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[AJD]

Okay, so there's Vineyard (Action-scaled Victory) and Silk Road (Victory-scaled Victory). Occasionally in this forum people suggest a Treasure-scaled Victory card, and the answer is usually that that wouldn't be interestingly different from a Province game, since getting as many Treasure cards as possible seems to enable Province acquisition pretty well already.

But: could a Copper-scaled Victory card be feasible?

There are two different ways to do it, I guess. One is to make it like Silk Road and Gardens, and be fairly easy to acquire with a deck full of Copper and green:

$4
Worth 1 VP for every 3 Coppers in your deck

...In which case you'd rush them while trying to get as much Copper as possible, not too different from the way you build a Gardens deck. This is probably overpowered since you can grow its value a lot faster than Gardens, although you have to sidetrack yourself from Copper-gaining in order to end the game on piles.

The other possibility strikes me as more interesting, but conceivably also broken in some way:

$6
Worth 1 VP for every 2 Coppers in your deck

This version introduces some tension: You want a lot of Copper in order to boost their value, but flooding your deck with Copper actually makes this card harder to buy (unlike the $4 version), so you have to thread the needle of boosting your Copper density, but not so fast as to make the $6 victory card unaffordable.

Thoughts?

[dondon151]

$4
Worth 1 VP for every 3 Coppers in your deck

...In which case you'd rush them while trying to get as much Copper as possible, not too different from the way you build a Gardens deck. This is probably overpowered since you can grow its value a lot faster than Gardens, although you have to sidetrack yourself from Copper-gaining in order to end the game on piles.

I don't think you'd want to end the game on piles with this card. You need 18 Coppers to make each of these worth a Province. Assuming there's nothing in the kingdom that gives +buy, it takes 19 turns of optimal purchasing to buy out this pile and make each of these worth a Province. I'd think that most BM+X combinations would not be able to buy out all 8 Provinces in 19 turns. The alternate Victory card player would just want to stall out the game as long as possible; there are 46 Coppers in the supply, so there is virtually no upper limit on the value of this card (obviously the actual upper limit is 20 VP). Throw in a +buy and you can make it faster.

Competing for this card is a scary thought. If you lose the split, you're pretty much boned; even with a 5-3 split, the player with 5 copies of this card gains on average 5/3 VP per Copper bought, while the other player can really only hope to catch up with Duchies, a card that's significantly more difficult to buy and yields only 3 VP.

$6
Worth 1 VP for every 2 Coppers in your deck

This version introduces some tension: You want a lot of Copper in order to boost their value, but flooding your deck with Copper actually makes this card harder to buy (unlike the $4 version), so you have to thread the needle of boosting your Copper density, but not so fast as to make the $6 victory card unaffordable.

I think the solution is easy for this one: buy these first, and then load up on Copper when you can no longer get to $6. You only need to gain 5 Copper to make this worth as much as a Province.

[brokoli]

In a "copper-scaled victory card" race, it would be good (if possible) to make the coppersmith/counting house worthwile.

[AJD]

So I guess really what would be needed here would be for a Copper-scaled Victory card to be fairly coarse-grained: since Copper is so easy to get, it should take a lot of copper to pump up their value.

Since Copper is almost as easy to acquire "a card" (i.e., in the large majority of cases when you gain any card at all, if you wanted to you could chosen for that card to be a Copper), maybe Gardens' granularity is the best comparison: it takes 10 gains to increase the value of Gardens by 1 point. So maybe Copper-scaled Victory should have a comparable level of granularity—maybe not as coarse as 10, since unlike in the Gardens case the green cards themselves and your gaining aids like Workshop don't contribute to the total, but perhaps 1VP per eight or so Coppers.

[timchen]

This isn't quite exactly what coarse-grain means; it is more like fairgrounds, which you jump the VP value. I guess this kind of card is feasible; it just needs some fine-tuning. The problem is whether this kind of card adds enough new things to the game.

An idea just occurred to me: how about a VP card caring about the card counts in the opponent's deck at your right? Sounds really interesting to me in 2p, in multiplayer maybe not so much, but still there can be strategies.

[HiveMindEmulator]

1 for every 8 is probably not going to do it, since you'd need 24 coppers to make it worth a duchy. Probably something like 2-3 points for every 10 coppers is more reasonable, still getting the granularity, but with more points. Then, like fairgrounds, you think of getting to threshold amounts of copper to make it kick in. You of course have to playtest for the right balance, but I think that the idea of big granularity is very important.

[dondon151]

Better yet, have the VP value scale quadratically (1 Copper = 1 VP, 4 Copper = 2 VP, 36 Copper = 6 VP, etc.) 

Though 36 Copper is pretty difficult to get to, but 16 Copper for 4 VP isn't so hard.

[Kirian]

How about the following:

Card
$4
6 VP
----
At the end of the game, count the cards remaining in the Copper pile in the supply.  This card is worth 1 fewer VP for every 6 cards in the Copper pile, rounded down, to a minimum of 0 VP.

It's worthless in the early game, and you have to nearly empty the Copper pile to make it worth a Province.  If all players try to split them, they'll effectively collude on buying out Coppers; if some players dissent, they'll be worth less but likely still OK.

[Jorbles]

$6
Worth 1 VP for every 2 Coppers in your deck

This version introduces some tension: You want a lot of Copper in order to boost their value, but flooding your deck with Copper actually makes this card harder to buy (unlike the $4 version), so you have to thread the needle of boosting your Copper density, but not so fast as to make the $6 victory card unaffordable.

Thoughts?

This seems overpowered as they are worth more than a Duchy with a single copper. I think $7 would be a more reasonable cost.

One thing I like about this idea is that it would actually make one of the worst cards in the game a lot stronger. Thief would be the ultimate counter to this card!

[Tables]

Better yet, have the VP value scale quadratically (1 Copper = 1 VP, 4 Copper = 2 VP, 36 Copper = 6 VP, etc.) 

Though 36 Copper is pretty difficult to get to, but 16 Copper for 4 VP isn't so hard.

That's not scaling quadratically, it's scaling with the square root. But I actually think this could work, althogh it does lead to having to do not very easy calculation (you could always have a guide in the rules clarification book though, I guess, since there's only 8 possibilities in a 2-4p game (and one of those requires Ambassador to reach), and well good luck getting to 64+ coppers in a 5-6p game. There's also the problem of needing 2 coppers for them to give 3VPs each, and another 7 for them to give 4VPs... actually, yeah, that seems like it really wouldn't work.