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Schneau

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Chapel Cost?
« on: June 15, 2013, 02:45:50 pm »
+1

Would you price Chapel at $2 knowing what you do now?
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SCSN

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Re: Chapel Cost?
« Reply #1 on: June 15, 2013, 03:17:19 pm »
+1

Not sure what you mean by "knowing what you do now", as Chapel is one of the most straight-forward cards?

I don't think it matters much whether it costs $2, $3 or $4. At $5 it would lose most of its strength to the point that it would be way overpriced. So I think it's perfectly fine at $2, especially because while it's a strong card, it's not strong in a spamable way.
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Re: Chapel Cost?
« Reply #2 on: June 15, 2013, 03:47:47 pm »
+1

I voted 2, but maybe 3 is also acceptable.

The main problem with it being 2 is that you could couple it with a powerful $5.
If it were 3 and someone would open Mountebank/-, you have a better chance if you're the one starting with the Chapel.
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Re: Chapel Cost?
« Reply #3 on: June 15, 2013, 03:57:16 pm »
+1

$2. Chapel is not overpowered, really.
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Re: Chapel Cost?
« Reply #4 on: June 15, 2013, 04:05:34 pm »
+2

I think it's good that regardless of your opening, you can open Chapel/Silver. Now getting a 5/2 is often very good in Chapel kingdoms, but it would absolutely suck to open 5/2 if Chapel was $3.
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Re: Chapel Cost?
« Reply #5 on: June 15, 2013, 04:51:02 pm »
+4

relevant:

Quote
People often talk about changing the cost and I don't think that gets you anywhere. At $4 you get less interesting games, not more interesting ones, and exchanging the 2/5 opening being especially good for the 2/5 opening being especially weak is a wash for me. If I had thought it was a mistake to print it at $2, I would have replaced it, not charged more for it.

And I will add, that this is the case in general. In that other thread about changing costs, there are a few cards where you could change the cost without really helping or hurting anything, but in general the cards that are weak or strong can only be fixed by changing what the card does. They just aren't far enough off.

(source)
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Re: Chapel Cost?
« Reply #6 on: June 15, 2013, 08:04:02 pm »
+7

Ok, let's see if I can piss off everybody at once. :)

I'm stunned by the poll results. Chapel is a no-brainer at $2 and it would still be a great card at $3. Don't try to assess its objective cost or weep for your lost Chapel/Witch openings. Just compare Chapel to the reasonably-priced $3 cards. In Qvist's 2013 list, the median $3 card is Storeroom. Great! I promise never to buy Storeroom again. In exchange, whenever it shows up in the kingdom, I'm allowed to buy a $3 Chapel instead, ok?

As to Donald's opinion on the matter, well... Donald is wrong, or at least he's missing the point. A $2 Chapel only makes the game more interesting because it balances out another questionable design decision: all the crap in your starting deck. If you want to make the game more interesting (i.e. faster and with a better chance for engines), just start with less crap. An underpriced Chapel gets you to the same place, but with a whole lot more shuffle luck.

Donald's general claim is wrong too. Most of the mis-priced cards are at least $1 off. I'd certainly still buy a $5 Tournament and pass on a $5 Adventurer. Plenty of cards could be made more reasonable by changing the price. The game would be better for it, too. The best kingdoms have a variety of playable cards and a range of reasonable strategies. The worst ones have a single dominating card and a bunch of overpriced/underpowered crap you just ignore.

Lots of games publish errata, revised editions, banned card lists, and alternative start/win conditions. Even Chess is a revised version of Shatranj. Dominion could benefit from a little revision too.
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Re: Chapel Cost?
« Reply #7 on: June 15, 2013, 08:11:08 pm »
+1

Ok, let's see if I can piss off everybody at once. :)

I'm stunned by the poll results. Chapel is a no-brainer at $2 and it would still be a great card at $3. Don't try to assess its objective cost or weep for your lost Chapel/Witch openings. Just compare Chapel to the reasonably-priced $3 cards. In Qvist's 2013 list, the median $3 card is Storeroom. Great! I promise never to buy Storeroom again. In exchange, whenever it shows up in the kingdom, I'm allowed to buy a $3 Chapel instead, ok?

As to Donald's opinion on the matter, well... Donald is wrong, or at least he's missing the point. A $2 Chapel only makes the game more interesting because it balances out another questionable design decision: all the crap in your starting deck. If you want to make the game more interesting (i.e. faster and with a better chance for engines), just start with less crap. An underpriced Chapel gets you to the same place, but with a whole lot more shuffle luck.

