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Author Topic: Treasure Chest Design Contest — Card #3: Dark Ages  (Read 100561 times)

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Archetype

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Re: Treasure Chest Design Contest — Card #3: Dark Ages
« Reply #325 on: October 02, 2013, 06:01:11 pm »
0

Congrats markusin!
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jamespotter

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Re: Treasure Chest Design Contest — Card #3: Dark Ages
« Reply #326 on: October 02, 2013, 06:03:38 pm »
+1

Congrats to markusin, of course  :)

My card was Garderobe, and I am still proud of it. I made it as a Ruins-for-Benefit because I thought a lot of people would and I wanted to get my 2 cents in. I actually really dislike self-junking fan cards in general, but I think my solution is fairly novel. I tried to make the card good on its own, but still incorporate ruins into its central concept. I am actually surprised at the wide variety of responses I got, ranging from "ridiculously weak" to "possibly really strong," and I am shocked that no one pointed out what I think is the cards biggest fallacy: It's swinginess based on the board. Some kingdoms it will be awful, which is fine, but in a game with Courtyard or Chapel, yikes.
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Nic

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Re: Treasure Chest Design Contest — Card #3: Dark Ages
« Reply #327 on: October 02, 2013, 06:30:27 pm »
+1

The Secret History of Condottiero
 If you were involved in this thread here, you probably deduced that Condottiero was my card. I got into a discussion with eHalc about Soothsayer (LastFootnote's card) and whether the decisions you were forced to make justified the wall of text on the card. In order to keep your deck from being junked, you had to discard treasure every single turn until the end of the game. If you whiffed once, or bought a Province on turn 15 instead of discarding down to $7, then end result was the same as if you never bothered with the effect to begin with. Other people disagreed, but it seemed obvious to me that the optimal strategy was to completely ignore the discard option on nearly every board, in which case they had something identical to a $4 Witch. I also had a personal prejudice against Duchess, apparently, because I did everything I could think of to kill the ''In games using this, . . ." clause.

I tried to come up with a scenario where I would be willing to use the discard, with the knowledge that I wouldn't be able to keep it up for the whole of the game. What I realized is that it could be useful when you're at the bottom of your deck and you have a spare Copper. If you can delay the Curse for a turn or two, you can cause it to miss the reshuffle. The variant I liked best (although obviously it took liberties with the spirit and the letter of the original card) was to gain the Curse immediately no matter what you did, but give you a free reshuffle if you decided to discard. People had already suggested renaming the card Loan Shark, and this seemed to still be thematic with the new name; you delay the painful part of the card by giving up money when you encounter it.

 We already had our share of $4 Cursers filling the Witch-with-a-nerf role, but there was still space in the Looters. Maybe it was that the extortion theme fit better in a military setting than a mystical one. For some reason, the card seemed more interesting to me giving out Ruins than Curses. So that gives me "Each player may discard a Treasure. If he does, he puts his deck into his discard pile and immediately reshuffles.
Each other player gains a Ruins."
It needs to do something for your economy as well; if you slap a +$2 on that, it might be playable at $3 or at $4, but still missing something. I could add more bonuses to the top; +Buy is a good way to turn a weak $4 into a strong $4, and +2 Buys is something only Dark Ages can do. Later, when I was actually typing up my submission in a PM, I started thinking about what I could do to make my card less vanilla. On-trash effects were on theme, and one of those would help my card stand out in the crowd, right? :P I thought about what I'd like most when I buy an attack card and then proceed to lose the Curse split: if I don't clear out the junker as well as the junk, I'm gonna fall too far behind. A Woodchopper that benefits other players is better than a dead Sea Hag, but it's still not a power card. Obviously a Sea Hag that has the option to self-trash is too good, but why not give you a free trash when you do get rid of it? (As it turns out, on-trash effects do not make a card unique in a DA fan card contest.)

When I decided to submit the card, I started flipping through a thesaurus to find synonyms for words like mercenary and soldier. I considered 'Landsknecht' for a while, but nothing else was good. Wikipedia turned out to be my savior here; the condottieri were mercenary commanders contracted by the city-states in Renaissance Italy to fight their wars, and they quickly gained a reputation for cutting deals with their enemies in the field. It might be a little over the Margrave threshold, but it was just so perfect that I couldn't resist.
 
The thing I liked most about it was that it's kind of a gateway drug to playing Chancellor. It gives you an immediate, concrete problem that can be solved with a reshuffle, and tossing a surplus copper from hand is a much lower opportunity cost than choosing to buy a terminal silver over a real one. I ended up not voting for it, as no one else seemed interested in it. The main criticism was that there was a semi-interesting idea buried under a lot of bloat, and that isn't false at all. Depending on how well it did (and whether repeat entries are encouraged or discouraged) I might submit it to the next DA contest with one little buff, rather than two.

