Heir
Types: Victory
Cost: $4
At the end of the game, choose one: Trash an Estate from your deck and this is worth 1 VP per Estate in your deck; or trash 2 Curses from your deck and this is worth 2 VP; or trash 3 Coppers from your deck and this is worth 3 VP if you have no Treasures in your deck.
This is the card I submitted to the Intrigue challenge a while back. I had meant to make a topic about it later, but never got around to it. I don't particularly care about this card itself, but I wanted to talk about the ideas that went into this and get feedback on those broader ideas.
So, Intrigue. I wanted a Victory card with choice. Now, alt-VP often gives a choice already. If Vineyard is on the board, you have the option of pursuing Vineyards instead of Provinces, which causes one's deck to evolve along a completely different path. But I wanted a choice Victory card which allowed multiple different paths. The most natural time to actually make the choice is at the end of the game (I'll come back to this complication later).
For instance, I could have designed a card that effectively says "At the end of the game, either score this as a Duke or score it as a Gardens". Simple enough, but there are two issues. The first is that the choice is boring at the end. In reality, you chose long ago as you built your deck whether these would be Dukes or Gardens. Second, Duke and Gardens are already good enough to be stand alone VP cards. What I wanted was a choice card where:
1) You wouldn't make the same choice for each copy at the end of the game.
2) We take advantage of the fact that a choice is granted to employ options that wouldn't viably stand alone.
Ok. So what can you do at the end of the game? Since turn order breaks down here, I wanted the choices to be independent, so that turn order would be immaterial. The choices could reference your deck's composition, the Supply's state, or the Trash's state. Since the Supply and Trash are shared, you cannot both use their states and change them, or else independence would be lost and turn order would matter. But if you don't change these states, then one option will be the best and you'll choose that one for all of your copies of Heir.
So I decided that the choices will have to rely on changing your own deck's composition. Now, you can't add to your deck, since those cards would come from a limited Supply or Trash, and turn order will matter. So instead, you should trash from your deck. Also, you can't trash just anything, or else you'll begin triggering on-trash effects. So I need to specify what you can trash. I don't want to specify "Action" or "Victory" because of Catacombs and Feodum. So I decided to name specific cards. This means that they should be cards which are common to all games. That limits you to EDPCSG, Curse, and Heir itself. You probably don't want to trash Duchies or Provinces at the end. Three choices always seemed best, so I naturally looked at Estate, Curse, and Copper.
Curses. Trashing Curse is already cool. It is sort of like those elusive Victory cards that count Curses. One problem with such a hypothetical Victory card is that you could theoretically gain 30 Curses in a 4-player game, which would make balancing nuts. But since Heir is just an after the fact trasher, there is no incentive to actively gain Curses, rather it just makes receiving them less bad. This effect would not stand alone, but is useful often enough to be a nice option out of 3.
Estates. The Estate-Duke is another common but troubled fan idea. It is tricky to get a good value on how many Estates you should need per 1 VP. It would be too strong if it were just a flat "1 VP per Estate". It would probably be too weak at "2 VP per Estate". Here, since the Heirs trash Estates, you get a more delicate balance. A big stack of Estates will allow for a few high valued Heirs, but if you go for too many Heirs then your point total will actually drop back down because you've trashed away all of your Estates. That would be a problem as a stand alone card, but since Heir has other choices, you will simply choose "Trash Estate" for a few Heirs, and different choices for the others. This also helps remedy the fact that Estate-Duke is just a boring, uninspired idea.
Copper. I wanted a third option. The Curse option gives a default 2 VP plus some post-game cleaning. The Estate option incentivized buying Estates. For balance, it seemed like you wanted to trash 1 Estate but 2 Curses. So I decided to go with 3 Coppers, and decided that this could be an option which rewards a truly Treasure-less deck. Now, your deck already starts with Treasure (7 Coppers), so unless you have a way to trash them you wouldn't be able to activate a Treasure-less reward. But since this option trashes 3 Coppers, it provides its own way to trash down. So, buy three Heirs and no additional Treasure, and you'll be able to access this option even without the presence of other Trashers.
Yeah, so that was the reasoning, more or less. I liked that the optimal choice in the end is often a mix of the three options. One complaint that I saw was that the calculations to choose them optimally were too complicated. Maybe this is true. As a mathematician, it can easy to overlook that, or more importantly to realize that many will see that as a bug rather than a feature. Still, I think most people would get a good feel for it after a few games and some reflection. Also, I spent a lot of time analyzing the Heir-Estate rush, and it is slightly weaker than Gardens or Silk Road, if I'm remembering correctly. It improves a bit if you can go Treasure-less.