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[gman314]

Here are just a few random and assorted cards my brothers and I came up with. We haven't playtested any of them, we've just thought about strategies and interactions. As you can probably tell from reading them, there is a strong emphasis among these on trying out ideas which don't appear on any existing cards. Feel free to share your thoughts.

Salesman $3 (maybe even just $2)
Action
+1 Card
+1 Action
+2 Buy

Bull in a china shop $4
Action
Trash as many cards as you like from your hand. If you trash 5 or more cards, gain a gold in hand.

Slaves $3
Action
+4 actions

Peon $4
Action-Duration
Choose two: +1 Card, +1 Action, +$1, +1 Buy. The choices must be different. At the start of your next turn, you get the other two.

Storage Facility$5
Action
+3 cards
+1 action
Discard two cards.

Chainsaw $5
Action
+$3
+2 Buys

Secret Council $5
Action
+3 cards
+2 buys

Grand Lab $6
+2 cards
+1 action
+$1
__________________
You can't buy this if you have any copper in play.

Secret Society$3 and a potion
+1 card
+1 action
Choose one: +$2, +1 potion.

[randomdragoon]

+2 buy is something that's very hard to balance -- most games it is no better than +1 buy, but some games the +2 buy is extremely overpowered.

Also, there are some big memory issues with Peon -- say I played 7 Peons in one turn. How the heck am I supposed to remember what I get the next turn?

[timchen]

Frankly speaking, I didn't see that much new idea at all. Either strategically or conceptually. Maybe you can explain more why you think they are new.

[eHalcyon]

You say that there is an emphasis on new ideas, but most of these are very similar to existing cards.  Salesman and Slaves are very Vanilla. Storage Facility is just a better Warehouse.  Chainsaw is a supercharged Woodcutter (aside: I'm pretty sure Woodcutter is a job, not a tool, making Chainsaw a weird name though I see what you were going for with it).  Secret Council is a variation on Council Room.  Grand Lab is obviously a Grand Market/Laboratory hybrid, where you add an extra +$1 and add a no-copper restriction.  So there's really not much to say about those...

Bull in a China Shop looks too powerful at first glance (super chapel with gold-in-hand bonus!) but it might be OK.  It needs a source of non-terminal draw to trigger the gold effect, like a Lab or (last turn) Caravan, and at $4 I can't think of a way to get both Bull and the drawer, so it's basically a chapel.  Needs testing.  However, I think it is still too similar to Chapel.

Peon - Looked boring until the last bit.  Linking the decision between both turns like this is neat.  Needs testing as well.  randomdragoon makes a good point about the tracking issue.  I think this is the only idea in the set that really has something unique to it though.

I'm really not sure about Secret Society.  When you look at Potion-cost cards, some of them are versions of existing cards where the potion cost translates to ~$2.5.  For example, Alchemist is Lab + bonus and it costs $5.5 (with that potion translation).  Familiar is a non-terminal curser and also costs $5.5, in line with Witch like Alchemist was with Lab.

Secret Society is a non-terminal Silver OR Potion.  It also ends up costing $5.5 like Alchemist and Familiar.  It looks to me like a Grand Market without +Buy.  The potion cost is its main restriction.  Getting one SS makes it easier to get more since you no longer need the Potion itself -- you have a virtual one.  It is also extremely powerful if there are other good potion cost cards  in the Kingdom.

If SS is the only potion-cost card on the board, it does end up inferior to Grand Market.  Yes, you can chain them to build up lots of coin, but you need another source of +Buy to take advantage of it.

I think this also needs testing to see if the pricepoint is good, but $3p is not a bad starting place.  The novel idea here is the virtual potion, but it's actually not that innovative.  I think it's generally avoided because the option is only really relevant when there are  other potion cost cards around.

[rspeer]

I actually enjoy exploring the space of straightforward cards, so thanks for posting this. Here are some of my thoughts:

Peon definitely sounds like the most fun of these cards. I'd bet it leads to a lot of very tactical play... with the notable drawbacks that it would play very slowly on Isotropic, and face-to-face it would be hard to keep track of which bonuses you have. For face-to-face games, I'd recommend that the Peon comes with 4 types of tokens.

