Wall of text incoming!
First, the general stuff about the set.
If it wasn’t clear already, the theme of the set is
mutual benefit. You’ve got the standard +1 card, the Bishop drawback, the Vault drawback, and then some odder drawbacks like Boutique.
The side theme is
number manipulation. I’ll be honest and say that the side theme came about entirely by accident, but it’s a really awesome accident for reasons I won’t divulge. Jewels divides by 2. Weather Factory adds 4. Iron Pony Competition compares cost. Cutie Mark counts cards. And Science has “2 = silver, 2 more = gold.”
Because of all the card draw, this set is fast. Like, a 14 turn game average fast. Because of this, although on the surface it’s all friendly and about cards that help out all players, in practice it is relentlessly quick and very rewarding of tight play. If you mess up, you don’t get much of a chance to get back in the game.
The card draw also has a side effect of increasing the value of +Buy. Now, +Buy is still really important in regular Dominion, but in here it is even more so. When you start essentially playing with 7 card hands, you start consistently getting >$8. If one player doesn’t pick up +buy, the extra cards might as well not matter after a point. As part of an effort to combat this, Dear Princess Celestia and Science were added as ways to deal with extra cards.
There’s a lot of flavor in the set, but it’s reliant on actually watching the show, so I won’t go too in-depth on it.
Finally, the set closely follows the Base Set cost distribution. This led to some tighter design constraints, but the set plays better for it.
Now, onto Card by Card design history.
Dear Princess Celestia This was added when I realized the set didn’t have a sifter. So here’s a Cellar variant. Entered set as is. Personally, I like how much the drawback fits the card: you sift, but so do your opponents. I’m making the wording less ambiguous.
Elements of Harmony This should be buffed, but right now I can’t think of good alternative. It has a problem in that you need to rush Friendship to make it worthwhile, but you don’t want to rush this card because it’s a terminal Copper and that’s horrible. Maybe I’ll increase the friendship and get rid of the +$1. I don’t know.
Workhorse Oh, this card. This card has been a problem for a while. This started out as “Choose 1: 2 cards, 2 actions, $2, 2 buys.” It was really unsatisfying, because you either got a disappearing Village or a weak terminal you didn’t want in the first place.
So, I changed it to “Choose 2: 2 cards, 2 actions, $2, 2 buys. Each opponent draws a card.” and added the Friendship clause. BAD CALL. Horribly broken. The +Buy meant you could pick up a ton really easily, and then you kept doing +2 Cards +2 Actions, +2 Cards +$2, rinse and repeat with some +Buy thrown it. It was awful. If both players rushed Workhorse, the game ended on turn 7. If one player rushed it and the other didn’t, the Workhorse player would have 5 Provinces by turn 9. I tried raising the cost to $3, but that didn’t help. After a while, I realized it was the +Cards and the +Buy that made it so problematic, so they got nerfed. The current card is the result. It’s still plenty good, but not game-breaking. It’s also incredibly fun.
Iron Pony Competition This was originally a $4 card, with +1 Card +2 Actions, +$1 if you are the iron pony. This was pretty boring, as you’d just pick it up if you needed a village and the +$1 was just a small bonus. This swapped costs with a $3 card that I’ll get to later, and it was changed to the current card. One turn Fishing Village or Bazaar? Not as good as Fishing Village, but Fishing Village is darn good.
Jewels This originally had you reveal a card instead of trash it. This was pretty much impossible to balance. High variance, worth lots of money but generally only after the first Province, no thinking involved. Just auto-pilot playing. So I changed it to trash. After doing some more testing, it’s now far too weak. Should give +$1, and I’m changing it accordingly.
Parasprite If no one picks it up, then everything’s fine. But as soon as someone takes one, they start multiplying and…well, then you have a problem with infestations and terminal collisions. That’s why it’s an attack btw, after a point you really don’t want these. There’s some interesting depth to this card. Early Parasprites will absolutely wreck engines. However, the longer you take the less effect they have, and against BM Parasprites don’t hurt nearly as much. And if the engine player can get their deck to work, they can start bombarding you back with Parasprites while maintaining a slim deck, which makes any engines of yours less feasible. I still haven’t figured this card out.
Stew Oh look everyone’s tossing their cards into the pot. Kinda like a Steward. It's good enough for starting engines, and later on you can still play it for $1 and not trash anything if you have to. It might not need the trash card drawback, not sure on this yet.
Boutique This used to cost $3, and also gave out Friendship. Way too good. Switched costs with IPC, removed Friendship, and then it was fine. It looks like a Coppersmith, but it’s secretly a Merchant Ship. Think about it.
Cutie Mark Oh no it’s the bully card! This used to not have the +2 Cards, but also didn’t give cards to the players who gained Curses. Oh, and it costed $5. The problem being that in 2 player it was bad, and in multiplayer it looked scary. So I added the +cards to make it a bit more forgiving. I’m actually really pleased with how this turned out. It’s questionably strong, especially in multiplayer, but then all Cursers are. Still, it’s its own Moat. And that’s iffy, because it means that you need to pick it up to defend against it, and as you gain Curses the odds of blocking it goes down. Compare to Sea Hag: Sea Hag is 4 card hand for you, 4 card hand next turn for opponent. Cutie Mark is 6 card hand for you, 6 card hand for opponent.
DiggerUsed to be “+$1, +$1 for each Digger in your discard pile.” This was kinda boring, especially once Hinterlands came out and it had to compare itself to Fool’s Gold. So I changed it to “dig” for good Treasure. I’m changing it to make it closer to my intentions. Now you name a treasure you want on top. So you could play it as a +$1 Chancellor on a treasure, which is the card I actually wanted to make.
