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[ChaosRed]

RE: Church Bell

It seems pretty strong, yes. It's not ridiculous at 5, but it is probably worth 6. It trashes conveniently, and then brings the best card of the three into your hand.

In one game, it amassed 5 Provinces and 1 Dutchy in just 15 turns. That's not staggering, but it is pretty effective.

It trashes, it tutors and it mills, all in one terminal action. The key problem with it, is how far ahead it puts a player if they get a 5-2 split. This is really the reason I leaning towards making it 6. It's probably a pretty weak 6, and a very strong 5.

Here's a rough-idea of what it does:

--- ChaosRed's turn 1 ---
ChaosRed plays 5 Coppers.
ChaosRed buys a Church Bell
(ChaosRed draws: 3 Estates and 2 Coppers.)
[DECK: 7 Copper, 3 Estates, Church Bell]

--- ChaosRed's turn 2 ---
ChaosRed plays 2 Coppers.
ChaosRed buys nothing
(ChaosRed draws: Church Bell, 3 Copper, 1 Estate)
[DECK: 7 Copper, 3 Estates, Church Bell]

--- ChaosRed's turn 3 ---
ChaosRed plays Church Bell, trashing 1 Estate and a 2 Copper.
ChaosRed buys a Silver
(ChaosRed draws: 2 Copper, 2 Estates, Church Bell)
[DECK: 1 Silver, 5 Copper, 2 Estates, Church Bell]

--- ChaosRed's turn 4 ---
ChaosRed plays Church Bell, trashing 2 Copper, and drawing a Silver into his hand
ChaosRed buys a Silver
(ChaosRed draws: 1 Silver, 2 Copper, 1 Estate)
[DECK: 2 Silver, 3 Copper, 2 Estates, Church Bell]

--- ChaosRed's turn 5 ---
ChaosRed plays 1 Silver, 1 Copper
ChaosRed buys a Silver
(ChaosRed draws: 2 Silver, 1 Copper, 1 Estate, Church Bell)
[DECK: 3 Silver, 3 Copper, 2 Estates, Church Bell]

--- ChaosRed's turn 6 ---
ChaosRed plays Church Bell, trashing two Copper and estate
ChaosRed buys nothing
(ChaosRed draws: 3 Silver, 1 Estate, Church Bell)
[DECK: 3 Silver, 1 Copper, 1 Estate, Church Bell]

--- ChaosRed's turn 7 ---
ChaosRed plays Church Bell, trashing an Estate
ChaosRed plays 3 Silver
ChaosRed buys Gold
(ChaosRed draws: 1 Gold, 2 Silver, 1 Copper, Church Bell)
[DECK: 1 Gold, 3 Silver, 1 Copper, Church Bell]

--- ChaosRed's turn 8 ---
ChaosRed plays Church Bell, puts a Silver into his hand
ChaosRed plays 1 Gold, 2 Silver
ChaosRed buys Gold
(ChaosRed draws: 2 Gold, 2 Silver, Church Bell)
[DECK: 2 Gold, 3 Silver, 1 Copper, Church Bell]

--- ChaosRed's turn 9 ---
ChaosRed plays Church Bell, trashing a Copper, puts a Silver in his hand
ChaosRed plays 2 Gold, 3 Silver
ChaosRed buys Province
(ChaosRed draws: 2 Gold, 2 Silver, Province)
[DECK: 1 Province, 2 Gold, 3 Silver, Church Bell]

--- ChaosRed's turn 10 ---
ChaosRed plays 2 Gold, 2 Silver
ChaosRed buys Province
(ChaosRed draws: 3 Silver, Province, Church Bell)
[DECK: 2 Province, 2 Gold, 3 Silver, Church Bell]

--- ChaosRed's turn 11 ---
ChaosRed plays Church Bell puts a Gold into his hand
ChaosRed buys Province
(ChaosRed draws: 3 Province, Silver, Gold)
[DECK: 3 Province, 2 Gold, 3 Silver, Church Bell]

--- ChaosRed's turn 12 ---
ChaosRed plays nothing
ChaosRed buys nothing
(ChaosRed draws: 1 Gold, 3 Silver, 1 Church Bell)
[DECK: 3 Province, 2 Gold, 3 Silver, Church Bell]

