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Author Topic: Interview with Donald X.  (Read 2127071 times)

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Donald X.

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #3150 on: June 22, 2016, 09:36:09 am »
+2

Did you discover any combos like Hermit/Market Square or Counting House/Travelling Fair before the community did? Are there other two card strategies you are surprised nobody found out about yet?
There necessarily have been both combos we knew about and combos we didn't. I mean of course we find some, and of course the community finds more.

Most combos are pretty blatant; if thinking about the card doesn't do the trick, seeing the combo on the table will. In general I wouldn't notice "oh now people have spotted this combo." Man sometimes they spot them after the preview. For any given two-card combo I thought of, my guess would be that someone has spotted it, but I wouldn't know for sure.

In the early days one exotic thing you could do was build a 5-card Throne / Remodel deck. I knew about it from when it was easier to spot, because 5-card Throne / Witch had been a thing (with more Curses, and various other differences). That Remodel deck isn't that good. But eventually someone who posted on BGG spotted it and talked about it.
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Seprix

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #3151 on: June 22, 2016, 11:55:30 am »
0

Have you ever tried making a 'pure' Reserve card? No Action - Reserve, just Reserve?
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werothegreat

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #3152 on: June 22, 2016, 11:59:06 am »
0

Have you ever tried making a 'pure' Reserve card? No Action - Reserve, just Reserve?

It would need a when-gain clause to put it on the mat. And then how would it ever get back on your mat?
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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #3153 on: June 22, 2016, 12:10:55 pm »
0

Have you ever tried making a 'pure' Reserve card? No Action - Reserve, just Reserve?

It would need a when-gain clause to put it on the mat. And then how would it ever get back on your mat?

I think Hireling was first one of those
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Seprix

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #3154 on: June 22, 2016, 12:22:01 pm »
0

Have you ever tried making a 'pure' Reserve card? No Action - Reserve, just Reserve?

It would need a when-gain clause to put it on the mat. And then how would it ever get back on your mat?

There are ways around that. It's really not as big an issue as you'd first think.
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LastFootnote

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #3155 on: June 22, 2016, 12:23:04 pm »
0

Have you ever tried making a 'pure' Reserve card? No Action - Reserve, just Reserve?

It would need a when-gain clause to put it on the mat. And then how would it ever get back on your mat?

I think Hireling was first one of those

No, Hireling was an Action-Reserve that needed to be played in order to get onto your mat.
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Donald X.

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #3156 on: June 22, 2016, 02:14:13 pm »
+6

Have you ever tried making a 'pure' Reserve card? No Action - Reserve, just Reserve?
No.

Mark Rosewater says "don't design something just to prove you can," and well I think he has that one wrong. Restrictions breed creativity, Mark! It's a fine thing to design something with some weird limit just to see how it goes. Maybe it will go great. But if it doesn't go well then you shouldn't, you know, publish it. So e.g. it was great to try to make a 2-mana planeswalker, in case it turned out great; they didn't need to publish it just because they'd made it. "Don't publish something just because you proved you could design it," that's how it should go.

Anyway I did not have any particular reason to try a pure Reserve card so I didn't. There was no special attraction there. I had plenty of good things to do with Reserve cards and focused on those.
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Hockey Mask

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #3157 on: June 22, 2016, 07:55:10 pm »
0

Pure Reserve that was put on the mat, pulled off and used once, clogged your hand the rest of the game sounds awesome. Mainly because I want to see what a card offers that would make me want to buy it.
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eHalcyon

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #3158 on: June 22, 2016, 08:49:31 pm »
0

Pure Reserve that was put on the mat, pulled off and used once, clogged your hand the rest of the game sounds awesome. Mainly because I want to see what a card offers that would make me want to buy it.

Doesn't sound that much different from pure Victory cards and weak cards with strong on-gain effects. The main difference would of course be the bonus effect can be delayed, but that flexibility means that it would have less raw power than the on-gain card.
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Hockey Mask

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #3159 on: June 23, 2016, 12:01:06 am »
0

I wouldn't tie it to victory points. Maybe you have to call two to activate.
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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #3160 on: July 01, 2016, 07:19:08 pm »
+1

Plain-jane vanilla cards have stood the test of time as being correctly priced, well-balanced, and used as benchmarks when comparing other cards of equal cost.  But other than Ruins, we haven't had one since Prosperity's Worker's Village.  (This depends on what you define as vanilla -- if discarding is vanilla, then Oasis; if trashing is, Junk Dealer; if coin tokens are, Candlestick Maker; etc.)  Do you think we will ever see a straight vanilla card again?  What would be needed to make such a card relevant in a new set?  Would it be a promo?
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Donald X.

