Dominion: Cornucopia
[This is a now-outdated April Fool’s joke. The actual Cornucopia card list
(and strategic analysis) can be found here.]
I’m delighted to announce that thanks to a little bit of inside information from one of the readers of this blog, we have a SNEAK PREVIEW of the 13 cards from the next Dominion expansion, Dominion: Cornucopia. Although the five unique cards are still being kept under wraps for now, and the artwork has not yet been finalized, you can find below an exclusive preview of the text of the new Kingdom cards!
Bountiful Harvest
Action
Cost: $4
+2 Actions
+2 Cards
All other players begin their next turn with +1 Action.
Crop Rotation
Action
Cost: $6
You may discard any number of cards. For each differently-colored card you discard, +$2.
Cornucopia
Action–Treasure
Cost: $4
+2 Actions
$?
For each differently-named Action you have in play (including this one), +$1.
Cursed Village
Action
Cost: $3
+2 Actions
You may either discard a Curse or gain a Curse. If you do, name a card: reveal cards from your deck until you reveal the named card. Put it in your hand and discard the other revealed cards.
Lady Luck
Action
Cost: $4
Trash the top card of your deck. If it is a Victory card, gain any Victory card. If it is a Treasure card, gain any Action card. Otherwise, gain a Curse.
Spiteful Neighbor
Action–Attack
Cost: $5
Trash a card. Your opponents must reveal their hands and trash all copies of that card in their hand.
Traitor
Action–Victory
Cost: $0
-2VP
Set this card aside.
—
At the end of the game, return all copies of Traitor to your deck. For each copy of Traitor that was set aside, multiply every players’ VP total by -1.
Nose-Stealing Competition
Treasure
Cost: $5
$?
Randomly select a card to reveal from the hand of the player to your left. This card is worth as much as the cost of the revealed card.
Artistic Taste
Action
Cost: $2
+1 Action
+1 Card
For the remainder of this turn, all cards illustrated by Maura Kalusky provide an additional $2 when played.
Enough
Action–Reaction
Cost: $3
+$2
You may reveal this card when another player plays his fifth Action card on his turn. That player’s Action phase ends immediately.
Kuh-KNEE-zee-ah
Victory
Cost: $4
?VP
At the end of the game, tabulate the amount of VPs gained from each Victory card. This is worth as many VPs as the fewest VPs you received from any particular Victory card.
Nontargeted Interactions Are Not Attacks
Action
Cost: $5
+1 Action
All players give their hand to the player on their left.
Double Down
Victory
Cost: $24
?VP
For each copy of Double Down in your deck, multiply your final VP total by 2 if the date is April 1st.
Dominion Strategy 
Happy April Fool’s everyone.
I want to hear from everyone how many card descriptions you read before you knew it was an April Fools Day joke. I happen to be a sucker, so I’ll start us off. Bountiful Harvest sounded awesome, Lady Luck seemed too crazy to be true, but I didn’t know for sure until Spiteful Neighbor.
Anybody more gullible than me?
I was chasing through that net this morning (GMT+1) for April’s fools but didn’t really expect one on a US-site yet, so I read the first one and believed it, the name of the second one sounds a little bit too thematic, so I remembered my original plan to find April’s fools and scrolled up to the date. While scrolling down to the comments I glanced over the last card which made it pretty clear…
me, realised it at non targeted interactions although kind of thought something was up through most of it
For my part, I saw the title of the post in the RSS feed, and thought “Oh cool!”
Then I followed the hyperlink to the BGG thread. I’d seen the first page or so of that thread but hadn’t subscribed to it, so I decided to read it. Midway through, I got up to get something to drink. While I was getting the drink, the conjunction of today’s date with the title of this post occurred to me.
So for me the answer is “Zero”.
I will give theory some props for starting off with cards that sound like they could actually be real and gradually ramping up the giggle factor — my favorite is “Kuh-KNEE-zee-ah”.
I skimmed the card names. Nose stealing competition was odd, but it wasn’t until I got to Kuh-KNEE-Zee-Ah that I clued in. Maybe I shouldn’t have been up so late last night.
I must be missing something for the name of this card? Anyone care to explain it to me?
Think “Reiner Knizia” and the scoring systems for games like “Tigris and Euphrates” and “Ingenious”.
Thanks, I had never heard of that guy (0_0)
I wasn’t postitive until “Nose-Stealing Competition.” But I really, really want “Enough” to be a real card.
Enough would be my nemesis.
Increasing disappointment as I saw swingier and swingier cards, but I did not catch on until I read the words “if the date is April 1st. “
I was buying it (with a raised eyebrow) right up to Artistic Taste but that’s when I checked the date. The other cards seemed at least somewhat plausible up to that point.
It took me a while. I was so excited when I read the “traitor” card, that I didn’t finish reading the rest for a while. “Artistic taste” was too silly, so at that point I hoped something was wrong. But I didn’t really know until I read “non targeted interactions are not attacks.” By that point I was pretty much at the end, so I was probably the most gullible of all. It was still lots of fun.
