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[eHalcyon]

Homestead
Types: Action – Victory
Cost: $4
+2 Actions. Reveal cards from the top of your deck until you reveal a Victory card. Put that card into your hand and discard the rest.
Worth 1 VP.

This is a village that draws Victory cards, including itself.  In general, this is worse than a regular village.  Drawing an Estate or Province is only slightly better than drawing nothing at all.  sometimes it helps with cycling/filtering, sometimes it makes you skip your good cards.  It can be nice if you have other Alt VP that you want in hand, like Nobles.  Drawing more Homesteads is not that great because it only nets you more actions and little else.  Homestead is also worth 1VP, which helps to justify the $4 cost, but I don't find Homestead much more interesting than Great Hall.

Landlord
Types: Action – Victory
Cost: $5
+2 Cards. You may discard a Victory card. If you do, +1 Action.
Worth 1 VP per empty Supply pile.

Lab worth at least 1VP but isn't always terminal.  Still sounds decent to me.

Monastery
Types: Action
Cost: $4
Gain a card costing up to $6. For each $1 over $4 it costs, each other player may choose one: he trashes a card from his hand; he gains up to 2 Coppers, putting them into his hand; he discards his hand and draws 5 cards.

I think it is a fairly interesting Workshop variant.  My misgivings are that Intrigue already has a thematic Workshop variant in Ironworks.  A small worry is how slow this can make the game.  It has every other player make a choice, possibly two choices.

Overseer
Types: Action
Cost: $4
Put a marker on an empty District of the Overseer Mat. If you put it on the…
Residential District, +1 Card and +2 Actions
Craftsmen's District, +3 Cards
Commercial District, +1 Card, +1 Action, and +$1
Industrial District, gain a card costing up to $4
Logging District, +1 Buy and +$2
If four districts of the mat have a marker, remove all the markers.

Rules Clarification: There is one communal Overseer mat, split into the five districts.

I think the concept is interesting, but my love for the card has fallen since initial reading.  A necessary tweak is that a lot of the text must be put on the mat rather than on the card itself.  That's fine.  A second thing is that I feel the options will have to be tweaked, and they might have to be tweaked severely in order to have a fun and balanced card.  I'll leave it at that because specifics have been discussed to death already.

If it doesn't win, I definitely think the overarching concept deserves revisiting.

Prefecture
Types: Action – Victory
Cost: $5
Reveal cards from your deck until you reveal a Victory card. If you do, put it and one other revealed card into your hand. Discard the rest.
Worth 2 VP.

I like this as an interesting Tutor variant.  Terminal means that you need support if you want to do fancy action combos, and stopping on VP means that it gets in its own way.  That's pretty nice.  Might be a bit weak for $5, but it's also worth a cool 2VP.

I wonder if Prefecture would still be strong enough if, instead of being worth the flat 2VP, it got the more interesting VP clause from Landlord.

[eHalcyon]

My submission was Secret Plot.  Although I had another concept prepped for Intrigue, I decided in the end that it would probably be too boring for most voters.  There are also some potential wording/layout problems with the concept.  If I don't submit it to the next Intrigue contest, I'll probably make a post about it because I think it could be interesting for some of the Dominion Academics like LF or WW.  I think that this mystery concept of mine is quite interesting, but also rather subtle.

Anyway, Secret Plot.

Secret Plot
Types: Treasure – Victory
Cost: $3
Worth $1. When you play this, each player may set aside a card face down on his Secret Plot mat. You may look at the cards on your mat at any time; reveal them and return them to your deck at the end of the game.
Worth 1 VP for each differently-named card on your mat that no other player has a copy of on his mat.

Props to LF for rewording it to be a bit more elegant than what I had originally submitted.

I created this pretty late.  The inspiration for it was strictly in the name -- I thought "Secret Plot" would be a hilarious name for an Intrigue VP card.  It fits perfectly, and "Plot" is a pun because, you know, VPs are often named after places and a Plot is a piece of land... yeah?  Yeah.  So funny.