--- ChaosRed's turn 13 ---
ChaosRed plays Church Bell put a Province into his hand
ChaosRed plays 2 Gold, 1 Silver
ChaosRed buys a Province
(ChaosRed draws: 2 Gold, 2 Province, 1 Church Bell)
[DECK: 4 Province, 2 Gold, 3 Silver, Church Bell]

--- ChaosRed's turn 14 ---
ChaosRed plays Church Bell puts a Silver into his hand
ChaosRed plays 2 Gold, 1 Silver
ChaosRed buys a Province
(ChaosRed draws: 1 Silver, 3 Provinces, 1 Church Bell)
[DECK: 5 Province, 2 Gold, 3 Silver, Church Bell]

Curse attacks help slow it down, but only a little.

Turn 15 would likely yield nothing (a buy of 4 or 5 likely, which isn't useful, unless you want to green more with a Dutchy), but Turn 16 is probably another Province or another Gold. It slows down as it greens obviously, but gets to 5 Provinces so fast, it often does not matter. It's often won the game by the 14th or 15th turn.

What do you think, am I right in thinking maybe it needs to have a cost adjustment, or is this acceptable?

[Jack Rudd]

Wait a minute, it trashes every cost-2-or-lower card of the ones it draws? I was thinking it trashed just one such card. In which case:

(a) I don't really want such a card in the sort of decks I like to build.
(b) I'm not surprised it's overpowered at 5, and it would be worse at 6. Try it at 4.

[rinkworks]

Wait, it does?  Ignore everything I've ever said about the card.  I figured it only trashed one such card, too.  I'd have called that as overpowered at the outset, otherwise.  Trash up to 3 probably-junk cards and get a good one if you turn one up?  Compare with these:

Chapel - The more you trash, the less you can do that turn.  Even just trashing one means you're playing the rest of your turn with a 3-card hand and no actions.

Trading Post - Must trash exactly two, so you can't always use it, but you get a Silver to help rescue the buy phase.

Forge - Card costs must add up to something you want, or an unavailable cost if you don't need anything back (which is hard to do with just Coppers and Estates).  The more you trash, the worse the rest of your turn will be.

Church Bell - Trashes up to 3 cards.  No constraints on when you can play it.  Usually replaces itself in your hand with a guaranteed good card, and when it doesn't that means you were able to trash an extra card.  Never really hurts your current turn's buy phase and often boosts it outright.  Cycles to your new purchases faster.

It blows Trading Post out of the water, which is a very fine $5 card.  It trashes more flexibility and often more powerfully and leaves you at the same or -1 hand size, instead of -2.  Trading Post does gain a Silver, but the fact that it's to your hand (effectively a vanilla +$2 bonus on top of a "gain a Silver") is the more important piece, and Church Bell usually manages at least that much, since it draws a card costing $3 or more into your hand.  When it doesn't, it just means you got more trashing out of it.

Church Bell also blows Chapel out of the water, which you'd expect given its greater cost.  But you have to consider that Chapel's actual power level is somewhere around a $4-cost or even $5-cost card.  It can trash nearly as much while improving your hand, while Chapel just about wipes it.  Using Church Bell instead of Chapel is almost like getting an extra free turn:  roughly the same trashing benefit, but Church Bell lets you play a 4- or 5-card hand afterwards, while Chapel makes you wait until the next turn to do that.

So yeah, I think the real power level of this card is $6 or likely even $7 (I'd rather have it than Forge, usually).  But Jack has a real concern here, that the card is, like Trading Post, probably a bad buy after the second shuffle or so, which means that pricing it according to its true power level makes it useless by the time you can afford it.  Pricing it at $4 -- thereby making sure that the game isn't decided by who gets the 5/2 split -- is the most workable option I see.  But it'll be a must-buy almost always and will look silly on a board with Trading Post and/or Chapel.

I would suggest having the card do what I thought it did and only trash 1 card.  Then it'll be a legitimate $3 or $4 card, while still being desirable.  Probably $4, since, while Masquerade will usually be stronger, the closer comparison is with Lookout, and it will definitely be stronger than that, since it puts a card in hand.  If you want to tweak it from there, changing the number of cards you get to draw from the deck to choose from is probably a good way to fine-tune it.