I liked the first five, was willing to give the benefit of the doubt to Spiteful Neighbor, was shocked and disappointed at Nose Stealing Competition, and experienced cognitive rupture at Artistic Taste.
“Enough
Action–Reaction
Cost: $3
+$2
You may reveal this card when another player plays his fifth Action card. That player’s Action phase ends immediately.”
This is such a cool card! I think it works even better at the third Action card.
*lol* Very nice.
Traitor would have been insane.
Excellent! Great job starting with realistic cards.
I realized no sooner than Traitor 🙂
Artistic Taste was probably my favourite, nice to see the disdain for her pictures is widespread. 😉
Maura is a guy, but whatever… I do agree that his illustrations are my least favourite of the dominion cards.
Those would be great cards tho… Artistic Taste + Shanty Town, Harem, Pearl Diver, and Navigator. You could build an unspeakable +$ engine…. with no +Buy.
This is the part where I say I didn’t like it. I always ruin parties, I never liked these jokes. I knew it was a fake at the first sentence. Last year the same thing was done on BGG with Alchemy.
I’m sorry you didn’t like it. 🙂 What we tried to do was come up with plausible sounding cards for a little while: I personally think all of those cards, up until a couple near the end, are totally possible if you’re willing to accept a wacky game.
Yep, you had me up until the Nose Stealing Competition, which is just a teenie weenie little bit too swingy 🙂 And I couldn’t figure out why anyone would ever play Spiteful Neighbour (unless it’s just for spite of course).
But some of these are cards I’d be very happy to see in a normal game. Bountiful Harvest seems like it could make some cool games, though I’d probably cost it higher. Cursed Village’s power level is very hard to evaluate – always a good sign.
I want to be the only one with 5/2 when Spiteful Neighbor is on the board, with a fortunate shuffle you trash a whole lot of your neighbors’ coppers 😀
For Spiteful Neighbour, I was thinking about usage against mass alchimist (or stash). Would be usefull in 1% of the games !
Spiteful Neighbour could be extremely powerful in some cases. Think about combinations with Council Room, maybe Cutpurse.
Think about this, build an engine with Council Room (which have huge drawbacks, usually), then buy 2 of those. At your turn, you play several CRs, then play Spiteful Neighbour on some card (estate, if you have any, for example. A curse bought for this purpose if there’s no cursing attack). Now you saw your opponent’s hand (or hands) and can trash a card that will hurt them more (they will trash more copies, if they have them). Buy a new card for the first SN. Probably won’t work, but it’s a nice idea. Cutpurse can be used instead of the first SN, as long as everyone run out of coppers.
I thought your pacing was pretty good; a nice slow descent from “wow, that looks strong” (but which expansion hasn’t had cards like that) into the realm of complete implausibility.
The first card was plausible except for the cost. I would pay $5 for it. It is a lab that gives everyone an action.
Love this! Thanks for sharing!
I admit I wasn’t sure it was fake until Nose-Stealing Competition.
Wow, I really liked this!
Is “enough” a King Harkanian reference?
Actually, the idea is borrowed from Branko’s thread Fun with Reactions.
This was great. Thanks for the laugh!
At Lady Luck, I just started being disappointed that this set would be full of the hyper-swingy cards I hate. At Traitor, I stopped and checked today’s date.
This almost describes my realization experience perfectly, except that I was also really annoyed that Bountiful Harvest wasn’t a Duration.
Oh, and also Cursed Village is amazing and I want it to be real (though probably it needs to just say ‘gain a curse’ and not be optional).
Very well played, theory!
Hilarious! Me and the guy next to me at work talk about Dominion all the time. We got soooo excited when i checked this site and saw this…!!! I started to get more and more sad as i read cause i thought, these cards started off interesting but these last few are lame… Then I read the last one and the only thing that came out my mouth was … you a hole… hahaha
That made my day! Thanks!
Jokes aside, I see one card that would GREAT as a Promo card: Traitor. If Donald X & the RGG crew is listening, make it happen!
I can just see the Dominion Strategy posting now: Combo of the Day #78, Traitor/Curse/Worker’s Village
Well, until someone else buys a second copy of Traitor 😉
Is it bad that I’m mentally developing strategies for non-existent cards? (Nerd Sniping via novel Dominion Cards?) Maybe I need to try this out with the blank cards from my sets. My plan was to rush the Traitors, Curses and Worker’s Villages. The extra buys and actions from the Worker’s Villages will help to ensure that you empty the third pile with an odd number of Traitors in play.
well dont forget cursed village… and if you buy curses early you risk not being able to enforce an odd number of traitors, the main problem being that without a way to end the game if the opponent can build some kind of draw engine and keep a traitor in his deck he could keep track and fire on his game ending turn(or not fire if there is an even amount in play already.
I was excited to pull off a Bountiful Harvest/Torturer chain. The only thing worse than starting a turn with 0 cards is starting it with 0 cards and half a dozen (wasted) actions!! 🙂
Suspected it at Crop Rotation (because it costs too much), confirmed at Lady Luck. Nice job of making a few plausible cards. ENOUGH is nice, and the costs of most of the cards actually feel about right.
