Okay, re-refined the list (Jack was definitely too high, being the biggest instigator). Now some responses:
I am extremely curious about the new position of JoaT! The top I mostly agree in general (disregarding small changes), although Fool's Gold and Chapel seem too high, so reading something about their positions would be interesting as well.
Chapel is amazingly good. Fool's Gold is also really good either for Big Money, or for engines (where it is pretty nice as a payload - you get them all together, so it's a good source of non-terminal, non-draw-dead-able economy after you've gotten your engine up).
I'm convinced that Feodum should be way higher than #185. Alt vp cards always need more time to be understood, and I think Feodum is particularly different from the others…
Otherwise I like the list. It's interesting. I don't necessarly agree but at least I can see the arguments. Excepting some cards : Margrave surprises me. So high, really ? Rebuild at #16 is also very surprising. Monument and lighthouse are very low, I think.
Margrave is just very good - particularly the first one - combining a discard attack, a smithy, and a buy is super nice for your engine, also not horrible for BM.
Rebuild being low some people will talk about - it is VERY good. But it's really not unbeatable - if you get a strong engine OR good BM, you can definitely overtake it. And it doesn't work very well with basically anything. Also not the greatest with shelters, colony, vineyard, VP chips.
Feodum: Well this is some discussion. There are pretty good combos with Trader and Masterpiece, but these aren't even unbeatable (good engine can be fast enough for sure), and otherwise, if you're playing a normal BM, they're often worth 1. You can often get them to 2, but it's quite hard to get them higher, even with a lot of the silver-gainers like Bureaucrat, and besides Jack, you probably don't really want to be playing those anyway. So I don't think that Feoda for points is really a strategy that does much for you very often at all, which would mean you usually need a significant value from the trashing bit. But the problem here is, even if you can put this together with a trasher, there aren't all that many times you really want 3 silvers all that much. And it does power up other feoda, but then there are fewer of them to be powered up... it's really hard to get it to make a big impact. Sure, it's not just a super-terrible card by any means, but there just really aren't all that many cards fitting that description.
It seems to me like you are putting the focus rather on "how often" the card is advantageous than on "how big" the advantage is.
I'm doing both.
Imho, the strength of a card is defined by the percentage of games I will lose if I never buy it.
This is close to right, and both things above are important.
According to this, let me pick three ratings which make me believe that you have another understanding of what "strength" means. Your List No.3 ranks
Quarry above Sea Hag,
Cartographer above Ghost Ship,
Junk Dealer above Goons.
Yeah. Actually probably Sea Hag is good more often than quarry, but there are times where quarry is SUCH a big game... Sea Hag can be too, but there's so many ways to deal with it, it can really often be pretty dead (most any good trashing makes it worthless, or nearly so).
Cartographer, apart from combos, is a nice bit of grease, and can let you cycle to an important card or few early on (trasher or junker typically). Ghost Ship is quite nice at stopping Big Money, but... that's about it. There's lots of counters, but even apart from that, engines are typically already good, and this doesn't hurt them that much, while... only giving you 2 cards from a 5-cost, which isn't really as good as I'm looking for.
Junk Dealer over Goons is definitely the closest of these to me. Sure, Goons is REALLY good, but Junk Dealer is REALLY good too - basically I have it a spot higher because getting your engine running (or clearing out junk) is SO important. And Goons is the point machine Par Excellence, but it is a terminal that doesn't draw, and it's terminal, which limits it if you are limited on villages. The bigger issue, though, is that there are other finishers which work really well, too, and you can typically get something good even without goons - usually not AS good, but if you get your engine going a lot better, you can win anyway. But of course it's very very very close.
discussions of card strength are a somewhat futile attempt to compress a multidimensional idea into a single number.
It is obviously true, that "strength" can be understood in many different ways. But that doesn't make it futile to provide a definition, quite the contrary: The less a common sense exists, the more it is necessary to clarify what exactly one is talking about to prevent misunderstandings.
That does, of course, not at all mean that I declare my personal definition of strength to be the one and only objective version. What it is supposed to do, is to set up an objective departing point for interesting discussions about the same thing. And so:
But I'm not sure your specific examples really make your point. It's not clear to me which of:
"never buying Quarry, Junk Dealer and Cartographer" or
"never buying Goons, Sea Hag and Ghost Ships",
will lead to a lower winning percentage overall.
That somewhat suprises me. It is mathematically correct that I am not sure about this, but in some degree, I am really convinced. Let me pick the comparison of the highest rated cards:
Certainly Junk Dealer is a huge card on many boards (it is BIG).
This far, you have my full agreement. I even wrote my very first article about Junk Dealer, as I felt it was crucially underrated on Qvist's Ranking. But really ...
bigger than GOONS ?!?
I can remember way more games where Goons was the one-and-only dominant card. And this not primarily because my attack hurt my soul but rather because of the insane amount of VP's one can achieve with multiple goons.
And this point: The insane amount of VPs - this is another thing that I think people can overrate. Sure, I might be able to score 300 points off of Goons, but this doesn't almost ever mean you really won crushingly. Well, typically it does, but not because you were able to play so many goons, more that your engine was miles ahead of whatever they can do. If I'm far ahead, in a goons game, it's basically because my engine is going better than yours. Goons gives you a payload, but that the payload can go huge just really doesn't matter THAT much terribly often - it's mostly that it gives you a lot of time against someone who is not building, who is going for green/BM and can't pressure piles on you. Well of course it's quite good anyway, but the insane amount of points is not what is winning you the game, it's the engine-building.
