Hello friends!
Well, it's a year later, and I’m revisiting my old fan expansion with a few revisions and updates. A number of my original cards were initially bit uninteresting or unbalanced in other ways, and over the past month I’ve been tinkering with the set and redesigning a few of the cards just for fun. Below are a few updates (also in
the OP). There are four completely overhauled cards and three brand new ones. I’d love to get feedback on the changes!
4est
Redesigned Cards
My first version of Falconer was a Sage variant. It was mostly balanced but kinda eh. The new Falconer is a cheap Band of Misfits variant that offers you a choice when you play it: a simple cantrip, or play it as the worst Action card in your opponent's hand. Sometimes what they reveal just doesn’t work, but hey that’s okay, Falconer can never hurt you. But sometimes, their worst card is still a winner. Late game, it can become a tactical puzzle for your opponent on which of their good actions to reveal that will help you the least.
I liked old Granary, but it was a wordy and unnecessarily complicated draw-to-x and none of my revisions worked, so I scrapped it. When I was revising Rebellion to no longer be a Smithy, I decided to make Granary a Smithy instead, with a neat discard effect. It does suffer from the Harbinger effect—you’re sad when your discard is empty, but when it’s not, trading out the worst card in your hand for the best card in your discard pile is a good deal.
I had tried a few different versions of Marshal as a Militia variant, but never really liked any of them, so now it’s more like a cantrip Soldier. It takes two of them gets your opponents down to 3 cards in hand, and Marshal counters other Marshals by giving you an extra bonus with a small handsize.
I decided the attack on Rebellion was too strong to be attached to terminal draw, even with on-gain bonuses for opponents, so now it provides terminal coin for each set of duplicate cards in your hand. It's not too hard to get at least $2, but with some help, you can get a lot more. The attack gives a Torturer-like Curse or discard choice for hands with duplicate cards, but can be countered by hands with no duplicates. Rebellions need like-minded people working together in order to succeed.
I'll add that this card has not been play-tested yet, so it may need rebalancing.
New Cards
Carnival’s “travel between players” mechanic is inspired by Last Footnote’s Wanderer and Asper’s Pilgrim, but instead of a draw card, Carnival provides some nice payload. It’s great for hitting $5 and $6 in the early game, and higher price points later, and players are never sad to have one passed to them. Another key difference is that taking the coins and passing to your opponent is optional—you can always play it just for the non-terminal buy and cash out at another time (or try to amass a few Carnivals for a big turn later). $4 might seem pricey, but this is mainly to prevent double Carnival openings. I had one too many games when everyone opened double Carnival, and well, I’ll just say that the Carnival is fun for a while, but there’s a reason you don’t go there every day.
It’s a giant Workshop! Gainers that can gain that many cards per play are usually risky designs, but the differently named clause prevents it from piledriving, and on many boards, you end up taking stuff you don’t necessarily need. Collector’s Shop’s value definitely depends heavily on what else is available in the kingdom, but that’s true of all gainers. Finally, for each card you gain, you can discard something else to topdeck it, a handy little bonus.
I’ve had this reaction idea for a while, but haven’t actually tried it until now. Similar to Watchtower in its versatility, Undertaker has lots of neat little tricks up its sleeve. It can turn sifters into trashers (including other Undertakers), it can defend against trashing attacks and make discard attacks actually helpful, it can turn trash-for-benefits like Apprentice into crazy discard-for-benefits instead, etc. Is the reaction wording correct? It should react similarly to Market Square for trashing and Tunnel for discarding (i.e. you can't reveal during clean-up). I’ve tried a bunch of different things for the top, and settled on a terminal Forum for now, but I’m still testing other on-play options as well.