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[NoMoreFun]

I think the "cards can be tweaked, vote for concepts you like" is the best aspect of the competition, and submissions and voting should be in line with this. The cards winning competitions this time are more interesting than last time where a lot of slight twists on existing cards won. However I think cards will still be ignored because they look/are imbalanced, undercosted etc. The worst is when a card isn't voted for because it "won't fit the set". Some of the most interesting ideas will come from users who aren't intimately familiar with the balance of the game, or who make a mistake with their proposal. There's also a lot of misconceptions about how a card would work, and clarifying intent BEFORE voting would have been helpful.

Therefore a proposal for future rounds -
Instead of just submitting a card, you submit a concept (the more concise the better), and then submit a "sample card".

For example, a card from the intrigue competiton (not mine) was this:

Tiller
Action - $4
Trash a card from your hand. The player to your left chooses a card in the Supply costing at least $2 more than the trashed card. Gain it.

Now this card is obviously bad because it's strictly worse than remodel for the same cost. I suspect that the creator intended it to be "more than $2 more". However the concept is interesting and I would have gladly voted for it. So the new submission

Tiller:
Concept: A powerful card where someone else chooses the card you gain
Sample card:
Tiller
Action - $4
Trash a card from your hand. The player to your left chooses a card costing at least $2 more for you to gain.

While the card is still imbalanced, it is more explicit that the concept is what's being voted on.

If the idea eventually wins, and it becomes apparent that the set is missing a $2 card, then it could be a $2 card that goes up $3, and if it needs a $5 card, it could remodel up $5 (as examples).

Associated ideas:
* You could leave out costs to emphasise.
* It could be run in rounds, for example
- Concepts you'd like to see (round 1)
- Pick the concept you want to develop (round 2)
- Design parameters (cost? vanilla effect? etc.)
* A good place to start with this would be the "alchemy" round, as I'd like to vote on different ideas for how the potion cost could be used in an interesting way.

I'd like to see the minds of this forum collaborate to make the best attempt at a fan set that adds a significant amount to the game.

[nopawnsintended]

I think the "cards can be tweaked, vote for concepts you like" is the best aspect of the competition, and submissions and voting should be in line with this. The cards winning competitions this time are more interesting than last time where a lot of slight twists on existing cards won. However I think cards will still be ignored because they look/are imbalanced, undercosted etc. The worst is when a card isn't voted for because it "won't fit the set". Some of the most interesting ideas will come from users who aren't intimately familiar with the balance of the game, or who make a mistake with their proposal. There's also a lot of misconceptions about how a card would work, and clarifying intent BEFORE voting would have been helpful.

Therefore a proposal for future rounds -
Instead of just submitting a card, you submit a concept (the more concise the better), and then submit a "sample card".

For example, a card from the intrigue competiton (not mine) was this:

Tiller
Action - $4
Trash a card from your hand. The player to your left chooses a card in the Supply costing at least $2 more than the trashed card. Gain it.

Now this card is obviously bad because it's strictly worse than remodel for the same cost. I suspect that the creator intended it to be "more than $2 more". However the concept is interesting and I would have gladly voted for it. So the new submission

Tiller:
Concept: A powerful card where someone else chooses the card you gain
Sample card:
Tiller
Action - $4
Trash a card from your hand. The player to your left chooses a card costing at least $2 more for you to gain.

While the card is still imbalanced, it is more explicit that the concept is what's being voted on.

If the idea eventually wins, and it becomes apparent that the set is missing a $2 card, then it could be a $2 card that goes up $3, and if it needs a $5 card, it could remodel up $5 (as examples).

Associated ideas:
* You could leave out costs to emphasise.
* It could be run in rounds, for example
- Concepts you'd like to see (round 1)
- Pick the concept you want to develop (round 2)
- Design parameters (cost? vanilla effect? etc.)
* A good place to start with this would be the "alchemy" round, as I'd like to vote on different ideas for how the potion cost could be used in an interesting way.

I'd like to see the minds of this forum collaborate to make the best attempt at a fan set that adds a significant amount to the game.

After the initial confusion of reading the card as "The player to your left chooses a card in the Supply costing at least $2...{stop reading}", this feels like a deliberate misreading of the card.  "costing at least $2 more than the trashed card.  Gain it." is the same as "a card costing at least $2 more for you to gain."  If you read the whole sentence, there's no ambiguity.  I agree that the second wording is better because it avoids the initial confusion, but there's no difference in what these two cards do.

------

Correction: The second wording fails to specify that the card come from the supply.  Perhaps then you could choose cards from the trash?