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #3161 on: July 01, 2016, 07:36:04 pm »
+5

Plain-jane vanilla cards have stood the test of time as being correctly priced, well-balanced, and used as benchmarks when comparing other cards of equal cost.  But other than Ruins, we haven't had one since Prosperity's Worker's Village.  (This depends on what you define as vanilla -- if discarding is vanilla, then Oasis; if trashing is, Junk Dealer; if coin tokens are, Candlestick Maker; etc.)  Do you think we will ever see a straight vanilla card again?  What would be needed to make such a card relevant in a new set?  Would it be a promo?
If you count things like Candlestick Maker then maybe there could be another one; it would take me making another set with something that could use the +1 notation, and then having a reasonable vanilla-if-that-counts card to do, but those things are possible. If you count discarding and trashing somehow, sure, maybe there's another thing there that somehow hasn't happened. If you count Ruinses and Necropolis then maybe.

A pure original +'s vanilla kingdom card, probably not happening. The one chance it would have is "secretly the cost is a mechanic but we somehow aren't counting that," like debt (which did have vanilla cards for a bit). The problem is picking a set of things that aren't just redundant with or strictly better/worse than existing cards. The smaller numbers are covered; the bigger numbers are normally too expensive.

If "worth VP" counts then Empires had "double Harem" for a bit. As the bottom card of a split pile, another invisible complication.
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pacovf

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #3162 on: July 01, 2016, 09:18:24 pm »
+3

Plain-jane vanilla cards have stood the test of time as being correctly priced, well-balanced, and used as benchmarks when comparing other cards of equal cost.

I mean, it's because new cards are always compared to old vanilla cards beforehand, so I think you've got this backwards? If the original vanilla cards had been priced differently, then all the cards coming after them would have been different too.
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markusin

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #3163 on: July 01, 2016, 09:37:36 pm »
0

...

A pure original +'s vanilla kingdom card, probably not happening. The one chance it would have is "secretly the cost is a mechanic but we somehow aren't counting that," like debt (which did have vanilla cards for a bit). The problem is picking a set of things that aren't just redundant with or strictly better/worse than existing cards. The smaller numbers are covered; the bigger numbers are normally too expensive.

Lost City can fit this category, and that's only the second latest expansion.

Edit: Or you mean like literally no card text besides vanilla bonuses, which excludes cards like Peddler.
« Last Edit: July 01, 2016, 09:39:30 pm by markusin »
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Donald X.

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #3164 on: July 01, 2016, 10:17:14 pm »
+4

Plain-jane vanilla cards have stood the test of time as being correctly priced, well-balanced, and used as benchmarks when comparing other cards of equal cost.

I mean, it's because new cards are always compared to old vanilla cards beforehand, so I think you've got this backwards? If the original vanilla cards had been priced differently, then all the cards coming after them would have been different too.
Well, everything is tied to the basic cards. Copper / Silver / Gold were always like that (except for names); the vanilla cards were tweaked to work with them.
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Donald X.

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #3165 on: July 01, 2016, 10:18:29 pm »
+2

...

A pure original +'s vanilla kingdom card, probably not happening. The one chance it would have is "secretly the cost is a mechanic but we somehow aren't counting that," like debt (which did have vanilla cards for a bit). The problem is picking a set of things that aren't just redundant with or strictly better/worse than existing cards. The smaller numbers are covered; the bigger numbers are normally too expensive.

Lost City can fit this category, and that's only the second latest expansion.

Edit: Or you mean like literally no card text besides vanilla bonuses, which excludes cards like Peddler.
I meant no card text, noting that you can cheat with symbols e.g. the debt hexagon. I don't know what counts for Dingan.

Stuff like Lost City can be done as long as you can do anything.
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Co0kieL0rd

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #3166 on: July 02, 2016, 01:19:46 am »
0

It seems to me that some older cards would have worked better as events, e. g. Chancellor, Feast, Navigator (which already has an equivalent in Scouting Party) or Saboteur. If you had included events in every Dominion set starting with Base, would you have used their effects in events instead of cards?
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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #3167 on: July 02, 2016, 01:44:39 am »
+4

Plain-jane vanilla cards have stood the test of time as being correctly priced, well-balanced, and used as benchmarks when comparing other cards of equal cost.  But other than Ruins, we haven't had one since Prosperity's Worker's Village.  (This depends on what you define as vanilla -- if discarding is vanilla, then Oasis; if trashing is, Junk Dealer; if coin tokens are, Candlestick Maker; etc.)  Do you think we will ever see a straight vanilla card again?  What would be needed to make such a card relevant in a new set?  Would it be a promo?

