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[emtzalex]

20 Hour Warning!!!
(I'm a few minutes late again. The deadline for submissions is still 23:59 UTC / 7:59 p.m. Eastern (Forum) time on Sunday, July 18, 2021.)


Here are the submissions so far:

spineflu's Carnavale
mxdata's Warlord
fika monster's Volatile Laboratory
naitchman's Breeder

You're missing Aquila's Aristocrat.

Fixed it. Thanks.

[emtzalex]

The contest is now closed

[Violet CLM]

Oh I just saw this topic, how cool! I've idly thought about this mechanic from time to time since 2018 and wondered if it would have been better if the rule had been, uh, using this terminology, "when you buy a Level card, add a Level token to that card's supply pile in addition to gaining it." Something like that. That would take away the choice factor but it would sure be much faster. Ofc this way you can have only individual cards include that, "when you gain a $cardname by buying it" or whatever.

[The Alchemist]

I know the contest is closed, so feel free to ignore this incredibly late submission if you've already started judgement. If so my apologies.



Since Fugitive is normally cited as needing to cost between $4 and $5, this card is a great way to make a card like that a Supply pile, on top of being able to make a card Stronger than Forum available without it needing to be prohibitively expensive. Takes 3 investments of $4 to make it a stronger-than-forum, but by then you might just want more Fugitives. Its an interesting tradeoff one will have to make between having more sifters or stronger sifters, so I can see it being a fun card to play with. Considering dropping the price to $3 though.

[emtzalex]

Fan Card Mechanics Week 15: Level Up

Carnavale -- $3* Action - Level Cards cost $1 less this turn, per level. Gain a card costing up to $2 (after the price change). On your turns, this costs $1 more per level.

Carnavale by spineflu An interesting take on discounters in general and Inventor in particular. The cost increasing effect creates a potentially interesting dilemma: whether to buy and gain first or start leveling up. However, the card is pretty useful from the jump, especially if there are any $2 cantrips, which reduces the risk of opening with it (if you end up playing it before you can add a level). Once there is one token, it will always get you at least a Silver, and if you add more tokens it can quickly become a powerful gainer and discounter. Also, because both effects are on-play, if you can use a Throne Room (or variant thereof), you can double the effect. With just 3 tokens the second play will gain you a Province. In theory, the increasing cost makes each token harder to add. However, while (absent other discounting) this doesn't self-gain, it does self-discount, meaning (again, absent other price changing) that in any turn it is played, the first buy costs $3. Combined with any decent +Buy, and it is not at all unfeasible to imagine  player repeatedly playing a Forager or Market Square then this, and buying both this (adding a token) and another, discounted card. While doing so would slow down deck development at first, by the time a player hit level 3 it would be a wash (except that Carnivale takes up a spot in your hand), and thereafter it's a net discount. Even if a player doesn't get it up to being a Province gainer, at just 4 tokens it gives you a Gold/Duchy/Fairgrounds, and cuts the cost of Provinces to $4. This effect can be further exacerbated by the presence of Quarry or Ferry, which can push that cost down to $1. In games without +Buy, it is somewhat weaker. The choice to add a level (or buy another copy) later in the game at $3 is going to be a tough one with a hand full money (and everything else on discount), while paying full price at higher levels may seem too burdensome. Nevertheless, it is not hard to imagine opening with this, adding a token at $3 and $4. That results in a Princess without a true +Buy, but with a gainer (which functions as a virtual +Buy). If you spring for putting on a token at $5 (or forego one Princess buy) it then gains $5 cards and discounts the non-Kingdom cards by one level (e.g. Gold to Silver, Province to Duchy). The fact that you have had to make 3 purchases prior to that keeps it from being broken, but it still is a powerful tool that seems like it would be hard to pass up in most games.

Aristocrat -- $3 Action - Level Reveal one card from the top of your deck per level. Choose one of the revealed Actions. Discard the rest, then play the Action twice.

