For Week 12, I am introducing a new card type that I have experiment with a bit,
Suppliers. Suppliers are cards that, once gained and played, offer the player one or more additional options during their Buy phase. Generally, Suppliers will come in a 10 card Kingdom piles in the Supply like any other Kingdom card.
How they work:
- Suppliers are played during your Buy phase. Unlike Treasures, they may be played at any point during your Buy phase, even after you buy something.
- Every Supplier card has at least one purchase option available. A purchase option is indicate by a price (in coins, debt, etc.), followed by a colon, followed by the effect the purchase generates.
- While the effect of a purchase will often be to gain a card, that is not a required.
- Buying a purchase from a Supplier you have played works exactly the same as buying a card, Event, or Project. The player spends the price and 1 Buy and then resolves the effect on the card's text.
- The price of a purchase can use pricing mechanics like costs less (e.g. Peddler) or overpay (e.g. Doctor).
- Once a player plays a Supplier, they may buy the purchase(s) as many times as that player has the Buys and resources to afford to do (subject to text on the card limiting such buying).
- In other words, playing a Supplier card is like adding a new Event (or multiple Events, if it has more than one purchase option) to the game, but one that is only available to the player who played the card, and only that turn.
- Buying the purchases isn't part of resolving the card (as, for example, paying your coins to Storyteller to draw cards is). But you can put restrictions on when/how the player can make the purchase, similar to Events that say "once per turn" or "once per game" (although the latter is not recommended for Suppliers).
- Suppliers may have some additional effect when they are played, which can including giving vanilla bonuses.
- Supplier cards can have other types (e.g. Treasure, Action, Reaction, Duration, Victory) as well.
As with Events, the possibilities are fairly extensive. However, an important design factor is that Supplier cards have some strong built-in disadvantages. The most obvious analogy is an Event, but Suppliers are weaker than Events in three important ways.
- First, unlike Events, which are automatically available to players, in order to get a Supplier one has to gain a copy of it, spending a Buy and its cost.
- Second, because a Supplier is a card in your hand that displaces some other card, you will generally be buying the purchase from a point of disadvantage (although this can be mitigated via vanilla bonuses).
- Third, while an Event is available every Buy phase, even once you have gained a Supplier card, it can only be used on turns during which you draw it. This means you not only have to gain the Supplier and forego a card in your hand, but you need to collide getting that card with the amount of the purchase. Contrast this with, for example, Ride; spending $2 and a Buy for a Horse is not necessarily the best value prospect, but when you end up with $2--especially when there are no $2 Kingdom cards--it is preferable to gain a Horse than nothing.
Therefore, the price point of any Event will almost always be much too high to be the price of a purchase for a Supplier with the same effect. This doesn't mean that Suppliers are inherently bad cards, but the value proposition of what you get for what you spend should reflect these factors.
Here are a few examples:
(I have designed several more, but I don't want to crowd out too many ideas; and yes, I stole the official art for Summoner)
The call of the contest is pretty straightforward.
Design at least one card that has the Supplier type. The card(s) may have other types as well, and you can design non-Supplier cards (or card-shaped objects, including Artifacts or States) to support the design. You can use other mechanics, either official or fan-created. If you would like to generate a card image, the Custom Color is R:1.0 G:1.0 B:0.76, or you can
use this template in Shard of Honor's New Fork of the Violet CLM's Card Image Generator.
The main
judging criteria is, as always, would I be excited to see in a Kingdom? Important factors for me are:
- balance -- is the card useful, but not overpowering (both in general and in a variety of Kingdoms)
- playability -- the card is fun to play and works in more than one type of deck
- simplicity -- this doesn't always mean fewer words; a card with lots of text that, once you understand it, can be easily and intuitively be played is better than one with four lines of text that is hard to understand;
- topicality -- I am keeping things very open-ended in terms of what is allowed, but the focus of your design should be the Supplier card(s); also, the main purpose of the Supplier type is the purchase; if your card's primary use is the on-play bonus, it has missed the point.
The
deadline for submissions will be
18:00 UTC / 2:00 p.m. Eastern/Forum time on
Friday, June 11, 2021. I hope you enjoy designing these. Please let me know if you have any questions.