Anyway, now that this misunderstanding is out in the open, my original comments about the card probably make more sense.  I recall that I suggested dropping the cost restrictions, since why not simply allow any card to be trashed and any card to be put in hand.  But I see what you were doing now.

[ChaosRed]

Thanks guys, I appreciate the feedback as always. I really owe you guys a beer, (someone needs to develop a pay-pal type app, whee you can buy people a beer at their favorite, registered pub).

I'll pull Church Bell from the beta test, put it on the drawing board to look at later when testing is done. I think my error was creating a card I wanted, (or have wanted) in previous games and then focusing on the theme of the card (summoning cards to chapel). I blew it. My initial thoughts are CB will now require a discard and only do the trashing portion, not the tutor portion. So you must cannibalize your own hand to play it, gaining nothing but a chance to trash the junk on top of your deck. Still quite useful, but slows it down considerably. I'll leave the revision discussion until the rest of the cards are tested.

It's unfortunate that I put the focus on that broken card, because most of the expansion is fun to play and testing well. So I highlighted a major design flaw, rather than giving myself credit, for actually producing a set of cards that are quite fun overall. There's cost adjustments that need to made, and some combinations are really strong, so this is far from being a refined fan-variant, but overall it really does play rather well.

Thanks again, guys.

[Qvist]

Again, I realize this is of limited interest to other readers

I like to read your posts and follow your process of beta testing. So, if I ever would make an expansion by myself I know how to do that.
But there's little to comment now as you make your conclusions on your own. So keep posting.

[ChaosRed]

BETA REPORT

I have 80 games now logged. The last 12 games or so, I've been testing the "least popular" cards, to try and get a better handle on their relative strength. It turns out one of the reasons why the cards were unpopular was they sucked. In the last 2 games, I pitted two attack cards against one another, (each with a solid support card). I have a section on combinations, where I'll delve into this further.

NOTE: Church Bell has been removed from the expansion entirely, as it testing revealed it was clearly far too strong. It will get nerfed in the second-wave of testing, (which takes place after I log 100 games with this set). The card will not appear in this report.

Take these rating calculations with a grain of salt, it's a rather clumsy formula and based on a limited dataset. Still it is producing a reasonable report of the power of each card. Here are some of the card ratings after 80 games.

TOP RATED CARDS

	VALUE: 1.38 +/- 0.10 Silver Vein wasn't tested during the last 19 runs, so its rating stayed the same. The card is REALLY strong, but I am not sure it is broken. One of the reasons it is so strong, is the entire set is built to complement it. There's a "middle road" theme to Silver Lining, that rewards buying Silver, buying Duthies early and winning without a lot of Provinces. I am actually rather pleased with the theme, because it works. However, the card also illustrates the set's overall weakness, it's appeal diminishes greatly when taken outside of its own set. Many of the cards really lose their appeal when combined with other expansions.
	VALUE: 1.38 +/- 0.12 Yes, this card still makes my leader board (although its rating slowly shrinks). It just combines so well with Black Knight, Shyster, Paladin and Silver Vein. It also helps clean your deck of Estates early (which were learning provides a huge advantage, although I guess this isn't news, but still it really opened our eyes). The card isn't broken in the least of course. It's one of those cards that has synergy with the overall set, so it is popular and tends to really help a deck win with the right Kingdom around it.
	VALUE: 1.28 +/- 0.1 The strongest and most popular 2. So beloved that we won't touch it on the second-wave, the card is balanced and well-liked it. It turns out that a weaker Chapel is quite useful because it bumps you up a Copper and trashes itself. Is it as strong as Chapel? Heck no, but it can do the job in the early rounds.
	VALUE: 1.28 +/- 0.1 One of the most popular cards in the set and in fact, a little broken. The card shines most when you have a single, terminal powerful attack to "summon". Every time you draw a Summon, you essentially assure you can fire the attack. And even better, you mill through a lot of your deck every time you do, helping you ensure you get that same Summon back into your hand on the next turn. It is streaky though. One of the worst results you get with it, is you tutor all your Summons and your Attack early in your deck. They go in the discard pile and now you have just cak to go through on the remaining deck, (which might take a few critical turns to get through). So as long as the Summons don't clump early, you motor along nicely. The card "feels" broken though, because you can mill through almost your entire deck, almost every turn. Consider a deck with two Summons and a Mountebank. You can almost guarantee a Montebank attack every turn (especially in the early rounds). It breezes right past those green cards too. I am unsure what to do with the card. I think a cost upgrade is necessary, but it might also need some kind of other governor.
	VALUE: 1.28 +/- 0.12 This card is a streaky son-of-a. When it "lucks" out and pushes two cards to the side, you begin to soar, when it "craps  out" and moves two useful cards to the discard pile, you curse the thing, (especially early in a shuffle and you know may not see those cards again for a few turns). It's rating is a bit inflated because for a few games in this test cycle, it was the only +2 Action on the board, so it became a necessary enabler of strong terminals and was purchased often. It rewards greening early, it blends well with Silver Vein (it can move those Silvers and Coppers to the side, to concentrate your Silver Veins). But in general, it is a very streaky card. It's not broken, it's costed about right (believe it or not), but it can really frustrate you, or can really launch you forward. On two plays, getting four cards pushed to the side is HUGE. But if those two plays, see you discarding four cards you wanted, well you suffer greatly. Streaky cards aren't new to Dominion, but I will look at ways to help govern the "luck" of this card a bit more.

