New thought for fan cards (and maybe some official cards that are yet to be revealed): a cheap debt card would be a lot like a regular cost card, because you wouldn't often need to put off paying for it. But it would have an important distinction - you can't gain it with cost-based gainers like Workshop, and you can't reduce its cost (unless there is a new card that does that specifically). You could also mix regular coin costs and debt costs to make something that essentially reduces in cost to a positive minimum.
Because of that clause, I suspect that there will be some card that cares directly about how much debt you have or whether you have debt. Maybe something that multiplies opponents' debt. Otherwise paying off debt early would be unnecessary, since the next time you could buy a card, you could just pay off the debt then.
(Except Black Market, but that's hardly a reason for that whole line of text.)
I thought that at first, but the clause is also helpful if you don't need the full $6 from Capital. As a simple case, suppose you only want to buy 2 Curses this turn for some reason. You play Capital for the +Buy and don't need the $6 at all. Without that clause, you are $6 in debt next turn. The clause lets you pay off the debt immediately instead. (I see Watno said this more succinctly than I did.)
I now want there to be a way to save up unused money from previous turns to pre-pay debt.
That's called coin tokens... right?
I assume you can use coin tokens to play off debt. It's a bit like a matter-antimatter annihilation.
Remember that you spend coin tokens at the start of the Buy phase to generate +$1 each; you can't just spend them any time you want. So at the start of your buy phase, you spend however many coin tokens you want. Then you can pay off your debt your accumulated coins, whether you got them from actions, treasures or coin tokens.
Donald. There is no Emperor card.
How do you know?
I don't know if I've said this before, but having a King/Queen/Emperor card just seems wrong, because the player is supposed to be those things. I think MTG has a thing where you can play cards that are like players, but I don't think Dominion should.
Another thing, I like that you can open with both City Quarter and Royal Blacksmith, but you don't want to.
That's why the Emperor card just has reflective foil instead of card art.
How can you all already determine whether it is a buff or nerf for Possession? So far, we have three cards that generate VP. Maybe this set has twelve debt cards, then it's clearly a nerf. Probably it doesn't have that much, and it maybe has some other VP generating cards which would buff Possession but it's definitely too early to determine the new strength of possession.
Still wouldn't be clear. The Possessor gaining the debt tokens is not necessarily a bad thing, because it means the Possessed player can continue to buy debt-cost cards without paying them off immediately.
Nobody is asking the important questions yet.
How are we going to include these in the Qvist community card rankings?
I'd count an <X> cost card as an $X card. You don't have to pay the full coin cost up-front, but you have to pay it eventually (unless you carry it to the end of the game).
Also, may have been answered before, but paying off debt does NOT use a Buy, correct?
Correct. That's how Capital lets you pay off Debt in your Clean-up phase.
No, Capital lets you pay off Debt in Clean-up because it says so. It would work even if it normally cost a Buy to pay off debt, just like how Cultist lets you play another Cultist for free even though it usually requires an action.
I think capital will end up being a bad card. Above stash/contraband, but still bad.
My initial guess would be to put it somewhere just below the middle of the list; often skippable, sometimes really good and usually not totally ignorable, similar to Knights.
I'll guess that it's above the middle. More specifically, I expect that it will be very dependent on the rest of the board. It looks to me like one of the best cards for spiking high costs. +$6 is better than any other static coin producer, and it doesn't even have a requirement attached to it (like Baron, for example). You hurt your next turn or two, but that's a small price to pay to grab a quick King's Court or Grand Market, or even to reach Colony in a junky deck that keeps topping out at $5-$6 a turn.