Earth Pony The flavor behind this was about preferring cheaper things. In practice the “drawback” It’for having a $5 cost in hand is pretty much the same (and maybe a bit better) than a third card. Really, this is just a filler card to add more viable BM strategies. When you draw so many cards, good BM strategies start getting rarer, so this helps with that.
Pegasus I just wanted a Monument allegory
Ponyville Used to have the “Cursed Scroll” effect: name a card, reveal a card at random from your hand, get bonus if the revealed card has the same name. And just like Cursed Scroll this triggered way too often. So now it’s a Wishing Well, although I’m considering changing it to a self-Spy.
Satchel Inspired by Druidic Satchel from M:tG. It’s random, but all the effects are reasonable. Either a Village ($3 cost), a +1 Card +1 Action +$1 ($4 cost), or a +3 Cards ($4 cost). There’s some cool stuff here: if you reveal an Action, you’re guaranteed to have the actions to play it. If you reveal a Victory, you’re guaranteed one dead card, which helps weaken the +3 Cards.
Showboater This card used to be “+5 Cards, discard 4 cards” Entirely different! Also horribly broken. Showboater-BM = 13 turns for 4 Provinces. Waaaay too fast. Changed it into the weird Thief spinoff see here, except instead of you gaining both cards, you gained one, and your opponent gained the other, and if only one non-Victory card was there you had to gain it. Which was way too wordy for my tastes, and wasn’t easy to grok. So now only you gain the cards. The old version is why this is still an attack, but it really isn’t. It’s definitely weak. Might change to “you may gain the card”, but on the other hand I sort of want there to be one spectacularly bad card.
Unicorn Entered as is, moving on.
Weather Factory Entered late when I needed a gainer. Luckily it worked out. Still feels awesome to play this naming 2 to gain a Gold. This used to not have the non-Victory clause, but it was too good.
Cloudsdale Yeah yeah it’s a Wharf. It’s very good, but it’s intentionally good. Can’t remember exactly who said it, but it’s okay to design strong cards if you want to encourage people to play a certain way.
Fruit Punch I really really tried to not make it a Minion variant, but in the end the Minion route was the cleanest route. All my other tries weren’t nearly as good.
Grand Galloping Gala Used to be Festival with +1 Card for everybody, including you. No buy restriction. It was, well, a Festival, except a bit worse. The set had too many Villages, so this was changed to look more like a Grand Market. I mean, they share the word Grand, come on. It’s high class! You need some good money to get in here. You know, like a Terminal Silver + 1 Gold. You’re normally picking up Provinces by this point, it’s not really worth going for unless you’ve got an engine.
Safe Compare to Treasury. Worse early, better late. It’s also where the name came from. Balanced, boring, but it fit.
Science! This originally had the “trash Victory for Gold” Transmute effect. Alchemy turns into Science! If you didn’t trash a Victory you gained a Silver. Was bad, so changed to gain in Hand and added Bishop drawback. Was too good, and too many trashers in the set, so changed to the current version. It’s nowhere near as good as it looks. Think of it this way: by the time you get a Science!, your hands are going to be $4+ a lot of the time, with at most 1 Victory card. So Science for Silver is +$2 +1 Buy if you’re lucky, and Science for Gold is about +$2. All in all, it’s not that good unless you’ve got a lot of cards to burn.
Sweet Apple Acres Similar to Lab and Governor, similar power level, moving on.
Canterlot This was originally “+2 Cards for every friendship token you have. Each opponent gets +1 Card for each friendship token they have.” After I realized making a card reliant on other cards was a bad idea, it got changed to the current version. (Elements of Harmony at least gives you friendship for playing it.) This intentionally doesn’t have +Buy. The point is that it’s excessive to the point of being unpractical. Adding a +Buy would make it both practical and too strong. Buy double Province, opponent can only buy single Province? No thank you.
Rebirth This card is…interesting. It has some rules headaches, but I still really like the whole Phoenix idea. Think of it as “Trash one card for every turn that has passed.” That’s not quite true in a +Buy game, but it’s close enough. That 10 cards is pretty tight, especially if you want to maintain an economy while greening.
Final notes:
The coolest combo (and I’m kinda sad no one found it) is Weather Factory/Fruit Punch. Play a +Actions, play Weather Factory naming 7438219847, gain a card (usually a +Buy if there is one), then play Fruit Punch and draw your entire deck. If you gained a +Buy, now you can play it. As long as you track your opponent’s deck well, you can do more with your entire deck than he/she can.
Earth Pony and Ponyville effects used to be switched. I liked the idea of the three main towns costing $4, $5, $6 in order of wealth and all being terminal card draw. Dominion “Village = +actions” flavor overrode that idea.
All the three pony races (Earth Pony, Unicorn, Pegasus) cost $4. And at one point I wanted them to all be engine components, but I scrapped that idea.
There used to be a VP for Friendship alternate Victory card that was always in play if a Friendship is Magic! card was in play. I cut it because it was too much of a headache to balance. When Friendship is worth it, you pick up the alternate Victory and never end the game. You just keep playing Pegasus and get way too much VP. Even Vineyard incentivizes you to buy Actions. When Friendship isn't worth it it's a dead card. It just didn't work.
Anyways, if you actually read this entire thing, holy crap you’re insane. People generally estimated power levels correctly, with only a few errors. I'm going to add some templating fixes + some card changes I mentioned above.