Stacking Peons on consecutive turns makes them better than Markets. As in, you can line up their effects so they're equivalent to Markets, or you can deviate from that to get more money or more cards or whatever when you need it. That's not necessarily a bad thing, as a big stack of Markets is rarely a dominant strategy.

I think the effect of the Bull will just be that more games are Chapel games. Its bonus effect wouldn't come up very often, but Bull/Silver will be just as effective an opening as Chapel/Silver.

To be more specific on why Salesman is dangerous: as a cheap cantrip +buy, it's really great at buying itself. (Definitely don't price it at $2.) So basically it's saying that, for an opportunity cost, you can have as many buys as you want. Perhaps not a factor in most games, but:

• When there's Highway, then Highway/Salesman becomes a power combo (I guess you could call it the "traveling salesman combo"), and it's one that's easy to build because three Highways make Salesmen free.
• When there's Goons, I assume the game becomes a contest to see who can get the larger 3-digit number of points in a turn. Or, if Watchtower is in play, the larger 4-digit number resulting from several megaturns.

Secret Society: I hadn't thought of using SS to buy itself and make a Grand Market-like stack until eHalcyon pointed it out, but that sounds like a reasonable strategy. I was thinking its main use would be to get lots of expensive Potion-costing cards without as much opportunity cost. And by that I basically mean "lots of Possessions". Which may not be something you want.

[gman314]

What I meant in terms of new ideas was basically a card providing one potion, cards providing 2 buys and then a card which provides way more actions than you need unless you have some sort of adequate drawing support. Although, there are some obvious correlations between my cards and existing cards. The observations about Secret Council, Grand Lab, Chainsaw and Storage facility are all very accurate and that's exactly how I named them. Maybe "Logger" or "logging corporation" would be a better name for chainsaw. I came up with some of the names just off the top of my head.

Like I said in my initial post, I haven't tried playing with any of these yet. So, I hadn't even really thought much about peon at all, especially multiples and tracking. I agree that it would have tracking issues, but I really hadn't thought about that one. (By the way, peon is quite obviously inspired by pawn.) I had also noticed the dangers of +2 buys, mostly in context of a Gardens or Goons strategy.

The motivation for Secret Society was Conspirator, and so the idea that it would act a lot like a Grand Market seemed natural to me. The idea was to create some sort of card which provided a potion. However, if this card is the only card in the game with potion in its cost, it still needs to be worth buying. So, the card needs to be powerful on its own. Grand Market and Conspirator are both quite powerful as cantrip silver so that's the ability I thought would work well. I had also noticed the comparison between Potion and Silver, although I thought of potion mostly as $2+ rather than strictly $2.5. That was not only motivation for cost, but also for the choice between $2 and a potion.

As pointed out, the Bull is basically a chapel. One interesting idea I had thought of was Bull as a defence against Torturer. You just take the curses, and then trash 5 cards, gaining a gold in hand. Another possibility with the Bull to emphasize its ability would be to make it cost 5 where it can only be opened with on a 5/2 split. However, then I think its ability would have to be stronger to make it worth getting. Just a thought.

[timchen]

Well, I guess +2 buys and +4 actions are not there for good reasons. They just does not add that much to an average game and are not meaningfully different. For example, with your card salve, how do you propose to build a +card/+engine around it? Apparently it's a good thing you can play 4 smithies from it, but you still have to have at least 1 slave in hand first. This means you need to get a few slaves to draw them in hand often enough; but then you have more extra actions then you can play. When building an engine deck with villages on board I will possibly only get 1 slave and get a lot of villages.

Cards providing potion optionally is actually a great idea. If Alchemy is a full expansion I would expect we actually need one of these cards. That card is almost certainly too powerful for its cost, though.

[gman314]

Yeah, I think that the main idea to get from these cards is really how much support you need to really use a plurality of buys and actions. Very rarely would you ever use two extra buys except maybe to buy copper for a Gardens or Goons deck. The +4 actions would be good only if you could reliably have a hand every turn with a slaves and some drawing power. Even with only one smithy in hand, if a single slaves were played first, a smithy could draw some strong cards to play. However, that would be if the deck were dense enough to be an engine. Smithy lends itself to Big Money much more than it does to engine decks except as drawing support.