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[Robz888]

Take Pearl Diver. That was a pretty awful card, back in the day. You didn't mind adding it to your deck if you had to, but the benefit was so limited. But then more expansions came out, and Dominion added cards that actually benefit from Pearl Diver... like Vineyard, Scrying Pool, Menagerie, Horn of Plenty, Haggler, etc. Now, Pearl Diver is a low-mediocre $2, rather than a pretty terrible $2.

My question is: Could the same thing happen with Scout? (I ask because I consider Scout to be the worst card in the game.) Most of the cards that supposedly work well with Scout were available in the same expansion as Scout. Now we have Crossroads, which is actually quite a bit better than Scout at everything Scout wants to do. They don't even work great together, because you'd really probably rather have two Crossroads than a Crossroad and a Scout.

But, I'm imagining a future card that's like a reverse Tunnel or something. We'll call it Other Tunnel.

Other Tunnel -- Victory/Reaction -- $3

Worth 2 VP
When you draw this into your hand other than after clean-up, reveal it and gain a Gold.

That would make Scout, like, slightly better. You would even want it more than Crossroads, given the availability of Other Tunnel.

Maybe after Dark Ages comes out we will laugh at the old days when Scout was totally and uniquely horrible, because in this strange future, it has become mediocre bad.

[Jfrisch]

Scout feels like one of the (very rare) instances in dominion where a number is wrong. 4 cards is just too few to make scout essentially ever worthwhile. Combos which really should work don't because, unless you've started greening, scout will on average get you less than card. Even if you're greening it's really hard to get enough cards in your hand to make it worthwhile. Even when your majorly greened, you probably have a big deck and, at that point, a single scout isn't doing much. With more than 4 cards, the card becomes much more plausible, with 4 cards, you basically need greathall and nobles and crossroads.

[O]

...Nope, pearl diver is still a terrible 2$.

[michaeljb]

How much better would Scout be if it had +1 Card built in?

[Jfrisch]

pure +1card, it would become significantly overpowered. (adding a card in a +action game is huge), if your reveal none +1card completely warps the card because you can re-order than draw. (which means it would probably be better with fewer vp cards in your deck). +1coin would, I think, probably lead to a reasonable card. (I was convinced by O of this)

[chwhite]

Scout tends to be weak outside of all-Intrigue games and well you get better at these things as you go along. Crossroads is not weak outside of all-Hinterlands games; there you go.

As far as I can tell, this is the strongest such statement that Donald X. has made about any of the cards which have been actually published.  Coppersmith got the disclaimer that "those Coppersmith decks don't just build themselves", and Duchess was "as a terminal Action costing $2, it's no hot ticket"... but this just seems more damning.  Like, some other cards may be situational and below-average, but Scout's power level was a mistake in a way these others weren't.

I suspect that Donald X. would, if he was forced to answer "what's the weakest card in Dominion", agree with you on Scout.  I find it hard to rank Scout last myself just because it's non-terminal so it gets bought too often... but it does seem to be the most egregiously underpowered card in the game*.  And I'm not sure it's worth trying to make more cards for the express purpose of making Scout look good. 

*My #1 worst choice, Thief of course, needs to be that weak to keep the game balanced for new players.

[michaeljb]

I was thinking +1 Card first, like on other cantrips, not before the Scout itself draws...so it'd be more like Apothecary. At least, what it sounds like you thought I said is this "+1 Action, look at the cards blah blah, +1 Card" but what I meant was "+1 Card, +1 Action, look at the cards blah blah"

Essentially it'd be a (edit: slightly) gimped Cartographer, maybe OP at $4? I dunno.
(edit) Yeah, probably too similar to Cartographer for $4.

PS this isn't the variants forum, my bad

[Jfrisch]

(not obvious to me that it's jimped at all, you draw the cards into your hand which helps with the major cartographer downside of reshuffles/cards which value discard/cards which like vp in hand (crossroads) both can benefit more from it)

[Axxle]

No.

[michaeljb]

No.