WORST CARDS

	VALUE: 0.62 +/- 0.15 This card isn't bad at all. In fact, if it were blended with certain cards in other kingdoms, I'm quite sure its broken. But alas, it doesn't quite work in this expansion. One reason why is this expansion features nothing like Laboratory. It has village-knock offs, but that's not enough to really pull in the cards it needs. Without adequate trashing, it can't get the concentration of Silver it needs to really soar. Sure, you get that 2-Province turn sometimes (4 Silver+1 Argent) gets you 16$ and 2 buys). But in this expansion getting a hand of 4 Silver+1 Argent, isn't easy. It takes too much time. This is where beta-testing can fall down a bit, (and I want to discuss this in another post). To really test an expansion requires hundreds of games, across several expansions. You really need 3 dedicated weeks I wager. Without that capacity, a card like this will seem weaker than it is. Imagine Argent with a card Laboratory + Chapel. It wouldn't be rated that poorly with that kind of support.
	VALUE: 0.8 +/- 0.3 So far decks that attempt to "feature" this attack fail. It turns out, spamming a Copper on your opponent and taking 1$ out of his hand, isn't really worth a terminal card in your deck. It's one of those cards that seems devastating, but in practice, actually falls short of a simple Militia. Also, it weakens terribly once someone has "piled". In a game where an alt-Victory card has been tapped out, discarding the victory card provides no penalty at all. I am really surprised this card is failing so badly, and think perhaps it might shine better if it has better support when cross-expansion testing begins in earnest.
	VALUE: 0.83 +/- 0.25 As I said before, Rummage likes big, wide, stupid decks (like a full-throttle Silver Vein deck), but fails when there's density. In fact, "rummaging" from your discard pile, isn't particularly effective at all, without a discard mechanism to feed the discard pile. One major problem is the card that help it in this expansion are also terminal. A two-terminal combination is an awful thing to make work, (even if you have Villages). Township was meant to work with it, and when this card is on the board it does okay, but on its own, the damn thing simply doesn't work as often, or as well, as you'd like.

COMBINATIONS

SHYSTER / BLACK KNIGHT

This combo has only been tested three times, but is currently undefeated. You can see why. If you draw both, you actually spawn an attack that delivers 2-curses to your opponent. The Shyster trashes the Black Knight, (which ignites a Curse), then the Black Knight trash effect lets you gain another Black Knight (which ignites another Curse). At first, I was delighted by this combination, but then realized how awful it is in a 4-player game, where essentially 6 Curses can get propagated in one play. It gets worse, in a hand of Shyster, Shyster, Black Knight, Black Knight, Paladin, you can do the following: Shyster_1 trashes Black Knight_1 (opponent gains a Curse you gain +1VP) Black Knight_1 trashes and gains a Black Knight (opponent gains a Curse) Shyster_1 discards Paladin to get +1 Action (gaining a Silver) Shyster_2 trashes Black Knight_2  (opponent gains a Curse, you gain +1VP) Black Knight_2 trashes and gains a Black Knight  (opponent gains a Curse) Sure you have no cards left in your hand to play, but you just gained +2VP, while firing 4 Curses into your opponent's hand, a total a 6-point swing in one hand, but most of all, your opponent is KNEE-DEEP in Curses. Also if your opponent is attempting the same overall tactic, it really comes down to who pulls this trick off first. I guess a lot of strong curse attacks come down to who get the curse attacks earliest and most-often, but considering the NASTY potential here, this becomes even more of a problem.