I don’t think Crop Rotation actually costs too much: in most decent-sized hands, you can probably get at least $6 from just Action / Treasure / Victory cards.
You don’t get a net value of $6 from it if you’ve discarded treasure! (unless the treasure be a Potion you didn’t want, I guess.)
And it costs an action to play it, so any action card you discard you could have played instead, so there’s the opportunity cost of whatever that could have gotten you.
I’d cost it at at $4-$5 myself. Secret Chamber only costs $2 and is sometimes better because you can discard multiple cards of the same type for $.
Nice use of the subjunctive there.
… mildly archaic though it be.
Not necessarily for the value of treasures and actions – late game you’ll probably have cards in your deck from the early game that you don’t need anymore but haven’t been able to trash. Now you get value, like from Vault.
Ex: maybe you want to discard your Talisman when buying a curse at the end of the game, because if you get two of them, Traitor won’t work!
I was trying to figure out how Traitor would affect the game, then I figured it out. Good show, theory!
You had me until Traitor.
I initially only had time to read the text for ‘Bountiful Harvest’ before I headed out the door to work. I thought that the timing of this spoiler was obviously questionable, but since I am so eager for info, I was willing to make the hope gamble. When I had a chance to fully read the list I went to the comments first and that gave it away. I think my favorite card on the list is ‘Enough’.
By the way, you should load these up in Isotropic for the next couple of days. Just for fun.
And on that note, has there ever been an effort to run an Isotropic option that used some of the more popular fan created sets? For example the 4 listed on the Dominion page at BGG? (Fairy Tale, The Books of Magic, Salvation, and Royal Court)
Thanks for the fun.
From the isotropic FAQ:
“I made my own expansion set. Can you add it?
Sorry, but there are a lot of fan-made expansions out there and I don’t really have the time or the inclination to implement them all, and I don’t really want to pick and choose whose I do. (If I run out of other things to do I may change my mind about this…)”
Also, I don’t run Isotropic 🙂
I made it all the way to traitor before it dawning on me. Well played.
Haha, I’m suck so much. I only realised the April Fool’s when I read the last words of the last card.
I thought “they’re really mixing things up this time” and “surely I’ll never include this swingy card in random draws”, but I never once started disbelieving. :p
Well done!
When I read Spiteful Neighbor’s description, I thought that it was just a badly designed card. When I saw “Got Your Nose”, I remembered what day it is.
You got me…. but I’m so looking forward to this set that I wanted it to be true.
Had me until Traitor, but I kept reading anyways. Double Down is actually a really interesting card, that I’d want to play with if it was available. Its cost of $16 for point doubling means that most people aren’t going to have many of them before the game ends, but everyone’s going to be trying to end the game the turn they get one more of these than their opponents. Lots of interesting tactics would develop around this.
I think I’d play with Spiteful Neighbour… *grins evilly*
I completely fell for it. Great job!
As soon as I read “differently-colored card” in Crop Rotation I got suspicious. I still believed it, but I started growing doubtful. Then I saw that Cornucopia was an Action–Treasure and I knew that it had to be a joke. I don’t know how an Action Treasure can exist, they get played on two separate phases, right? I didn’t get that it was April Fools though so I was still pretty confused as to why it all seemed wrong until I saw the comment about April 1st at the end.
Nice joke though 😀
As someone who read this many days after the 1st, I was less prepared for a Fool. Curse you! 😉
Anyway, I hadn’t read as far down as “Nose-Stealing Competition” before my eye caught that and I immediately realized this must be a joke. Dominion card titles are never as humorous as their boxes, and I hope they stay that way.
I got suspicious at “Artistic Taste”, and “Traitor” sounded like a game-ruiner, but some of these are surprisingly close to cards my friends and I have created and playtested. For instance, “Enough” is very similar to our “Impatience” card, which can be played out of turn to stop another player’s action phase. It’s obvious that this is a much-needed card to defend against the “I draw my whole deck every hand” strategy. And “Non Targeting Actions are not Attacks” is almost exactly what we came up with for bulked-up Masquerade rip-off “Carnivale”, only we added that you may then trash up to five cards.
Well, it is May now, so this totally caught me off guard. I was laughing when I was considering that these were real cards. I couldn’t believe the titles for some of them–they made me laugh a lot. Certain cards obviously were quite unbelievable. I was imagining something completely different, so it’s nice to know this was wrong, ha ha. Still, I think I might use some blank cards and turn them into Cursed Village, Lady Luck, or maybe even “Nontargeted Interactions Are Not Attacks” with a much shorter name. They sound pretty good.
btw the actual card list is out now, closer to the recent posts
since i’m reading this in june, i believed all the way till Artistic Taste. Then I got all upset over that card, and then checked the date of the post:) I really like Cursed Village and Spiteful neighbor:)
Hell Yeah man. Thanks for making this website. It was damn needed years ago. I am so stoked! Will be visiting often. My cornocopia should arrive this week. yesssssss!!