Actually thought about posting exactly this when I saw the thread title, before there were any other responses.

(not obvious to me that it's jimped at all, you draw the cards into your hand which helps with the major cartographer downside of reshuffles/cards which value discard/cards which like vp in hand (crossroads) both can benefit more from it)

Well Cartographer still deals with Curses/Coppers/unwanted Action cards better. But yeah, hadn't thought of other sifters or Crossroads. This is why I don't spend much time in the variants section

[Dsell]

I thought about writing a topic for this, and maybe I still will, but it's relevant here, too.

On the note of Pearl Diver (and scout), what other cards have changed in value most significantly over time with the release of cards from different expansions?

Obviously chancellor got a lot better with stash and pearl diver/spy with horn of plenty. Seems like thief has become less relevant over time because it was actually a good counter to the dominating chapel deck in base dominion (and now noble brigand has stole some of its thunder).

From reading this forum it appears that other cards have really taken some time to discover after being long underrated. Masquerade is one that comes to mind, but can anyone else think of other good examples?

[Axxle]

No.

Actually thought about posting exactly this when I saw the thread title, before there were any other responses.

Me too but didnt want to kill discussion.  But now I'm drunk and idgaf...

[ftl]

Scout would get better if there are more dual victory-X cards released.

In any board where a majority of your buys or gains are victory cards, scout is going to be good. However, such boards are extremely rare, since victory cards are typically the reward for building a good deck rather than the good deck itself. If you ever have deck that's >50% victory cards, scout is a lab for 4! But you never get that.

So if there were cards created that made that likely, scout would become good. Obviously, there is still plenty of design space for that to happen; at the very least Donald can always make a bunch of cards which are 1vp+[something similar to an existing card]. Or, you know, be more clever than that. Maybe Dark Ages will have a way to trash coppers into victory-coppers, or maybe it'll have a bunch of trash-for-benefit victory cards.

But dual victory-x was already a theme in Intrigue, so I don't really expect that to happen again.

So no, I don't expect scout will ever get better, though it's not impossible.

[yudantaiteki]

To me Pearl Diver isn't in Scout's league as far as badness; it's not a great card but at least it's a cantrip and you can get lucky with it.

I had a game recently with Swindler, Workshop, and Scout.  That was even worse than the Swindler/Counting House game that I had played a few weeks before.

(chriskern draws: 2 Scouts, a Workshop, and 2 Coppers.)

[Kahryl]

You need HALF of your cards to be green for scout to even perform as well as a $5 card (Laboratory) and even THEN it's inferior to Lab because it doesn't stack (with two scouts in a row the second will have fewer greens to pick up)

Even in boards full of goodies like great hall and harem and crossroads, that is just calibrated way too weak. It was flat out a badly designed card. Looking at the top 6 cards would probably be on target.

[DG]

The scout is weak but it isn't quite as awful as it is made out to be. It could get better if you have more options for green decks or more attacks against treasure decks. The adventurer became unexpectedly better with hinterlands.

[cherdano]

IMO Scout is best not in very green decks, but in combination with another type-specific card drawer (scrying pool, apothecary). More of these and scout will get better.

[RisingJaguar]

Scout probably needs to have 1 more card extra to 'scout' OR be able to draw out other scouts and make this more stackable.  I think either or would make this more competitive. I also don't get why they didn't allow for it to take curses too.  Any one of these buffs would make it a bad card $4 instead of a horrible card period. 

[WrathOfGlod]

If scout had a bureaucrat attack added to it, then it would both be better and more interesting (scout counters itself)

[WanderingWinder]

Will scout ever get better? Sure, it well might. Will it get better in any way to significantly matter? I seriously doubt it. It's just... so... bad...

[jomini]

Scout has gotten better. There are a number of cards that combo to give you better performance out of scout, for instance NV/scout has a good bit of positive synergy as you can know what you are matting and can use NV for psuedo-trashing on a board that lacks other trashing. Likewise, scout was improved by tunnel - yes scout doesn't directly get you the gold, but it increases the search space for tunnels for cards like cellar, secret chamber, tactician, vault, hamlet, horse traders, young witch, oasis, etc. On top of this scrying pool, forge, and arguably all the diversity cards in cornucopia have made scout better.