Donald's general claim is wrong too. Most of the mis-priced cards are at least $1 off. I'd certainly still buy a $5 Tournament and pass on a $5 Adventurer. Plenty of cards could be made more reasonable by changing the price. The game would be better for it, too. The best kingdoms have a variety of playable cards and a range of reasonable strategies. The worst ones have a single dominating card and a bunch of overpriced/underpowered crap you just ignore.

Lots of games publish errata, revised editions, banned card lists, and alternative start/win conditions. Even Chess is a revised version of Shatranj. Dominion could benefit from a little revision too.
Well, Donald did say that a Dominion 2 was possible and would interact with things like I bolded.

Hmm. I wonder if it would be possible to have Operation: Dominion Errata. It's code name would be "Code Name: Kings Court." This message will blow up in 5...4...3...2...

EDIT: I may be talking silly, but I'm being serious. Operation: Dominion Errata should actually happen sometime.
« Last Edit: June 15, 2013, 08:13:44 pm by StrongRhino »
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popsofctown

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Re: Chapel Cost?
« Reply #8 on: June 15, 2013, 08:23:35 pm »
+5

I would say allowing both 5/2 and 3/4 starts is the more questionable design decision.  There's just little necessity for it.  When you set up your starting deck it takes more work to randomize between 5/2 and 3/4 than it does to stack it for 3/4.  And while the existence of 5/2 mirrors and 5/2 versus 3/4 increases the total number of possibilities out there for Dominion, there's a lot of total possibilities out there for Dominion already, so you don't really need that variance to help you get there. 

Really, it's a less defensible design decision than Saboteur, even less defensible a design decision than Treasure Map, imo.
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Re: Chapel Cost?
« Reply #9 on: June 15, 2013, 08:27:26 pm »
+1

The problem is that if Chapel is needed in the kingdom (it most of the time is), it would be WAY too unfair for one person to be able to open with it and the other not to.
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Re: Chapel Cost?
« Reply #10 on: June 15, 2013, 08:35:50 pm »
+7

Ok, let's see if I can piss off everybody at once. :)

I'm stunned by the poll results. Chapel is a no-brainer at $2 and it would still be a great card at $3. Don't try to assess its objective cost or weep for your lost Chapel/Witch openings. Just compare Chapel to the reasonably-priced $3 cards. In Qvist's 2013 list, the median $3 card is Storeroom. Great! I promise never to buy Storeroom again. In exchange, whenever it shows up in the kingdom, I'm allowed to buy a $3 Chapel instead, ok?

As to Donald's opinion on the matter, well... Donald is wrong, or at least he's missing the point. A $2 Chapel only makes the game more interesting because it balances out another questionable design decision: all the crap in your starting deck. If you want to make the game more interesting (i.e. faster and with a better chance for engines), just start with less crap. An underpriced Chapel gets you to the same place, but with a whole lot more shuffle luck.

Donald's general claim is wrong too. Most of the mis-priced cards are at least $1 off. I'd certainly still buy a $5 Tournament and pass on a $5 Adventurer. Plenty of cards could be made more reasonable by changing the price. The game would be better for it, too. The best kingdoms have a variety of playable cards and a range of reasonable strategies. The worst ones have a single dominating card and a bunch of overpriced/underpowered crap you just ignore.

Lots of games publish errata, revised editions, banned card lists, and alternative start/win conditions. Even Chess is a revised version of Shatranj. Dominion could benefit from a little revision too.

It's clear you've thought things through, but I'm going to have to disagree with a lot of points.

Firstly, the starting deck. In a deckbuilder, your starting deck HAS to be mostly crap, or things stop making sense. Well, there's ways around it, but certainly in Dominion's case, you'd need radical changes to make it not the case. The reason for this is: The cards in your starting deck form a baseline - you're going to be improving your deck every turn for the rest of the game, or otherwise scoring points. And if you're goal is to improve your deck, you're going to be buying cards that are on average better than your starting cards, at worst. And that means, you won't want to buy cards that are only as good as your starting cards, or worse. Which means, every card available to buy should be at least better than the starting cards. If you improve the starting cards, suddenly you need to upscale everything else, and then you end up in more or less the same position you started in, or you can just leave it as is and end up with much faster, much swingier games.

Now, there are exceptions to just about every step of reasoning above. You can do things like having a very varied staring deck, of 10 different cards, each serving very different functions. Then you might buy cards worse than some of the starting ones to direct your deck (this is not dissimilar to Eminent Domain, but that has different mechanics and different gaining rules). And the obvious big exception that you were probably screaming at your monitor (well, perhaps not quite) is attacks, especially cursers, where your deck can quickly end up worse than it was at the start due to being flooded with bad cards. But those are a rare case (that is, rare it slows you down that much) and even then, you can still buy more of your basic cards.

