(Note: after feedback from Timinou and segura I have rearranged this to hopefully be more clear; nothing has substantively changed.)
For the Season 2 Finale,
you need to submit two designs, each with at least one mechanic. One design needs to be based around
a Kingdom card pile and the other a
landscape.
For the
Kingdom card pile design, the only requirement is that it
must incorporate at least one of the mechanics from Season 2 (Weeks 11-19) that is not used in the landscape design. Feel free to submit a regular, 10 (or 8/12) card plie, or to use any official (or unofficial) mechanics that jigger with pile size and makeup: split piles, extra cards (like Port or Rats), or even mixed piles (like Castles or Knights--but be warned, with these there is a serious risk of losing points in the simplicity category).
Your
landscape design also
needs to incorporate a Season 2 Mechanic not used in your Kingdom pile design. If your landscape is an Act or an Edict, you have already met this requirement. But you could also make an Event that Queues or a Project that is affected by the Seasons mat.
As a reminder, here are the Fan Mechanics featured in
Season 2:
Season 2
Week 11: Acting Sideways
Week 12: High on your own Supplier
Week 13: Et Factum Est Ita
Week 14: 'Tis the Season
Week 15: Level Up
Week 16: We Only Take Card, No Cash
Week 17: Idle Hands
Week 18: From A to B
Week 19: Join the Queue
Feel free to support either of your designs (or both) with additional cards (non-Supply piles, Heirlooms, etc.) or landscapes (Artifact, States, etc.); your submission will still qualify if the Mechanic is used in the supporting card/landscape. For example, you could submit an Action card which gains an Artifact that Queues cards or an Event which gains a non-Supply card with the Season type. I'm not putting any limit on the number of these, but simplicity is one of the factors on which I am judging, and if I have to learn what a dozen cards/landscapes do to understand how your card works, it will hurt you in that department.
Also, while you can use these to support your design, they can't be the core of the design itself. In the first example given above, the Artifact-gaining-Action-card could count just as your Kingdom card design, but the Artifact could not count as your landscape. I would count it (and judge it) as part of the design of your Kingdom card.
JudgingI will judge each of the designs based on my usual criteria, which include
Balance,
Playability,
Simplicity, as well as
use of the mechanic and staying within Dominion's
theme. I have previously summarized these as asking whether I would be excited to see the card as part of a Kingdom. Since I am asking for 2 designs, I will also be judging on how those designs work together. I would like to see some kind of synergy between the two designs, but more importantly, I would like to see them work together in a fun, balanced way.
Since this all will make scoring a lot more complex, I am actually going to score the submissions based on a specific criteria, and award points for each. I will not post the scores, but will be happy to message them to you privately as requested. I will give up to 40 points each for the individual designs, and 20 points for the interaction between the two designs (laid out in more detail below). The winner will be the highest overall score.
DeadlineBecause I am asking for two designs, I am going to expand the notion of a "week" for the contest, to include the next work week, along with the weekend before and after it. Therefore, the deadline for submissions will be the end of next weekend,
Sunday, September 19, 2021 at
11:59 p.m. Eastern Time (a.k.a. forum time). (That is Monday, September 20 at 03:45 UTC.)
I hope this is not too complicated, and that you all enjoy designing these. Let me know if you have any questions.
TL;DRDesign a Kingdom card pile and an landscape, each using at least one Season 2 mechanic not used by the other. The deadline is Sunday, September 19, 2021 at 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time (a.k.a. forum time).
BackstoryThis contest is based on an idea I had, which is this: while there is interesting self-synergy in some official cards (Minion comes immediately to mind) or other designs (split piles, Heirlooms, etc.), the most interesting interactions in Dominion are between different cards/piles/landscapes/etc.
Around Week 15, I started thinking about a Season 2 Finale, and I got a bit worried. We already had two mechanics (Acts and Edicts) which, by definition, had to be landscapes, and two more (Suppliers and Level cards) which, by their nature, had to be implement via cards (Supplier because they only work when in play, and Level because you need to put something on their pile). This meant that the only mechanic that (at the time) could pair with each other was Seasons. By contrast, in Season 1, every mechanic except one (Wonders), could interact in a single design with every other mechanic. That's 28 different potential pairs (plus a few of them--Worshippers, Conditions, Ice tokens, and maybe even Kin--could have worked with a Wonder). This problem has been mitigated significantly in Weeks 16 through 19, with mechanics that are much more flexible. Idle Hands or Route tokens can be dished out just as easily by Acts and Edicts as by Kingdom cards, and (as I will express when I get the chance to post all the cards I designed over the past week), I think Queuing may have the most design potential of all, and can easily combine with any other.
Nevertheless, an idea I had earlier in the season has stuck with me, and I am going to go with it. As I said above, the most interesting interactions in Dominion are not within a design (Minion's disappearing money helping its dtx; Patricians allowing for lots of Actions to be in play when you buy a Forum, then drawing it once its in your deck; Secret Cave staying in play 2 turns to help your chances of triggering Magic Lamp), they are between designs (Rats + Ritual; Tactician + Baths; Skulk + Cathedral; Treasure Map + Way of the Turtle).
Detailed Scoring CriteriaIndividual designs (40 points each)Relevance (10 points) -- Did you make good, interesting use the mechanic (or mechanics)?
Balance (10 points) -- Is design useful, but not overpowering (both in general and in a variety of Kingdoms)? Put another way, in what percentage of Kingdoms would both using it and not using it be part of a viable strategy?
Playability (10 points) -- Is the design fun to play and does it work in more than one type of deck in a variety of different Kingdoms?
Simplicity (5 points) -- Is the design easy to understand, and is it easy to play the card (and remember how it is played (this doesn't always mean fewer words; a card with lots of text that, once you understand it, can be easily and intuitively be played is better than one with four lines of text that is hard to resolve)?
Theme and creativity (5 points) -- Does the design's name/concept fit into the general theme of Dominion historically and have some connection to what the design actually does (including what the mechanic does)? (You may want to give an explanation here if you think there might be some ambiguity.) The last couple of points are available for particularly clever or creative titles, references, etc.
Interaction between the designsSynergies (5 points) -- Does the presence of one design enhances the play of the other (and how broadly does that work)?
General compatibility (15 points) -- Do the two designs, when considered as a unit meet the tests (especially Balance and Playability) from above? If they combine to substantially limit a common strategy or the use of a broad class of cards (e.g. Attacks, Durations), they will score very low. On the other hand, if the ways in which they work together are useful (but not too powerful) across a range of common strategies, all 15 points might be on the table.