Fun Wikipedia fact for people from the Hinterlands contest: there's a very old card game called Lansquenet (named after the German landsknechts) which is literally just the European variant of Oicho-Kabu. You play a card and then reveal copies from the top of the deck, going bust on the first match.
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LastFootnote

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Re: Treasure Chest Design Contest — Card #3: Dark Ages
« Reply #328 on: October 02, 2013, 06:33:48 pm »
+11

Results are up! Because I have less time than I did, I didn't repost every card's text again. Instead there's just a table. I hope that's OK with everyone!

Congratulations to markusin!
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jamespotter

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Re: Treasure Chest Design Contest — Card #3: Dark Ages
« Reply #329 on: October 02, 2013, 06:47:29 pm »
+4

Results are up! Because I have less time than I did, I didn't repost every card's text again. Instead there's just a table. I hope that's OK with everyone!
I actually like the table a lot better as it makes it easy to compare results quickly. Thanks again for organizing this!
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eHalcyon

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Re: Treasure Chest Design Contest — Card #3: Dark Ages
« Reply #330 on: October 02, 2013, 06:47:49 pm »
0

If you whiffed once, or bought a Province on turn 15 instead of discarding down to $7, then end result was the same as if you never bothered with the effect to begin with.

...

+Buy is a good way to turn a weak $4 into a strong $4, and +2 Buys is something only Dark Ages can do.

...

I ended up not voting for it, as no one else seemed interested in it.

The thing about Soothsayer is certainly not true.  If you keep the Curses out of your deck until turn 15, you've had at least 15 turns with a clean deck.  Curses usually matter most because of clogging up your hands.  Even if you let the Curses in before the end of the game, you'll have had many turns without them slowing down your shuffles and making your hands worse.  Whether that's worth discarding a Copper (or other Treasure) is not at all clear, but the end result is not "the same as if you never bothered with the effect to begin with."

There's no reason why you can't do +2 Buys outside of DA.

You should still vote for it if you like it.  If you ended up not liking it so much, then that's fair.  I didn't vote for my previous entries, but I voted for Soldier in this challenge because I still liked it, despite a lukewarm-at-best reception from the general public. :P  FWIW, I liked Condottiero.  I can't remember if I voted for it in the end (I think not), but I did like it.  Letting opponents Chancellor is a really neat drawback for a junker.
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GeoLib

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Re: Treasure Chest Design Contest — Card #3: Dark Ages
« Reply #331 on: October 02, 2013, 07:24:28 pm »
+2

I'm pretty pleased with tied-for-fourth! :) Thanks you guys!

Bargain originated when I was thinking about a post from Greatest Dominion Moments of (I think) 2012 in which Stef revealed a trader and then a watchtower to an opponent's swindler to return his swindled silver to the top of his deck. I was thinking about if there was a way to actually get something better off of an opponents swindler.

This turned into the idea of copper-as-a-reaction, which is basically what it became. I also liked the challenge of designing something that was a pure reaction and avoiding the problems those usually have by making it almost never just a dead card. I originally priced it at $2 and then went through a brief period of idiocy in which I thought it interacted with multiple buys and therefore should cost $3. I actually dropped it to $1 specifically to nerf the reaction with cursers, which I think was a mistake.

It was too late to submit to the hinterlands contest, but I thought it fit with dark ages in that: it upgraded your cards, it cost $1, it was thematically about hunting for a bargain in impoverished times. Depending on how people feel about resubmission, I might put it in for Hinterlands II at least costing $2 and perhaps buffing it (maybe by giving it an action of its own, though I rather like pure reaction).
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Nic

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Re: Treasure Chest Design Contest — Card #3: Dark Ages
« Reply #332 on: October 03, 2013, 12:04:58 am »
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The thing about Soothsayer is certainly not true.  If you keep the Curses out of your deck until turn 15, you've had at least 15 turns with a clean deck.  Curses usually matter most because of clogging up your hands.  Even if you let the Curses in before the end of the game, you'll have had many turns without them slowing down your shuffles and making your hands worse.  Whether that's worth discarding a Copper (or other Treasure) is not at all clear, but the end result is not "the same as if you never bothered with the effect to begin with."

There's no reason why you can't do +2 Buys outside of DA.

You should still vote for it if you like it.  If you ended up not liking it so much, then that's fair.  I didn't vote for my previous entries, but I voted for Soldier in this challenge because I still liked it, despite a lukewarm-at-best reception from the general public. :P  FWIW, I liked Condottiero.  I can't remember if I voted for it in the end (I think not), but I did like it.  Letting opponents Chancellor is a really neat drawback for a junker.
Yeah, I really meant to say Dark Ages is the only set that has such a card in it. No idea how it got written it down like that.

I'll admit that the VP penalty on a Curse still scares me as much as the dead card does, but the two effects are equivalent to a first approximation. A Curse is a dead card in your hand, and so is a Copper or Silver that you've already decided to discard. If there are as many Curses on the mat as there are hands per shuffle (unlikely, as there won't be any trashing in the games where you want the cards to stay on your Soothsayer mat) then all you're doing is lowering the variance on the number of dead cards per hand. The problem is that there are very few reasons to do that.
« Last Edit: October 03, 2013, 01:27:35 am by Nic »
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