What you say about Chapel isn't really the case. The main reason Chapel costs $2 is so you can get it if you realise you need it, such as beginners in those chapel flood games. And it's not an automatic buy, and loses you some tempo early if you do go for it. Like most cards, in the right place it's a big game shifter, it just so happens to cost $2. The real question I think is, which is worse, 5/2 openings with Chapel on the 2 against 4/3 openings with chapel, or 5/2 with chapel unavailable because it costs 3 against 4/3 openings with chapel. I can't answer that, I would need to test it it a lot, but Donald already did and says 2 is the best cost, so I'll defer to his wide experience.

As for what you say about other cards, I think very few can really be properly called mispriced. Tournament at $5 would be... a lot weaker. It would be a poor $5, except when you can get a Prize out of it, which is generally late game, when the distinction between $5 and $4 becomes a lot smaller. But mostly, it would just delay getting Tournaments. I'd probably actually like that, because it'd be a lot less swingy (no early tournaments = harder to match them up), but it'd be a mediocre $5 most of the time, I suspect. And at $6, it's definitely too weak. Adventurer at $5 would be pretty alright. Like, about Harvest level normally, but with trashing easily going up to +$5 or more, which is great. At $4, it would be very underpriced. I do think Adventurer should cost $5, but then again so do most people (or given a buff).

And I'm glad you didn't mention Scout. Most people think that should cost like $7, and they'd be quite right.
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Re: Chapel Cost?
« Reply #11 on: June 15, 2013, 08:48:44 pm »
+10

Ok, let's see if I can piss off everybody at once. :)

I'm stunned by the poll results. Chapel is a no-brainer at $2 and it would still be a great card at $3. Don't try to assess its objective cost or weep for your lost Chapel/Witch openings. Just compare Chapel to the reasonably-priced $3 cards. In Qvist's 2013 list, the median $3 card is Storeroom. Great! I promise never to buy Storeroom again. In exchange, whenever it shows up in the kingdom, I'm allowed to buy a $3 Chapel instead, ok?

As to Donald's opinion on the matter, well... Donald is wrong, or at least he's missing the point. A $2 Chapel only makes the game more interesting because it balances out another questionable design decision: all the crap in your starting deck. If you want to make the game more interesting (i.e. faster and with a better chance for engines), just start with less crap. An underpriced Chapel gets you to the same place, but with a whole lot more shuffle luck.

Donald's general claim is wrong too. Most of the mis-priced cards are at least $1 off. I'd certainly still buy a $5 Tournament and pass on a $5 Adventurer. Plenty of cards could be made more reasonable by changing the price. The game would be better for it, too. The best kingdoms have a variety of playable cards and a range of reasonable strategies. The worst ones have a single dominating card and a bunch of overpriced/underpowered crap you just ignore.

Lots of games publish errata, revised editions, banned card lists, and alternative start/win conditions. Even Chess is a revised version of Shatranj. Dominion could benefit from a little revision too.

It's clear you've thought things through, but I'm going to have to disagree with a lot of points.

Firstly, the starting deck. In a deckbuilder, your starting deck HAS to be mostly crap, or things stop making sense. Well, there's ways around it, but certainly in Dominion's case, you'd need radical changes to make it not the case. The reason for this is: The cards in your starting deck form a baseline - you're going to be improving your deck every turn for the rest of the game, or otherwise scoring points. And if you're goal is to improve your deck, you're going to be buying cards that are on average better than your starting cards, at worst. And that means, you won't want to buy cards that are only as good as your starting cards, or worse. Which means, every card available to buy should be at least better than the starting cards. If you improve the starting cards, suddenly you need to upscale everything else, and then you end up in more or less the same position you started in, or you can just leave it as is and end up with much faster, much swingier games.

Now, there are exceptions to just about every step of reasoning above. You can do things like having a very varied staring deck, of 10 different cards, each serving very different functions. Then you might buy cards worse than some of the starting ones to direct your deck (this is not dissimilar to Eminent Domain, but that has different mechanics and different gaining rules). And the obvious big exception that you were probably screaming at your monitor (well, perhaps not quite) is attacks, especially cursers, where your deck can quickly end up worse than it was at the start due to being flooded with bad cards. But those are a rare case (that is, rare it slows you down that much) and even then, you can still buy more of your basic cards.

What you say about Chapel isn't really the case. The main reason Chapel costs $2 is so you can get it if you realise you need it, such as beginners in those chapel flood games. And it's not an automatic buy, and loses you some tempo early if you do go for it. Like most cards, in the right place it's a big game shifter, it just so happens to cost $2. The real question I think is, which is worse, 5/2 openings with Chapel on the 2 against 4/3 openings with chapel, or 5/2 with chapel unavailable because it costs 3 against 4/3 openings with chapel. I can't answer that, I would need to test it it a lot, but Donald already did and says 2 is the best cost, so I'll defer to his wide experience.

