I dreamed last night that Donald and I were playing his new set that had just come out. And it was a pretty bad set. I don't remember the set name or any card names, but the mechanics borrowed several things from MTG, which were just not good for Dominion, A few things I remember:
- The worst part, it had a pay-to-win type thing. I have no idea how this was supposed to work with an IRL game, but basically the expansion itself only came with part of the expansion; during the game you could buy the rest of the expansion to have access to more stuff. Yeah, you would actually buy the rest of the expansion as part of the game-play mechanics.
- It had several cards that only one player could get. At the beginning, you were assigned a random "faction" card; which would allow you to take certain other cards as they came out.
- Yes, other cards "came out"... I guess like Ascension style? I don't remember exactly, but there was definitely an element where the set of cards you could purchase or use each turn kept changing.
- There were a lot of combo-specific cards. You would buy one card which did nothing unless you collected a bunch of tokens on it, and you needed different cards to get those tokens.
- There were these "goal" cards that rotated each game. I guess maybe like my alternate win condition cards idea, except these completely replaced VP. I don't remember if the VP cards were still in the game or not, but I remember that the way to win was to complete certain goals. Mostly involving getting enough of those tokens.
- The interactions and rules were complex. At one point I asked how a certain thing would work, and Donald didn't know. He looked through the rulebook to try and find what it said and make a ruling off of it.