Time for part 2!
EventsTriumph: It's basically a Goons event except not as good. Really you want to get loads of buys then purchase a ton of coppers followed by as many of these as you can afford (and the last one doesn't need any money because it costs debt). It needs the right board with tons of buys to actually be worthwhile, but even then it's not always all that good. Seems quite narrow to me. 2/5
Annex: The 8 debt cost seems really steep for what you get. It gives you a Duchy, but it's still a pretty steep cost. I guess you would buy this if you hit 7 near the end of a shuffle while greening so you can not put some of your green in your next shuffle, but... eh. I'm not all that impressed with this. 2/5
Donate: It's as insane as everybody thinks it is. 5/5
Advance: Nice for getting up to 5 and 6 cost action cards quickly but I think it looks sexier than it really is. If you need lots of 5s then you're likely better off buying a silver or two instead of buying cheap actions just to convert them a shuffle later, because that's slow. It's really nice for letting you take more risks with opening two terminals, as a terminal collision is not so bad. 3/5
Delve: Silver flooding is usually a mediocre strategy because many silver gainers are just too slow, but this event is certainly better than Masterpiece and makes silver flooding very quick and easy. But even when not silver flooding its a nice way to spend a spare $2 and really keeps your economy going, so it's still useful with engines but way more restrained. I think this will impact pretty much every game it's in, but it's not going to be totally dominant very often. 4/5
Tax: The debt starting on the board is different and cool, but the event itself seems a bit pants, like an easier to use but much worse Embargo. 2/5
Banquet: I can see uses for this but being flooded with copper is so so bad most of the time, as we all learned from Cache. I think this is narrow and situational. 2/5
Ritual: Worth noting that trashing victory cards to Ritual is actually really poor, you usually break even or end up only 1 point ahead, which is a waste of time, and because you gain a curse doesn't even thin your deck. I think where this is most useful is trashing golds or actions in the late game for a last-minute point spike, but you're not always going to be able to pull that off easily. you definitely only want to trash something with a cost of $4 or higher. It seems like there is huge point potential here but you're going to need strong gaining or purchasing power I think. 3/5
Salt the Earth: On the one hand this seems nuts at first glance but on the other hand you really need to be substantially in the lead for it to be worth buying so its use only really comes into play right at the very end of the game. Obviously this card is all about positioning yourself into a strong end-game position with multiple buys and lots of money and so it brings that end game position a lot sooner sometimes. It also has some possible synergies with winning splits on strong alt-VP piles or shutting down some alternate strategies. It seems to help close the game early for the player with the stronger engine, but that person might have won anyway? Gauging the real impact of this seems tough. 3/5
Wedding: Gold for 4 is nice, and getting a point with your gold is nice, but in practice this is much more exciting looking than it really is. I think this is going to be overrated by newer players and in practice isn't going to be all that important. Allows you to get away with thinning more aggressively though as it's easier to buy decent payload, you only need to keep around 2 silvers instead of 3. Feels low impact to me in the grand scheme of things. 2/5
Windfall: This is either really crazy or totally useless, and it's usually quite obvious when either is the case. You need either super good trashing or really strong draw, and in the former case it adds payload so fast that you don't really need much else, so it seems like it might make those games a bit dull. Was going to rate it 4 but the games where it is totally useless stick out in my mind enough to drop its rating. 3/5
Conquest: This is really good for big-money silver flooding type strategies, although you do want to start picking up Provinces whenever you can because buying one of these per turn is not that fast in terms of points. I think it can work in an engine too but in more limited capacity, you actually want to buy this multiple times in a single turn and only one turn of doing that, as other ways to get silver during a turn are quite hard and if you can buy 4 of these that's 20 points for $24, so a bit like colonies, except you get 8 silver instead of two green cards. Sure in that case you don't really want the silver but it really helps you green reliably so that's probably why you want to do it once? I dunno. Seems powerful but the more I think about it the less powerful it seems? 3/5
Dominate: This is so many points, it's mad. But if the engine is weak it's quite easy to snipe Provinces from under it, but even so I think this is worth going for more often than not and 15 points all at once is enormous. I think that not having the Platinum around for this event will mean that this is not the right call more often than that is the case for Colonies, but it's still really good. It's only not getting 5 because it's not always so game-defining. 4/5
LandmarksAqueduct: Requires you to situationally dip into Duchies or nab an Estate. If you ignore this and your opponent goes Big Money they will rapidly accumulate lots of points but it's easy to stop while also buying you some more time to build if you're paying attention. It's there and forces your hand occasionally but overall doesn't feel like a huge deal. 3/5
Arena: Lets you take more risks with terminal collision, and then the points run out and it's business as usual. Might change the order you build your deck in slightly but not going to be all that important. 3/5
Bandit Fort: Massively punishing and game-warping, and heavily encourages even weak engines with lacklustre payload actions. Just don't be so scared that you forgo treasures entirely, sometimes you really need that Silver to get to $5, or that Gold to trigger Legionary. 5/5
Basilica: Rarely will this actively encourage you to buy cheaper cards, sometimes you will either go for more buys and economy earlier but often it will just randomly give you points and you will be like "oh OK". 2/5
Baths: Going to buy a wimpy 2-cost like Settlers or Pearl Diver? Stop. Take the points instead. Otherwise totally ignorable. Cards are good! Gain them! 2/5
