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Author Topic: Vanilla Card Combos  (Read 2226 times)

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rinkworks

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Vanilla Card Combos
« on: September 06, 2011, 11:24:11 am »
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Continuing the Vanilla Cards post, I thought it would be interesting to look at all the possible combinations of vanilla cards and see what space is left.  There is also this, from Donald X.'s essay on rule complexity, to keep in mind:

Quote
Some of the atoms have parameters, but not all simple combinations of atoms with parameters are worth doing. Most of them are either utter duds ("+1 Card"), too strong to cost low enough to get to buy them before the game's over ("+6 Cards"), or too close to an existing card ("+2 Actions +2 Buys +$2" is too close to Festival). A bunch are randomly different in a really uninteresting way ("+2 Cards +$1"). At one point I made a chart of all of the combinations of pluses to possibly consider, and figured out which ones I thought were good enough to actually do. There weren't many.

Skip to the end if you just want to read my conclusions.  Anyway, here's the list of combinations:

+Cards

Smithy has this pretty covered.  +2 Cards is too weak to price without an additional bonus (see: Moat) and well-used in other cards anyway (Witch, Ghost Ship, Followers).  +4 Cards is probably balanced at $5 but boring in light of Envoy and Council Room (though Council Room is closer to a separate item in this list).

+Actions

+2 Actions is too weak to price.  +3 Actions is probably the only doable card here and was proposed in another thread, but as intriguing as the idea is, I'm skeptical about its practical use.  Can't know without playtesting though, which I haven't done.

+Buys

+1 Buy is too weak on its own to price -- perhaps even at $1.  I thought of a "+3 Buys" card, but I suspect it would be dominating on several boards, useless on most, and interesting on all too few.

+$

Terminal treasure works, but it's boring.  A card offering +$3 is probably perfectly balanced at $5, but what does it add to the game?  Merchant Ship is probably as close as you can get to this idea and still be interesting.

+Cards/+Actions

Pretty sure the design space here is exhausted.  You need to do better than +1 of each for the card to do anything, but +2 of each (e.g., a Level 2 City), is dominating.  You'd have to price it at $6 or $7, and then many games with it would boil down to a race to exhaust the pile.  Then the winner of the race wins the game.

The only combinations in between are Village and Laboratory, which already exist.

+Cards/+Buys

Council Room isn't quite a vanilla card, but it's close enough to cover a lot of this design space.  +3 Cards/+1 Buy is probably balanced at $5 but would be quite uninteresting on a board with Council Room.  Worse, it would suffer badly in comparison to Torturer and Rabble, priced at the same level.  The problem here is that, since the difference between $3 and $4 is small, there is room for vanilla Village and various village-with-a-bonus cards.  But the cost difference between $4 and $5 is larger, making it impossible to price smithy-with-a-bonus cards unless that bonus is huge.

The most promising card in this category is +2 Cards/+1 Buy, priced at $2.  Seems like that one would work fine.  I wouldn't mind having slightly more frequent sources of +Buy, too.

+Cards/+$

This combination is interesting at first glance, but I'm not convinced it is.  The problem is that, in the absence of extra actions, the benefit you get from the +Cards translates mostly into $ anyway.  (The exception being when you have special treasures, like Contraband or Talisman, in your deck.)  So most of the time you're not really getting two different things; rather, you're getting the same thing from two different places.

+2 Cards/+$1 is probably balanced at $4.  +1 Card/+$2 is probably closer to $4.5.  But they're probably not interesting enough to use.

+Actions/+Buys

Non-terminal sources of +Buy are rare enough that one of these might be worth having.  +Buys are most useful in strong engines, and in strong engines you'd rather not have your +Buys be terminals.  To date, Worker's Village and Market provide cantrip sources of +Buy, but only Festival gives you non-terminal +Buy at the expense of a card slot.

However, there isn't much design space here.  +1 Action/+1 Buy and +2 Actions/+1 Buy are pretty much the only two cards worth considering.  The former is too weak to price, while the latter is probably fine at $2.  But you'd still probably only use it in the absence of most other sources of extra actions.  Probably it's preferable to Shanty Town, Native Village, and University sometimes.  But often not.

+Actions/+$

This combination, as was pointed out to be in the earlier thread, is basically treasure.  You can do things like Throne Room it in exchange for the hazard of drawing it dead.  But it's still basically just treasure.

