Revised is bloated with non-interesting cards

[jooool]

Hello

I have played Agricola for 6-7 years now and I absolutely love the game. I started with playing EIK and after some time I got hold of some more decks and started play EIKWmFrG (and even occasionally G4567 on playagricola.com). I have played live with friends, on boiteajeux, playagricola and now finally for over a year or so on boardgamearena.

When revised Agricola came out I was very happy and bought the base game and all the additional decks hoping for even more fun live games with friends. And it was fun as long as the cards were new and I just thought I didn't quite figure them out as my game experience went from playing as many cards as possible to playing as few cards as possible to win games. now after 100's of games with revised I have decided I think that there are way too many cards that just "bloats" the deck and will never be played in any situation unless you have other payoff to play them rather than the card and its effect (ie bookcase, tutor, lantern house and more)
I have not played much arena as i dislike playing draft 8 with the revised cards due to reasons explained earlier but thought id give it a try this league to actually try to focus on the cards but most of the games I feel I have lost interest before the draft is even over.
Most cards are so specific and requires so much synergy to even consider that drafting is more of a lottery than anything else to me.
It feels like there is such a disadvantage in a game with similar elo players if you do not get one of the absolutely top cards while someone else does (WHE, childless, lover, wood barterer and a few more that just is sooo much stronger than all other cards).

I think that revised would be better off removing the bottom 20-30% of the cards, loosing some specific criteria like "unconditional sow" and this to me very wierd rule on when played cards trigger on action spaces. On top of this it will require more cards that make you grow without building rooms and giving payoff for not building/growing/building later to make more strategies viable, as revised tend to favor early build and early grow much more than the base game. (cards like cowboy and mother, grotto, cat lover, benefactor, country doctor, lighthouse are all excellent examples of this).

With this post I'm hoping to spark a debate not only to ban all the top cards making the games even less interesting every arena season, but more likely looking over to ban the weakest cards and introduce new more interesting cards that makes new, to me often funnier, strategies viable.

Me and my friends have completely gone back to playing the original game when playing live and I'm not sure how long I'll have it in me to play on boardgamearena even though I really like the implementation and UI.

Hoping for others input in the matter and a constructive discussion.
/Joool

[Ranior]

First off, I think you severely underestimate how much work the fan expansion decks are doing to your enjoyment of "original" edition Agricola. I agree that the Wm and Fr decks are extremely good and probably the best ever created, and g4g5 are also very high quality. I too appreciate how many cards in those decks help open up other strategic avenues. Every single card you highlight though is not part of true original EIK Agricola. (And especially not draft 7 EIK Agricola).

Personally then, I think it's a lot less that this is Revised is bloated with non-interesting cards, as I think it's really not much better or worse than EIK. There's a big reason draft 9 became the standard on play-agricola, and it's partially they prefer to see more synergy and cards, but also partially EIK is full of crap.

I think fan decks generally are better for the game. The good news is that the next revised deck will basically be g4g5 cards. Will it get programmed on BGA? I have no clue, but hopefully. That would be a big boost to the game.

You claim to be hoping to spark a few things with this post. Let me respond to them:

--Ban all the top cards: I have no clue what your cutoff point would be, but we already have removed the strongest things (Braggart, Trade Teacher, etc). The current strong cards to me are at a good point, and personally are right within the power level of the strongest cards in EIK+ over on play-Agricola.

--Ban the weakest cards: I think this is a bad plan, and there's really no good cutoff point either. I will agree there's a couple cards that I think are almost entirely never worth playing, but it's a much much smaller list than others. Others have also suggested this, but I think the answer is you just need to play more draft 9 or draft 10. (And I understand those that wish the arena setting for this would change. The gurus keep voting draft 8 though, and personally I agree with them--I think it's a really good blend for the game. Some players prefer seeing and playing more cards, but I think Agricola as a whole really benefits from there being a good balance between wanting to play the worker placement portion of the game on the board, and the card playing/combo creating part of the game. Draft 8 is a nice spot, but I don't blame those that want to play other draft counts).

--Introduce new more interesting cards: BGA is only going to put out officially printed cards, they don't do fan content for games. They also only have the license to do revised edition content, so there won't be original edition cards or content based on the current arrangements/agreements. As such, the only cards not on BGA are the remainders of the A, B, C, and D decks that have not been programmed yet. I don't think those cards are going to meet this criteria though as they pretty much are more of the same. Therefore I think the best hope is that when the next deck, E, gets published later this year, that we could see those cards get added to BGA. The E deck will be 168 cards taken almost entirely from G4G5 (with a handful of other sources to fill out revised editions rigid deck structure). With that said, I have no clue if this will get programmed or not, nor have any clue how we could go about making it happen.

