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451

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest #113: Power Up!

« on: April 30, 2021, 02:37:47 pm »

Does this count as fitting this weeks challenge?

Decision making concerning Projects revolves around IF and WHEN to buy it. Stuff with green like Road Network and Crop Rotation has the focus on when, timing is tricky with those.
Your card makes the timing utterly trivial. You will never buy it early (which can make sense with the two aforementioned Projects) and always (it is a more flexible, automatic Prince and usually stronger than Citadel) buy it when one pile is empty respectively about to empty.

How is edit 2?

I really liked the second version. Sure, in some Kingdoms Buys are easy to come by early and at 5/2 without any decent 2 this is also automatic. But more often than not, it provides agonizing decisions.

Version 2 is miles better than the current/original version which flips from worthless to stronger than the most powerful official Project once a pile empties. That is simply too much of a power shift. No other official card does this. With Prince or Citadel you gotta think, they are not automatic and I guess everybody here bought them when it was wrong (Prince is trickier than Citadel). This is not the case with your card, it is so powerful that you absolutely have to buy the Project once a pile is empty (unless it is really later in the game and Duchy or an $6 Alt-VP is superior).

452

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: More Dominon Fan Card Ideas

« on: April 30, 2021, 02:29:43 pm »

Although I like the flavour of it, Key to the City looks nearly strictly worse than Bazaar.
Booming Town feels like an official card. Sure, it does not reinvent the wheel but which village actually can nowadays?

453

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest #113: Power Up!

« on: April 30, 2021, 07:00:29 am »

Does this count as fitting this weeks challenge?

Decision making concerning Projects revolves around IF and WHEN to buy it. Stuff with green like Road Network and Crop Rotation has the focus on when, timing is tricky with those.
Your card makes the timing utterly trivial. You will never buy it early (which can make sense with the two aforementioned Projects) and always (it is a more flexible, automatic Prince and usually stronger than Citadel) buy it when one pile is empty respectively about to empty.

454

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest #113: Power Up!

« on: April 29, 2021, 04:16:21 am »

I like this card a lot, but I think it is arguable whether Smithy is really stronger than +3 Villagers.

455

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest #113: Power Up!

« on: April 29, 2021, 04:15:10 am »

improved version with gambit05's wording:

Iron Throne
Action - $5

Discard the top card of your deck. If it's a Treasure or an Action card, play it twice.
Repeat this for each empty Supply pile.

original version:

Iron Throne
Action - $5

Reveal the top X+1 cards of your deck.
Play the revealed Treasures and Action twice and discard the rest.
—————————————————————
X is the number of empty Supply piles.

The card could be too strong and might have to cost $6. Also the wording is slightly too "mathematical", so if anybody has a smoother way to formulate this I appreciate it.

456

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest #112: Steal the Show

« on: April 28, 2021, 07:00:34 am »

Did you ever play a Knights game in which only one player bought Knights?
Unchallenged Knights are stronger than challenged Knighs, which is why everybody contests the piles.

That is why Dark Knight without gaining is stronger than Knights. Add the gaining and the card transforms from already broken to totally crazy.

457

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest #112: Steal the Show

« on: April 28, 2021, 05:32:35 am »

That is far too harsh, it is like Knight and Rogue combined without any mitigating factors like Knights slaughtering each other.

Rogue alone can also steal a card from an opponent if you play it twice. But unlike Dark Knight, Rogue also gives a +$2 vanilla bonus. So two plays of Rogue roughly equal one play of Dark Knight (minus the Coffers recompensation) plus one play of a terminal +$4 Action card, which on its own would be strictly better than Harvest and probably a reasonable $5 card.

I've considered increasing the recompensation for losing a $5+ card to 2 Coffers, so the attacked player could easily rebuy the lost card on their next turn. But I'm not sure it's necessary, as Rogue and Knight are also fine without any recompensation.

Rogue and Knights have mitigating factors. The Knights kill off each other and Rogue oscillates between a trashing Attack and gaining. If you combine a trashing Attack with gaining this is simply too strong. Some Coffers for the opponents do not compensate for total deck annihilation.

