Ban weak cards

[Acerbic]

The two solutions still don't have the same effect, no matter how you slice it. Statistical pack power averages are not all that relevant here since one of the main purposes is to eliminate some outlier results.

As for decision space, cards like Catcher or Loudmouth don't lead to interesting decisions, they lead to losses or dead cards in hand. Replacing these cards with more playable ones does not remove any interesting decisions, it actually adds more of them because there will be more viable options.

[RicardoRix]

As for decision space, cards like Catcher or Loudmouth don't lead to interesting decisions, they lead to losses or dead cards in hand. Replacing these cards with more playable ones does not remove any interesting decisions, it actually adds more of them because there will be more viable options.

This is true if you are comparing a draft with equal number of card, with and without a banlist.
Unhelpfully ignoring the latest discussion.

draft+1 and it's the same outcome. You're providing a solution that is already solved.

[Acerbic]

Since you are refusing to engage with any of the points in support of these two things not being equivalent, I'll dip out of this conversation - please feel free to ignore the new setting and play as you prefer

[alexwjb]

IThis is particularly true in lower draft count games (draft 7 or draft 8). The relevant point is towards the end of the draft, it becomes quite common to have 2 or 3 awful cards left. For those that want the option not to have those situations, why not?

If you ban 5% of the cards, then it won't be 2 or 3 awful cards, on average it will be maximum of 1.
That 1 still doesn't get played either way.
You're making up situations. And irrelevant situations at that.

There might just be the very slim outside chance that one of those cards can be playable in a highly skilled mind. Board games are all about decisions. The more decisions to make the higher likelihood is that a good player can shine.

If you roll a D20 die 8 times, the probability you get at least two 20s is 5.72%.

Equivalently, if you are dealt a hand of 8 occupations, the probability you get two cards in the bottom 5% of strength is 5.72%.

That is roughly 1 in every 17 deals of 8 occs. There are four occupation deals per 4-player game (one to each player). So roughly 1 in 4 draft-8 games will have this situation occur.

So it's not as unusual as you are making out. (And I haven't included the minors in that analysis.)

That also isn't the only point. Even having one such card in a pack limits the strategic options towards the end of the draft.

Also - it is not the case that Draft 7/8 with a weak banlist is equivalent to Draft 7/9 with no banlist. Apart from anything else, moving from 8 to 9 cards is adding 12.5% more cards to the draft. The weak card banlist removes 5% (or a bit less). And that's without considerations of how much more likely it is you get combo cards together when you increase the draft count. Some players want the option to avoid the weak banlist cards without having to raise the draft count and thus change the game in other ways.

[cranesflyhigh]

I love this thread...
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Yeah, nothing more to add, made my day

[alexwjb]

One other thought on this.

The E deck in Agricola is based on a playtested set of cards, from play-agricola.com. The designers tweaked one or two things, but my understanding it it's largely the same as the G4/G5 decks which had been played many thousands of times on that site. It's not a coincidence that of the 30ish cards that are proposed to end up on the weak card list (occs + minors), only one (Blackberry Farmer) comes from the E deck, and it's one of the more marginal selections.

The strong cards banlist of 32 cards also has only one E deck card (Guest Room) - and again Guest Room is one of the more marginal cards there. (Personally I actually don't think it does need to be banned, its PWR is very good but not among the truly busted cards.) Also, IIRC the designers actually made a change to Guest Room to make it stronger when they published it, by making it proc the same turn you play it!

The playtesting and refinement of cards by the play-agricola.com community over time led to a more balanced and better deck. The banlists propsed here aim to do a similar thing.

[torvaldur_makan]

What is it with everyone choosing to ban weak cards from their games now? Do you think you all know better than the designers of the game?

I think the game is best played as is, cherry picking the cards to play with and discarding the rest makes for a very bland game. That's my opinion anyway.

I think it's painfully obvious (in many, many cases) that the game designer doesn't know the game at a competitive level. The game design itself is fantastic, but the balance of the cards is not. It somehow got worse in the revised edition (the one we play here at BGA). The best decks in the game are WM, G, FR (for the original) and E for revised, all of which are designed and play-tested by the community at play-agricola.com.