The problem is, that this increase in utility has occurred with all the cards. Pearl diver benefits more from having some new "weak" 2's come out - like herbalist and duchess - while scout has slipped further down the 4 rankings. We need more "weak" 4s to make scout look better.

I'd also add that dominion has seen several general thematic pushes that favored cantrips heavily - prosperity brought us a lot of things that like long, expensive games so engine building became much more accessible and even crazy things like TR/PD for a pseudo-village became viable. Cornucopia rewards diversity so cantrips that increase diversity, but not effective deck size, are greatly rewarded. This has started to swing back with hinterlands - traders is much bigger than watchtower for wanting it in your hand during other player's turns' missing the curse with watchtower sucks, but you may be able to trash it anyways later - you never get a second shot a free silver. Tunnel likewise is a bit anti-cantrip (though only on boards with discarding attacks). It wouldn't surprise me if another expansion of dominion continued making cantrips less automatic buys and rewarded dynamic use of victory cards or something. I mean suppose we get an attack card called White Elephant - "Each other player trashes a treasure from hand and gains an estate." Scout suddenly becomes a direct counter and is arguably stronger than xroads here. Or something along the way of "discard a victory card. If you did, then do X".

There are a lot of ways scout could be improved by game dynamics and rejigger the card rankings. I don't expect it to happen, but I also wouldn't write it off.

[michaeljb]

But the best NV pseudo-trashing sets aside green cards (Apothecary/NV) which you can't do since Scout will pick them up. And really, I think Scout is going to do best in Intrigue only games, where there's a good chance you're going to have some of those hybrid cards, but even then it's underwhelming (Ironworks/Scout/GH sounds good, but isn't that good).

[PitzerMike]

Scout probably needs to have 1 more card extra to 'scout' OR be able to draw out other scouts and make this more stackable.  I think either or would make this more competitive. I also don't get why they didn't allow for it to take curses too.  Any one of these buffs would make it a bad card $4 instead of a horrible card period.

I suggested scout be a 1 VP victory card in addition to its current action in the other thread. This way you could chain them.
But it might be too powerful in an ironworks game?

[Axxle]

Scout probably needs to have 1 more card extra to 'scout' OR be able to draw out other scouts and make this more stackable.  I think either or would make this more competitive. I also don't get why they didn't allow for it to take curses too.  Any one of these buffs would make it a bad card $4 instead of a horrible card period.

I suggested scout be a 1 VP victory card in addition to its current action in the other thread. This way you could chain them.
But it might be too powerful in an ironworks game?

Maybe a 0 VP victory card?  Wonky but..

[BubbleBoy]

There are plenty of ways to make Scout more useful by adding new cards to the Dominion card pool, and not all of those even need to be Victory cards. Maybe some card could be made that says, "Reveal the top 3 cards of your deck. If none of them are Victory cards, ..." or, "Any time a card is revealed, ..." However, the Dominion card pool is already so large that the chances of both Scout and any of these new cards ending up in any particular kingdom are too small to justify purposely adding cards to the pool to help Scout. It just wouldn't be worthwhile.

So, will Scout ever get better? Hey, who's to say no? Maybe it will. But seeing how much effort would be needed to make any significant impact, my guess would be that it will not get much better any time in the near future, and if it does, it will be an accident; Maybe Dark Ages and/or Guilds will just have lots of half-Victory cards in them, or maybe there will be a couple of cards with abilities like I suggested above, or maybe someone will come up with a new way to use Dominion cards that will bring Scout's usefulness up (hopefully a way that doesn't have to do with bicycle spokes). If one of these things happen, great for Scout. If not, oh well, it's just one card. In the meantime, I do buy a Scout every once in a while - maybe not as much as other cards, but it still does have a use, and I enjoy trying to find that use.