As for what you say about other cards, I think very few can really be properly called mispriced. Tournament at $5 would be... a lot weaker. It would be a poor $5, except when you can get a Prize out of it, which is generally late game, when the distinction between $5 and $4 becomes a lot smaller. But mostly, it would just delay getting Tournaments. I'd probably actually like that, because it'd be a lot less swingy (no early tournaments = harder to match them up), but it'd be a mediocre $5 most of the time, I suspect. And at $6, it's definitely too weak. Adventurer at $5 would be pretty alright. Like, about Harvest level normally, but with trashing easily going up to +$5 or more, which is great. At $4, it would be very underpriced. I do think Adventurer should cost $5, but then again so do most people (or given a buff).

And I'm glad you didn't mention Scout. Most people think that should cost like $7, and they'd be quite right.

I, for one, would buy Scout no less frequently for costing $7.
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Re: Chapel Cost?
« Reply #12 on: June 15, 2013, 08:49:04 pm »
+7

Ok, let's see if I can piss off everybody at once. :)

I'm stunned by the poll results. Chapel is a no-brainer at $2 and it would still be a great card at $3. Don't try to assess its objective cost or weep for your lost Chapel/Witch openings. Just compare Chapel to the reasonably-priced $3 cards. In Qvist's 2013 list, the median $3 card is Storeroom. Great! I promise never to buy Storeroom again. In exchange, whenever it shows up in the kingdom, I'm allowed to buy a $3 Chapel instead, ok?

As to Donald's opinion on the matter, well... Donald is wrong, or at least he's missing the point. A $2 Chapel only makes the game more interesting because it balances out another questionable design decision: all the crap in your starting deck. If you want to make the game more interesting (i.e. faster and with a better chance for engines), just start with less crap. An underpriced Chapel gets you to the same place, but with a whole lot more shuffle luck.

Donald's general claim is wrong too. Most of the mis-priced cards are at least $1 off. I'd certainly still buy a $5 Tournament and pass on a $5 Adventurer. Plenty of cards could be made more reasonable by changing the price. The game would be better for it, too. The best kingdoms have a variety of playable cards and a range of reasonable strategies. The worst ones have a single dominating card and a bunch of overpriced/underpowered crap you just ignore.

Lots of games publish errata, revised editions, banned card lists, and alternative start/win conditions. Even Chess is a revised version of Shatranj. Dominion could benefit from a little revision too.

It's clear you've thought things through, but I'm going to have to disagree with a lot of points.

Firstly, the starting deck. In a deckbuilder, your starting deck HAS to be mostly crap, or things stop making sense. Well, there's ways around it, but certainly in Dominion's case, you'd need radical changes to make it not the case. The reason for this is: The cards in your starting deck form a baseline - you're going to be improving your deck every turn for the rest of the game, or otherwise scoring points. And if you're goal is to improve your deck, you're going to be buying cards that are on average better than your starting cards, at worst. And that means, you won't want to buy cards that are only as good as your starting cards, or worse. Which means, every card available to buy should be at least better than the starting cards. If you improve the starting cards, suddenly you need to upscale everything else, and then you end up in more or less the same position you started in, or you can just leave it as is and end up with much faster, much swingier games.

Now, there are exceptions to just about every step of reasoning above. You can do things like having a very varied staring deck, of 10 different cards, each serving very different functions. Then you might buy cards worse than some of the starting ones to direct your deck (this is not dissimilar to Eminent Domain, but that has different mechanics and different gaining rules). And the obvious big exception that you were probably screaming at your monitor (well, perhaps not quite) is attacks, especially cursers, where your deck can quickly end up worse than it was at the start due to being flooded with bad cards. But those are a rare case (that is, rare it slows you down that much) and even then, you can still buy more of your basic cards.

What you say about Chapel isn't really the case. The main reason Chapel costs $2 is so you can get it if you realise you need it, such as beginners in those chapel flood games. And it's not an automatic buy, and loses you some tempo early if you do go for it. Like most cards, in the right place it's a big game shifter, it just so happens to cost $2. The real question I think is, which is worse, 5/2 openings with Chapel on the 2 against 4/3 openings with chapel, or 5/2 with chapel unavailable because it costs 3 against 4/3 openings with chapel. I can't answer that, I would need to test it it a lot, but Donald already did and says 2 is the best cost, so I'll defer to his wide experience.