This is what I said about the card in my first review of the submissions:

The card itself is mediocre.  You can use it as an infinite Island, but everyone else gets that too.  That weakens it quite a bit.  Making it worth even one VP could be quite tricky as well -- Coppers and Estates are almost certainly never going to do anything for you.  Other VP cards are unlikely as well because opponents will be happy to Plot away their Provinces.  To get VP, you'd have to try putting away something decent.  Silver maybe, or Gold or a key action card.  But is that even worth it?  What if others have the same idea?  I guess it's thematic that way.

There is a practical concern in that people could very easily forget about revealing their mats at the end of the game and just dump them into the rest of their deck like with Native Village and Island.  There's also a significant amount of text to fit underneath the big coin.  Eh, this might be OK.

[/quote]

SP got a decent bunch of discussion on it.  I defended it a lot more than cards I've submitted in the past.  I still don't think there are really any abuse cases, even with Black Market.  I think the potential mind games would be fun, and thematically appropriate for an Intrigue card named "Secret Plot".  My biggest concern with the concept is still that it is probably too weak most of the time.

Thanks to the people who commented on it, even dghunter who seemed to really hate it.

[ConMan]

Usurer
Types: Action – Attack
Cost: $5
Discard any number of cards. Choose one: +$1 per card discarded; or each other player discards until he has the same number of cards in hand as you.

So, this was my card. It has everything an Intrigue card needs - choice, crippling interaction, gives you something to do with all those pesky Victory cards ... and it's completely broken, like I realised after the card list was posted. The original idea was going to be something like "For each card discarded, choose one: +$1, or each other player discards a card", but I decided to be all clever and change it so you only had to make a single decision. Not that the original version was that much better, but it required you to draw a few cards before you could completely pin the other player. I would still like to make a card with some kind of similar ability, but even I wasn't going to vote for this one.

[Archetype]

I didn't submit a card this time, but I'll comment on the top 5 briefly.

Homestead: Basically a Great Hall-Village, at the cost of $4. Concept would be interesting if Great Hall didn't exist.

Landlord: Really nifty card. Love that the maker didn't put something boring for it's VP clause. The synergy between the VP and the action is there, but it's not overly obvious which I think is the sign of a good design.

Monastery: Could possibly take too long to resolve, but the concept is novel. By choice for runnerup if Landlord doesn't win.

Overseer: Neat-o idea, but could probably have been executed better. Don't really want it to win (It's a bit too out there Intrigue-wise) but I hope it gets another look in it's own thread.

Prefacture: Cool stuff. The more you have, the less of a choice of cards to draw you'll have. But the more you have, the more often you'll be able to pick up cards. Not just playing them, but also having them as a stopping point for your card flipping.

[Robz888]

Here is my card, which did fairly well:

Majordomo
Types: Action
Cost: $4
+1 Action. Discard a card. If it is a… Victory card, +1 Card; Treasure card, +2 Cards; Action card, +3 Cards.

I suppose it may have been less interesting than I thought it was, but I was really think of the Intrigue-specific mixed-type card case, where this would be a really fun powerhouse. Discard Great Hall for +4 cards!

That said, I do think the card should probably cost $3, and would sort of be on the weaker side.

[ChocophileBenj]

Okay, it's nonsense juste crying alone and leaving you...

and we have interesting cards here ! So I've voted, but I won't tell you for what ^^

[Nic]

I wonder if Prefecture would still be strong enough if, instead of being worth the flat 2VP, it got the more interesting VP clause from Landlord.

I don't think every card needs to be IGG. Prefecture is a very well-thought out action card, and one of the consequences of its construction is that it needs to be typed Action-Victory; the exact value doesn't matter. Similarly, Landlord is an alt-VP with a unique scoring mechanism, and the best way to make that viable in a game is for the card itself to give you some utility in alt-VP rushes. I think fusing them together would not only be a waste of one really good card, but also make the result a little bloated.

[LastFootnote]

Sooooo, we have a few days left to go. If you remember, during this phase of the Seaside contest, I outed the authors and gave them a chance to defend their card. eHalcyon suggested that this time authors remain anonymous, but they could PM their thoughts to me and I would post them here. Ideally I would have done this right after the first poll finished, but then I up and disappeared.

