It’s been a few months since release and I conducted another poll on the Renaissance cards to see how opinions have changed after some time playing with the cards.
For those who are interested, here’s a link to a Google Sheet where I’ve compiled the results from all of the card rating polls I’ve ever done, except for first impressions. It includes all of the cards, but for this post I’ll just focus on the Renaissance cards, comparing them to the first impressions poll. Sample size for these polls was about the same as for Nocturne, with around 40 entries for the first impressions and about 20 entries for the revisited poll.
If you’d like to hear the opinions of Jake and myself, you can check out these two podcast episodes where we give our first impressions, and then our revisited takes.
All right, now that we’ve defined the scope of this discussion, let’s show the data and start talking about it. The “Mean” is the average of all of the revisited scores, the “1I mean” is the average of the first-impressions scores, and the “diff” shows the change between the two — the list below is sorted by the absolute value of this “diff” column, with the top of the list representing the cards whose valuation has changed the most since the first impressions.
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Card Name Mean 1I mean diff Lackeys 7.47 4.81 +2.66 Silk Merchant 8.26 5.62 +2.64 Cathedral 8.61 6.62 +1.99 Road Network 3.44 5.22 -1.78 Capitalism 6.5 8.18 -1.68 Sinister Plot 7.89 6.24 +1.65 Star Chart 8.22 6.58 +1.64 Seer 8.37 6.83 +1.54 Scepter 5.11 6.55 -1.44 Treasurer 7.74 6.47 +1.27 Recruiter 9.05 7.8 +1.25 Spices 6.53 5.35 +1.18 Sculptor 6.37 5.19 +1.18 Barracks 5.83 6.93 -1.1 Scholar 4.53 5.57 -1.04 Acting Troupe 4.42 5.43 -1.01 Improve 6.05 5.06 +0.99 Guildhall 6.39 5.4 +0.99 Swashbuckler 6.42 5.66 +0.76 Priest 7.63 6.89 +0.74 Research 5.37 6.11 -0.74 Innovation 7.5 6.77 +0.73 Academy 6.78 6.11 +0.67 Inventor 7.79 7.15 +0.64 Sewers 7.39 6.82 +0.57 Cargo Ship 6.11 5.55 +0.56 Old Witch 7.79 7.28 +0.51 Patron 5.74 5.24 +0.5 Fleet 7.11 7.58 -0.47 Citadel 6.89 7.33 -0.44 Border Guard 5.53 5.13 +0.4 Ducat 4.11 4.51 -0.4 City Gate 4.67 5.04 -0.37 Exploration 3.44 3.8 -0.36 Piazza 5.56 5.89 -0.33 Experiment 6.05 6.34 -0.29 Mountain Village6.74 6.45 +0.29 Fair 5.33 5.6 -0.27 Canal 6.5 6.73 -0.23 Crop Rotation 5.17 5.36 -0.19 Silos 5.78 5.62 +0.16 Pageant 5.72 5.62 +0.1 Villain 4.21 4.15 +0.06 Flag Bearer 5.26 5.28 -0.02 Hideout 6.53 6.51 +0.02
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So the two biggest differences are Lackeys and Silk Merchant, both very underestimated cards, and both with the distinction of giving Villagers on-gain. Silk Merchant’s ability to give Coffers on-gain was probably underestimated as well, with the other card capable of doing this (Spices) getting a significant increase.
With a bit less of a bump, but still a significant increase in perceived power level, we see Cathedral; then to a lesser extent, Sinister Plot, Star Chart, and Seer. I’m guessing that Cathedral’s required trash spooked many people into rating it lower (it still has a very high variance so this hasn’t completely gone away).
Some overestimated cards seemed to be Road Network and Capitalism. To be quite honest, I’m not sure how Road Network was originally rated so high. As for Capitalism, it seems that in spite of the huge effect it gives, the fact that it isn’t relevant in a reasonable portion of games where it appears caused opinions of it to drop.
So these are the cards that had opinions on them change the most. As for the most powerful cards in the set, it looks like that distinction goes to Cathedral, Recruiter, Seer, Silk Merchant, and Star Chart.
The Ratings main page will be updated with the complete list of all cards and their ratings, and the poll will stay open so people can submit their ratings if they want. I’ll periodically update the numbers on that page and if there’s another expansion in the future I’ll be sure to capture the opinions of the community on that as well. Thanks to everyone who participated!