I think in this contest flavor has an important role.
I’m from Brazil, so I chose the currency to be fruits of my country. They really were one of the currencies here in barter times, at the same time of castles and knights in Europe. So, they have a similar flavor to Hinterlands expansion cards.
Here’s my entry:
TROPICAL FRUITS • • Treasure
$1
Choose one:
+1 Coffers; or
+1 Villager.
FRUIT MIX • • Treasure
+1 Buy
When you play this, it's worth $1 per different named treasure you have in play (including this).
It’s a split pile with 5 Tropical Fruits over 5 Fruit Mix.
TROPICAL FRUITS
A Copper with a chosen bonus, a Coffers or a Villagers, which has big versatility, enabling good resources control. You can choose either use payload now, save payload or save actions.
FRUIT MIX
A Bank variant which cares for treasure names and give +buy. The split pile itself has two different named treasures, so without other alternative treasures in kingdom it may worth up to $5. It may shine with these other treasures in kingdom and even sometimes be very strong with Capitalism, but it’s the same with Bank. The +Buy feature ensures you won’t lose your additional money.
With $4 in hand it’s (almost) strictly better to buy Tropical Fruits than Silver, but you still may want to buy some Silver for more diversity to Fruit Mix. Tropical Fruits being a better choice than Silver in most cases also helps to buy them fast to reveal Fruit Mix sooner.
Feedbacks are always welcome.
Fruit Mix feels very similar to Bank to me.
Thank you! As I said it's a Bank variant, but I think it plays very different from Bank, since variety is tough to achieve. With four Coppers and Bank your Bank worth $5. For the same result with Fruit Mix, you would need five different treasures. It is more in the spirit of Cornucopia cards than Prosperity cards. It also has +Buy.
I suppose it's a bit harder to get it to "pop off" like Bank. I guess I'm worried that this becomes a far superior alternative to Gold most of the time because it will almost always be worth at least $3 and it has a +Buy on it too.
Yes, but it's not an automatic Gold+, you have to align three different treasures for it to be. Also, it's the second card of a split pile, not available all the time and with the extra cost of buying top cards first. Besides that, you probably would want to buy Gold anyway to give the variety needed by Fruit Mix.
Aligning three different treasures is not very difficult. Fruit Mix counts as one of those three so you really only need a copper + something else (which you almost certainly have a lot of thanks to the strength of Tropical Fruits).
It is true that it isn't available all the time; however, the strength of Fruit Mix makes me think that this will almost always be available when you want it in the games where you would buy it anyways. I don't see myself picking up a gold in Fruit Mix games most of the time because by the time I have a Fruit Mix either a) I'm drawing my deck and getting +$4 from each fruit mix is enough (assuming copper, silver, tropical fruits) or b) I'm not drawing that much so it's unlikely that buying a gold actually increases variety.
It's definitely worse than Gold in sloggy games but I don't think that's enough to make it not too good in the average case.
A Gold is a guaranteed $3 with only one card, so in your situation B (not drawing so much) it’s not obvious that a Fruit Mix is better than it.
In situations with good draw and deck control of course it’s easier to align 3 cards, but I think it’s counterbalanced by the fact that the cards needed to be aligned in this case are treasures, a type of card which presence in deck hinder good draw and deck control.
In many situations Fruit Mix is not automatically better than Gold:
- with junkers or cursers.
- without trashers.
- without good draw.
- with handsize attacks.
- with cards which care about Gold.
- in situations you could buy a Gold without the step of buy a Silver first.
- in decks you may want only one or two treasures which give some payload and don’t clog your engine.
- after start greening (it’s harder either to draw deck or align cards in start hand).
- when it collides with other copies of itself without other treasures (Gold + Gold + Gold = $9 – Fruit Mix + Fruit Mix = Fruit Mix = $3). This also makes it a card that is not always automatically good to overbuy.
In your example A, Fruit Mix is better of course, but it’s the kind of situation in which you also always activate your Conspirators or other cards that need some cards to be played before to do its better. Even in this situation A, I think I would want to buy a Gold, either to replace that Copper or to make my Fruit Mix worth $5 (since I have +Buy, why I would want produce only $8 per turn?).
Anyway, it’s possible to include a clause that you get +Buy only if it worth $4 or more, but I really don’t know if it’s necessary. What do you think?