ANYHOW, I know it's late in the game, but if any of the authors want to PM me a blurb defending their card, please do so. I have had one author already request to do this. I have also changed the poll such that anybody can redo his/her vote with the "REMOVE VOTE" button at the bottom of the poll. So if something you read sways your vote, feel free to have a do-over. I'm also going to extend the poll a couple more days, I think. Let's give people the weekend to talk about this.

[Robz888]

Well, Landlord got my vote. Bunch of cool cards, though.

[Polk5440]

So, I have a little time to comment and vote this time.

Homestead
Types: Action – Victory
Cost: $4
+2 Actions. Reveal cards from the top of your deck until you reveal a Victory card. Put that card into your hand and discard the rest.
Worth 1 VP.

Seems fine to me. It combos with itself, so it doesn't have to be a dual-type heavy board to see some action. In fact, it could be sneaky good in some engines since it gives you sifting that doesn't get bogged down by Curses or Ruins. With just a little trashing you could set up a Homestead-chain (a la Venture chain) that also gives you a bunch of actions to spend and goes through your deck and discard -- not that you'll need it once you draw your whole deck and set up that mega-turn.

Landlord
Types: Action – Victory
Cost: $5
+2 Cards. You may discard a Victory card. If you do, +1 Action.
Worth 1 VP per empty Supply pile.

I like the VP depending on empty supply piles. It seems like it'd be good in engines, but green cards aren't good in engines. I suspect it's a nombo with itself, though. If you could pick some up late, that would be great. But for some reason, this doesn't strike me as a fan card that would be fun to play. Not my favorite "depends on the # of empty supply piles" card in the world.

Monastery
Types: Action
Cost: $4
Gain a card costing up to $6. For each $1 over $4 it costs, each other player may choose one: he trashes a card from his hand; he gains up to 2 Coppers, putting them into his hand; he discards his hand and draws 5 cards.

I love the idea of giving your opponents a choice of what benefit they would like. That sounds fun. I can see how this card would encourage fast games (fewer turns, that is) and be a little swingy, but I don't mind that style of play every once in a while. This is a concept worth voting for, but of the five cards, I suspect this one would require the most tweaking for balance.

Overseer
Types: Action
Cost: $4
Put a marker on an empty District of the Overseer Mat. If you put it on the…
Residential District, +1 Card and +2 Actions
Craftsmen's District, +3 Cards
Commercial District, +1 Card, +1 Action, and +$1
Industrial District, gain a card costing up to $4
Logging District, +1 Buy and +$2
If four districts of the mat have a marker, remove all the markers.

Rules Clarification: There is one communal Overseer mat, split into the five districts.

My first thought was: "Good grief. Are we playing Dominion or Lords of Waterdeep?" Then I thought about it more, and it could work, if you like that sort of thing. I don't like new mats and tokens, so I personally would never play with this card. But I can see the appeal of playing with it.... once. Maybe.

Prefecture
Types: Action – Victory
Cost: $5
Reveal cards from your deck until you reveal a Victory card. If you do, put it and one other revealed card into your hand. Discard the rest.
Worth 2 VP.

I don't have much to say except: It feels like Intrigue and I like it!

[LastFootnote]

As of now, I've voted for Prefecture. I think it could maybe be cheaper, but overall I like it better than the other options.

Landlord
Types: Action – Victory
Cost: $5
+2 Cards. You may discard a Victory card. If you do, +1 Action.
Worth 1 VP per empty Supply pile.

I find both the top and bottom of Landlord to both be pretty uninteresting. The top is a weak sometimes-Lab and the bottom fluctuates between 1 and 3 VP in most games. Not exciting to me.

Overseer
Types: Action
Cost: $4
Put a marker on an empty District of the Overseer Mat. If you put it on the…
Residential District, +1 Card and +2 Actions
Craftsmen's District, +3 Cards
Commercial District, +1 Card, +1 Action, and +$1
Industrial District, gain a card costing up to $4
Logging District, +1 Buy and +$2
If four districts of the mat have a marker, remove all the markers.

