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[Willvon]

I checked out the threads on variants for Alchemy on BGG.  There were a couple of discussions there about giving some kind of value to the Potion cost if you were to use the cards without Potions.  Admittedly, if you are going to buy Alchemy, it really doesn't make a lot of sense to try to make such a conversion.  Just play with Potions as it was designed.

Though I personally have Base Dominion, Intrigue, all of the other expansions, and will probably purchase future expansions, I have decided at this time not to purchase Alchemy.  However, I have some blank cards that I have put to use to create an Apprentice in my collection since it doesn't use potions.  I love the card when it comes up in our random decks.  There are a couple of other cards from Alchemy for which I would like to do the same thing, namely Vineyard and University.  Obviously Herbalist would be the easiest because it doesn't require Potion in its cost.  Perhaps I will do it also if I get more blanks with future expansions, but for now I am interested in the other two mentioned.  The problem lies in translating the cost of a Potion to a card value that doesn't include Potion in the cost.

I don't wish to cause a big controversy here.  I realize that some will feel that I should just buy Alchemy and use the Potions. If that is how you feel, you probably have an excellent point, but it won't change my mind as far as buying it right now.  However, if there are some of you willing to bear with me, I would appreciate any thoughts on my reasoning on how to translate the costs for the two cards.

First of all, a Potion costs $4, Silver costs $3, and Gold costs $6.  Since Silver is then worth $2 in buying power and Gold is worth $3, that would seem to put Potion as being a Treasure worth at best $2-1/2.  Obviously that is a ludicrous cost to try to translate over to a card.  But even if you consider it as being worth $3, that would mean Vineyard costs $3 to buy and University would cost $5.  Both of those costs seem to be too low when compared to other cards in the game.  If you make it worth $4, that is what you have to pay to obtain a Potion in the first place.  So I am looking as that as my starting point.  Now let’s consider the individual cards.

First, Vineyard: In Donald X's post about the Secret History of Alchemy, he mentioned that Vineyard was originally in the Base set and Gardens was in what became Alchemy with the costs switched.  That would indicate that $4 is an acceptable cost for Vineyard since that is what it would have been if it had remained in the Base game.  That fits with the $4 translation cost for Potion since a Vineyard normally costs $0 and 1 Potion.  So that all seems pretty straight forward.

Next, University: In the post “Combo: University/Watchtower/X” on this forum the point was made that with Potion in its cost, University is kept from being too crazy.  Certainly that would be a big issue if you translated the Potion cost to just $3 for University.  It would end up being a $5 card, which you could use to get multiple Universities and then use them for multiple purchases of other $5 cards.  However, if we apply the Potion cost as $4, then University now costs $6 to buy.  That would prevent someone from using it to get more Universities.  So it would seem that would be a good cost for it, but is there any reason to think that it is too powerful to be a $6 card?  On the other hand, $7 seems to be way too much for it, and would weaken it to an extreme.  So for me, it feels best to give it a cost of $6.

Any thoughts as to my reasoning or lack of it?

[timchen]

I would probably let Vineyard be a $5 card and same for the University.

I think it is okay for the University to gain themselves. At $6 I feel it is overpriced mainly due to the fact that they can then usually be bought after the second shuffle and the gaining ability is quite a bit weakened. Note that 2+P is almost guaranteed in your second shuffle.

On the other side, in a setup where it is unwise to get 10+ action cards to your deck, you should probably never bother Vineyard. Making them cost less does not change this. However, in the case where you can easily add extra actions to your deck, Vineyard can easily reach 4 or 5 VP. $5 would probably be on the cheap side, if you compare it to Fairgrounds.

[Kirian]

I'd place Uni at $5 with the other change:  You may gain an Action card other than University costing up to $5.

[ackack]

I don't think Vineyard can be a 4. Gainers + Vineyard become even stronger in that scenario, and given that Ironworks/Vineyard is already very, very tough to beat, I don't think that can be good.

[Deadlock39]

It sounds like most of the issues people are bringing up are related to being able to gain these cards without buying them.  I think Kirian's version of University, and a $3 or $4 Vineyards that you cannot gain directly without buying would work in most situations. 

Also, at the risk of getting more complicated, I might restrict them to one per turn because you almost never have 2 potions and a +buy (especially if Vineyards is at $3). 

Opening with University on a 2/5 start could be insane on some boards, so you might have an issue with that.

