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[Accatitippi]

Hi there!
During the last two years I've been occasionally testing and refining a small set of fanmade card-shaped things. I never felt confident enough to post them all here, partly because they are still quite fluid in state.
Anyway, since some of the names (and mechanics, kinda) have been taken by nocturne, I guess I'll post them in their current state, before I figure out what to do with them. We haven't done any work on them in the last two months anyway. :/
I'll appreciate all criticism you will fire on them.
Some of these are quite "unconventional", but generally they stayed because we enjoyed them.
The flavor is in general wildlands/farmlands/vikings, and there is no mechanical theme except that I generally like cards that make decks more fluid, changing not only by accretion but also by replacement, like Procession, Swindler and Saboteur tend to do.

Hunter started as a "fix" to Saboteur before second edition existed. Then a couple others ended up being some sort of Woodcutter, Harvest, and Coppersmith variants, even though it wasn't the original intent.


The totems work like heirlooms, replacing one copper. At the start of the game each player receives one each of the three totems, secretly chooses one and returns the others face-down to the box. The chosen totem replaces a starting Copper.
Courage got a buff (there used to be no discard-for-benefit clause), and is still untested in its current form. I predict it'll still be the most situational of the bunch.
Patience might be a bit too good too often. Check what it does to Provinces.
We don't have rules for including them. They used to be linked to Shaman (just like heirlooms do, funnily) but Shaman was terrible and we don't use it any more. Totems are fun and we use them.


Hunter is the Sab replacement. Doesn't stack, and being a cantrip fits more easily into a deck. It wants to keep the fun decision of "what do I want to replace my card with". It created messy tracking issues with Durations (eg itself), so we simply decided that those are immune.


Raiders' Village is the dreaded Mirror Reaction, except that it works. Not very often relevant, but I'm fine with that on a village.


Rush used to say "up to 4$". Then, "up to 5". Then we decided that we just wanted to Rush University in one game, and the limit was lifted altogether.


Abbey has been around, like, forever.


This one has been tested quite a lot and we're still struggling to find the right format. It's a cute "friendly player interaction" one, except having you try and burn as many fields as possible after your turn. We use Plow tiles from Agricola for this one, and in the current version they are limited to 5 or 6.


Rare Spices is the card introducing drugs to Dominion. It's weak, but it makes you build fun and unique decks. We might have to add a +Buy here. It has one flavourful combo with Herbalist.


Shepherd introduces sex to Dominion! It started as two different cards: a coppersmith variant for +Cards and a Workshop variant. It's not amazing but it's fun to build draw engines out of it. I'm considering swapping its price with Farmer.


Seer is a cute early game junker for 4$, trying to have the victims make some painful decisions like Torturer does.


Slavery and Revolt is a two-face Event. I'm fine with Slavery, but Revolt will change sooner or later.


Ascend is still very experimental. Kinda replaced by Dominate, too.


Tulip Field was inspired by a thread by someone else here in the subforum. It was then adjusted to the version you see, which was pretty weak. The last games we played it as "Trash this or an Estate from the Supply..." and that was fine, and probably needed to keep Tulips vaguely competitive with pretty much any other +Buy.


Druid is sorta redundant now, what with official Druid, Boons, and Necromancer. Still, it's a very fun card, if quite whacky and a tad random. My little sister had asked for a "common deck" and that's what I came up with.

[Violet CLM]

Is Rare Spices supposed to be limited to one use per turn or anything like that?

[Accatitippi]

Is Rare Spices supposed to be limited to one use per turn or anything like that?

No, it's only limited by the number of action cards that you can play for the Conspirator effect.

[ThetaSigma12]

Hey, nice cards! They're not all obsolete. I'll give my usual jaded opinion:

Totems: The concept is really neat, and I think it's fine staying as-is. I would try to make all the cards weaker so one isn't more OP on a given board. Of course, that's not a balancing issue, but it'd be nice to have multiple viable options. Courage Totem needs a dividing line and is probably the most broken. Boring on boards with no cursers but an obvious choice with them. Patience Totem is too powerful as a replayable Island, I'd restrict it to non-Victory cards. Wisdom Totem seems like the weakest, and suffers when a good engine is present. Personally, I'd edit Patience Totem as said above, give Wisdom an ability with actions instead (When you gain an Action costing up to , you may topdeck?) and change Courage to make it work on non-cursing boards.