+Buys/+$

This is a natural combination:  provide extra cash, with an extra buy so you can make better use of it.  The problem here is that there isn't much design space, and what little there is has been used.  +1 Buy/+$1 is weaker than an Herbalist and insufficiently different from it anyway.  +1 Buy/+$2 is a Woodcutter.  +1 Buy/+$3 would have to cost $6 (it's a Gold that provides a +Buy but which you have to spend an action on).  It's probably quite workable there, but the card wouldn't do anything that isn't already covered in similar ways by other cards.

+Cards/+Actions/+Buys

There are probably only three possible cards here.  Worker's Village is one of them.  +1 Card/+1 Action/+1 Buy would be balanced at $2, but lots of times Worker's Village gets used in the exact same way this card would.  However, I think a "Worker's Laboratory" -- +2 Cards/+1 Action/+1 Buy -- would be kind of a fun $6 card sometimes.

+Cards/+Actions/+$1

Bazaar, Peddler, Treasury, and Conspirator have this space thoroughly covered, even though only one of them is a pure vanilla card.  Pretty sure there aren't any pure vanilla cards left to do here.

+Cards/+Buys/+$1

This space is unused so far.  It has some of the problems I described in the "+Cards/+$" section, but I think throwing in the +Buy makes those problems less important.  +1 of each could work at $3.  Add a card or a coin, and it goes to $5.  That's probably the extent of what's possible here.  Although I like this particular mix, I don't see a particular instance of it that intrigues me.

+Actions/+Buys/+$

Seems like there should be more design space here than there is, but Festival pretty much has it nailed down.  +1 Action/+1 Buy/+$2 could be interesting at $4, though.  +2 Actions/+1 Buy/+$1 might also work at $3.

+Cards/+Actions/+Buys/+$

Market and Grand Market fit here.  Since Market, priced at $5, is the weakest possible card in this category, anything better would have to be priced at $6 or more.  So that limits the design space pretty severely.  A Market Village (+1 Card/+2 Actions/+1 Buy/+$) priced at $6 would be neat.  But when you've got $6 to spend, you're probably past the point of needing a Village card.

Conclusions

Not surprisingly, Donald X. was right.  There aren't many interesting possible vanilla cards, and since the base set got the lion's share, we probably won't be seeing many more.  But there are still a couple of holes left.  If we do see any more vanilla cards, I would not be surprised if they're in this list:

Remaining Interesting Vanilla Cards

(Note that you wouldn't want all of these, as some infringe on the design space of others.)

1. +2 Cards/+1 Action/+1 Buy.  Cost: $6.
2. +1 Action/+1 Buy/+$2.  Cost: $4.
3. +2 Actions/+1 Buy/+$1.  Cost: $3.
4. +2 Cards/+1 Buy.  Cost: $2.
5. +2 Actions/+1 Buy.  Cost: $2.

Possibly, but probably not:

6. +1 Buy/+$3.  Cost: $6.
7. +2 Cards/+1 Buy/+$1.  Cost: $5.
8. +1 Card/+1 Buy/+$2.  Cost: $5.
9. +1 Card/+1 Buy/+$1.  Cost: $3.
10. +1 Card/+2 Actions/+1 Buy/+$1. Cost: $6.
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DG

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Re: Vanilla Card Combos
« Reply #1 on: September 06, 2011, 11:54:49 am »
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The cellar is a vanilla card with plenty of variants left. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a village style card in a future expansion along the lines of +2 actions, discard cards, draw cards. A sort of combined village/cellar.
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rinkworks

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Re: Vanilla Card Combos
« Reply #2 on: September 06, 2011, 11:59:36 am »
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I guess it depends on how you define "vanilla."  I'm taking strictly in terms of fixed-value plusses to cards, actions, buys, or $, with no other qualifications.  That would exclude Cellar, but you're not wrong -- I just didn't define my terms.

I'd consider Monument a vanilla card, though, and if there was any chance of seeing another card that uses VP tokens, I'd probably have analyzed those combinations.  But I suspect Monument is the only card you want along those lines.  The danger is that such a card would lead to a deck where the right play is simply to repeatedly play actions that earn VP tokens and never deplete any piles.  (For example, would you EVER buy anything after building a reliable engine of actions offering +2 Cards, +1 Action, +1 VP?)  By offering +$2 and thus the incentive to spend money, Monument is probably the least dangerous such card.

A Village/Cellar combo sounds great, by the way.
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