Aristocrat by Aquila I like this card a lot. It combines two of my favorite effects (the choice-of-draw from Border Guard/Raze and throne variants). I also like the use of the Level mechanic as a way to adjust its power. I liked that that is variable, and I'm not sure there is a good alternative. There's not really a card price to tie it to (as with Raze) and City's empty Supply pile mechanic is probably to slow. I certainly don't think it needs any kind of ceiling. No matter how many tokens you put on it, I'm not sure that it is ever strictly better than Golem, which comparably requires multiple purchases (the a purchase of a Potion at $4 and then another purchase of Golem at $4+), and that can go as far into your deck as you need. At 4 purchases of $3, this only shows you the top 3 cards of your deck (and, of course, you also have to have bought whatever Action card you are going to play). The ability to choose from among more than one card is strong, but not strong enough to make Raze or Border Guard cost more than $2. Heck, no matter how powerful this gets, it's never even strictly better than Throne Room (which works in cases when you've drawn or played all of your Actions, while this does not).

Warlord -- $2 Action - Level - Attack +1 Card +1 Action Each other player discards cards until the number of cards in their hand is one per token less than five, then draws to three cards. When you gain this during your buy phase, +1D per level.

Warlord by mxdata A cantrip attack at $2 seems way too dangerous. There is no cost to playing it, and this can pretty easily turn into one of the most destructive attacks in the game. The only attack that makes you discard your entire hand is Minion, and that gives the target back 4 cards, and also requires the attacker to discard--although if played right that is to the attacker's benefit. Legionary's attack is conditional and attached to a terminal card. Also, the reason Legionary's attack is better than Militia's is that Militia leaves you with the 3 best cads in your hand, while Legionary leaves you with the 2 best, and one random card from your deck; here, at 5 tokens opponents are left with 3 random cards from their deck. Also, as was pointed out with fika monster's card, the $2 cost with these is dangerous, as a simple Ferry or Quarry reduces the cost of it to $0. It isn't as big a problem here, as yours does not give the +buy, but it nevertheless turns each Buy a player has into another level (and it's not hard to imagine a player opening Ferry/Worker's Villager or Forager/Quarry). While this is somewhat mitigated by the debt penalty, because this is a cantrip there is not much downside to putting one (or more) into your deck before powering it up (especially at $2, where you are not even foregoing buying a Silver, even without cost reduction). You can also remodel Coppers and Curses into it, meaning even after you add levels, on many board you will still be able to easily get copies of it. Overall, I think this becomes extremely oppressive much too quickly and easily. I think the idea of a scaling attack has potential, but I think this is just too powerful.

Volatile Laboratory -- @2 Action - Level +1 Action +1 Card per level you have. Reduce your level by one. When you buy this, +1 Buy/

Volatile Laboratory by fika monster When I started thinking about this card, it made me think of the "Secret History" of Horses. The other idea was for a particular way to do "+1 Card tokens." I considered them for Renaissance, but it didn't sound great to have a pile of tokens you could constantly consider cashing in for cards. What I ended up doing for Renaissance was Sinister Plot, which just happens at the start of a turn. But another approach was to have a pile of One-shot Labs you could gain. It was like a +1 Card token, except different in all the ways it's different - you can only use it when drawing it, you can Remodel it, and so on. There wasn't room for a big pile of those in Renaissance, though it got Experiment. So this was another thing to try right away, and right away I liked it. Horse itself started and ended costing , but I tried having it cost , to make it weaker with trash-for-benefit. I preferred it being stronger there. Here, you have found a new way to create a new version of the +1 Card token, the Level tokens on Volatile Laboratory. As with Ride, buying one of these to add a Level token will later result in your drawing an additional card. However, the is a massive difference between this card and Horses, Experiments, or Sinister Plot tokens. With each of those, for every extra card you draw, you must "cash in" one of your tokens. Horses/Experiments are returned to their respective piles, and the tokens on Sinister Plot are all returned as well. Here, when you play your Volatile Lab, you get one card per token you have (minus one, since you are playing a card to make it happen), but you only need to cash in one of your tokens. This means that, as long as you continue to invest in it by adding a token after each play, the other tokens can be used an unlimited number of times. There is also a disadvantage to this compared to those cards, which is that you have to pay a kind of tax, once per copy of Volatile Lab you buy (which is required for you to access the tokens, but does not itself give a token), and once per play, as playing the card from your hand is functionally -1 Card (which is why Horse gives you +2 Cards to net +1). However, these taxes are little compared to the massive advantages. Of course, there are ways to use Experiment/Horse more than once, namely by using a Throne variant, but those inherently require interactions with other cards, and will at most play the card 3 times using Kings Court. But you could easily use many of these tokens far more than 3 times each. It would not at all be hard to put, say, five tokens on this and then gain one, spending $12 distributed over as many turns as you need (or, with the +Buy, as few as you want). If you committed to replacing a token every time you used it, you would have a card that gave, in effect, +5 Cards, +1 Action, -$2, not as a one-shot but to be played once per shuffle, for the rest of the game. You can also get more of them for 2 Debt each (although they would not chain well on the same turn, since each would give you one card fewer and still cost -$2 to get you back, so you would not want to get too many). Plus, before long, on the turns you used it you would very likely hit a number well above $10, meaning in a Provinces game you could frequently not only replace the token spent, but add more tokens for the following play of the card. I do like the idea, but I think it needs to be nerfed. I think the most obvious way to do it would be to take away the +1 Buy. If that's too harsh, you could switch it back to costing coins, and make the +Buy contingent on the player actually spending $2. This will prevent players from adding an unlimited number of tokens, but also require players to actually hit $2 to add or gain (and not, for example, be able to pay $1 on one turn and $1 on the next). This was definitely a good effort, but I think it ended up being a bit too powerful.