Rules Clarification: There is one communal Overseer mat, split into the five districts.

I like the concept of Overseer. I can't speak for everyone else, but I personally probably won't be printing my own custom mat for it. Sleeving proxies is tough enough. I'd like people to be able to just buy a copy of Alchemy and proxy up this set, and Overseer would make that tougher.

Monastery
Types: Action
Cost: $4
Gain a card costing up to $6. For each $1 over $4 it costs, each other player may choose one: he trashes a card from his hand; he gains up to 2 Coppers, putting them into his hand; he discards his hand and draws 5 cards.

Monastery is clunky. Cool concept, but I'd rather see a cleaner implementation like, "Gain a card costing up to $6. Each other player may gain a card costing at most $2 less than it."

Homestead
Types: Action – Victory
Cost: $4
+2 Actions. Reveal cards from the top of your deck until you reveal a Victory card. Put that card into your hand and discard the rest.
Worth 1 VP.

Prefecture
Types: Action – Victory
Cost: $5
Reveal cards from your deck until you reveal a Victory card. If you do, put it and one other revealed card into your hand. Discard the rest.
Worth 2 VP.

Homestead is sort of like Prefecture. Perhaps a happy medium between the two would be best. Like a Prefecture that gave +1 Action, but was only worth 1 VP. That might be a cool Lab variant. Between the two, I'll take Prefecture.


My favorite card submitted was jackelfrink's Liege. I really like the "play this again" mechanic; it's something I've been trying unsuccessfully to fit into my own cards. I also like that it's a mild "attack" that is often just using your opponents' hands to draw you cards, rather than actually hurting them.

Liege
Types: Action – Attack
Cost: $5
+2 Cards. Each other player discards a Victory card (or reveals a hand with no Victory cards). If any player discards a card this way, play this again.

I agree with those who said it really anti-synergizes with Intrigue cards, though. Even more than Tribute, it makes you not want to buy Great Hall, Nobles, and Harem. I'd like to see it in the next Hinterlands contest! Cool interaction with Tunnel.

[LastFootnote]

Author's commentary on Homestead:

Homestead
Types: Action – Victory
Cost: $4
+2 Actions. Reveal cards from the top of your deck until you reveal a Victory card. Put that card into your hand and discard the rest.
Worth 1 VP.

A popular idea for fixing scout is to make it a Victory card itself. I thought about how that would play, and while with Scout itself it wouldn't do much on its own, I thought some of the patterns were interesting. I looked at the card "1VP // +1 action, +$1, search for a victory card".  Early game, the searching was worse than "+1 card", but with trashing the self comboing takes over, but it chokes on green as the game draws to a close. Also interesting was how it didn't benefit to have multiple copies in the same hand. I feel like it gave the card a sort of "alien" feel; that these were cards that behaved like they were in a different game, but they interacted perfectly with Dominion cards. It also worked well with Harem and the other Action/Victory cards, so it seemed perfect for Intrigue.

This idea was given a name and a thread, and the consensus was that it was too strong for $4, too weak for $5. I wanted the card to be a $4 card for Ironworks and so the effect of buying many copies could be seen in more games, but I didn't like the "0VP" idea. I couldn't think of any good alt VPs that would reasonably seem worse than a flat 1VP, and the card was very wordy despite being simple. So, with Peddler being too strong, I looked to other simple cantrips. Lab self combo'd a bit too well and would definitely be a $5 card, although it's an idea I may submit to later competitions for being interesting in its own way. I ended up going with Village, although it seemed quite weak. With trashing it might be especially good for a Megaturn, although it can be wonky and you'll need to have the other engine components ready to go in your hand, just like with other non drawing Villages. It should probably be $3 but I didn't think it should be the same price as Great Hall, and of course it can't be $2 because estate is $2.

The key idea is the non terminal Victory searching combined with being a Victory card itself. I went with a cheap and simple version, but if the card wins I would be happy for it to mutate heavily as long as it gives at least +1 action, is a Victory card and digs for Victory cards.