Well, think about it - Villa existing means that a card with just +2 Actions, +1 Buy, + would be kind of anticlimactic now.  There are a few cards with vanilla bonuses being their main schtick, just with some penalty or other snag on them - Lost City and Encampment you get purely for the +2 Cards/+2 Actions, the rest of the card is to make that harder to get, whereas Junk Dealer, though it's mainly vanilla bonuses, is bought purely for the trashing effect - and they kind of inch out the design space for a pure vanilla card with their stats.  And isn't it better that way?  Aren't Hunting Grounds and Royal Blacksmith cooler to have than just vanilla +4/+5 cards?  And having just a pure vanilla card means you can't put a bonus on a card like that and have it cost the same - basically the Village problem.  Since Vanillage costs , Farming Village has to cost .  If Vanillage were never made (not that I'm suggesting it shouldn't have been, it's clearly an important card to have), maybe Farming Village could have cost .
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Donald X.

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #3168 on: July 02, 2016, 02:50:05 pm »
+3

It seems to me that some older cards would have worked better as events, e. g. Chancellor, Feast, Navigator (which already has an equivalent in Scouting Party) or Saboteur. If you had included events in every Dominion set starting with Base, would you have used their effects in events instead of cards?
In this alternate universe, do I also know how things turn out? I mean uh. I wouldn't make Feast today, but I did back then, and was happy with it. I wouldn't have been thinking, "oh man maybe there's some different way to do this." In fact a lot of questions along the lines of "why did this early card do things this way" are answered "that was what I started with and I never felt a need to change it." If I'd had Events early maybe I would have saved them for one set's thing; if I decided to put them in every set, they'd be whatever other effects, they wouldn't replace existing cards, which as far as I knew were already doing good work I had no reason to throw away.

Instead we can consider, what would I do now, knowing how things turned out. Here though one thing is that I don't have any special need for a particular card to exist; I don't need Event-style Feast, I can just not do Feast. Maybe some bad cards work well as somewhat-related Events; it would be a case-by-case thing that I sure don't need to work out in this thread, if I ever want to do them.

And there's that: if Event-style Feast is cool then it's still on the table now, nothing's stopping me.
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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #3169 on: July 02, 2016, 02:52:14 pm »
0

Isn't advance similar to event style feast?
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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #3170 on: July 02, 2016, 06:56:52 pm »
0

And there was a Chancellor-style Event outtake in Adventures, as stated in the secret history. Chancellor existing sure isn't what killed it.
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Seprix

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #3171 on: July 02, 2016, 07:43:01 pm »
0

And there was a Chancellor-style Event outtake in Adventures, as stated in the secret history. Chancellor existing sure isn't what killed it.

That just sounds terrible unless it gave another bonus along with it.
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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #3172 on: July 03, 2016, 12:01:51 am »
+1

And there was a Chancellor-style Event outtake in Adventures, as stated in the secret history. Chancellor existing sure isn't what killed it.

That just sounds terrible unless it gave another bonus along with it.
That sounds great for two and it gives you a buy. Trigger all the shuffles and don't care.
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LastFootnote

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #3173 on: July 03, 2016, 12:16:52 am »
+3

And there was a Chancellor-style Event outtake in Adventures, as stated in the secret history. Chancellor existing sure isn't what killed it.

That just sounds terrible unless it gave another bonus along with it.
That sounds great for two and it gives you a buy. Trigger all the shuffles and don't care.

It cost $1 and (I think) gave +1 Buy. But it didn't really add enough gameplay. It was mostly just: do you have a spare $1? If so, buy it.
« Last Edit: July 03, 2016, 12:18:17 am by LastFootnote »
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Donald X.

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #3174 on: July 03, 2016, 12:17:42 am »
+3

And there was a Chancellor-style Event outtake in Adventures, as stated in the secret history. Chancellor existing sure isn't what killed it.

That just sounds terrible unless it gave another bonus along with it.
That sounds great for two and it gives you a buy. Trigger all the shuffles and don't care.

It cost $1 and (I think?) gave +1 Buy. But it didn't really add enough gameplay. It was mostly just: do you have a spare $1? If so, buy it.
Confirmed.
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