Breeder -- $4 Action - Level +2 Cards +1 Action Return this to the Supply. When you gain this, gain another Breeder per level (that doesn't come with another).

Breeder by naitchman This is a fun idea, and I really like it. The comparison to Experiment is obvious, and I do like the innovative way of using the Level tokens to adjust the card's power. However, I think you have overpriced it, as I don't think your version is better than the original. The two cards are identical in function on-play, so the only issue is which version gets you more copies per buy. With Breeder, you will have to Buy it at least twice to add Level tokens before buying it for a gain in order to ever get more copies than you would from just buying an Experiment (as at Level 0 you always get fewer, and at Level 1 you get the same number, but have used one of your buys not gaining any). My sense was that it was going to frequently be hard to catch up, so I decided to look at the numbers: This presumes you buy Breeder a certain number of times to add tokens, then start buying it to gain cards. As you can see, none of them get ahead of Experiment before the 7th buy. In addition to it being questionable how frequently that will ever happen, you are also pushing the gaining of any of them back, delaying the point at which it helps you hit higher totals to let you improve your deck. And it increases the chance that you will end up buying these and not getting to use them because the game ended. There might be some circumstances where you would prefer to get this type of card later in games and in larger batches (especially if you have a Royal Seal or the like). But I don't think that's enough to make these cost more. In games with both Breeder and Experiment, I think it would be very rare to choose investing in these as opposed to just using Experiment. Now, I actually think one potential design element of Level cards is the ability to strengthen your future deck without adding any cards to it (in that way it bears some similarity to VP tokens). You can add Level tokens before putting the then-weak card into your deck. However, I don't think that reasoning applies as well here, as gaining non-terminal Actions that always let you increase your handsize by 1 is something you want in virtually every context and fairly consistently throughout the game. But the core idea behind the card is a good one.

Assembly -- $4 Action - Level +1 Card +1 Action +1 Card per level, then discard a card per level.

Assembly by The Alchemist This is a really solid entry. While the leveling function is certainly significant, it never becomes too overpowered, as the player ultimately ends up with the same number of cards in their hand. There are also some degree of diminishing returns, as at some point you are almost always able to get exactly what you need into your hand, and further sifting doesn't help. Another thing I really like about this card is the fact that (as you suggested) it sets up an interesting choice on an ongoing basis between buying for gain and buying for a level token. Would you rather have 2 Fugitives or 1 Forum? Probably 2 Fugitives. Would you rather have 3 Fugitives or 2 Forums? Maybe a harder call, but if you take the Fugitives, the next choice is between 4 Fugitives and 3 Forums, at which point you probably add the token. There's kind of a Duke/Duchy dynamic, in that each time you purchase one, it makes buying the other more appealing. Definitely a solid card design and would have been a real contender if it had been submitted by the deadline.

[emtzalex]

The Results

Thanks to everyone who participated. I think each of you came up with a pretty interesting way to use these cards. I am going to have further thoughts on the mechanic, but one of my initial impressions in doing this judging was that pricing these can be tricky. They have to be relatively inexpensive (because they are generally terrible to useless unleveled, but if they are too expensive leveling them becomes difficult), but that will often mean that in the presence of +Buy cards (something that happens quite unreliably in Dominion, in my experience), there will be the capacity to level them up much more frequently (especially when suppimented by cost reduction). That probably calls for some degree of limitation on how powerful they will get (like Aquila's card, which scales to increase your choices, but only lets you throne one card) or find some way to make it so players can't repeatedly power up the card on the cheap (like spineflu's cost adjusting). Otherwise, the cards swing substantially in their utility based on the absence or presence of +Buy (as does at least one official card, Peddler).