SHYSTER / EXCURSION

This combo is far less "broken" than the one above, you can also see its obvious synergy. Shyster/Excursion plays this weird game of trading estates for victory tokens, hoping the curses slow the opponent down enough, that it can eventually three pile Dutchies to win. It works, but it can also be beaten, and indeed the next combo I'm about to highlight loses to it, but also wins against it, and the split is slightly in Excursion/Shyster's favor, but only slightly.

SUMMON / LYCANTHROPE

The purpose of "Summon" was essentially to tutor a strong attack to your hand. You can see how it would work. You put one or more Summons in your deck, (as your deck widens, you buy a Summon here and there to increase the likelihood of drawing at least 1) and you virtually ensure you can attack every turn. You essentially fire your Lycanthope almost every turn in the middle rounds. Of course, since Lycanthrope sometimes just trashes a Silver, you tend to lose the Curse war. This combo's "luck" factor comes down to three things: 1. The Summon cards are nicely spread around the deck on a reshuffle. "Clumping" can mean Summons and Lycanthrope lie dormant in the discard pile until you go through the rest of your deck. If that deck has some curses in it, this can take two or three turns, and puts you far too behind to really ever catch up. 2. The card that Lycanthrope draws is a treasure. This is what you want, because you are on your last terminal action. Drawing another Summon sucks of course at that point, and drawing a Province also sucks. Drawing a Gold usually launches you to a Province. 3. Getting "lucky" with 2 Summons is kind of nice, you guarantee a really nice mill to your attack card, then you get a Treasure on the second one and then finally one more card and +1, on your Lycanthrope play. You've probably also depleted your deck so well, that you'll likely need to reshuffle everything back after your buy.

CONCLUSION
I've highlighted a lot of the problems in my expansion. I do this for a reason of course. I do it to illustrate the kinds of things you encounter in testing and to illustrate what revisions I'll need to consider on my second-wave of testing.

But I should end this positively...

My wife and I have had a BALL playing this expansion. It is very unique in some ways. An all-Silver Lining game, often means the ability to green-up early, there's usually plenty of alternate-victory paths and there's almost always a synergistic combination to explore and exploit. Games are often VERY close and very competitive. I am quite proud of that, the expansion is fairly unique in flavor this reason. Also, a lot of the cards I'm testing are coming very close to the 1.0 rating, which means, so far, many are showing themselves to be quite balanced, and the costing of many of them seem accurate too.

But testing has to focus on problems. It's great when things work, but the purpose of testing is to find bugs, glitches and problems. There have been plenty in this expansion so far. Alas, the solution to the problems, is the same you take in software. You revise the situation, and then you must test again.

I am 20 games away from my 100th play-test, only to learn, that I'll need to revise and test again, before I can ever really call the expansion complete. That likely means another 100 games. Yup, all I really revealed in testing, was that I need to readjust and test more.

Now I don't mind, the testing is fun. But I would caution others from attempting to make a full 25-card expansion like I have. It's a LOT of work, with a lot of problems you do not foresee until you test. Now you are likely more experienced and brighter than I am, so you might avoid some of the deleterious problems I made in design, but you will make mistakes and testing is not only going to uncover them, its going to mean you have to keep testing.

Testing your own expansion is a highly iterative process and requires a great deal of testing, data and analysis to perfect.

You might be wiser to limit the number of cards you create, or do the opposite of what I did. I specifically tried to create an expansion with synergy, combinations and a very strong central theme. Well naturally such an approach produces combinations that are overwhelming. The set is fun, but at times, very broken.

The irony is, in some ways, Silver Lining works too well. But it only does so within its own Kingdom. Without its companions and combinations, even my strongest cards can't really hold a candle to the real cards.

I mean seriously, are you ever going to buy Excursion, over the multitude of strong 3$ cards in DOMINION? And does Lycanthrope have any hope at all of being bought, it there is any other Curse attack available?