[LastFootnote]

Author's commentary on Landlord:

Landlord
Types: Action – Victory
Cost: $5
+2 Cards. You may discard a Victory card. If you do, +1 Action.
Worth 1 VP per empty Supply pile.

The top half is very generic. Basically I thought the concept of a Victory card that filters itself would be a cool concept. I thought a Lab variant suited it well, although it looks a bit boring, it gets the job done. To make it a bit more "fancy," I attached the VP for empty Supply piles. I thought it would be an interesting enough mechanic that brought something new to the table, but kept the simplicity of a beginner set. I think it'd be awesome for someone to try to empty more than three piles to rank up points, and the reason Landlord doesn't have a "+Buy" is so you need supporting cards to make that happen. I know others are turned off by the possible empty 4-6 of the piles, but I don't think it would happen often enough for it to be an issue. Like (I believe) someone said earlier about Beggar/Gardens or Trader/Feodum. I don't think City/Candlestick Maker/Landlord would come up often enough for it to matter. After all, every card has power that is (at least somewhat) board dependent.

I'm awful with pricing cards. I'm starting to wonder if Landlord would actually be worth $4. Gardens usually end up being a cheap Duchy for someone going for Provinces, so maybe that would be a fairer price for Landlord. Anyway, either way, (like any author) I am proud of my card: I enjoy its self-synergy, its simplicity, how it fits in the theme of Intrigue, its new way of earning VP, how in the end of the game each Landlord is the same VP for everyone, and that it is a Hybrid-Victory card which filters.

[LastFootnote]

Author's commentary on Monastery:

Monastery
Types: Action
Cost: $4
Gain a card costing up to $6. For each $1 over $4 it costs, each other player may choose one: he trashes a card from his hand; he gains up to 2 Coppers, putting them into his hand; he discards his hand and draws 5 cards.

The card started out life as a kind of friendly anti-ironworks; Gain a card costing up to $5. If it is an… Action card, [Some Benefit to Opponents]. Treasure card, [Some Other Benefit]. Victory card, [Some Other Benefit]. This turns out to be a bad idea for a number of reasons. In particular, what benefit the opponents get would never really influence what sort of card you chose to gain. However, Intrigue is about choices as well as different card types so why not let the opponents choose their benefit? I stuck with 3 possible benefits (one for each card type) as before although this possibly a mistake. I also wanted the possible benefits to include something useful in all deck types and at all stages of the game. So we have: trashing (for engines and early game), gaining Coppers in hand (for slogs and late game cash boost), and filtering (generally useful but maybe best in money based decks).

If I were to tweak the card now I'd probably give a choice of 2 rather than 3 possible benefits (choosing one of 2 nice things to happen to you counterpoints torturer in some sense). This would make it a bit less wordy and maybe quicker to resolve. A more niche range of benefits might also make for more interesting decisions on when to buy and how to use the card, although it does go against the "something for every type of deck" principle. If the card does win then I'd be happy for it to be changed along these lines so long as it keeps the form "Gain an expensive card with a choice of benefit to opponents."

[LastFootnote]

Author's commentary on Overseer:

Overseer
Types: Action
Cost: $4
Put a marker on an empty District of the Overseer Mat. If you put it on the…
Residential District, +1 Card and +2 Actions
Craftsmen's District, +3 Cards
Commercial District, +1 Card, +1 Action, and +$1
Industrial District, gain a card costing up to $4
Logging District, +1 Buy and +$2
If four districts of the mat have a marker, remove all the markers.

Rules Clarification: There is one communal Overseer mat, split into the five districts.