With that in mind, here are the results:

Runner up: spineflu's Carnavale

Winner: Aquila's Aristocrat

[emtzalex]

I know the contest is closed, so feel free to ignore this incredibly late submission if you've already started judgement. If so my apologies.



Since Fugitive is normally cited as needing to cost between $4 and $5, this card is a great way to make a card like that a Supply pile, on top of being able to make a card Stronger than Forum available without it needing to be prohibitively expensive. Takes 3 investments of $4 to make it a stronger-than-forum, but by then you might just want more Fugitives. Its an interesting tradeoff one will have to make between having more sifters or stronger sifters, so I can see it being a fun card to play with. Considering dropping the price to $3 though.

Sorry, I somehow missed this before. I will try to give you feedback later today/tomorrow (but I've already decided on the winner).

[Aquila]

Lovely, thanks! I'll prepare the next contest now and try to choose something simple. This felt like a mechanic where once you know what design principles it needs to follow (card price, base power, level up power, etc.) a lot can be done with it. I did a WDC entry which basically used the level up mechanic, and it had a different 'level 1' and 'level 2' effect, something we didn't see here.

[emtzalex]

I know the contest is closed, so feel free to ignore this incredibly late submission if you've already started judgement. If so my apologies.



Since Fugitive is normally cited as needing to cost between $4 and $5, this card is a great way to make a card like that a Supply pile, on top of being able to make a card Stronger than Forum available without it needing to be prohibitively expensive. Takes 3 investments of $4 to make it a stronger-than-forum, but by then you might just want more Fugitives. Its an interesting tradeoff one will have to make between having more sifters or stronger sifters, so I can see it being a fun card to play with. Considering dropping the price to $3 though.

Sorry, I somehow missed this before. I will try to give you feedback later today/tomorrow (but I've already decided on the winner).

I updated the Judging entry to include Assembly. Great design.

[emtzalex]

So, I have wanted to share some designs, along with my thoughts, since before the contest ended, but I have been super busy at work. I wanted to do the judging first, and have not had time to put this post together since.

As VioletCLM suggested in the OP, the fact that these tokens are specific to each card means they can do more or less anything that is possible in the game. They can increase or decrease a bonus or penalty; they can add to, subtract from, or otherwise alter a card's cost, or it's on-buy, on-gain, or on-trash effect; they can correspond to the price of another card that can be gained, trashed, Exiled, or

Despite this seemingly limitless potential, the cards actually appear to have at least one fairly significant limitation. Both in judging the contest and designing my cards, one big challenge I noticed was pricing. On one hand, these cards cannot be too expensive, as (at least in the "standard" design of a card that requires leveling up at least a couple of times to be effective) they will require multiple buys to work, and for anything costing more than $4 that is not going to be realistic in many if not most games. On the other hand, especially in the context of Action cards, the existence of Ferry and Quarry means there is a non-negligible possibility of discounting the cost by $2 without great difficulty. This, in turn, means that if the card costs $2 or less, every +Buy is another level. If multiple levels produces too powerful of an effect, the cards can become broken when combined with that discounting. The ultimate effect of this is that a sizeable portion of these cards end up costing either $3 or $4. While there is nothing inherently wrong with that, it is something I don't love about them.

While the contest was going I designed a number of these.  Like fika, my first idea was to some sort of Lab variant or other scaling non-terminal card gainer. The first thing I came up with was this:

Salon -- $7* Action - Level +2 Cards per level +1 Action During a player's Action phase, this costs $3 less.

The idea here is that it is accessible at $4 to gainers and remodelers, but in order to add levels and make it into a more effective card, it requires hitting $7 during the Buy phase. The most obvious problem is that, absent the ability to gain cards outside of the Buy phase, this will always be $7, and is much too expensive (even with a discount).

My next idea was to use a scaling cost, as spineflu and mxdata did in their submissions. Here, I came up with this.

King's Men -- $1* Action - Level Once per level: +1 Card, +1 Action. During your turns, this costs $2 more per level.