It is not like this is new or controversial, we know since Intrigue (Saboteur had the anti-Remodel-ing as mitigating element) how super nasty trashing Attacks are. Your attack would be likely be too harsh even without the gaining (makes it more or less a Dame Josephine).

458

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest #112: Steal the Show

« on: April 27, 2021, 09:59:01 am »

That is far too harsh, it is like Knight and Rogue combined without any mitigating factors like Knights slaughtering each other.

459

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Witchcraft - A dominion Fan Expansion

« on: April 27, 2021, 04:06:24 am »

And this is where we can talk about Citadel:
In fact; my though about Alchemist comparaison is quite clear: 'Alchemist vs Citadel debate' is nearly the same as a theorical 'lost city vs laboartory debate'.
The quesion is: why this debate don't exist?
And the answer seem simple to me: both cards don't do the same thing and none of them are strictly better than the other.

There is no vanilla Lost City for a very good reason: that card is a powerhouse so it needs some twist. Golem, Lost City and Herald are all variants of that hypothetical vanilla.
You could argue that having a Potion cost is enough of a twist but I disagree. That your card is likely slightly stronger than Alchemist is a secondary issue.

460

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: More Dominon Fan Card Ideas

« on: April 26, 2021, 10:59:45 am »

They all look like very fine and interesting cards. Just a short note on Resupply: I think it is slightly weird that you will never play the card directly but only ever via its Reaction. So it could arguably be a pure Reaction.
Also, there are neat combos with non-junk $0s like Peddler, Prizes, Spoils and so on.

461

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Witchcraft - A dominion Fan Expansion

« on: April 26, 2021, 02:13:46 am »

Mechanical soundness is easy to evaluate, especially with pure vanillas. But you seem to have missed the issue of high cost / high power cards that I tried to point out. There is a reason that all the official $7s+ (except for Platinum) do something non-vanilla-ish.

462

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Witchcraft - A dominion Fan Expansion

« on: April 25, 2021, 10:38:44 am »

Arboretum is too cheap, too expensive and too strong at the same time. This seems weird at first glance, but the card is a Villager-Lab plus Baker. That is a combination of two $5s and then some.
Compare it to Grand Market which is a $5 plus a $4.

But a price of $7 is arguably too high for a pure vanilla card. Sure, there is nothing inherently mechanically wrong with it but if you take a look at Grand Market it becomes obvious. Grand Market without the Buy restriction could be a $7 or $8 or $9 but at $7 it is too cheap for what it does and at $8 it directly competes with Province. People would still buy it for $8 but the twist of the official card leads to far more interesting play (you gotta thin or sift, once you did you can get the GMs relatively cheap at $6).

So yeah, that cards needs a twist of some kind to be worthwhile.

Same with Citadel. It obviously cannot cost $4P because the digging of Golem is stronger than drawing (this is controversial, Golem frequently digs for nothing). It can cost $3 but I have a hunch that it is then slightly better than Alchemist. Again, the card is mechanically totally sound but slightly too strong and missing some kind of twist to make it interesting and different enough from the Lost City and Lab variants that Alchemy features.

463

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest #112: Steal the Show

« on: April 23, 2021, 05:24:42 am »

This is an interesting, creative concept; however, the card seems rather political in a very un-Dominion-like way: players pass you cards, then you give the Curses to the players you hate and the Silvers to the ones you like.

Or you play rational, keep the good stuff, pass the worst junk to whoever leads and the other stuff to the other dudes and dudettes.
I don't see the issue. An interactive card that makes the game less solitaire-ish, makes you want to memorize hard who leads and enables you to hit whoever leads (to a very mild degree) is more of an asset than a liability.

Would that every game player, in every game, were as enlightened as you, segura – the world would be a much better place. As it is though, Dominion is intended to be as non-political as possible. Just read anything Donald X. has said on the subject. Interactive is awesome; political is not. Carnival is political. Every official card ever made is not. (Or as the master would say: “There are players who like to pick who to hose and, well, there are games out there that cater to them.”)

I am aware of DXV's distaste for "political" games. I never got that term. The games I like least are solitaire-ish, the games I like moderately are indirectly interactive (like Dominion, although I obviously like Dominion quite a lot) and the games I like most are highly interactive (when you feel like you are playing the players and not the game).