This started out trying to get a card like Minion that could combo with itself. Preventing you from repeating choices seemed like a good way to go about doing that as it let you create a card that did everything without doing everything at once (which would be too powerful). But then I realized a joint card could be far more fun than just keeping track of choices yourself. Sure it prevents the card from achieving the self-combo, but its more fun this way. The self combo is still sort of there (it can still gain itself, and you can still do village/smithy with it once, but even with no one else using it you still need other villages/drawers)

As far as the power of the card goes: I think I agree with most people that its probably weak because of the unreliability it provides. Its a balance that I probably didn't give enough thought to when creating the card. You want a group of powers that is diverse enough that the mechanic is meaningful, but you probably want enough sameness that people can get at least a little consistency out of the card because consistency is the bread and butter of dominion. As far as the mat mechanic goes: the amount of text on the card is a fair point. Moving the text to the mat, or using cards instead of mats (print text on card, put cards by supply, flip over cards to show they've been used) is probably a better idea. So some of the other cards are certainly far more complete ideas, but I think the mechanic of 'group set of choices that dwindles as more choices are made" works really well in a lot of other games and don't see why it couldn't be done with dominion as well.

[LastFootnote]

Author's commentary on Prefecture:

Prefecture
Types: Action – Victory
Cost: $5
Reveal cards from your deck until you reveal a Victory card. If you do, put it and one other revealed card into your hand. Discard the rest.
Worth 2 VP.

Prefecture has actually gone through some testing long before this competition to get to its current position. The testing is cursory though, so the card is open to changes.

Prefecture plays a lot with positive tension. When you play a Prefecture, you will pull a select card and bad Victory card from your deck (assuming you don't draw another Prefecture dead) which will leave your deck better, shuffling notwithstanding. This means that you will almost always come out ahead in a subtle way for playing a Prefecture.
Some posters worry the Action is weak. I can assure you: It is not very strong, but it is fun to use. While the choice of cards it gives you is often not a real decision to make, but if you can play them, drawing Actions makes Prefecture really fun to play.
GendoIkari pointed out that alternating Village and Prefecture makes Prefecture into a Laboratory. This is true, but doesn't properly emphasize that Prefecture is like a Laboratory that is worth VPs and, with light trashing, hunts for itself. Like Laboratory, it would take time to build up, so it is not likely that any game with a Village will work, even with the VP.
On that, I think it is valid to worry that the 2VP are too good attached to this Action. This has not received much testing at $5 producing 2VP, but I can imagine that players will almost always but 1 or 2 Prefectures on any table it appears... but that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Prefecture adds another question mark to "When should I green?" Prefecture doesn't hurt players' decks the same way a Duchy would, which makes Prefecture as a Victory card somewhat similar in utility to Farmland, but less tactical and more strategic.

Prefecture felt right at home in Intrigue from the day of its inception, being a hybrid Victory with an interesting choice mechanism built into it.

[GendoIkari]

Author's commentary on Landlord:

Landlord
Types: Action – Victory
Cost: $5
+2 Cards. You may discard a Victory card. If you do, +1 Action.
Worth 1 VP per empty Supply pile.

The top half is very generic. Basically I thought the concept of a Victory card that filters itself would be a cool concept. I thought a Lab variant suited it well, although it looks a bit boring, it gets the job done. To make it a bit more "fancy," I attached the VP for empty Supply piles. I thought it would be an interesting enough mechanic that brought something new to the table, but kept the simplicity of a beginner set. I think it'd be awesome for someone to try to empty more than three piles to rank up points, and the reason Landlord doesn't have a "+Buy" is so you need supporting cards to make that happen. I know others are turned off by the possible empty 4-6 of the piles, but I don't think it would happen often enough for it to be an issue. Like (I believe) someone said earlier about Beggar/Gardens or Trader/Feodum. I don't think City/Candlestick Maker/Landlord would come up often enough for it to matter. After all, every card has power that is (at least somewhat) board dependent.

I'm awful with pricing cards. I'm starting to wonder if Landlord would actually be worth $4. Gardens usually end up being a cheap Duchy for someone going for Provinces, so maybe that would be a fairer price for Landlord. Anyway, either way, (like any author) I am proud of my card: I enjoy its self-synergy, its simplicity, how it fits in the theme of Intrigue, its new way of earning VP, how in the end of the game each Landlord is the same VP for everyone, and that it is a Hybrid-Victory card which filters.

So this has probably been discussed and I just haven't seen it, but if Landlord wins, and turns out to be at all too weak, I would highly support giving it +1 buy. I think it would be neat in terms of giving itself a possibility of a 4-pile ending, even though it would still be rare.