[Willvon]

Thanks to all of you for your suggestions.  I appreciate hearing the various points of view.  I hadn't thought about Vineyard as being that strong.  I guess I looked at it as being like Gardens, but if you compare it to Fairgrounds, that does put a different spin on it.

If anyone else has any thoughts on this, I would love to hear your opinion.

[krawhitham]

Just a comment about converting a potion cost card into coin cost. A potion costs $4 of course, but you also need to assign a value to the 'cost' of having a potion card in your deck.

Having to buy a potion card first means you can't buy card with a potion cost until at least turn 3. Then when you do draw your potion card there is no guarantee that you will have enough coin to buy the university (unlikey... but possible).

So in the past you would only be able to have a card with a potion cost in your hand by turn 5 at the very earliest. Add to this the 'cost' of waiting for your potion card to cycle through your deck to buy another alchemy card (or the cost of buying multiple potions).

[rinkworks]

I realize this is an old thread, but I was thinking about this issue the other day and realizing that Vineyards is the one potion-cost card that really *can't* be converted to a coin cost and retain its flavor.  The other potion-cost cards could be converted over and retain their flavor, even if they don't behave exactly the way they're intended to.  I'm satisfied that a $5 University with an "except University" clause is close enough to the real thing to play similarly.

But here's how a Vineyard game typically goes:  You buy some Potions, some gainers (Workshop/Ironworks), maybe a little money, and some starter actions, and then, once you're off, you basically buy a Vineyard every time a Potion comes up in your hand and an action every time it doesn't.  This allows the purchase of a Vineyard even with a hand as weak as Vineyard-Vineyard-Estate-Estate-Potion.  Then when you get some actual coins, you can buy actions.

But by costing Vineyard at $4 or $5 or so, you might have the right approximate coin-cost, but now a Vineyard-based game is completely different.  When your hand can afford a Vineyard, it can also afford an action, and perhaps vice-versa.  When it doesn't even generate enough cash to buy an action card -- possibly not even enough to buy an Estate -- you're dead in the water.  Basically Vineyards and the actions that power them up are competing for the same resources, whereas a true Vineyard game is about managing separate resources to get each piece of the puzzle.  That distinction defines the flavor of the whole game.

Thus, I wonder if a truer conversion of Vineyard to a non-Potion board would be to make it cost zero coins but require some relatively innocuous card to be present in your hand.  Make the cost of Vineyard, for example, a Pearl Diver.  Or a Curse.  Or a Duchy, though Duchies could swing a game all on their own, so probably that's a bad idea.  Perhaps the most accurate way to do the conversion is to pick a $4 treasure card (Quarry or Talisman fit the bill nicely) and pretend they're really Potions.

[Thisisnotasmile]

Vineyard used to be a $4 card. Gardens was a $0P card. They got switched just before Dominion was released but I'm sure if they were released that way you would not notice the difference.

[WanderingWinder]

Vineyard used to be a $4 card. Gardens was a $0P card. They got switched just before Dominion was released but I'm sure if they were released that way you would not notice the difference.

I would if the formula remained the same. I'm guessing the cards were different then than they are now, 'cause vineyards really goes with Alchemy's action-y theme much better than gardens. And my gut says it's much easier to get 3 actions than 10 cards. But maybe Donald knows better about these things than I do.

[rinkworks]

Vineyard used to be a $4 card. Gardens was a $0P card. They got switched just before Dominion was released but I'm sure if they were released that way you would not notice the difference.

But there always WAS a difference, is the point.  Both cards would have continued to play very differently from each other.  It doesn't really matter that Old Vineyard is more like New Gardens and Old Gardens like New Vineyard.  You got both types of game with either the old pair or the new pair.

By taking New Vineyard and changing it back into Old Vineyard, all you're really doing is duplicating New Gardens, with a couple of different nuances in the scoring.  Granted, those nuances might be quite significant -- but not nearly as significant as changing the costs does.  Neither Old Vineyard nor New Gardens can recreate the gameplay experience of Old Gardens or New Vineyard.

[Willvon]

Thanks for taking a fresh look at my question and providing some more food for thought.  Since I never played with Alchemy, I didn't fully appreciate the difference it makes to have to buy Potions until I started this thread. 

[chwhite]

I think the best way to convert Vineyards would be to have them cost $4, like Gardens (and Potion), but to add a clause that you can can only gain it by buying it in the buy phase.  No Ironworks, no Workshop, no Smugglers even, none of that.  It doesn't quite keep the entire flavor of having to manage two separate streams of currency ($$ for actions, Potions for the Vineyard), but it should come close.

