch that Ruins can be used to consume excess Villagers.
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Sentinel -- gambit05
So, this is 'Discard the top 3 cards of your deck; at the start of your next turn, +3 Cards and +3 Debt' with upside -- the upside being that you can choose to leave strong cards on top of your deck, but at the cost of drawing fewer cards next turn. It's worth pointing out that discarding cards is quality-neutral, so the baseline is 'no sifting' and you get to 'purchase' sifting at the cost of card disadvantage. That's kind of interesting, just because I don't know any other card that does this.
I do think it feels a bit unintuitive that you draw for the cards you discard rather than the ones you topdeck, but I don't know how the same effect could have been achieved otherwise.
Unfortunately for you, I strongly agree with faust that the fail-state is a problem. To address what you said to him in response:
There are a lot of deck inspection cards around and to my knowledge none of them has a backup function for the case that the deck is (nearly) empty.
The thing is, this is not deck inspection, it's draw with some optional inspection. This is akin to a Hunted Woods not working if you've drawn your deck, and I imagine that to feel really awful when it happens. I also don't think any official draw-for-next turn card has this property. Harvest is payoff with that property, and I do think it's a problem for Harvest, too. (Not often talked about just because Harvest is so weak anyway.) Although, the fact that you play this after you get to buy cards is a mitigating factor.
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Freak -- Aquila
A card playing 5$s with the restriction that each card played with Freak cannot be played again afterwards, neither via Freak nor the usual way.
It's a neat idea for sure. However, I expect it to be an auto-buy most of the time. The reason is that most dominion boards have at least one Action card that is not competitive with the primary strategy, yet adding a cantrip is so powerful that almost everything becomes super strong. For example, suppose there is Navigator on the board, a card that you would ordinarily just ignore entirely. Well, with Freak it becomes a cantrip +2$ that also has some potential sifting on top. This is Grand Market powerlevel. And the peanlty -- zero, given that you're not interested in Navigator anyway.
That said, this is not a terrible thing if true, and it may offer some interesting decisions about whether you want to buy a medium-ish card, or rather avoid it to reap the benefits with Freak.
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Naive Entrepreneur -- fika monster
On first play, this gains a a card costing up to 3$, probably a cheap action or a Silver. On second play, it probably gains a 5$ Action. On third play, it probably gains a Province, but each other player gains a card costing 4$ to their hand. Then, repeat.
This one is tough to evaluate. The only official card that just makes Provinces by itself that I can think of is Rebuild. Compared to Rebuild, this has some significant advantages (does something on the first two plays, doesn't require Victory cards) and disadvantages (doesn't cycle, can't choose to remove Provinces from the supply by remodeling Province). However, since it's also non-Terminal and costs 4$, a rush of buying it whenever you can and gaining Provinces whenever you can will probably be quite strong. In fact, I worry that it's oppresively strong -- you need only play it twelve times to get 4 Provinces, and this should be doable before many decks can really take off. Making it cost 4$ rather than 3$ was certainly a wise choice.
You may not have thought of a Rebuild-style approach as the way to use this card at all. However, I suspect that using i differently is not competitive. The penalty is significant, deliberately not getting a Province is tough, and if it's correct to buy one Naive Entrepreneur to gain Provinces, it's almost certainly correct to get as many of them as possible. There is no 'green a little bit' strategy.
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Wanderer -- anordinaryman
Neat! This is exactly the kind of design I was envisioning with the theme. (As by your disclaimer, I'm evaluating it as a stand-alone.)
This seems very strong on first glance. However, it's somewhat tricky to use. The problem is that each new Wanderer turns all of your existing Wanderers into moats, so you cannot get by without villages -- and if you do buy Villages to support them, you're building a pretty inefficient engine with the upside of suddenly having a ton of free Actions. You need to have a plan about how to use those Actions if you want this to be worth it.
Another way to do it might be be with guaranteed +Actions like Fishing Village. If you have exactly 4 FV and play 2 each turn, you could support an arbitrary number of Wanderers while buying one new one per turn.
While I can't predict exactly how it would play out, I think this is a cool design. I like cards that make you plan ahead in novel ways.
Finalist
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Chancellor -- majiponi
A fixed Chancellor! This is quite strong -- a terminal Gold with +buy is no joke, and the discarding ability is, in fact, quite useful (just itself not competitive with what other +2$ terminals can do).
I'm not quite sure why this doesn't just have the debt as part of its cost? The primary difference is that it interacts with remodeling differently. Either way, I think this is a solid design. I don't really have any complaints.
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Businessman -- mathdude
Some debate over this one. As you may or may not know, I'm a balance skeptic, as-in, I don't buy that balance is itself something worth caring about. It can be an issue if a card is oppressive, like Rebuild, and being excessively weak is necessarily an issue since that makes a card unusable. However, being very strong can be fine: Fishing Village and Spice Merchant are extremely busted, but no-one complaints because they're support cards with diminishing returns.
This is also a support card. Moreover, it also has diminishing returns because of the in-built self-limiting effect. This means it can't ruin the game, no matter how strong it is. At worst, it takes strategy out of the opening turns if you always buy it.
With that all said, I think this is a neat way to design a sifter. It has the unique property that (unless you can pay off debt during your turn) it only gives you a limited amount of total sifting before it becomes too bad to be worth using. It has some added swinginess if you draw too many at once, but at least you can always choose to discard further Businessmen with your initial Businessman. Overall, solid.
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Indebted Blacksmith -- JW
Much like Royal Blacksmith, Indebted Blacksmith is also one of the worst things you could buy early on. (Which establishes a nice theme.) Since the value of cards and Actions compared to Debt increases with the strength of your deck, this is a card that only gets worth buying later in the game.
... however, the catch is that the card is an unconditional +3 Cards. As such, it may well be your only key to an engine, in which case you will have to buy it early-ish, even when it's still much worse than a Smithy. Also an interesting touch.
Pretty cool. This was definitely one where thinking more about it made me like it more. Alas, there can only be four Finalists so I had to retract the title.
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Verdict:
#Approaching Englightenemnt: Disappearing Village by mxdata
#Close to Enlightenment: Wanderer by anordinaryman
#Almost Enlightened: Way of the Octopus by Timinou
#Fully Enlightened...
Wicked Village by pubby! |
Author
Topic: Weekly Design Contest #111: Chasing Enlightenment (Read 10631 times)