I did kind of find an elegance to the various price points. At $1 it's a vastly overpriced dead card, at $3 it's a somewhat overpriced cantrip, at $5 it's a slightly discounted (losing the on-buy penalty) Lost City, at $7 it's a strongly-underpriced double-Lost City, etc. However, I think a fairly obvious strategy (especially in the presence of early +Buy from cards like Pouch or Forager) is to level it up once, buy/gain a number of these at $3 (putting non-harmful cantrips into your deck), then leveling it up twice more at $3 and $5, getting the insanely powerful double Lost Cities without ever having had to hit a significant price point.

Another way I thought about using the mechanic was finding alternative ways to put level token on cards. One option there was to use an Heirloom, which every player will receive and which always collides in Kingdoms with the other card. So I decided to go with a very expensive double Lab and an heirloom which can give you the level tokens you need to make it cheaper.

Ivory Tower -- $9* Action - Level +3 Cards +1 Action During your turns, this card costs $1 less per level. Heirloom: Scholarly Tome

Scholarly Tome -- $0 Treasure - Heirloom Choose one: +1 Card per Ivory Tower level; or +$1; or put a Level token on the Ivory Tower pile.

I'm actually not sure if $9* is a high enough baseline, but the card image generator doesn't like 2 digit numbers with asterisks by them.
Separate from wanting to work on a scaling lab variant, another mechanic I wanted to mix with these was split piles. Because the Level tokens go onto the pile, they would (I presume) apply to both cards in the pile. This creates the potential for some interesting interactions and strategic choices. Players will want to put their level tokens on the pile in anticipation of getting the bottom card, but they may not have much incentive to buy the top card, yet if they never buy any of the cards, the tokens are useless. I came up with a fairly simple pair of cards, the first being a scaling village and the second a scaling lab (in a standard 5/5 split pile).

Dormitory -- $3 Action - Level +1 Card +1 Action per level

Lecture Hall -- $3 Action - Level +1 Card per level +1 Action

I think these need play-testing, as I still feel very unsure about how strong they are and how they would actually play.

Finally, I wanted to make a kind of scaling Pawn variant, giving a choice of one vanilla bonus per level. To juice it up I added a weak gainer, but one that self-gains, allowing players to use their buys to level up while using the on-play ability to add more to their deck.

Rookery -- $3 Action - Level Choose up to one per level: +1 Card; +1 Action; +1 Buy; +$1; gain a card costing up to $3. The choices must be different.

One benefit to these is that, of course, they don't get any more powerful after 5 level tokens are placed onto them.

During the contest, when people were initially slow to post, I started to wonder if the mechanic was not as versatile as I had thought when I chose it. In order to test that question, I decided I would try to make a Level card with every official card type that can be found in at least two Kingdom card piles (i.e. no exclusively non-Supply types like Spirits and no single pile types like Castles). I eventually came up with designs for every type, and I am posting most of them here. I actually came up with 2 Traveller lines, but neither is yet ready to be posted.

The first type I went for was an Attack. Like mxdata, I wanted the strength of the attack itself to scale, but I thought that discarding a card per level would be too strong. Ultimately I came up with a cross between a Villain and a Militia, requiring a more expensive card per level if players want to end up with more than 4 cards, but never forcing a player to go below three. 

Irregulars -- $3 Action - Attack - Level +1 Buy +1 Coffers Each other player may discard a card costing at least $1 per level. If they don't, they discard down to 3 cards in hand.

This card may still be too weak. I think I might add "non-Victory" to the single card discard. I should probably also specify that it is the level of the player playing the attack card, not the level of the player discarding.

I also designed a Reaction...

Trained Bear -- $3 Action - Reaction - Level +1 Card per level When another player buys a card costing less than $1 per your level, you may play this from your hand.

...and a couple of Durations...

Supply Ship -- $4 Action - Duration - Level +$2 At the start of your next turn, gain a card to your hand costing up to $2 per level.

Docks -- $5 Action - Duration - Level At the start of each of your turns for the rest of the game, if the level is then at least... one, +1 Buy two, +1 Action four, +1 Card (This stays in play.)

I like Docks, although I am uncertain if it is too strong or too weak. The nice part is that you add levels after getting the card, and still get the improvement on the following turn. (And yes, that's the same painting for both of them, zoomed in on the ship for the former).

I also designed a Command card (although I am thinking it should maybe be $2 per level).

