Provisioner
Types: Action
Cost: $5
You may gain a Silver. For each card in your hand, the player to your left puts a card from your discard pile into your hand.
Doubles your hand from the worst cards in your discard pile (or all of them if you don't have that many). It also lets you gain a Silver for the cases when you don't have a discard pile or want to slog your deck.
This seems like a card that should be purchased with some debt. And more expensive maybe? Maybe 3$ and $3debt?
Can't say why. Just a feel that it is OP at $5.
Without villages and labs, it's worse than Envoy, and degrading quickly while greening. I would value it $4
You make a convincing case there. I think you are right. In one sense, a guaranteed 10 cards is better than. But I would easily prefer 5 cards of cycling progression to five cards without it.
$4 is right. But a pretty good card at that price if TFB cards and a village is present.
But not as good as Envoy.
Provisioner's draw becomes big and decent if you have a source of +actions and a way to ensure you have a larger number of cards in hand than useless cards in your discard pile (especially trash Estates, gain mid-turn, and discard productively). When this occurs, Provisioner's draw is often non-trivial, so the length of its resolution becomes an important consideration in its design. The draw effect on its own is likely a $4 effect due to how much needs to appear to make it valuable, but I want Provisioner to be a $5 card to reduce the number of times it is gained and played in a game. In order to make Provisioner's draw worthwhile, I put one of the things it needs onto it: A mid-turn gain. The form of that mid-turn gain needs to be something that does not add significantly to its resolution speed (
Workshop or
The Sky's Gift would take too long), so it optionally gains a Silver. With that gain, its plays become more like
Explorer (can't gain Gold) or
Sculptor (can't gain non-Silver, doesn't give Villagers), so $5 looks like a fair enough cost─though definitely in the weaker half of $5 cards.
Summer House - Action Shelter, $1
You may play a non-Duration, non-Shelter Action card from your hand twice. If you do, trash this.
Taverna - Night Shelter, $1
Choose a card you have in play that you've gained a copy of this turn. If you do, trash this to gain another copy of it.
Asylum - Action Shelter, $1
Discard 2 Shelters. If you do, +1 Card per card in your hand.
Edit: reworked Summer House so it can't be trashed in the opening. Replaced Wagon with the cleaner Taverna, which also can't be trashed in the opening.
You can still trash Taverna in the opening by turning it into a Copper. Not sure if that's good or not, but I would just ask to "choose an Action you have in play..." to avoid the issue altogether.
Asylum looks super weak. I get that the idea is that you have to hold onto Taverna and Summer House so you can get a powerful draw, but fact is that if you can manage to draw all 3 junk Shelters in any kind of consistent way, the not-even-doubling your hand (your hand is reduced by 3 before you get to draw anything) will be a paltry benefit that only clinches a deck that was already going to draw itself anyway. I cannot imagine a deck that could stomach 3 extra dead-weight cards that it could otherwise trash just for the hope of this benefit.
Harlequin
Types: Action
Cost: $4
You may play a card from your hand three times. If you did, trash it.
Note that it specifies card, not just action, meaning it can be used on any playable card.
This is strictly better than Moneylender (as in, using it on a copper is the same as Moneylender, and this adds additional functionality) and should probably cost more as a result
Seconded. I'd say it would still be strong at $5 but unhealthy at $6 (as swinging into a strong tempo-trasher on turn 3\4 is typically too luck-based).
I'm also not sure that the rules inherently imply that you can't "play" a Curse or Victory card, it just doesn't have any generic function to do so nor a definition of what would happen if you did. I think this does need to specify Action or Treasure. It also should either trash the card when it is discarded or else follow
Procession's lead by excluding Duration cards to avoid tracking issues.
Vista • $5 • Action - Victory - Duration
Set a Victory card aside under this, face up.
(This stays in play)
If the card set aside in this way cost $5 or more, cards cost <1> more during your turn.
-
This is worth VP equal to the set-aside card.
This is a riff on an old card from the Throne Room contest, spiralstaircase's Eyre, with the difference being this always works (and sometimes hurts you after the fact) instead of having to try to time it.
Needs to be optional for when it gets played with no Victory cards in your hand.
I was playing around with a similar idea, but the problem is that its power budget gets completely eaten up by setting aside Provinces and then it ends up feeling so similar to a less interesting
Island anyway. The really meaningful difference here is that it makes cards more expensive, but that only occurs so close to the end of the game (other than the fact that it drags out the game's ending more because adding another whole ~36VP to the game is pretty silly) and doing virtually anything else with it seems like such a waste of a one-shot $5 card.
Promenade (Action, $6).
You may play an Action card from your hand twice.
You may return one of your Villagers. If you did, play it a third time.
---
When you gain this, +1 Villager.
A Throne Room variant that lets you upgrade to King's Court if you have a Villager to hand.
...
Yeah. This is just a more-expensive Throne Room that has a stronger effect than Throne Room. I dunno if it's weak at or not, but it seemed weird to use the term "dead" when that generally refers to something like Stables in a hand with no treasure; or when people make fan cards that do almost nothing unless there's an attack available, etc. Even if the card were just literally Throne Room but costing , I wouldn't think to use the term "dead".
Would this work better as a $5? I wasn't sure initially if it should cost $5 or $6; eventually I erred on the side of caution.
I think $6 is an appropriate cost. I'd generally advise against using busted cards like King's Court as a benchmark to balance other cards and comparing this to the $5 Throne variants it seems clearly much stronger than those to me.
A
King's Court once that becomes a
Throne Room is much stronger than a
Throne Room that never misses (
Royal Carriage)?
Crown and
Scepter are definitely a very marginal benefit on top of
Throne Room, but having a one-time upgrade is also not much of one. I would not vote a $5 price as overwhelming, merely that the way it plays is dully familiar.
I'd personally prefer its playing be limited in some other way and it generate Villagers in some circumstance. It would make it feel more different than
Throne Room and the other Villager cards.
Siege Tower
Types: Action, Attack, Duration
Cost: $4
You may play an Attack card from your hand. If you do, at the start of your next turn, play it again. Otherwise, each other player puts their -1 Card token on their deck.
Setup: Add 2 extra Attack Kingdom card piles to the Supply.
I've played with "Play a non-Duration Action from your hand. If it is still in play, at the start of your next turn: Play it again." Even with no limiters it is such a weak effect that it is often best ignored at a cost of $2, because the costs of aligning it with a worthwhile Action and that inherent -1 Card on the first turn is not nearly compensated by the strength of start-of-turn draw. Siege Tower however is significantly more limited than that. It should probably
Throne Room the Attack now and play it again next turn.
Playing an Attack Duration in an Attack Duration sounds like a tracking headache, and it seems doubly frustrating that Siege Tower is so bad in Siege Tower. I'd much rather its Attack be something that can stack. Maybe "+$1 and each other player with at least 4 cards in hand puts a card from their hand on top of their deck"?
I continue to dislike the idea of anything that throws more piles into the Supply simply because that is a design path that doesn't seem to have any meaningful end: We're just going to keep getting bigger and bigger Kingdoms. That is completely to taste, though, so don't mind me.