Over the past couple of weeks, I had a poll open asking people to rate each card-shaped object in the newest Dominion expansion on a scale from 0 to 10. The results are in!
Click here to see the results of that poll in a Google Sheet.
You may also be interested in two podcast episodes where our first impressions of the Plunder stuff was discussed: One Two. I’ll highlight a couple of things that I think were interesting about these results in this post.
First, I’d like to talk about the places where my ratings differed the most from the community’s ratings:
Silver Mine is getting a very low score, among the lowest in the set, while I gave it an above-average score; I also rated Gondola quite a bit higher than the community. After viewing lots of discussion on the topic, I think this is a difference in the value of Silver. It’s very popular to dunk on Silver and Gold as being extremely bad and it’s my opinion that this is pretty overblown. The difference in ratings certainly reflects that.
Shaman has quite a bit of things happening to it, so the difference between my rating and the community’s rating is just not telling the whole story. I’d like to share a graphic showing the cards with the highest variance stat, meaning that there is the most disagreement among the community.
Shaman (as well as Cage) are two cards that have a significantly higher variance than everything else in the set. In Shaman’s case, where I personally believe that should receive a high rating, but I believe the card is also unpopular, the variance is likely to be pulling Shaman’s overall rating closer to the middle than it should be. It’s also possible that people are rating only the on-play effect of Shaman, as opposed to considering the effect it has in all games. This is a perfectly valid way to rate the card and could also be pulling its rating towards the middle.
As for Swamp Shacks, after some discussion it appears that there is some real disagreement there: I think that Swamp Shacks is much less powerful than everyone else does. Time will tell what the story is…
Next I’ll talk about what the community rated as the most and least powerful cards in the set:
These are the highest and lowest card ratings — I agree for the most part with all of these except for Silver Mine, which I’ve already talked about… and Rope.
As I played more with Rope I lowered my rating on it from 8 to 6. My belief is that Rope is a card that looks great and feels great at first, probably because it does so many different things; but I think the community will calm down by the time the time my next Card Power Levels poll comes out. Rope is fine, but I just don’t think it’s one of the best cards in the set.
Let me know what you think!