As for what you say about other cards, I think very few can really be properly called mispriced. Tournament at $5 would be... a lot weaker. It would be a poor $5, except when you can get a Prize out of it, which is generally late game, when the distinction between $5 and $4 becomes a lot smaller. But mostly, it would just delay getting Tournaments. I'd probably actually like that, because it'd be a lot less swingy (no early tournaments = harder to match them up), but it'd be a mediocre $5 most of the time, I suspect. And at $6, it's definitely too weak. Adventurer at $5 would be pretty alright. Like, about Harvest level normally, but with trashing easily going up to +$5 or more, which is great. At $4, it would be very underpriced. I do think Adventurer should cost $5, but then again so do most people (or given a buff).

And I'm glad you didn't mention Scout. Most people think that should cost like $7, and they'd be quite right.

Long post with reasonable thoughts I agree with. Lots of efforts went it to writing this. - Still, I don't give a +1.
Scout joke at the end ... +1

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Re: Chapel Cost?
« Reply #13 on: June 15, 2013, 08:50:27 pm »
+10

"Hmm... not sure if people will agree with me.

I'll just throw in a scout joke. Now they either like the whole post or hate scout jokes!"
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Re: Chapel Cost?
« Reply #14 on: June 15, 2013, 08:51:37 pm »
+3

If you think that chapel should be priced at $3 or more, you must be thinking about it the wrong way.  The price is not a direct reflection of the goodness of the cards, it's a restriction on when you can buy it, and how many you're able to buy.  Chapel is priced at $2 because
a) Everyone can buy it
b) It's not broken if you can buy a lot.
Maybe I'd rather be able to buy chapel than storeroom, and chapel is a more useful card than storeroom.  That does not mean chapel should cost more than storeroom.

Basically: how would pricing chapel at $3 improve the gameplay?
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Re: Chapel Cost?
« Reply #15 on: June 15, 2013, 10:36:17 pm »
+5

Chapel at $2 runs into the "Chapel problem", which is ridiculousness when someone opens 5/2 with some power $5 on the board.

Chapel at $3 runs into the "Ambassador problem", which is ridiculousness when someone opens 5/2 with Ambassador on the board.

Either way, you have problems, and I don't know which is preferrable. When both players open the same, well, it doesn't really matter much. You're buying it anyway, probably.
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Re: Chapel Cost?
« Reply #16 on: June 15, 2013, 10:40:39 pm »
+3

What you say about Chapel isn't really the case. The main reason Chapel costs $2 is so you can get it if you realise you need it, such as beginners in those chapel flood games. And it's not an automatic buy, and loses you some tempo early if you do go for it. Like most cards, in the right place it's a big game shifter, it just so happens to cost $2. The real question I think is, which is worse, 5/2 openings with Chapel on the 2 against 4/3 openings with chapel, or 5/2 with chapel unavailable because it costs 3 against 4/3 openings with chapel. I can't answer that, I would need to test it it a lot, but Donald already did and says 2 is the best cost, so I'll defer to his wide experience.

It's pretty automatic. Iso players bought it in 78% of the games it was available, making it a little more popular than Governor and a little less popular than Gold. For top players, that number is closer to 90%.

Basically: how would pricing chapel at $3 improve the gameplay?

Chapel at $2 makes 2/5 splits devastating. In something like 25% of games, one player has a 5/2 split and the other has 4/3. When Chapel's on the board, those aren't usually very fun games to play.

Chapel at $3 wouldn't be nearly as objectionable, and that's what I voted it, but Chapel at $4 warrants consideration too. Even Chapel/Silver is about as strong as Jack/Silver, and $4 would be certainly enough that it would no longer be an automatic first-round buy.

The problem with Chapel being a correct first-round buy is all the shuffle luck it adds. That luck comes at the start of the game, when luck matters most. Drawing [Chapel + EEEC] on T3 instead of [Chapel + CCCC] on T5 is a way bigger deal than the Minion split or whether you hit your first King's Court on T7 or T8.
« Last Edit: June 15, 2013, 10:43:00 pm by ragingduckd »
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Re: Chapel Cost?
« Reply #17 on: June 15, 2013, 10:57:21 pm »
+8

Ok, let's see if I can piss off everybody at once. :)