Hunter: "Until the start of your next turn, the first time each turn a player plays a non-Duration Action, they trash it to gain a cheaper card." I might limit this to gaining cheaper Actions, to make it better late game and avoid Curse/Copper junking early game on or Actions. The card itself is well done.

Raider's Village: Reminiscent of Escalation by Nekau which trashed itself for + instead of the under the line. I'm not sure if I like your version better. The Village effect is a good idea because most attacks are terminal draw, but I liked how Escalation helped you spike early Attacks. It made things more interesting. Consider doing a combination. "Choose one: +2 Actions, or return this to the Supply, for +"

Rush: Hey, this could work with a Status. The Token variant is wordy, but it might be fine. I really like the card and the implementation.

Abbey: Ah, an old friend. I love this card, great in Ruins games.

Farmer: I feel like this is a complicated way to make what will usually be a Woodcutter. Setup, text, and tokens is a lot of work for something that really doesn't add anything more than Trade Route or any other Woodcutter variant. Although, it could be re-used as like, a BoM variant, where you can place a field token or play it as an Action with a field token.

Rare Spices: This seems too good, making all of your Actions almost GMs. Of course, a Copper is weak, but I think this guy should cost at least to compete with Conspirator.

Shepherd: Okay, I can see it. Suggested wording: "Name a non-Victory card. You may reveal 2 or more copies of the named card from your hand, for +1 Card each, and to gain a copy of the named card."

Seer: Good card. Just to clarify, you do mean or less? A little annoying with s you want more of. All in all, the card is probably too powerful with the discard, junking, and +2 Cards. A slight nerf would be in order.

Slavery: Is there a reason this needs to move your +Action token? Seems like it would be a pain with Teacher. Also, do you get Actions when it's Revolt, and why do you get attacked buy Revolt if you never bought slavery?

Ascend: I think this merits it's own slot, even with Dominate. I would want a cap of up to 3 Provinces.

Tulip Field: I'll pass. All this does is try to pile out the Estates and be a better Woodcutter along the way.

Druid: Yeah, this is dead after Nocturne. Not a big fan of it in the first place.

[Asper]

The first thing I see is that you should probably buy Rush repeatedly. There's just one token and it doesn't stack.

The second thing is, "I'm fine with Slavery" makes for a nice out-of-context quote. 

The third is that I find Druid a bit complicated. Which 100% translates to the official cards that work similarly. At the very least, it's not random and depends on when you draw it (looking at you, Fool).

I kind of like Tulip Field, even though given your other explanations I'm kinda confused whether it's a drug reference. Tsk tsk tsk. "Dominion - Addiction".

[Accatitippi]

Thanks for your feedback, guys!

Courage totem needs indeed a dividing line. I suspect it got eaten by Gimp at some point. Wisdom-talisman was tried and it was too good too often. The royal seal effect could be fun, I'll make sure to try it. Notice that patience is powerful but really hurts your opening, and can normally island only one card per turn, keeping it in check. It has been tried with non-victory cards only, but it compared unfavourably with pretty much any other trasher, even when it provided 1 coin on play. Courage is indeed useless a lot of the time. It needs a good non curse-related effect, I guess. Maybe it could get the silver-duplicating effect?

Thanks for the rewording on Hunter, it flows much better. It used to gain cheaper actions only, but we dropped that to slightly reduce complexity, and avoid the "pearl diver" counter, which one player in particular hates viscerally. It would work fine that way as well, though.

I'm not sure about what you mean wrt raiders' village. Choose between +2 actions and +3$?

Rush would still need a token to mark the drained pile, so I'm not sure how it could work with a status?
Asper, Rush is once per game, so you can't take it every turn

Farmer is definitely not just a woodcutter. It routinely reaches 4 dollars and we chose to limit the tokens after a game in which we had it at 9. A lot depends on how willing to "cooperate" the players are.

Rare spices' weakness is that you need to draw it before you can chain conspirators. Its strength is that you can overbuild a draw engine and turn all extra actions into money. Outside of engines, it's actually weak. A "silver plus" version was briefly tested for 5$, hoping to make it a bit broader (it would be decent anti-collision protection in good stuff decks). But I can assure you that it's not op, except in its ideal case, in which is price doesn't really matter, because you only want one, and you don't need it early.

