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[Showdown35]

Happy New Year to this Wonderful Community!

The holidays are over and there is time once again for hobbies! So, I return (well, I've actually been reading posts here whenever I got a chance over the holidays, just not really contributing) with a toss up between two version of a Black Market variant for my Corruption set.

Here are the two versions I'm playing with:

Unreal Dealer - $5 - Action
Gain the top card of the Unreal deck. If you don't, +1 Action and trash this.
(Before the game, make an Unreal deck out of one copy of each Kingdom card from one Dominion Expansion or Base Set not being used in this game.)

Unreal Dealer - $7 - Action
Discard a card that is not a Victory card.
Gain a Kingdom card from the Unreal set costing up to $2 more than it.
(Before the game, choose a Dominion Expansion or Base Set not being used in this game. That is the Unreal set.)

I'm really torn between these two versions, and I'm looking for comments, tweak suggestions, and criticisms for both.

 I really like the way the $7 version plays with the whole trade a good card for an "Unreal" card but I'm not sure if making the possibility of gaining multiple copies of an "Unreal" card is too crazy. The $7 price tag is partially there to help prevent that kind of craziness.

 The $5 version is pretty similar to Black Market, with a much higher risk/reward (you don't get multiple cards to choose from and you might just get a crappy cheap card, but you don't have to pay anything if you get a great high-priced card), which fits the theme of my expansion set perfectly!

I look forward to your comments!

[popsofctown]

You definitely want to go with the first version, I think.  The second version will end up tutoring out certain cards from certain sets over and over again and not feeling much like what I think you're going for.

[Showdown35]

You definitely want to go with the first version, I think.  The second version will end up tutoring out certain cards from certain sets over and over again and not feeling much like what I think you're going for.

That's what I was worried about with that one, which is why I made the condition of having to trade a non-victory card (meaning you have to discard a good card you likely could have otherwise used), but I guess it would still be too easy to just load up an specific combo piece or overly strong cards. Maybe if I made the card gained have to be exactly $2 more... Meh...

Thanks for the comment, I'm thinking I will go with the $5 version. It fits my high risk/high reward theme, and it stops my set from having a $7 card.

That being said, anyone have any comments or critiques of the $5 version? Too similar to Black Market? Priced fairly?

[Deadlock39]

I think your second concept might work better (and could be cheaper) if you somehow randomized your options each time.  If you could purchase or somehow gain one of a random 3 cards from the Unreal set, it would prevent you from being able to get an engine rolling that could just grab King's Court every turn, but could still possibly get multiples of the same card out.  That might be too similar to Black Market.

[popsofctown]

I really like the first one as-is, to be honest, so I can't give much feedback there.  The only thing I would possibly mess with is the fizzle mechanic.  Which looks fine, but is the only part of the card that seems to have a chance of being suboptimal.

It seems to me that if the whole set gets emptied, you should reward the player who bought fewer Unreal cards somewhat to discourage heavy purchasing of the Unreal Dealer.  Of course you're already doing that because the player with fewer Unreal cards has fewer nothing burgers to pitch.  You could go further with that though.  Making it terminal is little help since the Unreal spammer probably has more villages.  Replacing the trashed Unreal Dealer with a Duchy or Estate might punish the Unreal spammer a little bit, since the player with fewer of them is more likely to be BM or half BM and accomodate that ok.