Officer-in-Training -- $4 Action - Command - Level Play a non-Command Action card from the Supply costing up to $1 per level, leaving it there.

I'm putting the rest in chronological order in which it's expansion was released. I came up with a Looter that combines the Ruins' vanilla bonuses (or deck manipulation) into a single effect. (You may notice that this version 0.4; that isn't because I have messed with the design a great deal, as it has largely remained the same; instead the card has had several different names, including Refugee Camp, Lamentations, and Rack).

Archeologist -- $2 Action - Looter - Level If the number of Ruins on your Archeologist mat is less than the level, gain a Ruins, then put it onto your Archeologist mat. Otherwise, play each card from your Archeologist mat in any order, leaving them there.

I really like this card. One of the reasons I feel comfortable setting it at $2 is that not only will adding levels not endlessly strengthen the card, but (unlike Rookery), adding too many levels is guaranteed to brick it. A player has to be very careful about adding levels as the Ruin pile gets lower. That being said, I recognize that it can be swingy and hard to gauge early on (due to uncertainty around which Ruins a player will get), but I think it has a lot of potential.

Next was Adventures and Reserve cards...

Librarian -- $4 Action - Reserve - Level +1 Card +1 Action Put this on your Tavern mat. At the start of your turn, you may call this for +1 Card per level.

This is easily my least favorite card here, and I considered not posting it. (As previously mentioned, I am not yet posting the Traveller cards I designed, as they are not ready). As with Docks, it seems to me that this has some interesting potential, since you can add levels while it sits on your Reserve mat. This might actually be a space to test a mechanic that consumes level tokens (like fika's did), perhaps requiring a certain number to call the Reserve card.

Next is Empires and its cards with the Gathering type. (Empires also has split piles, which I used and posted above, but that isn't a type that is listed on the card).

Almonry -- $3 Action - Gathering - Level Choose one: gain a card costing up to $1 per level and add a VP the Almonry Supply pile; or if there are more VP on the pile than your Level tokens, take the VP from the pile.

This is a kind of silly card. I was going for a card version of Alms, and I am mostly amused by the potential for this pile to be spilling over with a ridiculous number of different kinds of tokens. I do like that the higher you make the level, the harder it is to gain the VP tokens.

Next comes Nocturn, with three new types, Doom, Fate, and Night.

Raven -- $3 Action - Attack - Doom - Level +2 Cards per level Discard down to 5 cards in hand. Each other player receives the next Hex.

I actually really like this as a way to limit the strength of tying +Cards to the level. It will generally just serve as a terminal sifter, with the side effect of mitigating handsize attacks (but with a detriment to other drawing).

Fairy Ring -- $3 Action - Fate - Level Receive a Boon. +1 Card per 2 levels (round down). If your level is an odd number, +2 Actions. If your level is greater than that of all other players, +$2.

Given their reputation for mischief, I though Fairies would be perfect for some loopy effects. You get an extra card every 2 levels, but each time the number of cards goes up the effect goes from village to terminal. That said, the +$ bonus incentivizes players to keep pushing the card upward (and, of course, there's a 1 in 12 chance of getting an extra action, 1 in 6 if you have a Village Square).

Up All Night -- $4 Night - Duration - Level Choose one: put a Level token on the pile of a Level card you have in play; or set aside a card you would discard from play this turn costing up to $1 per level, and if you did, at the start of your next turn, play it.

Finally, a Night card. I struggled a bit with these, but ultimately I like UAN's ability to add levels as an on-play option. Whether or not that is broken with respect to other cards depends somewhat on what exists, but the only one that gives me pause is Salon.

I also tinkered with Treasures. Here is the only one I liked at all:

Option -- $1 Treasure - Level +1 Buy +$1 per level, then take 1 Debt per 2 levels (round down).

This effectively turns buys into future coins, but the debt effect means that it gets stronger more slowly.

Finally, I also designed two Victory cards. To me, there were a couple of obvious ways to go with this. Either a scaling Victory card that gets stronger per level or a fixed VP card that gets cheaper per level. Here is what I came up with for those:

Utopian Community -- $3 Victory - Level Worth 1VP per 2 levels (round down). When you buy this, +1 Buy per $2 you spent (round down).

Exclusive Retreat -- $4* Victory - Level 2VP - During your turns, this costs $1 less per level.

Ultimately, despite some clear limitations, I do think this is a design space with a ton of potential.