I don't consider the expansion a failure, but I do realize 80-games in, just how difficult elegant design can be.

[theory]

Major props for all this playtesting!  I think the biggest complaint against player variants (and the reason rrenaud didn't want to open this forum ) is that it's mostly theorycrafting without anyone actually playing it and trying it out.  I'm glad to see someone buck that trend and actually do some hardcore analysis!

[rinkworks]

Seconded, re: the playtesting.  I don't mind people posting their unplaytested ideas, but having the playtesting reports adds so much more value.

By the way, I noticed a wording issue on Excursion that escaped me before.  To follow the instructions literally, you put the revealed card in your hand and THEN possibly discard it.  This has an accountability issue -- by the time the card is in hand, who's to say it's the same one you're now trashing?  I suggest something along these lines:

"You may trash the revealed card.  If you do, +1 Card; otherwise, put the revealed card in your hand."

[ChaosRed]

"You may trash the revealed card.  If you do, +1 Card; otherwise, put the revealed card in your hand."

Nice catch! Yes, important too, because you really want to ensure the Victory card that was fished out is the one trashed. Much obliged!

[ChaosRed]

My wife and I hit 100 games with the expansion last night. The very last game, was a superb match, that ended 19-19 on a 3-pile, on an even distribution of curses, but not precisely the same set of cards played. It was a fitting way to end the testing.

This ends my testing cycle. I'll write much more on this in the days ahead, (including I'm afraid asking for some peer review on some of the revisions that are necessary).

The good news is many of the cards tested just fine and won't need adjustments. So it should be a faster, shorter cycle the second-time through.

My sincere appreciation to everyone for their help, encouragement and guidance, this was a really, really fun exercise.

[ChaosRed]

FINAL BETA REPORT

The first beta is complete. I have some solid findings and a decent assessment of all cards in the set.

In the end, all the 100 games revealed was I need to alter the set and then conduct another round of tests (it will likely be my final set of tests though as I believe the set is pretty close). I will be discussing each card individually for peer review in a separate thread. The good news is most of the cards tested just fine, and most were quite fun and cool.

For now here are the final conclusions of the test run:

NOTE: Church Bell has been removed from the expansion entirely, as it testing revealed it was clearly far too strong. It will get nerfed in the second-wave of testing. The card will not appear in this report.

Take these rating calculations with a grain of salt, it's a rather clumsy formula and based on a limited dataset. Still it is producing a reasonable report of the power of each card. Here are some of the card ratings after 100 games.