I'm stunned by the poll results. Chapel is a no-brainer at $2 and it would still be a great card at $3. Don't try to assess its objective cost or weep for your lost Chapel/Witch openings. Just compare Chapel to the reasonably-priced $3 cards. In Qvist's 2013 list, the median $3 card is Storeroom. Great! I promise never to buy Storeroom again. In exchange, whenever it shows up in the kingdom, I'm allowed to buy a $3 Chapel instead, ok?
I'm stunned that you're stunned. It's really *not* about how strong the card is. Indeed, lots of 5-costs are usually better than gold, silver is usually better than many-a-4-cost, Jack usually does more for you than counting house, etc. Cards aren't cost where they are because of power level directly. A card costs X because that makes the game best, and it makes the game best because of it costing X, not because it's better than cards costing less than X and worse than cards costing more than X. Now, power level is a very big factor here, but indirectly. The most pressing thing in the cost is when decks can reasonably expect to be able to buy the card. Obviously, to make the game interesting, better cards *tend* to need to cost more than worse ones, but this is a generalization, and not a hard-and-fast rule. Some cards, it matters how easy it is to amass large numbers of them. Sometimes, it's ow quickly you can get to them, or to a couple copies. Some cards are better costing more, a la remodel and border village, where the price can be an asset. With Chapel, you are almost certainly ever going to buy only one, and almost certainly just right at the beginning of the game. So making it cost 5 or more will be a big difference, because it takes time to get. But 2,3, or 4, you are going to be getting it on t1 or t2, if you get it, whether it costs 2 or 3 or 4. It actually doesn't really matter for the card itself, what matters is what you can get it with. And the issue here is 3/4 vs 5/2. At 3-4, a 5/2 player has to waste his 5 on it, and... well, not only would this forego a potentially powerful 5, but opening with the likely chapel/- is actually pretty unappetizing. This is pretty lopsided. If it's 2, then if there is a very nice 5 on the board for it AND there isn't something real nice on 4/3 open, then it can be big advantage for 5/2. It's not totally clear, but I think it's a better balance for 2-cost. Regardless, I am actually pretty dumbfounded that you think it should cost 3. This is the LEAST logical cost for it. At 3, the 4/3 player gets to get a 4 with it if he wants, putting Mr. 5/2 even further behind. So 4 is just a much better cost than 3. Also, in terms of power it doesn't make sense - Chapel would certainly be one of the best 4-costers.....

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As to Donald's opinion on the matter, well... Donald is wrong, or at least he's missing the point. A $2 Chapel only makes the game more interesting because it balances out another questionable design decision: all the crap in your starting deck. If you want to make the game more interesting (i.e. faster and with a better chance for engines), just start with less crap. An underpriced Chapel gets you to the same place, but with a whole lot more shuffle luck.

Donald's general claim is wrong too. Most of the mis-priced cards are at least $1 off. I'd certainly still buy a $5 Tournament and pass on a $5 Adventurer. Plenty of cards could be made more reasonable by changing the price. The game would be better for it, too. The best kingdoms have a variety of playable cards and a range of reasonable strategies. The worst ones have a single dominating card and a bunch of overpriced/underpowered crap you just ignore.
Really? You've gone through lots of playtesting on these alternative versions, have you? The weak starting deck is necessary, because it gives you scope to make meaningful decisions over the long term, to plot out a course. Indeed, if anything, they should be *weaker*, not stronger. But they are probably good where they are now. If you can actually just have strong things up front, I think it would actually make *more* shuffle luck problems, not less, as well as exacerbate first turn advantage.
Tournament at $5 would not be a very good card in 2 player. Playable, sure, sorta similar to treasury. But this makes tournament a lot weaker, and not just because it is harder to get them or lots of them. At 5, it competes with lots of the cards which support it, making it pretty hard for you to get your tournaments AND stuff to help you connect therm. Sure, you can get lucky, but it won't happen all that much. And without draw help, it gets blocked a little more often than it connects even, and I am not sure it is even better than peddler. well, sometimes yes, but often I think not. And this would put it below all those peddler-with-a-bonuses, quite weak. And with more players it would just be terrible. You have to remember that this game was designed for 2 through 4 players, not just 1 vs 1s.
Adventurer at 5 might be okay. I in fact doubt it would be great, but it would certainly be reasonably playable decently often, a real option for BM decks. Probably this is one of the few places where I would say it would be better costed elsewhere, but you know, even this 5-6 isn't really a miscosting, just a potential difference.

Actually the only other cards I would look at changing price on, I think, are Rebuild to 6 and Ambassador to 4. Everything else almost has to be where it is (well, Scout, but man, they can't all be explorer). And maybe you can argue things shouldn't have been printed at all, and actually that's really where I would go with both scout and Rebuild, but it's not so bad anyway, and Donald has LOADS more playtesting experience here with other versions of stuff than I do, so I defer. Ambassador to 4 I think would be interesting for sure, as it takes a lot of the brutalest bite out, but on the other hand, it might just be too weak for multiplayer anyway.

