Irrigated Land
Cost: $4
Victory/Treasure
Worth $1/1vp
When you buy this, you may trash a card from your hand. If you do, +1 vp (token)
I'm weighing this against Bishop. Thinking this through, Bishop does all of the same things, but whereas Irrigated Land can only do one trash and only gives you its flat 1 VP once, Bishop can do both things on each play, and it yields a greater number of VP tokens when trashing most cards. Irrigated Land yields more VP on trashing Coppers and Curses, but you wouldn't want to get one early to do that (when trashing Coppers is most useful), because all you'd be doing is replacing one Copper with one Copper equivalent. So Bishop is clearly the better early card.
Additionally, although Treasures are usually less problematic to have collide than terminal actions are, Bishops can always be used on other Bishops, while multiple Copper-level treasures is probably a bad hand.
But I guess Irrigated Land has two things going for it over Bishop:
1. The lack of an opportunity for every other player to do something. That's pretty big, I guess.
2. The trash-for-VP effect takes place immediately, rather than when the card finally winds up in your hand. That suggests it's best as an endgame card, when you want an immediate VP bump and won't be bothered by the then-weak card clogging up your deck. The $1 treasure value, then, is ultimately not very interesting, because often the card will never be played.
These subtle differences suggest wildly different uses from Bishop, but I still wonder if the card is underpowered. Seems to me you'd only want to buy one in the very last stages of the game and only then when you can't afford a Duchy, let alone a Province. That late in the game, being able to trash a card might well be utterly useless to you, which means, in turn, that
having to trash a card to realize the VP token benefit makes the card weaker.
Even earlier in the game, though, the trashing benefit is weaker than it normally would be, because you're not thinning your deck so much as replacing a bad card (mostly only Coppers, Estates, and Curses) with a slightly less bad card.
So I guess I'd want to look for a way to buff the card a bit; failing that, to try out a cost of $3. But I'm curious to hear if my thoughts here are out of sync with your playtesting experience. I could well believe they are.
Abandoned Village
Action
Cost: $4
When any player gains a Victory card, you may set aside this from your hand. If you do, gain a Silver, putting it in your hand. At the start of your next turn, return this card to your hand
Same as the above card, been tested a lot, and is extremely useful in the greening stage.
(I'm assuming +1 Card, +2 Actions as the action component....)
This seems pretty cool. My initial impulse was that this might be too strong for $4, but every line of reasoning I came up with fell short. So yeah, I think this is probably just right, and I think it's a really interesting card, too.
Squire
Cost: $2
Action
+ 1 card, + 1 Action
Reveal a Victory card from your hand. If you do, discard it, and
+ 1 card, + $1
This one feels a lot like Oasis. Oasis is usually a cantrip with no effect in a hand without Victory cards, because you play it, discard a Copper, and wind up with the same amount of money you'd have had if you hadn't had the Oasis in the first place. Squire is also a cantrip with no effect in a hand without Victory cards.
The differences:
1. Oasis also works with dead terminals and Curses. Usually this is not a significant distinction.
2. Oasis is sometimes worse than a cantrip that does nothing, because if you have it in a hand without any useless cards AND without any Copper, you might have to discard a Silver or an action card to activate it. The net benefit might well be negative, in which case you don't play it, and you're effectively playing with a 4-card hand. Squire, by contrast, is never worse than a cantrip that does nothing. Again, though, usually this is not a significant distinction.
3. Squire draws a card on success. That's huge, especially since this is a non-terminal.
I'd say that if you got rid of the +1 Card on discarding a Victory card, then differences #1 and #2 would cancel each other out, and you'd have a balanced card at a cost of $3 (though insufficiently distinct from Oasis to be interesting). As is, though, I think it's probably a $5 card. Maybe a situational one, but in the right deck it's effectively money-earning Laboratory, though not one you can chain indefinitely.
Bathhouse
Cost: $4
Action
+ 1 buy, + 1 action
Trash up to 3 cards, + $1 per card trashed
A trash for benefit card my friend came up with.
This one is spectacularly powerful. Figure that although Chapel costs $2, it's competitive at $4 and maybe even $5. Trashing one fewer card isn't that big a deal, since often you only trash 3 with Chapel anyway. It's certainly a drawback, but compensating for that you have an action and a bunch of money, which remove Chapel's primary limitation: namely, not being able to buy much of anything useful on a Chapel turn. Pulling in a $3-$5 card on a Chapelesque Then, once you've slimmed down your deck all you want, it's not necessarily a dead card, as Chapel is, because you can always play it for the +Buy, which is exactly what you'll need in the deck you'll have wound up with.
Actually, the better comparison is not Chapel but Trading Post. Trading Post is trash two cards and gain a Silver. Here, you can trash three cards and gain a Silver (the +Buy gives you the extra buy you need), but the extra card doesn't HAVE to be a Silver, and you can lump the money together into a single purchase if you prefer, and you aren't required to trash any specific number of cards, and even if you only trash 1 or 2, you can probably still get the Silver if not better. In other words, even if you removed the +1 Action, this card would be still wildly more powerful than Trading Post, which is a $5 card.
I think that without the +Action and +Buy, it would be an interesting $5 card. Perhaps still too powerful, but worth testing to see, in any case.
Author
Topic: Fan Expansion: Ingenuity (temporary name) (Read 13923 times)