So yeah, that card is interactive, it gives you the option to hurt people to a very mild degree (I think this matters, it is not as if we talk e.g. about a Witch that gives you the option to give one player two Curses and the other none). But my argument is that this does not break the game but actually enhances it. The "non-politics" dogma isn't a fundamental design principle that you cannot violate like, don't do a Village+ for $3 or whatever, but more or less just a matter of taste.

464

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest #112: Steal the Show

« on: April 23, 2021, 03:26:20 am »

This is an interesting, creative concept; however, the card seems rather political in a very un-Dominion-like way: players pass you cards, then you give the Curses to the players you hate and the Silvers to the ones you like.

Or you play rational, keep the good stuff, pass the worst junk to whoever leads and the other stuff to the other dudes and dudettes.
I don't see the issue. An interactive card that makes the game less solitaire-ish, makes you want to memorize hard who leads and enables you to hit whoever leads (to a very mild degree) is more of an asset than a liability.

465

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Dominion: New Dawn (a fan expansion)

« on: April 21, 2021, 01:17:02 pm »

Hitting a Postal Cart is not problematic, digging will just continue. With Bank, you actually want to play that other Postal Cart.
I don’t think that a non-Copper wording is elegant but it slightly buffs the card and makes it more interesting (not that you don’t wanna trash Coppers because of it, but hey, it does something).

466

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest #112: Steal the Show

« on: April 21, 2021, 12:00:47 pm »

Glad that I've already made a card with this type of effect:

Don't hesitate to told me what you think about it.
(Edited)

I don’t get the point of the variable cost. Is this really stronger in 3P?

467

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Dominion: New Dawn (a fan expansion)

« on: April 21, 2021, 11:06:34 am »

At $3 it might be better, hard to say. You can also buff it. Digging for a card you name is something that comes to mind, that’s novel but I am not sure that this is what you are aiming for ... and of course it makes the card more skill dependent, especially when you play it as Treasure (you gotta know what’s left in your deck and what you can dig for).

468

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Dominion: New Dawn (a fan expansion)

« on: April 21, 2021, 07:03:24 am »

This was already mentioned long ago, when Dawn cards were first introduced as a seemingly natural counterpart to Night cards, but the risk of dudding makes the cards potentially swingy. I like that you avoided this potential pitfall via doing more than just Night-Duration-Dawn ( the symmetrical counterpart to all those official Night-Durations).
So yeah, although I am personally not fan of the concept you have some fantastic ideas. A few short notes:

You don't really want to topdeck Treasures or Victories anyway, so Early Experiment can be simplified to topdecking anything you buy.

Postal Cart is either a Treasure-digging cantrip or a Treasure-digging Lab. That's too weak. Digging for Treasures is not that brilliant but above all, the chance that you play the card as Dawn is far smaller than playing it as cantrip (the card would arguably be weakish even if the chances were roughly identical).

469

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest #111: Chasing Enlightenment

« on: April 19, 2021, 05:06:40 am »

I agree with most of what segura said about Businessman, except:

...  discarding one card hurts more than 1 Debt.

I think in more cases than not, discarding a card is less harsh than taking 1 Debt, e.g. discarding a Victory card or a Curse, picking up the discarded card again, preparing for a draw to X, etc.

This is a good point and I agree that the delta between Lab and Peddler is larger than that between a cantrip discarding a card and taking 1D. But there is still a positive difference that becomes easily visible if we look at an example.

Suppose we make Business more extreme, i.e. +3 Cards +1 Action Take 2D.
Ignoring general issues with Double Labs, the question is whether you want a Lab with another Lab that forces you to take 2D or whether the average card in your deck is better than Silver. I think it is pretty clear that this is a powerhouse.
Sure, Storyteller can draw more but you gotta match Storyteller with those Treasures (and Peddlers played in between that generated Coins that you don't want to convert into draw is a frequent Storyteller issue) whereas this card doesn't care where and how the Coins are generated and is thus more robust and flexbile.