Battlefield: Makes Action-Victory cards like Island and Great Hall quite good, and without those will encourage earlier greening. Makes a difference because the players have a lot of control over this and can change your strategy a bit. 4/5
Colonnade: When life gives you a colon, make colonnade? This card shouts
build more! at you but you were gonna do that anyway, right? 3/5
Defiled Shrine: This can accumulate big points fast. Grab something like a woodcutter and be prepared to snipe points at a moment's notice, but the fact that you get a curse makes it tricky. Seems powerful on an engine board but might only be tie-breaker points to someone on lame Big Money boards. 4/5
Fountain: A no-brainer with no copper trashing but with trashing you're gonna need some strong draw if you go for this. I think this will be tricky to tell if it's worth it or not sometimes, which is fun, but how good is it really? Trashing is just so strong. 3/5
Keep: I don't think you can ignore this, and games will become treasure-heavy and there will be a lot of back and forth, with 5 or 10 point swings happening all the time. 5/5
Labyrinth: Well I guess I will go for that Workshop after all. 2/5
Mountain Pass: Throws an enormous and high-impact decision into the mix at a moment's notice, I think you really need to try and prepare yourself with the ability to generate decent money and then grab an early province if you can so you can be in a strong position to get a good deal for those points. If your opponent clearly isn't having very high-money turns and they bet big you can set them back multiple turns by letting them take the points and then crush them if there's a good engine, and if they don't want to take the risk you might get lots of points on the cheap. It's a lot of points, a 16-point swing is huge. I think you have to keep this in your mind all the time until it goes off but also pay attention to your opponent's deck. 5/5
Museum: Big points, but usually it's easy to just pick up variety either really late or opportunistically. You'll definitely need to pay attention to this, but I think most of the time both players will just have to go for it and things end up turning out the same so not super interesting. 4/5
Obelisk: Super random as to whether or not it will be any impact. Hard to give an overall assessment because it's so heavily dependent on both the board and what it grants bonus points to. 3/5
Orchard: It seems like sometimes it will actually be quite hard to get a lot of points out of this and scores will be similar. Really it will mainly just exist to provide a number of extra points to an engine player and so dis-incentivise alternative strategies slightly. When both players go for an engine it will probably make no difference at all? 2/5
Palace: Barring boards that are insanely good for this like Jack + Treasure Trove, this seems like while it offers some bonus points to big money players, engines that need treasures as payload will still be able to easily get 6 or 9 points from this, so overall the difference is not huge. Then again sometimes an extra province of points is all the big money player needs to beat the weak engine so pay attention. 3/5
Tomb: Trashing is really good so you were going to do it anyway, so this makes almost no difference honestly. 2/5
Tower: How often do piles empty where all players aren't going for them anyway? Games where one player gets substantially more of a certain card on a card are super-rare and those boards are either already going to win as they got loads of minions, or more rarely they were piling all of the cities themselves and now they might not get completely crushed. But usually at least one of the piles that runs are going to be a victory card so this will not make all that much difference. It's the speedy three-pile boards where you have to watch out because players don't need to pick up as many extra points while pulling off the three-pile and so three-piling is so much easier and harder to try and stop by grabbing green. I think overall this landmark is often weak but occasionally throws a spanner into the works of the end-game on boards that were already really tricky to play anyway. 3/5
Triumphal Arch: It seems to be so difficult to get a lot of points out of this, and feels a bit like Tower really. Usually the point differences it gives are very small, but like Tower sometimes that really matters. 3/5
Wall: Absolutely crushing. This seems to be game-warping because it's so easy to lose a lot of points by playing only slightly carelessly. Hurts the small point-value VP quite a lot so you really really need to care about point-chip sources and provinces. 5/5
Wolf Den: You've really got to pay attention to this because it's so easy to get caught out and lose a ton of points. Your first Duchy being worth 0 and the second effectively worth 6 makes a big difference too. There are actually quite a lot of cards that you only want one copy of so either you double-down on them or you have to be very careful about trashing them at the end game, it's so easy to end up having the game end before you trash them and get punished for them. you will have this playing on your mind throughout the entire game. 5/5
Summary5/5: Very powerful cards that usually dictate a part of your strategy- City Quarter
- Gladiator / Fortune
- Temple
- Legionary
- Wild Hunt
- Donate (Event)
- Bandit Fort (Landmark)
- Keep (Landmark)
- Mountain Pass (Landmark)
- Wall (Landmark)
- Wolf Den (Landmark)
4/5: Strong cards that you often base a part of your strategy around- Overlord
- Royal Blacksmith
- Encampment / Plunder
- Castles
- Sacrifice
- Villa
- Archive
- Crown
- Delve (Event)
- Dominate (Event)
- Battlefield (Landmark)
- Defiled Shrine (Landmark)
- Museum (Landmark)
3/5: Generally good cards or those that are only strong in rare circumstances- Engineer
- Enchantress
- Farmer's Market
- Charm
- Forum
- Groundskeeper
- Advance (Event)
- Ritual (Event)
- Salt the Earth (Event)
- Windfall (Event)
- Conquest (Event)
- Aqueduct (Landmark)
- Arena (Landmark)
- Colonnade (Landmark)
- Fountain (Landmark)
- Obelisk (Landmark)
- Palace (Landmark)
- Tower (Landmark)
- Triumphal Arch (Landmark)
2/5: Often ignorable or quite weak cards or things that make no real difference to your strategy- Patrician / Emporium
- Settlers / Bustling Village
- Chariot Race
- Capital
- Triumph (Event)
- Annex (Event)
- Tax (Event)
- Banquet (Event)
- Wedding (Event)
- Basilica (Landmark)
- Baths (Landmark)
- Labyrinth (Landmark)
- Orchard (Landmark)
- Tomb (Landmark)
1/5: Chancellor says hi
