Dominion > Variants and Fan Cards
Vineyard and University Cost Without Potion
Willvon:
Thanks to all of you for your suggestions. I appreciate hearing the various points of view. I hadn't thought about Vineyard as being that strong. I guess I looked at it as being like Gardens, but if you compare it to Fairgrounds, that does put a different spin on it.
If anyone else has any thoughts on this, I would love to hear your opinion.
krawhitham:
Just a comment about converting a potion cost card into coin cost. A potion costs $4 of course, but you also need to assign a value to the 'cost' of having a potion card in your deck.
Having to buy a potion card first means you can't buy card with a potion cost until at least turn 3. Then when you do draw your potion card there is no guarantee that you will have enough coin to buy the university (unlikey... but possible).
So in the past you would only be able to have a card with a potion cost in your hand by turn 5 at the very earliest. Add to this the 'cost' of waiting for your potion card to cycle through your deck to buy another alchemy card (or the cost of buying multiple potions).
rinkworks:
I realize this is an old thread, but I was thinking about this issue the other day and realizing that Vineyards is the one potion-cost card that really *can't* be converted to a coin cost and retain its flavor. The other potion-cost cards could be converted over and retain their flavor, even if they don't behave exactly the way they're intended to. I'm satisfied that a $5 University with an "except University" clause is close enough to the real thing to play similarly.
But here's how a Vineyard game typically goes: You buy some Potions, some gainers (Workshop/Ironworks), maybe a little money, and some starter actions, and then, once you're off, you basically buy a Vineyard every time a Potion comes up in your hand and an action every time it doesn't. This allows the purchase of a Vineyard even with a hand as weak as Vineyard-Vineyard-Estate-Estate-Potion. Then when you get some actual coins, you can buy actions.
But by costing Vineyard at $4 or $5 or so, you might have the right approximate coin-cost, but now a Vineyard-based game is completely different. When your hand can afford a Vineyard, it can also afford an action, and perhaps vice-versa. When it doesn't even generate enough cash to buy an action card -- possibly not even enough to buy an Estate -- you're dead in the water. Basically Vineyards and the actions that power them up are competing for the same resources, whereas a true Vineyard game is about managing separate resources to get each piece of the puzzle. That distinction defines the flavor of the whole game.
Thus, I wonder if a truer conversion of Vineyard to a non-Potion board would be to make it cost zero coins but require some relatively innocuous card to be present in your hand. Make the cost of Vineyard, for example, a Pearl Diver. Or a Curse. Or a Duchy, though Duchies could swing a game all on their own, so probably that's a bad idea. Perhaps the most accurate way to do the conversion is to pick a $4 treasure card (Quarry or Talisman fit the bill nicely) and pretend they're really Potions.
Thisisnotasmile:
Vineyard used to be a $4 card. Gardens was a $0P card. They got switched just before Dominion was released but I'm sure if they were released that way you would not notice the difference.
WanderingWinder:
--- Quote from: Thisisnotasmile on August 16, 2011, 05:09:17 pm ---Vineyard used to be a $4 card. Gardens was a $0P card. They got switched just before Dominion was released but I'm sure if they were released that way you would not notice the difference.
--- End quote ---
I would if the formula remained the same. I'm guessing the cards were different then than they are now, 'cause vineyards really goes with Alchemy's action-y theme much better than gardens. And my gut says it's much easier to get 3 actions than 10 cards. But maybe Donald knows better about these things than I do.
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