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Lots of games publish errata, revised editions, banned card lists, and alternative start/win conditions. Even Chess is a revised version of Shatranj. Dominion could benefit from a little revision too.
Well, banned cards, errata, revisions, fine, though it's obviously just much much better to not have to do this, and I don't really think there is a need.
Calling chess a revised version of Shatranj is bogus though. It's not like there were a well codified set of rules in Shatranj and then they were like 'huh, bishops should move further and not be able to jump' at a big conference meeting, and thus decreed it. No, people played with slightly different versions from place to place, and it naturally just sort of changed over time, and then eventually it was codified with the laws it has today. This is similar to the process of many card games (e.g. bridge, poker, various others) as well as sports. I mean, you wouldn't say that American Football is a revised version of Association Football (soccer). Or of Rugby even. And all these things are qualitatively different from Dominion as they developed over time, with slightly differing conditions, and this was a long slow process undertaken generally locally by players, whereas Dominion was something which was invented and polished. Now, Basketball fits more into that mold, and there are changes there as well, so it's not totally unreasonable to say you could have changes here. But it's undesirable for a card game like this to make cards which do things other than what they say as printed.

WanderingWinder

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Re: Chapel Cost?
« Reply #18 on: June 15, 2013, 11:06:27 pm »
+2

What you say about Chapel isn't really the case. The main reason Chapel costs $2 is so you can get it if you realise you need it, such as beginners in those chapel flood games. And it's not an automatic buy, and loses you some tempo early if you do go for it. Like most cards, in the right place it's a big game shifter, it just so happens to cost $2. The real question I think is, which is worse, 5/2 openings with Chapel on the 2 against 4/3 openings with chapel, or 5/2 with chapel unavailable because it costs 3 against 4/3 openings with chapel. I can't answer that, I would need to test it it a lot, but Donald already did and says 2 is the best cost, so I'll defer to his wide experience.

It's pretty automatic. Iso players bought it in 78% of the games it was available, making it a little more popular than Governor and a little less popular than Gold. For top players, that number is closer to 90%.
Okay, it's close to an auto-buy on 2. It would be pretty close on 3 as well. Also, because people do it doesn't mean it's good. Because it's good doesn't mean it's broken. And lots of the iso data is different from how things evolved out - those games were played with all kinds of different card pools. But okay, it is definitely strong, no argument here. Making it 3 doesn't help THAT though...

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Basically: how would pricing chapel at $3 improve the gameplay?

Chapel at $2 makes 2/5 splits devastating. In something like 25% of games, one player has a 5/2 split and the other has 4/3. When Chapel's on the board, those aren't usually very fun games to play.
This number is WAY off. There's a 1 in 6 chance for a player to get 2/5 (lumping 2/5 together with 5/2), and thus a 5 in 36 chance, under 14%. Furthermore, you need a good 5 to pair it with AND a lack of a strong 4/3 option. Then you have to consider that for some of those cases, just opening the 5 is pretty devastating anyway. Again, this is indeed the biggest problem with $2 chapel, but making it more expensive *shifts* the problem rather than eliminating it.

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Chapel at $3 wouldn't be nearly as objectionable, and that's what I voted it, but Chapel at $4 warrants consideration too. Even Chapel/Silver is about as strong as Jack/Silver, and $4 would be certainly enough that it would no longer be an automatic first-round buy.
Really? You don't think that $4 chapel wouldn't be a near-automatic opener? Because it would. It really would.

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The problem with Chapel being a correct first-round buy is all the shuffle luck it adds. That luck comes at the start of the game, when luck matters most. Drawing [Chapel + EEEC] on T3 instead of [Chapel + CCCC] on T5 is a way bigger deal than the Minion split or whether you hit your first King's Court on T7 or T8.
Well, it does add shuffle luck, but so does, I dunno, militia. Yeah, those extreme splits are a big deal, but this is part of the calculated risk of the game. If you want a game without this kind of luck, this isn't the right one. Curse splits are big deals, and KC turn 7 or 8 may not be so big, but it can often be something like 4, 5, 6 turns different. Or tournaments hitting much better/worse. There are all kinds of other luck effects here.

ragingduckd

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Re: Chapel Cost?
« Reply #19 on: June 16, 2013, 05:28:02 am »
+3

In real-life discussion and debate, I often employ the simple tactic of interrupting a speaker and asking "Do you really believe that?" or "Aside from debunking my argument, what are you actually trying to say?"

Surprisingly often, these simple questions will actually carry the day (really! try it!). When they don't, they at least rescue the argument from point-scoring and minutia and bring us back to substantive discussion.

Online, this tactic is not nearly so effective. Anyone can spout off 1349 words (yup) of quibbles, irrelevancies, and ad hominim attacks without interruption. When this happens, it leaves me with the uncomfortable choice of either challenging the argument point by point (and thereby creating as ponderous and unreadable a tome as what I'm responding to) or letting those points pass unchallenged.