Your wording of shepherd is better, thanks!

Seer: yes, I mean two or less. It's often a must-open, but the fact that the attacked player gets a choice sort of compensates for its nominal power, like in torturer. It boils down to: discard an useful card, or discard a useless card for little damage, but gain a copy of it. By the end of the game, you have provinces to discard and the attack is comparable to urchin. How would you nerf it?

Slavery could probably become a Status, and not need the token. Revolt affects everybody because otherwise nobody wanted slavery.

Ascend: the most we have seen is five provinces, and it was very satisfying. I wouldn't cap it unless I really needed to.

Tulip field refers to the tulip financial bubble of the 1600s. If it referred to drugs, it would have been a poppy field. Anyway, +3 coins is very good in the early game, but yeah, the terminality of this one hurts it a lot. I'll look into alternative formulations. (the risk here is replicating poacher).

Finally, i must say that "looking at you, fool" wasn't the sort of reaction I was expecting when I posted these.

Edited to add bolding.

[josh56]

About Tulip Field, while terminal Golds have become better / more available recently (Legionary, Courtier) +$3, +1 Buy is still pretty good. But you can play every Tullip Field on average only 4 times before it is a dead so I don't think that this is overpowered, only perhaps a bit too mandatory (even if you don't have the terminal space for the card, you want it in order to make the Tullip Fields of the other players stop earlier).
As you pointed out, it is also a very thematic card.

[popsofctown]

Why does Tulip field trash the Estate pile instead of the Tulip Pile?  There's so many cards with special mechanics that must mess with the Estate pile to make them work, like Baron, Official Shepherd, Inheritance, Salt the Earth.  If it's remotely reasonable to mess up your own pile instead of the Estate pile to reduce the damage from colliding with those other cards in kingdoms, it seems like a good call.

[josh56]

Why does Tulip field trash the Estate pile instead of the Tulip Pile?  There's so many cards with special mechanics that must mess with the Estate pile to make them work, like Baron, Official Shepherd, Inheritance, Salt the Earth.  If it's remotely reasonable to mess up your own pile instead of the Estate pile to reduce the damage from colliding with those other cards in kingdoms, it seems like a good call.

4 cards are not really a lot of Estate interaction so chances are slim that Tulip Field plus one of the 4 is in the Kingdom. The obvious reason for using the Estate pile is scaling: in a 2P and 3P game you can play a Tulip Field on average 4 times.

[Accatitippi]

Yes, scaling is the reason why Tulip Field works the way it does. The original card (I wish I had kept track of its name and author) used tokens or something similar to track how many times it had been played, adding a setup clause saying something like "put 5 tokens per player on the common tulip deck". Estates are a proxy to that, and has worked quite well. The cases where it collides with other Estate-caring cards seem not too bad, or even making the kingdom more interesting?

I think the card could do with a more interesting bonus, but the estate trashing has served us well until now.

A funky variant to tulip field that I'd also be interested in testing could be:

Return an Estate from the trash to the Supply.
If you did, *bonus bonus*
----
Setup: trash the Estate pile.

It's not fixing the part of the card that I should be fixing, but it is attractive in a weird way.

[Accatitippi]

I haven't made mockups yet, but this is what we are testing right now:
Rare Spices - 5$ Treasure Reaction
Worth 2c, when you play an Action, you may reveal this from your hand to get +1 Card, +1 Action and +2 coins instead of following that card's instructions.

Courage Totem still has the "curse vp inversion" effect, plus a straightforward Chancellor effect. I'm pretty happy with it.
We have been testing a Patience Totem that works as a mine limited to copper->silver. The initial impression is that sometimes it's too powerful, but you don't always want it because of terminal space or wanting better long-term payload than Silver.
For Wisdom we wanted something a bit attacky, since the "deck manipulator", "Silver gaining" and "thinning" ideas were condensed in the other two. We haven't come up with a good one yet.
The only promising one was: when you buy a Duchy, every other player gains a Curse (it was ok, but the Rock-Paper-Scissors  effect with Courage was way too strong, and the game could be over before T1)

We are also considering giving them different costs. Courage would need to be worth 2 to avoid Rogue shenanigans. Then Patience 3 and Wisdom 4, most likely.