470

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest #111: Chasing Enlightenment

« on: April 19, 2021, 04:02:46 am »

I don't think it's broken. Lots of $4 cards are better than it - I'd rather open a Moneylender or Spice Merchant or Shepherd, which tends to be better than a $4 Lab too. Obviously the first copy you buy is strong - perhaps too strong - but you're extrapolating that to mean the whole stack of Businessmen will break the game when in reality it's just a single above-average card in your deck. It's not going to do *that* much.

None of the cards you mentioned is easily comparable to another cards and two of them are trashers so of course you want to open with them. Opening double Raze can be a thing on a board, doesn't mean that Raze is super strong.

Businessman on the other hand is very similar to Forum, you can directly compare the fan card to an official card and the first copy it is virtually strictly better while being far cheaper.

471

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest #111: Chasing Enlightenment

« on: April 18, 2021, 04:22:29 pm »

Forum is fairly weak in its end result - it's a sifter that ends up resulting as a cantrip.  In an optimized deck ("junk" all trashed), Forum is a waste of a $5 purchase.  It will always leave you with the same number of cards (default case, I'll say leave you with 5 cards in hand).  In its best case, with multiple Forums, you end up getting the 5 best cards from your deck into your hand.

That is flat out wrong. Sifters have their use even in a thin decks. Before or while you thin you wanna cycle as hard as you can, sooner or later you will green and you gotta sift through your green and you always wanna match your engine pieces. For example with Dungeon a decent rule of thumb is to always get one and to get two (or sometimes more) if there is no trashing or junking.
Forum is always useful and far from being a weak $5. I don't think that I ever had a Kingdom with Forum in which I did not get at least one Forum.

overall worse than Forum (even though a single play may be better some of the time).  And I think that's okay, since dealing with negative tokens will sometimes have varying power levels, I suspect.

That is again flat out wrong. A single copy of Businessman is better than Forum for the very same reason that Laboratory is better than Poacher: discarding one card hurts more than 1 Debt.

The design is simply broken. If you price it at $6 people will just get one copy, if you price it at $5 or lower the first copy is too strong.

472

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest #111: Chasing Enlightenment

« on: April 18, 2021, 03:24:42 am »

$3 - Action
+3 Cards
+1 Action
Take 1 Debt
For each Debt you have, discard a card.

I think there's some more design potential in this area.  I thought about going larger (4 cards, take 2 debt), or switching to Lost City variants (3 cards, 2 actions, 1 or 2 debt), but I figured I'd stick to a fairly simple one for the contest.  It's hard to judge how much it should be worth.  It looks like a Lab, ending you with 2 cards and 1 action (after 1 discard)... and/or strictly better than a Warehouse.  But this card doesn't stack well (play 2 in one turn, your second one now discards 2 instead of 1 leaving you with a cantrip).  And on top of the stacking problem, you also have a debt to pay off before you can buy a card.

Looks better than Forum. The Debt is better for you then discarding another card.
Sure, with more copies it becomes more tricky to evaluate but a card that is better than a $5 while only costing $3 if you only run one copy of it is most likely totally out of balance.

473

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Variants to make the game more fair & less luck dependent?

« on: April 10, 2021, 06:49:27 am »

Of course it is trivially true that generally more options imply more choices. It is also true that adding a powerful option makes the decision easier. If you can checkmate, there is no need the consider the other 29 possible moves.
But on average the first point matters more as those powerful, trivial decisions are rare.

474

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest #110: This stays in play

« on: April 09, 2021, 06:06:36 pm »

Updated Collector 1 last time

So with the current version, once you are through the Coppers, the other dude Exiles your best cards

You get to choose which cards you Exile.

You refer to an old version. In the current version, the other dude chooses.

475

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest #110: This stays in play

« on: April 09, 2021, 02:11:42 pm »

Updated Collector 1 last time

So with the current version, once you are through the Coppers, the other dude Exiles your best cards and makes you play your worst cards. That makes the card more of a (Double-)Treasury/trasher thing and interesting mini-games can arise, like trashing an Exiled Silver to get at the good stuff.
It should be clear though that the large majority of Exiled cards will be Treasures (a Pearl Diver in Exile can potentially be better for the active player than a Gold!) so the card will behave very differently than the original Prince+ version.