First and foremost, thank you to LastFootnote for initiating and organizing this contest! And you are putting in the effort to fix/standardize the wording of each entry? Wow! You are awesome.
Beyond LastFootnote, thanks for the support and serous scrutiny that so many of you offered Indulgence. I feel like there were other good ideas here which never got a close enough look, frankly because there were just so many entries that no one could really give each one a thorough and thoughtful analysis. Or at least, I couldn't. I like my Hinterlands submission more than I like Indulgence, but most people are dismissing it so far, so I definitely sympathize.
I always really liked reading the Secret Histories that Donald X. would share. I think it would be really cool if we wrote Secret Histories for at least the winning cards. What is an expansion without a Secret History, after all?
The Secret History of Indulgence:Believe it or not, Indulgence began its life as an attempt to get a
cost increase card to work.
The idea, vaguely, was to have a card named Aristocrat and a "trendy" marker. There would be just one marker, and you'd put it on a Supply pile. Cards from that Supply pile would cost $1 more. I never nailed it down entirely, but one idea was that, at the start of clean-up, if you had an Aristocrat in play, then you would move the marker to a Supply pile which you purchased from that turn. Thematically, your Aristocrat started a trend by buying something, and so now that thing is more expensive.
By using a marker, and moving it during clean-up, I felt that the primacy issue with cost increases would be addressed. That is, obviously the cost increase is factored in before any decreases from Bridge et al. since the marker was there before your turn began, and somehow a "In games using" rule trumps on-card rules. (I knew that could still be contentious, which is part of why I ultimately scrapped the marker)
Cost increasers have other issues. By having one marker, it didn't have stacking issues, but I still didn't want it messing with the costs of the basic cards, especially Province and Copper. "Kingdom Card" isn't often referred to, so I decided that you could only put the marker on Action piles. This was doable, since Aristocrat was an Action. And I decided that the marker would start out on the Aristocrat pile.
So why would you want to increase costs? It would have some fun interactions with Trash-for-Benefit, or cards like Band of Misfits, Catacombs, or Border Village. I guess it could foil your opponent's attempt to buy cards. But in order to make the trendy theme work, you had to move it to something you bought. But hey,
I want those. It sucks that they cost more now. How about a bonus if you pay up? I decided you could give a VP token or so if you bought the trendy card.
Hey, VP tokens for buying a particular card? That sounded pretty cool in itself. Both the cost increase and the marker felt like they could be contentious, so I decided to look more closely at just this new idea. Now, it is no fun getting VP tokens for buying what you would anyway. So lets have your opponent pick the distinguished card, like with Contraband. I don't want them to just pick Curse or Copper though. So let's restrict the choice to Action cards still. After all, Aristocrat is an Action, so there will always be one. And even if Aristocrat were in the Black Market deck, at least Black Market is an Action in the Supply. Awesome.
But now, what would the on-play effect be? Your opponent is likely to insist that you buy a bunch of weak terminals, so it should be something which makes that more manageable. The obvious solution was Village. So Aristocrat was a village with the Indulgence effect. Oh, and you don't want to have to remember all of the cards your opponent named throughout your engine-y Action phase, so there was a delay on the naming: "At the start of your buy phase, the player to your left...".
I wanted Aristocrat to cost $6, so I felt that it needed to be something more than just vanilla village. Every attempt felt too wordy. An extra buy would be nice, since then you could buy the named cheap card along with another, or even two copies of the named card for double points. Eventually I decided that I could lower the price while still being on-theme by making it a kingdom treasure. This also let me avoid the awkward "At the start of your buy phase..." delay on the Indulgence effect. I decided on making it a $5 Silver with a buy. I thought it would be cool that, on certain boards, you would buy the Indulgence just for the buy. Also, Silver is decent card in just about any deck.
Making it a Treasure card also meant that it coudn't be named Aristocrat. I had recently looked at an old list of proposed fan card names, and saw that werothegreat suggested Indulgence.
[redacted]. Anyhow...
Oh! But now I can't require that your opponent choose an Action card, since now it is possible that there are no Actions at all (not likely, but this is f.ds. y'all would have torn me a new one.). I didn't want people to name Curse. "Between $3 and $6" is a familiar restriction for us all. Rules out junk. Sucks a bit that it rules out expensive stuff,
especially in Prosperity, but then it is kind of unfair to name Colony on turn 5, knowing full well that your opponent couldn't possibly afford it. One nice thing about Indulgence being a Silver is that you are likely able to afford anything between $3 and $6. In retrospect, I saw that the $3 to $6 restriction also avoids potion costs being named. What if your opponent were a dick and named p-stone when you clearly had no Potion? Well, he could still name Potion, but at least you
could buy that if you deemed the VP important enough.
Yeah, so that's the summary.