Okay, here we go! Sorry for the delay, I was busy last night.
We're all more or less in agreement about what constitutes a good card, but everyone has their preferences. With that in mind, here is the sort of thing I particularly favour:
.. oh, and it should be fun to play too.
| User | Card | Comments |
| spineflu | Vista | It’s been great seeing this refined over the course of the week. The concept is great. The final version is carefully balanced. I'm flattered that it has two duplication effects – double your doubles, you're really going for the contest theme this week. Nice job on the art, too. The wording is a little complex; it has a different effect for every Victory card in the base game, and even one that isn’t. I’m not sure about referencing Potions on a non-Alchemy card. |
| majiponi | Coffer Clicker | After the third or fourth time you play this, you may never need to worry about money again. Who needs terminal Silvers when you have a terminal Diamond for $4? The no-quadrupling caveat might not be necessary. If somebody wants to buy Villages and extra copies of this so they can try to outrace their opponent, it’s worth a try. This card is crazy, don’t try to make it sane! Note that the box only comes with 40 coin tokens, so you'll eventually need a different way to track your vast wealth. |
| Something_Smart | Knight Errant | A terminal Gold with a chaos-inducing… upside? Interesting. I don't know how often it'll matter who makes the choice - and in any case, the top of players' decks isn't very controllable. I love the $3-$6 as a callback to the Knights pile from Dark Ages. It’s unfortunate that it looks so much like one, and yet for the purposes of cards that care about Knights, it’s not a Knight. Nor an Attack, for that matter. |
| mad4math | unnamed | Potent stuff! Any cantrip becomes a Lost City and any terminal Silver becomes a +4$… even before their actual effects. With all that, it’s maybe a bit too much. It’s already an $8 Project, so you can’t simply balance it by increasing the cost. And it needs a name. |
| Gubump | Mausoleum | Procession with no downsides. Simple idea, well executed. With the name and trash-for-benefit effect, it could be an actual Dark Ages card. Not strictly better than Upgrade, but close enough that I’d never take Upgrade if this is around. |
| scolapasta | Siege Tower | Throne Room for Attacks! This was a tall order, but you pulled it off. So many Attacks don’t combo with themselves. Splitting the effect over two turns is an inspired fix. The extra Setup clause is inelegant, even Moat doesn't have that – if Siege Tower shows up in Kingdoms with no other Attacks, it should be able to live with the consequences. |
| Aquila | Summer House / Taverna / Cavern | Nice! Thanks for trying something new with this one. Another set of Shelters was outside the rules I set but it’s definitely allowed – I should have encouraged it more. Summer House is actually useful, what kind of Shelter is this? Taverna might be hard to line up, but only being able to get a card you already have two of is a good drawback (I’d probably always use it on Gold). Cavern is tempting – I can’t see how it would be played if you need 4 otherwise-dead cards in your hand, but it’d be interesting to find out. |
| [TP] Inferno | Toads | Cool plague of frogs. I like the parallel with Rats here – you get one and they infest your deck, and fittingly it benefits from trash-for-benefit in the same way as Rats. The way it gets a lot worse when its pile runs out is interesting, and adds some nontrivial traps to a card that's otherwise a Smithy variant. |
| pubby | Zimbabwe Money | Points for originality: You made the only card in this contest whose doubling is unambiguously bad for its player! It’s good in that it looks like a bad joke but it secretly has uses for Projects, for Debt, for anytime you really need the +Buys. Oh, and for doing weird stuff that tracks the cost of cards. Not exactly medieval-themed, though. |
| Fragasnap | Provisioner | Again, it looks like a bad joke but there’s definitely combos that make it work, e.g. don’t have any bad cards in your deck. The extra Silver prevents it from being a dead card. It’s a shame that it’s so dependent on shuffle luck – it’s most useful when you have about 5 cards in discard, and there’s no way to control whether it shows up then. |
| D782802859 | Harlequin | Welcome to the forums! This is nice – you want to spend it on a good card, but you don’t want your good cards to be trashed. It produces some interesting choices. Good work. The timing suggests it should only work on Actions – if nothing else, it’s not clear what “playing” a Curse or Victory card would do. |
| kru5h | Twins | It’s rare to actually want 4 Actions (or 6, or 8 ) so it makes sense that it’s an optional extra. I don’t see why it returns to the supply instead of trashing – some combo where you can keep gaining them once the Supply is empty? Sometimes you just want a $4 Village in your deck and the bonus doesn’t matter. Good card. |
| somekindoftony | Flattery | I’ll be honest, I’m just amused by the mental image of two players getting these and comboing off each others’ Flatteries. “You’re the best!” “No, you’re the best!”. Self-replicating gold is every miser’s dream and the +Buy is a powerful bonus; once there’s two of these in play the game won’t last much longer. |
| NoMoreFun | Dance Hall | It’s really interesting to compare this with Coffer Clicker, above. There’s a limit to how many Actions you can use up in a game, and cards like Champion show that even unlimited Actions aren’t necessarily unbalanced. So this starts out as a basically-Necropolis, hits the sweet spot around the 4th time you play it, and shortly after becomes… a completely dead card. And again, past 40 it becomes hard to track. |
| Saul Goodman | Addiction | Welcome to the forums! This card empties two piles by itself, making a very short clock before the game ends. Is Dominion too long a game for you? Getting to play and gain the best Action every turn is amazing, but it’s a steep penalty and you need to buy the card legitimately at least once. It’s a good question whether you always buy this after your opponent does – maybe the -10VP from curses is enough to stop them? A brokenly cheap card, but that doesn’t mean anything! It reshapes the game and it creates interesting decisions, that’s the important part. |
| grep | Flooded Fields | Simple, but effective. Its two effects both make sense individually and feed each other. Making it a Victory card so that it can trigger itself is very elegant, and gives it a reason to be played in the midgame when players don't want Duchies. Doesn't work on Provinces, but doesn't necessarily force a Duchy game the way e.g. Duke does. A simple but deep card. |
| natichman | Profit | It’s an expensive dead card if there isn’t enough +$ in your hand, when discarding your Treasures means you may well be worse off for playing this. And it’s brokenly strong if there are reliable sources of money in the Action phase. With very little middle ground. |
| mandioca15 | Promenade | This would have been a very good entry to the previous contest! Its value depends a lot on whether you have another source of Villagers – it’s too expensive for a Throne Room and too cheap for a King’s Court. |
| Gazbag | Town Hall | Makes a lot of sense. It’s a kind of intermediate between Barracks and Lost Arts. $6 to make a bunch of your cards into Villages is about right, you can prepare for this it by filling your deck with cantrips first. It looks like it’ll take skilful timing to have enough of an engine to buy this without immediately becoming the Village Idiot with too many +Actions. |
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Topic: Weekly Design Contests #1 - #100 (Read 1722836 times)