WW, I enjoyed your analysis of the cards, although I don't agree 100% with your critiques. It seems to me that we have slightly differing priorities when rating cards. Your priorities seem to be Elegant > Balanced >> Interesting. Or maybe Balanced > Elegant >> Interesting. For me it's Elegant > Interesting >> Balanced. Balanced is just as important as Interesting and Elegant, but Unbalanced tends to be waaaaaaay easier to fix than Boring or Clunky. Maybe I'm wrong, so forgive me if I'm off base. I'm not trying to put words in your mouth.
Let's talk about Indulgence.
Indulgence: I feel like this card is too strong. Basically, what card would I not buy for an extra 2 VP? Virtually none of them. Okay, too many terminals you say. But this is a treasure! There aren't many terminals you can just buy too many of straight off the bat, particularly when basically any village just gets you there anyway. I do like the idea of the card, incentivizing you go buy weaker cards, sort of an anti contraband or anti embargo, but I feel like it would be better served being either only 1 vp, or being a terminal action (*possibly* costing 4).
You claim that the card is too strong, then explain why you'd nearly always buy the named card. But I notice that you never really explain how the latter implies the former. Even if I nearly always buy the named card, how does that make the card too strong? Having it where you almost always want to buy the named card is way better than almost never buying it and probably significantly better than buying it about half the time. Otherwise it's mostly a Silver with +1 Buy.
My question for you is, how often is a strategy that includes Indulgences and buys some cards it doesn't really want better than a well-trimmed engine that doesn't buy Indulgences?
Well, I have had this thought. And what I am saying is not necessarily how I vote, because I can say it's boring, but I don't feel like it benefits anyone. So there is that. Also, I think in many cases broken is not so easy to fix, and moreover, boring isn't often an issue. I mean, is smithy boring? Is Village boring? So there are some boring cards here, but it's subjective (very important), and I think even basic effects are interesting, and often at least as much so as complicated ones.
But probably we just have differences of opinion, and as far as I'm concerned, this is fine.
Now, about Indulgence, SirPeebles points out (and this is one of the great comparisons I've seen about dominion cards) that buying ONE card named makes this effectively harem with a buy. So, it has to be a worse card than you'd want normally, so if it were only once, then that's okay. But you know, I think that on the whole, the ability to do it more than once outweighs that (especially with the +buy), so it has to be a stronger AND cheaper card than harem. Okay, harem isn't a world-beater, so maybe this isn't game-breaking, but it doesn't give me good feelings. And I guess my point, in the larger scheme of things, about always buying the named card, isn't so much about it being too strong as about it not making an interesting decision - and actually largely reducing the interestingness of the decisions you have to make, at least relative to the other cards. So it's boring, in a way, because it's too strong.
Having said that, the idea can probably be fixed somehow, so you know, that's not a deathknell; because the concept, at least, is very nice.
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Topic: Treasure Chest Design Contest — Card #1: Prosperity (Read 97125 times)