So for the sake of constructive discourse, let me concede that Tournament would be a weak $5 card, that Shatranj and Chess have nothing to do with Dominion, and that Donald X. Vaccarino is a god among men, and simply ask (because I honestly can't tell):

In 300 words or less, WW, what are you actually saying that Chapel should cost?
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Re: Chapel Cost?
« Reply #20 on: June 16, 2013, 05:32:43 am »
0

I voted $2 but thinking about it more $0 might be better.
You only buy it T1 or T2, and making is cost less means it is worse with trash for benefit.
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DStu

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Re: Chapel Cost?
« Reply #21 on: June 16, 2013, 06:14:04 am »
+1

In 300 words or less, WW, what are you actually saying that Chapel should cost?
I can give it you in 30:
Chapel at more than $2 would make the game feel fairer because "a more powerful card has to cost more" (*), but it would make the game worse because (*) is wrong.
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Warfreak2

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Re: Chapel Cost?
« Reply #22 on: June 16, 2013, 06:44:06 am »
+6

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Chapel at $2 makes 2/5 splits devastating. In something like 25% of games, one player has a 5/2 split and the other has 4/3. When Chapel's on the board, those aren't usually very fun games to play.

This number is WAY off. There's a 1 in 6 chance for a player to get 2/5 (lumping 2/5 together with 5/2), and thus a 5 in 36 chance, under 14%.
It's actually twice as much as that, because you've got two different ways you can pair a 2/5 split with a 4/3 split; I can have one and you can have the other, or you can have the other and I can have the one. That makes 10/36 which is a little more than 25%.

Put another way, in (1/6)^2 = 1/36 of games, both have 2/5, and in (5/6)^2 = 25/36, both have 4/3. The remaining 10/36 must be one of each.
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WanderingWinder

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Re: Chapel Cost?
« Reply #23 on: June 16, 2013, 08:20:14 am »
+4

In real-life discussion and debate, I often employ the simple tactic of interrupting a speaker and asking "Do you really believe that?" or "Aside from debunking my argument, what are you actually trying to say?"

Surprisingly often, these simple questions will actually carry the day (really! try it!). When they don't, they at least rescue the argument from point-scoring and minutia and bring us back to substantive discussion.

Online, this tactic is not nearly so effective. Anyone can spout off 1349 words (yup) of quibbles, irrelevancies, and ad hominim attacks without interruption. When this happens, it leaves me with the uncomfortable choice of either challenging the argument point by point (and thereby creating as ponderous and unreadable a tome as what I'm responding to) or letting those points pass unchallenged.
All I'm going to say is that we're on equal ground here.

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So for the sake of constructive discourse, let me concede that Tournament would be a weak $5 card, that Shatranj and Chess have nothing to do with Dominion, and that Donald X. Vaccarino is a god among men, and simply ask (because I honestly can't tell):
Okay, but this is actually not constructive either, because it implies that I am being totally ridiculous and claiming things that I am not (I surely believe the first of the three things here and surely don't believe the second and third).
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In 300 words or less, WW, what are you actually saying that Chapel should cost?
"Chapel would have some problems no matter what it costs. It is best (for the game) at $2, followed by $4, and worst at $3. However, $2-$4 doesn't really change all that much, and it would probably actually be fine at any of those costs. $2 has the problem of helping a 2/5 split, the others have the problem of hurting it. Having not actually tested Chapel at other costs, this is shooting a bit from the hip, but I do actually believe it all.
Costs don't convey power directly, but govern when you can get cards. Since chapel wants to be a t1-t2 card, and you only want to get one, $2-$4 make a difference almost exclusively for what you are allowed to pair it with. So the question becomes whether it's more imbalanced to force a 5/2 player to buy it alone, or for the same player to be able to pair it with a 5-cost. Again, without testing, I’m not sure of the answer. But 4 is better than 3 rather clearly, because at 3 the 4/3 player can open chapel/4-cost vs the 5/2 player’s chapel/-, whereas at 4 the 4/3 player can only get chapel/3-cost. You can really make an argument for chapel costing 4, but again, I defer to people who have tested it this way."

Edit: oh, and same to you. Succinctly, why should it cost $3?
« Last Edit: June 16, 2013, 08:35:29 am by WanderingWinder »
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NoMoreFun

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Re: Chapel Cost?
« Reply #24 on: June 16, 2013, 09:10:19 am »
0

I picked $3 because opening double Chapel isn't that hot, and the $5/$2 chapel openings dominated the rankings IIRC.

I didn't think about it that hard.
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