TOP RATED CARDS

	LYCANTHROPE VALUE: 1.35 +/- 0.11 This card isn't that great, against almost every 5-attack card in the real game it probably stacks up as rather weak. But since we tested almost entirely inter-set this card stood out as a useful, bona fide attack. If it has a strength, it's that it adds that 1$, while it often takes away a Silver, and so it provides a money edge  in the early rounds. Of course, it sometimes even spawns a Curse (which is even better). The damn card often took me from 8$ to 6$ in the later rounds. In the early rounds, I often watched as my opponent reach gold in the early rounds by getting +1$, +1 Card, while I had to rebuy my Silver I just lost as I went from 3$ to 5$ (which coincidentally delayed me getting my own Lycan). The rating is skewed a little high, because I ran three solo games with this against Black Knight (to test the two 5$ curse attacks against one another). Lycanthrope beat the Black Knight three straight, so it juiced the rating a little. Given the nature of the set, losing a Silver to this card is sometimes a big deal. The set caters exclusively to Province games and the set moves FAST (games often end before or at turn 18), so you must get ahead early and Lycanthrope can prevent your opponent from doing that. It helps gimp an opponent's Silver Vein deck, it works well with Druid and works very well with Summon. When I begin to assess the changes to the set, I may actually increase the power of the card slightly (despite its high rating), or I will solos with it against Witch and see how it fares (I suspect it will get clobbered).
	PAUPER'S FEAST VALUE: 1.24 +/- 0.07 The strongest and most popular 2. So beloved that we won't touch it on the second-wave, the card is balanced and well-liked it. It turns out that a weaker Chapel is quite useful because it bumps you up a Copper and trashes itself. Is it as strong as Chapel? Heck no, but it can do the job in the early rounds. I might tweak the name and look of the card a little, a card this popular deserves the best treatment I can give it. I am VERY happy with this card. I should note the flaw in my rating system with this card. Really, this card performed better than Lycanthrope, but because it was often in the winning AND losing deck, the card didn't score as well. I adjusted for this slightly with some data fudging, but I can tell you, the card works well and can really stand quite well against a lot of real 2s in the Dominion kingdom.
	SILVER VEIN VALUE: 1.24 +/- 0.08 Silver Vein is just a tad broken, the rating doesn't quite reflect this, because again, it wound up so often in both winner's and victor's hands. One thing this card commands is respect, you MUST purchase at least two or you will NOT win (assuming its an all Silver Lining game anyway). The card is just that strong. It's much stronger than a Gardens deck, because the card itself feeds you the points and the thing you feed your points with acquires more Silver Veins (and even eventually a few Provinces). In other words it often doesn't need the kind of support a Gardens needs to win. You couple that with the fact the expansion caters to this victory path and we have a bit of a problem. It's a FUN card to run. It's a FUN way to win. And it works. I just might need to governor the thing just a tad, so that it isn't so utterly commanding on a board. Right now, you can't ignore the card in an inter-set match.
	EXCURSION VALUE: 1.23 +/- 0.11 This card's rating continues to decline. We got fooled by own numbers a little. We ran so few games, saw the "success" factor of the card and then bought it frequently in the early rounds. In fact, the card shines when there's an alternate-victory card that does something to enable your engine. When it doesn't have that, it's a weak cantrip with a weak trashing power (that's usually useless by turn 5 or 6 once your estates are out). It's a perfectly balanced card though and has a little more utility than it appears at first glance. I call that a success and this card will stay as-is. One note however, is rink found a wording issue which I will address. The verbiage will now make sure the victory card from the discard pile is revealed before its trashed, so you are sure the card from the discard pile is the one that is trashed.
	EMPORIUM VALUE: 1.2 +/- 0.1 This card is a streaky son-of-a. When it "lucks" out and pushes two cards to the side, you begin to soar, when it "craps  out" and moves two useful cards to the discard pile, you curse the thing, (especially early in a shuffle and you know may not see those cards again for a few turns). Actually, as we reached the end of the testing cycle, this card often stayed dead. It was one of those cards that frustrates you too much. It  has too much of a luck factor. I actually expect this card's rating would diminish to a neutral 1.0 if we tested it more. We learned later, that Druid was MUCH better at doing what this card's primary purpose is. Still, sometimes +2 Actions and a +Buy is really useful combo, and when it is, you don't mind spending the 5$.

WORST CARDS

	VALUE: 0.6 +/- 0.15 This card sucks. We hated it by the end of the test-run and it stayed dead on the board more often than any other card during the last 20 games. It will get a SERIOUS overhaul in the next version.
	VALUE: 0.77 +/- 0.23 This card is actually pretty bad. It's not as bad as the rating suggests though. The story of this card, is my wife hates attack cards. She liked this one though, because it had a constructive element (she could possibly gain the discarded card). Also her favorite attack is Militia, and this seemed similar to her. Actually, I wager Militia kicks this card's ass one-on-one (something I need to test), because in fact, spamming Copper now and then doesn't really hurt (especially when certain other victory conditions are present in this set). The thing is though, my wife doesn't attack aggressively. In  other words, attack cards complement her overall engine, but they are never the focus of the deck. So she does not actively work to spam the attack as much as possible. I expect a very aggressive attack with this card might yield better results. Still, usually get to spam a copper into your opponent's discard pile, or you get a lousy silver in your discard pile. In the end, that's simply not that exciting, nor does it really focus you onto a victory path.
	VALUE: 0.77 +/- 0.14 Just an AWFUL card, that doesn't get you anywhere. My poor wife tried to make this card work for in several games (she likes having a defense in any game where there's attacks), but really reaction cards can't compete with attacks and this particular reaction card, sucks. This will get a serious face lift in the revision.