[Accatitippi]

I've fortuitously managed to track down the origin of Poppy Field. It's Gibbar's Stock Market.
http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=14459.msg553813#msg553813

[jonaskoelker]

Nice cards, much approve, would play, 10/10.

A few questions and suggestions:

Totems: if all 7 Heirlooms are in use, do 8 cards replace the starting 7 Coppers?

Hunter: do I trash the action I play before or after carrying out its instructions? If I play Lurker, can it gain itself back as part of its effect? It would be nice to have this clarified.

I think Rush reads better if it says "shuffle" rather than "reshuffle". You can only buy it after the before-turn-1 shuffle, so I don't think anyone will interpret the two words in a functionally different way—it just sounds nicer. To me at least.

Also, I think I would like Rush to say "draw pile" rather than "deck". The way I use the word "deck", it can either mean "draw pile" or "all my cards" (draw + discard + hand + all mats + Princed cards + ... ?)—not that I'm in doubt about how I'm supposed to play Rush, but with my wording I would have a negative amount of doubt

Farmer: how does this interact with Ambassador? If I return a card to the supply, can there be a card on top of a token on top of a card? Can I add more tokens? Do I get the bonus for each token in the pile? Do I get to look through the Knights pile until the back of a card is face up?

I think the cleanest way of doing away with all of this is to remove the token when the top card stops being the top card—either because it was moved or another card was added.

Slavery: I think it wants the same wording as Mountain Pass just for consistency. Maybe it wants to say "substitute Revolt for Slavery", such that Slavery can have the same back as other Event cards. Flipping is a cool mechanic, though, so maybe messing with the no-longer-completely-blind shuffling of the randomizer deck is okay.

Maybe Revolt wants to be a normal Event as well? I can definitely see it working. Open question, then: what happens if you start with both Slavery and Revolt?

[Accatitippi]

Nice cards, much approve, would play, 10/10.

Thanks!

Totems: if all 7 Heirlooms are in use, do 8 cards replace the starting 7 Coppers?

I'm going to rule that in that case, after choosing Totem, every player takes their 8 copper replacements and secretly chooses the 7 they want to use.

Hunter: do I trash the action I play before or after carrying out its instructions? If I play Lurker, can it gain itself back as part of its effect? It would be nice to have this clarified.

According to the wiki, "when you play..." effects happen "after the card enters the play area but before you resolve any of its own on-play abilities". The most relevant examples are Moat and Enchantress. So yes, I'm pretty sure that you can play a Lurker, gain a Poor House due to Hunter, and then gain the same Lurker from the trash.

I think Rush reads better if it says "shuffle" rather than "reshuffle". You can only buy it after the before-turn-1 shuffle, so I don't think anyone will interpret the two words in a functionally different way—it just sounds nicer. To me at least.

Also, I think I would like Rush to say "draw pile" rather than "deck". The way I use the word "deck", it can either mean "draw pile" or "all my cards" (draw + discard + hand + all mats + Princed cards + ... ?)—not that I'm in doubt about how I'm supposed to play Rush, but with my wording I would have a negative amount of doubt

To my foreign ears it felt like if I said "shuffle" I'd have to say "shuffle your deck" in full, while reshuffle has an unofficial but condensed specific meaning.
EDIT: also, it would add weird cases with some cards that make you shuffle stuff into your deck, such as Inn and Trusty Steed.
"Deck" also has a specific meaning in Dominion, and it's one's draw pile. Otherwise Secret Passage would indeed be very secret and surprising. ("place a card anywhere in your deck")

Farmer: how does this interact with Ambassador? If I return a card to the supply, can there be a card on top of a token on top of a card? Can I add more tokens? Do I get the bonus for each token in the pile? Do I get to look through the Knights pile until the back of a card is face up?

I think the cleanest way of doing away with all of this is to remove the token when the top card stops being the top card—either because it was moved or another card was added.

Generally Ambassador adds cards to a pile and then immediately removes some of them, so it shouldn't matter a lot. The added cards are added under any tokens, anyway. It works exactly like Trade Route tokens.

Slavery: I think it wants the same wording as Mountain Pass just for consistency. Maybe it wants to say "substitute Revolt for Slavery", such that Slavery can have the same back as other Event cards. Flipping is a cool mechanic, though, so maybe messing with the no-longer-completely-blind shuffling of the randomizer deck is okay.