I agree with the suggestion to cost University at $5 with a "you can't gain other Universities" clause, for similar reasons.

[sherwinpr]

Here's one possible rule, but not if it will be to anyone's liking: 

Every turn you have one free "virtual potion" that you may play during your buy phase (or Black Market phase), the purpose of which is toward buying the following cards; the virtual potion is not a card (so no contribution toward Horn of Plenty, and can be played even if you've discarded your hand from a Tactician--although this latter rule make it less Potion-like):

University ($5+P)
Vineyards ($4+P)

You may also modify Apprentice so it draws 4 cards for University and 2 for Vineyards as in the standard game.  Or just let it draw 5 for University and 4 for Vineyards (ignore the potion part of the text, as we could call this new virtual cost anything if we wanted, say "cows," "computers," or "euros").

Consequences:
Universities can only be Swindled into themselves.
Vineyards can only be Swindled into themselves.
Gainers can't be used to gain these, except that Vineyards can be upgraded/remade/remodeled/expanded into Universities, and you can gain these during an opponent's use of an Ambassador.
As a special case of the above, University can't gain itself.
Another special case is that an opponent's Saboteur won't let you gain these.
You cannot buy multiple Vineyards in a turn.
You cannot by multiple Universities in a turn.
You cannot buy a Vineyard and a University in a turn.
The cards are a little bit better with Forge/Salvager/Bishop, but this isn't a big deal, and you can use a further rule if it is.

[Loschmidt]

A possibility for vineyard;
____
Vineyard - $3

1VP per 3 actions (rounded down)
This card may only be purchased with coppers (and not gained through any other effect)
-----

The 'only purchased with coppers' penalty is something I've been toying with. I feel it has a similar effect to the penalty of buying a potion; you can't really have a nice lean deck if you want to reliably draw 3 coppers.

It has a bit of a rules clash with Workshop (and co.) hence the garbled qualifier in brackets.

[guided]

Coppers are not used to buy things; coins are! When you play a Copper it gives you 1 coin. Also since you're forbidding the card from being "gained" by other means, and there is nothing in Dominion called "purchasing", you should probably use the "buy" terminology.

Perhaps you meant to say: "You can't buy or gain this if you have fewer than 3 Coppers in play." That might be an adequate way to balance the card in the OP's situation where you simply cannot put a Potion pile on the table. (If you have a stack of Potion cards in your possession, or some blank cards that can stand in for them, really the best way to balance Vineyards is to just put the Potion cards on the table. No other Alchemy cards are needed to make Vineyards viable some reasonable percentage of the time.)

[dondon151]

Alternate idea: make it so that for cards costing a Potion, "during your buy phase, you may only buy 1 copy of this card per Silver in play." Obviously it doesn't bypass gaining, but it imposes a similar buying restriction using a card that costs close to Potion.

I suppose an easy way to implement the gaining restriction of Potion cards is to make them unable to be obtained during anything but the buy phase, e.g. "you may not gain this card except during the buy phase." That might create an issue with cards like Ambassador and Jester, though.

[Newcomer]

As for the "only gain during the buy phase" element, it might be more appropriate to use a split cost.  So, say, University could cost $5/$2P*, $5 during the buy phase and $2P at all other times.  That way its interactions with other cards such as remodel and ironworks would still work the same as in potion games.  You can still add a buying restriction of some sort to the $5 if that mimics having a potion in the deck better, as suggested by others.  Perhaps even something as off the wall as rolling a die or flipping a coin to see whether you can spend a phantom potion that turn..

[guided]

As for the "only gain during the buy phase" element, it might be more appropriate to use a split cost.

It might be even more appropriate to just leave it at the $2P cost (for University as an example), which is already thoroughly balanced. I do not think there is any need to de-Potionify costs for those who actually have Potion cards they can put on the table.

[Loschmidt]

"You can't buy or gain this if you have fewer than 3 Coppers in play."

Thank you guided, that very neatly summarises what I meant.

Any opinions of that kind of restriction?

[guided]

Any opinions of that kind of restriction?

I don't find it super compelling or anything, but it's probably pretty balanced.

[Thisisnotasmile]

"You can't buy or gain this if you have fewer than 3 Coppers in play."

Thank you guided, that very neatly summarises what I meant.

Any opinions of that kind of restriction?

You'd probably also have to discard 3 coppers from play when you buy the card, otherwise multiple buys are going to abuse this restriction.