COMBINATIONS

DRUID / ARGENT

This actually is three-card combo. The combo also needs Pauper's Feast to really shine.  It takes about 9 turns to get it going. You Pauper your junk a little, and buy a few Druids and an Argent and two Silver. Then you are off to the races. The Druids give you cards and actions, and then the next turn they help you put your land away. I had 7 Provinces by turn 15 with this combination and best of all, my deck was still really tight, because most of those Provinces were off to the side. Is the combo broken? A little, but I don't consider it deleterious. Still, I would say other than Church Bell (which we banned), Argent has the most danger of being really broken. Also, having a lot of Druids in your  deck is  a stupendous boost. When you start your turn with three of them on the Duration stack, that means you get +3 Cards and +3 Actions before you've even played a card. You couple that fact those same Druids are keeping your deck lean and mean, it's very, very strong.

SPRITE / SILVER VEIN

Sprite is a really dumb, but terribly addictive and fun card.  It shines when you have lots of green. It wants to be green, it rewards you with cards and actions (and more Sprites). The thing I really like about Sprite from a design stand point is her allure is temporary. She  WILL go away, she will almost pile-out in any game and the engine you build around her will eventually crumble. She's a time bomb, albeit one whose spamming victory points along the way. With Silver Vein, she can discard a Silver Vein in a hand that is close a Province, or she can discard the Province, to help you draw the Silver Veins you need. The two are compatible and this was a pretty common victory path in some of our games.

AUCTION / BLACK KNIGHT

Auction is weird. It LOOKS cool. Actually, it doesn't even enable a Silver Vein strategy as well as Druid does (although it is still a great support for Silver Vein tactics). But with Black Knight it can be quite delightful. You essentially trash the Black Knight, spread a Curse, gain a Silver and another Black Knight. The silvers eventually assure you can rush the Black Knights even more and when they run out, the Auction turns Black Knights into Dutchies. It's not a lethal combo, but you can rush Black Knight and Dutchy really quickly this way, you're only challenge is to find a third pile to deplete to win before your opponent hops on the Province-train. One solution is Auction itself, (which you can just Auction into Silver), but an even better solution is Land Grab, which also adds to the speed at which you deplete Black Knight (and spread curses). We're pretty pleased with how complementary many of the cards are, and how it can produce alternate means of winning. I've only highlighted a few of the combinations in these reports.

CONCLUSION
We discovered some of the card's strengths late. Druid was something we experimented with, but never rushed, but when we realized it was an EXCELLENT card to have four or five of, it came to dominate the board. This was one of the flaws of our testing. You have so much to try, sample and test, that sometimes your discovery of power-problems come too late. Also, you have to FORCE yourself to test everything, so you sometimes are building decks just for testing purposes rather than winning.

This caused a lot of problems for us. It really skewed some of our ratings and at times, created some pretty awful games. When we shifted back to "just win baby", the games got better, faster and the exposure of dangerous combinations manifested themselves much more quickly.

I think some forced assessments are necessary. In other words, in some games my wife and I would discuss what cards we would try and make work, sometimes ensuring we would not test the same thing at the same time.  But I would limit this much more than we initially did. It's useful, but only to a point.

Also I did about 18 solo games out of the 100. Most of the time solo games ran on VERY basic algorithms, or sometimes pitted one card exclusively against another (with BM). These produced interesting results, but far, far less interesting than a real game. Also the data from the games tended to skew my ratings. I don't think testing things against BM (or with BM) reveals too much, in the end. BM can't handle curses at all, for example, but that doesn't mean you have a well-balanced curse card.

One thing I noted was even a really weak curse card (like Lycanthrope or Shyster) can clobber Big Money+1 Card Draw card. So what do you really gain from testing this way?

In future, I will continue to "pit" similar cards against one another to assess their relative strength, but I will no longer fold those tests into my overall results, data or ratings.

Finally, I would say a vast majority of my designs and cards functioned really well. That is to say, they had some basic utility, weren't particularly broken and were costed fairly accurately. Most importantly, most of the games we played were REALLY fun.

Without tooting my horn too loudly I hope, I think this set is quite fun. It has a variety of paths to take to win, and it rewards greening early and greening via Silver/Dutchies and other victory cards. It has curse attacks, that are a little more cumbersome than the curse attacks in real sets, but they still function and they still have to be recognized (and used if you wish to win).

I wanted to thank you all again for your patience while I went through this exercise. I will start a new thread in a day or two, that will assess each card individually and offer revisions (if necessary).

Then I test it all over again.