[AJD]

If the card does win then I'd be happy for it to be changed along these lines so long as it keeps the form "Gain an expensive card with a choice of benefit to opponents."

I really like the practice of the authors of the finalists stating what they believe to be the core concept of the card.

[KingZog3]

If the card does win then I'd be happy for it to be changed along these lines so long as it keeps the form "Gain an expensive card with a choice of benefit to opponents."

I really like the practice of the authors of the finalists stating what they believe to be the core concept of the card.

I agree. It makes people vote for the mechanic, not the execution.

[Fragasnap]

Landlord
Types: Action – Victory
Cost: $5
+2 Cards. You may discard a Victory card. If you do, +1 Action.
Worth 1 VP per empty Supply pile.

The biggest problem I see with this card strategically is that it is practically impossible to sneak a 3-pile, even with +Buys. If 3-piling is beneficial to one player, players will work to end the game first (which a Landlord player has to get dangerously close to already).

Overseer
Types: Action
Cost: $4
Put a marker on an empty District of the Overseer Mat. If you put it on the…
Residential District, +1 Card and +2 Actions
Craftsmen's District, +3 Cards
Commercial District, +1 Card, +1 Action, and +$1
Industrial District, gain a card costing up to $4
Logging District, +1 Buy and +$2
If four districts of the mat have a marker, remove all the markers.

Rules Clarification: There is one communal Overseer mat, split into the five districts.

This card is a pain to remember. As a Dominion Academic you can tell me it gives me a choice between Village, Smithy, Peddler, Workshop, or Woodcutter, and I know what you mean, but think about that from a beginner stand-point. What are those cards?
Thinking about a card trying to fit into Dominion: Intrigue as a starter set, this card looks pretty terrible, regardless of the options one can choose.

Monastery
Types: Action
Cost: $4
Gain a card costing up to $6. For each $1 over $4 it costs, each other player may choose one: he trashes a card from his hand; he gains up to 2 Coppers, putting them into his hand; he discards his hand and draws 5 cards.

I'm not sure most of the benefits are good enough to let players gain even $5, let alone $6. I might like this a bit better if it did have only two options, but then I'm not sure what those options should be to really counterbalance how strong this Workshop+ is.

Homestead
Types: Action – Victory
Cost: $4
+2 Actions. Reveal cards from the top of your deck until you reveal a Victory card. Put that card into your hand and discard the rest.
Worth 1 VP.

Have we considered the ridiculous amount of shuffling this card implies? It's all the problems of Scrying Pool and Hunting Party with none of the payoff. There is an alien sense as the author stated in having so many Actions if you can trash those Estates, but I don't know if I could deal with all the shuffling.

Prefecture
Types: Action – Victory
Cost: $5
Reveal cards from your deck until you reveal a Victory card. If you do, put it and one other revealed card into your hand. Discard the rest.
Worth 2 VP.

I keep flip-flopping on whether this is too weak or too strong. The top is certainly weak and will choke hard with other green even if it does somehow work when drawing itself. 2VP can be hard to ignore on a lot of boards in a non-dead card though...

[scott_pilgrim]

Homestead
Types: Action – Victory
Cost: $4
+2 Actions. Reveal cards from the top of your deck until you reveal a Victory card. Put that card into your hand and discard the rest.
Worth 1 VP.

Have we considered the ridiculous amount of shuffling this card implies? It's all the problems of Scrying Pool and Hunting Party with none of the payoff. There is an alien sense as the author stated in having so many Actions if you can trash those Estates, but I don't know if I could deal with all the shuffling.