Maybe Revolt wants to be a normal Event as well? I can definitely see it working. Open question, then: what happens if you start with both Slavery and Revolt?

No, they were meant to work in tandem, but Revolt would work as a standalone. Slavery is interesting in how it turns off after a while, and I'm not sure it would be worthwile to have otherwise, because of Champion and of pricing.
Anyway, I'm working on a Status version to resolve the double-face event issue and to make the event itself less wordy. But you're right about following Mountain Pass' wording.


Many thanks for the feedback, sorry for not applying many of your suggestions, but I want the cards to be as consistent as possible with the existing cards!

[jonaskoelker]

Totems, Hunter: ...

thumbs-up.png

To my foreign ears it felt like if I said "shuffle" I'd have to say "shuffle your deck" in full, while reshuffle has an unofficial but condensed specific meaning.

Stash says "When you shuffle, <do stuff>", so there's a precedent which uses my suggested wording. Last I checked, DXV speaks Americanese natively.

I stand corrected wrt. the usage of "deck", see for example any card with the word "deck" on it, but especially Philosopher's Stone. What was I derping?

Weird case: for e.g. Vineyard and Gardens to work the way everyone (including me) thinks they work, do you put your discard pile and hand into your deck at the end of the game? That's not how I handle the components, but I haven't had anyone disagree with me about my Gardens points. Probably the answer is that "conceptually you do—but don't actually bother doing it, for obvious reasons".

Note that if you shuffle your hand and discard pile into your deck at the end of the game, you can lose points thanks to the Vineyard/Rush interaction, but if you put all your cards into/onto your deck, you can't. If DXV hasn't ruled which it is, you probably should. At least if my model of how the game works is reasonably close to correct.

[/high-dimensional-corner-case]

Generally Ambassador adds cards to a pile and then immediately removes some of them, so it shouldn't matter a lot. The added cards are added under any tokens, anyway. It works exactly like Trade Route tokens.

Oh hey, if there's a precedent which makes all the issues I raised go away, then go with that!

Edge case: if every opponent has Moat/Lighthouse/Champion/etc., Ambassador doesn't remove the returned card.

I looked in the Prosperity rulebook, and it didn't mention Ambassador or how it interacts with Trade Route. I don't disbelieve that there's precedent, I just haven't found it yet.

Random semi-related observation: with Salt the Earth and Graverobber, you can put a Duchy into your deck without removing the Trade Route token from the Duchy pile. If you then Ambassador a Duchy and everyone blocks, uh... then Trade Route would still work even if the Duchy went on top of the token, I think, because it says "move the token" and doesn't care whether the token is on top.

[/mental-masturbation]

[Slavery and Revolt] were meant to work in tandem

I was unclear: I understood this. I did not mean to say that Revolt ought to be a standalone, just that it can be. Also, implicit: some people might like that variant.

Many thanks for the feedback, sorry for not applying many of your suggestions, but I want the cards to be as consistent as possible with the existing cards!

You're welcome, and no problem.

[jonaskoelker]

Note that if you shuffle your hand and discard pile into your deck at the end of the game, you can lose points thanks to the Vineyard/Rush interaction, but if you put all your cards into/onto your deck, you can't. If DXV hasn't ruled which it is, you probably should. At least if my model of how the game works is reasonably close to correct.

Oh hey, I can read! The base game rulebook says "put". I'm great at coming up with non-issues!

[Limetime]

You should have posted this before nocturne so that we could have had more evidence that D.X. is just stealing ideas from the Fan Cards board.

[Accatitippi]

We are now testing a new Wisdom totem: Treasure, 1c, while this is in play, when you buy a Treasure, you may gain a cheaper card.
Toghether with Chancellor-Courage and miniMine-Patience.
We're not very impressed with it, maybe it will become "gain a card at most as expensive", which is more wordy.

Rare Spices giving 2 coins and costing 5 is pretty scary, I will probably bump it to 6 when I mock it up.

We have been playing with some of the others, and haven't made big changes. (Ascend discards instead of revealing, Farmer is still looking for its ideal size, Shepherd has been put on the side for the time being, even though it's pretty neat).