Weekly Design Contest #226 JudgmentYour designs are terrific and show the vast potential of this design space, more than I had considered when posting the contest.
Party: a debt cost Laboratory, if you’re willing to take the debt on play. It can give a lot of actions from the first Party if you left yourself in debt, which you’ll be able to do by buying Party. It might make getting lots of +Actions too easy, but to do it from the first Party you need to start the turn in debt. And you still need to get a few for reliability if you’re relying on terminals for draw. Neat design.
Combine: A mini Forge but more flexible in terms of what you gain. I like how it’s not overwhelmingly good as an opener most of the time, as some of the $5 trashers overly favor a 5/2 opening. However, it seems too weak because it’s so poor at trashing Coppers (or Curses or Ruins).
Cattle: Fun flavor and art! I like that it stops at six tokens. That eases concerns about a herd of Cattle piling out the Provinces, and means that in 3+ player games two players can’t combine to buy all the Cattle then increase the value of Cattle to unstoppable lengths.
Architect: nice use of debt cost so that it can’t gain itself. I do think that it can make gaining Provinces a bit too automatic, for the many kingdoms where you can reliably gain them with Architect. Great use of the counting theme, and fitting art.
Beacon: Great flavor and art! Similar to Holger’s comments (
https://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=21994.msg909612#msg909612), I think that it’s going to be weak a lot of the time; while the eventual draw can be very large, getting the draw soon so that your deck can function is typically more important. Games where opponents regularly play Attacks are an exception; there, you can load up on Beacons even without +Actions support and you’ll quickly get to the point where you can trigger a Beacon to draw other Beacons (like stronger Mapmaker chains) for huge hand sizes (hope that attack wasn’t a Militia). That might be very dynamic, but I think it’s more likely that your opponent buys fewer attacks and just stops playing them once you get a large number of Beacons.
Frontier: Fleet for hand-size. Great for decks that can get lots of VP without buying (gainers or VP tokens). Shows that there’s more space for “after the game ends” effects. However, counting cards in hand rewards engines for doing the same things that they want to do anyways, which is to draw lots of cards. You might buy Coppers on the turn you end the game to try to increase VP on your extra turn, instead of just messing up the statistics someone (markus?) keeps.
Racketeer: Interesting Exile attack. Like Enchantress, it’s particularly strong against decks with money + a small number of key actions (especially terminals). Until piles run out, the attack will often get undone the next turn, but it could be very strong early if you play Racketeer and they have to keep rebuying a card they need to play again but don’t want many copies of (e.g., Chapel). And of course once piles run the Action cards played the most tend to be the ones where the pile ran out. Actions at the start of turn is a rare bonus, but it seems well used here as it helps ensure that you have more interesting decisions to make about which actions to play in response to opposing Racketeers. Seems like it would be strong overall, and it might cascade too much in favor of someone who can start playing them early.
Benefactor: An interesting Ally. It seems on the weaker end of potential uses for favors, but has the benefit that you can typically benefit from generating several favors a turn. It’s a little farther from the counting theme to only consider the cost of a single card in coins, though.
Lady of the Spirits: Night cards work great with Horses, Coffers, and Villagers. The only downside is that using so many mechanics on one card requires a lot from players. It seems like it would lead to interesting gameplay. For example, you can buy extra Villages for reliability and then have one in your hand to power this up, it encourages getting a variety of Victory cards, and it helps soften turns where you can’t play all the Actions in your hand. You might be able to use it as your primary source of Actions or draw, but that would take a lot of work. Bonus points because my 4-year-old asks if every day can be Halloween.
Town Square: I presume that it would only work on your buy phase “this turn”, it may need wording added to that effect. I assume that it’s referring to the number of Town Squares gained in your buy phase but the wording doesn’t seem clear about that. As silverspawn says, it’s hard to trigger, and the Coffers often wouldn’t be a sufficient reason to add multiple sources of +Actions unless you could also add something to play using those +Actions. But by the time you can buy two Town Squares and a useful terminal, you are more likely to have had to play two Town Squares, etc.
Count du Monet: fun card, but the mandatory Copper gain seems to make it too weak. Like Magnate, you’re going to need other sources of draw to use it well. Unlike Magnate, you’re also going to need to deal with the Coppers it gives before it breaks your engine. I think a revamp that makes the Copper gaining optional has a lot of promise.
Crossbowman: Cool card, nice use of counting card types. Seems like it’s a bit weak at $4 and could probably cost $3. Flavor-wise, I am not sure why it’s named Crossbowman.
Trapping Grounds: Great flavor and art. Interesting use of counting. However, I agree with silverspawn that it won’t lead to interesting 2-player gameplay. With 3 or 4 players, the gameplay gets more interesting but also more political (in a more direct way than most similar decisions in Dominion). If only one player goes for it, they have an enormous advantage with the 12-card pile as they can get, say, 3 Trapping Grounds worth 9 VP. If multiple players go for it, it can end up being worse for them than if they had never contested it at all. E.g., two players each buy 4 Trapping Grounds. Then a third player buys 2 Trapping Grounds, reducing them to worth 2 VP each. Then (if applicable) a fourth player buys 1 Trapping Grounds, reducing the others to being worth only 1 VP.
Winner:Lady of the Spirits by Segura (I PMd them about their victory).
Runners up, in order (should segura not want to run the next contest):
Party by NoMoreFun
Architect by X-tra
Beacon by 4est
Author
Topic: Weekly Design Contest #226: The Count! (Judging complete) (Read 2276 times)