[scott_pilgrim]

Honestly, I don't really think that explicitly stating the concept of each card helps anymore than just a reminder that we are voting on the concept of the card and not the card itself.  Plus, it means there's a lot more text to read; it already takes quite a while to read through all the submissions.  Furthermore, I feel like a lot of cards (maybe most cards?) are such that their concept is best expressed by the card itself; often times reading the concept in addition to the actual card text is just redundant.

Also, as I and others have pointed out, Tiller is not strictly worse than Remodel.  With no $7's on the board, it can turn $5's into Provinces, and with no $4's on the board, it can turn $2's into $5's.

[Powerman]

Honestly, I don't really think that explicitly stating the concept of each card helps anymore than just a reminder that we are voting on the concept of the card and not the card itself.  Plus, it means there's a lot more text to read; it already takes quite a while to read through all the submissions.  Furthermore, I feel like a lot of cards (maybe most cards?) are such that their concept is best expressed by the card itself; often times reading the concept in addition to the actual card text is just redundant.

Also, as I and others have pointed out, Tiller is not strictly worse than Remodel.  With no $7's on the board, it can turn $5's into Provinces, and with no $4's on the board, it can turn $2's into $5's.

... You realize Tiller is a $4?

[Nic]

Honestly, I don't really think that explicitly stating the concept of each card helps anymore than just a reminder that we are voting on the concept of the card and not the card itself.  Plus, it means there's a lot more text to read; it already takes quite a while to read through all the submissions.  Furthermore, I feel like a lot of cards (maybe most cards?) are such that their concept is best expressed by the card itself; often times reading the concept in addition to the actual card text is just redundant.

Also, as I and others have pointed out, Tiller is not strictly worse than Remodel.  With no $7's on the board, it can turn $5's into Provinces, and with no $4's on the board, it can turn $2's into $5's.

... You realize Tiller is a $4?

You realize Supply piles do not contain an infinite number of cards?
Also Black Market

[AJD]

I wonder if Tiller would be better priced at $3, for being mostly worse than Remodel, and so that it wouldn't always be on the board with a $4.... That said, the fact that it can usually expand $5s to Provinces is pretty powerful and probably justifies the higher price point.

(also it should probably be called Renovate or something)

[Nic]

  Back to the OP's idea, I'm in favor. It would be nice for the people who wrote the bizarre 'choose one' cards to explain how the options fit together, because a lot of them are inscrutable. (If it keeps people from submitting a random assortment of bonuses disguised as an idea, so much the better.) If a card is interesting but broken, it would be nice to frame the discussion in terms of the degree of the tweaks we can make without changing it to a different card entirely. This was the problem with Hinterland from the second contest, which had the silliest implementation of a cool idea. More text to wade through is a dangerous idea, but I think if it limited to 140 characters, and only allowed for cards that don't already require rule clarifications, it'll be bearable.

  That being said, I disagree about Tilller: I think the price was reasonable, but just writing an interaction on the card doesn't automatically make it interesting. The worst card your opponent can pick is the most expensive one Remodel could've given you, so you lose all the flexibility but retain plenty of the strength, especially since it expands $5 cards. It's terrible at getting rid of copper, yeah, but so is Remodel.
You know what card your opponent will name in every conceivable situation, so you're only going to play it when he doesn't have a choice: you might as well write "Trash a card costing more than this. If you do, gain a Province." It'll get the same amount of play as Tiller (provided there's no $7), and it's still viable at $4, but I don't find it interesting.

[NoMoreFun]

Sorry for any confusion. I redid the wording from memory, then realised it was better to copy the old wording, but I only made the one replacement.

I should know better than to provide an illustrative example on this forum. I didn't make this topic to discuss Tiller.

Another benefit to having concepts written is that they can prevent cards from being misread. That does play a bit of a role in how votes fall.

Also a card may get votes for being interpreted completely differently to its intention. I remember voting for a card, "Bargain", hoping that if it won it would be quite different to how it was submitted, but still a pure reaction costing $1 that upgrades. If however the creator's intent was different, it probably isn't right for the card to morph into something different. Early disclosure of the concept (even if short and in spoiler tags) could help here.

[eHalcyon]

I think that this could be good, except that it would become much more time consuming to review all the submissions.  I actually tried to do this with the very first contest -- for every submission, I tried to describe the "concept" of the card to help me focus my criticism.  But it takes a ridiculous amount of time.

A potential issue is that it doesn't really solve the current problem of voting based on the submitted card rather than the concept.   I'm sure plenty of people already do this, and the ones who don't may very well continue to just judge based on the sample card.  Moreover, there are probably some concepts that sound cool but just don't work in practice. 

For me personally, I already try to judge by concept more than the specific card, and I think I do it subconsciously as well.  If I particularly like a concept, I will suggest tweaks if I think they would be necessary.