I think you're exaggerating a bit.  The maximum number of times you will have to shuffle your deck in a turn as a result of playing Homesteads is equal to the number of Homesteads in your starting hand that turn, which will probably be one most of the time, and occasionally two.  If you start with only one Homestead in your hand and play Homesteads continuously until you run out of them, you'll only ever shuffle once during that process.  Compare with Hunting Party, which can make you shuffle up to one time per HP in the chain.  So you can say that Homestead is not as exciting to you as HP or SP, and that's fine, but I don't think it's as bad as either of them in terms of how much it slows the game down.  I think it's more comparable to Golem.  If the number of non-Golem action cards in a Golem deck is on average less than twice the number of victory cards in a Homestead deck, then Golem causes more shuffling than Homestead.  I'm not really sure if that conditional is satisfied but I would guess it's close-ish, so I would think that Homestead would cause roughly the same amount of shuffling as Golem (which I think is considerably less than Hunting Party).

Also, note that even if you start with more than one Homestead in your hand, after the first time you shuffle, if you're playing with reasonable friends, you can just say "I have no green cards in my discard pile" and flash your discard pile, rather than shuffling it, revealing one card at a time, and then re-shuffling it the next time you need to draw.  In that case, whenever you play Homesteads consecutively, you will never need to shuffle more than once.

[Fragasnap]

So you can say that Homestead is not as exciting to you as HP or SP, and that's fine, but I don't think it's as bad as either of them in terms of how much it slows the game down.  I think it's more comparable to Golem.

In most games I don't shuffle every turn, but some cards imply that I will need to shuffle frequently. That takes quite a bit of time and is one reason I am bothered to play with Scrying Pool and Hunting Party in real life--which is every game I play. Golem's effect on shuffling is not really comparable as Golem is much harder to stack than any previously mentioned card because it's so expensive. Even when I have used Golem, I've usually built up such an economy that by the time I have 2 or 3 Golems in my deck I need to be buying green. Consider how much more accessible Homestead is than any of these three other cards. Also one Homestead has much more effect upon your shuffle than one Scrying Pool or Hunting Party does (even if two don't).

I imagine the best way to play Homestead involve having an absurd number of Actions through stacking them for some kind of payoff through (most commonly) card draw and Attacks. Homestead's application reasonably exciting, but it will still cause lots of shuffling really fast which can bog down games. It also could bring a rather dull certainty to the game. King's Court\Scheme is cute, but only fun once.

[LastFootnote]

Well, the poll ended yesterday and Fragasnap's Prefecture won! Congrats to Fragasnap and a hearty "great job!" to all five finalists.

[Asper]

Congratulations to Fragasnap for winning this. I hoped for a card that would actually support green cards instead of being harmed by them, but i can definitely live with this winner. In general, i thought the avarage quality of this contest was pretty high. Also:

Secret History of Nouveau Riche
The original premise of the card was to be a Baron for all the basic victory cards, especially the cheaper ones. I figured i would make the bonuses go steps from 3 to 1 and give a different reward for each, but with the biggest bonus for Estates, the middle one for Duchies, and the worst for Provinces. +3 cards +2$ and +1 Action seemed natural, and i placed the draw first to make the chance for getting the other two higher. "You may discard a province for +1 action" turned out too weak, and as most "reveal a Province" cards it was almost never useful. I considered making it "another victory card" so that any but Estate or Duchy would work, and decided that was still too weak. So it took the form it has now, where you can discard any victory card for the action.

I was very confident for this card in the Intrigue contest, as it is heavily relies on the "deal with victories" theme of Intrigue. Unlike Duke or Baron it doesn't interact with one type of victory card, though, and unlike them you actually need to mix different victories to get the most out of it. The name is based on the fact that many cards in Intrigue are nobles, and this is a new one which inpolitely steals their spotlight especially for Estate and Duchy interaction - also it originally came from my "Modern Times" expansion.

At last i'd like to remind KingZog (who wrote that "you may discard a victory card" was confusing considering you just did that) that Hamlet uses the exact same wording.

[KingZog3]

At last i'd like to remind KingZog (who wrote that "you may discard a victory card" was confusing considering you just did that) that Hamlet uses the exact same wording.

I think I found it confusing just because it specifies Duchies and Estates, then just Victory cards. It sounds a bit like "Hey,I already did do that so I guess I should get this bonus too." But I mean, it is true Hamlet is like that. Maybe if they were on different lines, because I think the cards were all just written on one line. That way it would feel more sequential.