[jooool]

thanks for a good respons!
Yeah I agree it's to a major extent the fan decks that makes the original game so fantastic.
Maybe the variation that comes from having several people with different thoughts making cards gives it the variety which i appreciate .
When a new deck in revised has been released it just feel "more of the same cards".

I think my wording was poor in the debate-sentence, I'm not trying to say we should ban the strong cards, I'm was instead trying to say that we should stop banning the top performing cards (this far only annoying and strong cards has been banned before a new arena-start) and start banning from the bottom.

I do play draft 10/9 every chance I get when not playing arena, but the arena do add up to some more excitement. I just feel that the game becomes so repetitive and lose the edge that makes Agricola so fun when it's all about the worker-placment and resources on the board (they dont change much from game to game).
A wish from me if the arena-settings won't change is to add a card-filter (like the one where the banned cards are filtered out) and make it possible to remove the bottom cards aswell or in some way choose a maximum or minimum card power level.

All in all I think we are saying almost the same things, lets just hope that the G45-decks gets implemented on BGA to makes add some variety to the play-styles!

[torvaldur_makan]

I agree with you that original cards (especially G, Wm, Fr, G456, i.e the fan made decks) are much more fun than the revised cards. EIK also have some terrible cards that should be removed. One difference is that the terrible EIK cards at least are easy to understand. Compare EIK's Butcher to Revised Facades Carving, Growing Farm... What these do are tricking less experienced players into playing cards that should never be played.

The main issue I think joool is highlighting is that the range of power in the cards is too big. This introduces more chance to the game, especially in lower draft formats, like the current arena format. I guess the revised decks weren't properly play tested as they are poorly tuned at both ends of the spectrum. For example, Informant, why does it also give 1w when you play the card???

For this reason I don't play Arena, in favor of draft 10, but sometimes this isn't enough either to weed out worst cards. I was only half-joking when I proposed in the other thread to ban all <1 PWR cards.

I get that we will not be able to modify existing cards or are able to add fan-made cards. There are a few interesting cards in ABCD that are not yet implemented that we could hope for, otherwise I hope you are correct that G45 is coming.

If we aren't banning useless cards I'd like a filter like on play-agricola where you can filter on PWR.

[fiscused]

I agree that EIK has a lot more weak and uninteresting cards than the revised AB. I think the new base set is much easier to learn with and play interesting games. The selection of cards for revised was done to have certain types of cards in certain categories, so they tends to be more useful. There are plenty of cards in the full ABCD sets, and when playing with them all you get lots of varied games and lots of fun. There are many nice cards not yet implemented here. I don't know if there's a chance of getting more, but it would be nice. The fan-made cards are a mixture to me. Fan-made cards that do average things tend to get ignored, so they tend to be power gaming stuff, or cards that really alter the game. But the quality of the D deck in particular is not as nice as the others.

The most interesting aspect of Revised, to me, is the 5-6 player variant. They have great new cards and spaces and it's something that could really thrive here on BGA where there's a huge pool of players. I can't get close to 6 players to play at the table currently, and I miss those games.

[jooool]

I don't think anyone said that EIK has worse or more uninteresting cards than AB, just that revised cards and EIK are on pair with lower power cards.
To me the AB only was indeed easy to play with, but extremely uninteresting as the low amount of cards and the high amount of specific cards that could combo, made playing early or big stone house; DL-combo or Big country/Ranch the winning combo in most games (which I guess was why many beginners liked it and found it easy to play with). This also made it so that drafting was very based on luck and "hate-picking" was often the only way too not lose.

What you are describing with the Fan made cards is the reason I love them and want more similar cards; "or cards that really alter the game" which to me is what make games interesting. Some attempts that are really fun exists even in revised like freemason, trowel, lantern house with more.

I only tried 5 players a few times and I think it's the worst format I have played Agricola in (I have not tried 6p which I would assume would be even worse) as calculating what move could come back and the tremendous setback for having the player after you abusing SP really isn't appealing to me in addition to games being very long and slow, but each to their own in that matter.

[Anadh]

they don't do fan content for games.

And when they do, they split the BGA Terra Mystica community in half.
(sorry, couldn't resist)

A.