Talk:Infinite Dvorak deck

This deck is perpetually under construction. If you want to join in, just add some cards to the card list.

Neat idea

This is a neat idea! As I remember cards from my gaming group's old 1000 Blank White Cards game, I'll add the ones that make sense (and probably some that don't) here. Edit: And in case you're wondering, the original cards designed for use with Full Deck were: Diamonds Are Forever, Gone Clubbing, "Cover Your Heart, Indy!", and Have Your Pet Spade or Neutered. Jtwe 21:03, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Tokens = Things

Wouldn't it be easier to define Tokens as created-on-the-spot Things? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Zaratustra (talk • contribs).

That plays heck with game balance. For example, "Hoard"...-Bucky 06:58, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

I get the feeling this deck is never going to be particularly "balanced".

Tokens being Things sounds like a good idea from the infinite deck perspective - if a game features one token generator card, but no cards that do anything with tokens, then there's less card interaction than there could be. Treating all "destroy a token to achieve X" cards as "destroy a token or Thing" won't hurt anyway - if the effect is tailored for an abundance of tokens, then using a non-token Thing is just an expensive alternative, which is better than the card being unusable. --Kevan 10:21, 2 March 2007 (UTC)]

Cards by Bucky

[Hex:] It certainly has odd synergies with Magnitude Error. :D Zaratustra 19:04, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Aw. Zaratustra 20:22, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

The problem was that it applied to itself. Its actual base could not be determined, since it claimed it was some base other than "10".-Bucky 20:26, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Cards by Kazz

Card "Striptease" is unsuitable for online play. -Bucky 23:17, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, I suppose it is. Should I be keeping that in mind? I'll delete it. For the record, it was an Action: "If you remove all of your clothing immediately, you win." Kazz 23:19, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Eh, that seems okay; the player would just have to somehow prove that they'd done this. --Kevan 23:39, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

In my opinion, many of the cards by Kazz, when played, instantly unbalance the game in favor of whoever played them. While other cards, such as Magnitude Error, are quite powerful, few give their owner/user the sheer power of Horde, Throne, Pet, or Customs Board.

What, if anything, should be done about this? Horde is the worst offender, because not only are 9 Tokens cheap, but its protection effect also makes it powerful even without the victory condition. Throne is overpowered because there is only one card (Antimatter) that can destroy it without permission. Customs Board basically lets you see everyone's hand. Pet is overpowered for obvious reasons.

Again, should we adjust these cards? Should we introduce counter-cards knowing that they will probably not be used in the same deck? Or should we just let it go?-Bucky 06:12, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Uhm, apologies. I was the one that informed Kazz (among others) of the existence of this page, knowing of his tendency to do this kind of thing. Zaratustra 06:28, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

The cards themselves are cool, they just need to be weakened. For example "Throne" would be fine if limited to negating one action per round, Horde would be fine without a victory condition (since it has a side effect of not allowing you to spend tokens) etc.-Bucky 07:06, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Given that this project is public, these cards are probably quite mild. We're bound to get straight "I win" cards coming in eventually.

Maybe we should view the card set as infinite and inevitably containing broken cards, and let players decide what subset to actually play with; the export functionality could be tweaked to allow "all cards except by this user" or "only include cards by these users". --Kevan 10:05, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Cards by KillSmiley

The cards "Free-For-All" and "The Dreaded Legal Department" are colored and written as Actions, but are of type Thing. This should be corrected. -Bucky 03:56, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

Never mind, he corrected it.-Bucky 05:25, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

Cards by Ryan_1729

For Zork Dork, the card type "Quiz" is meaningless. If it's an action, a type of "Action - Quiz" would at least tell players what to do with it. --Kevan 11:25, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

alright.

--Ryan 1729 11:56, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

Cards by The T

Shovel says to draw the bottom of the deck. However, in an infinite deck such a card may not exist. Similarly, a few other cards say to search the entire deck, which we can't do since we have not defined all the cards in the deck.-Bucky 18:20, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Although the deck's theoretically infinite, any actual game of it will involve a finite subset. (I'll probably end up putting an "output just 100 random cards" option on the card export, so that this can be played on the Dvorak Engine without crashing it.) --Kevan 18:22, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Cards by Zaratustra

"Spend 1 Energy to produce 1 Blood." - maybe I should reword "cards shouldn't refer to other cards" to stress the infinite thing more; even if there are other cards that refer to Energy and Blood in the deck, if they don't come up in the same game then this card is meaningless, and fairly useless. (Well, usable as a generic, effectively-blank Thing, but having a blank card in the set seems a bit of a waste, when it could have had a similar but game-affecting mechanic.) --Kevan 23:49, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

"Produce 1 Blood" is fine because other cards can read "Destroy/Spend 1 liquid Thing". likewise, "Spend 1 Energy" is fine because you can use many kinds of Energy, presumably including Heat, "Lightning Bolt" cards etc.-Bucky 23:59, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Hmm, that feels like it's straying into Blank White Card territory, where anything can mean anything if you argue it entertainingly enough; although that's fun, I think it's useful to keep the distinction that Dvorak has strict and consistent rules.

Maybe it'd be good to have a general rule about resolving arbitrary decisions - whenever anything is open to interpretation (like Katamari's "smallest Thing"), it goes to a straight vote, and if there's no majority verdict then it's resolved in some generic, automatic way. But Artificial Heart's "spend 1 Energy" puts far too much onus on the players to decide what "spend 1 Energy" counts as; whether a Lightning Bolt should generate more than 1 Energy, whether Springfield Nuclear Power Station should be able to "spend 1 Energy" every single turn without destroying itself, whether a player's sweeping Plasma Storm can power someone else's Heart, etc.

"Discard or destroy an electricity-related card you control, to put a Blood counter into play." would work better, I think, with players only having to vote on whether a particular card is "electricity-related" or not. --Kevan 00:18, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

There, better? Zaratustra 01:21, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, I think so. Argue this out with me if you think I've got the wrong idea about how this deck should work, though. --Kevan 01:37, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Statistics

Statistics of cards defined as of definition of "Greek Gift".
Actions: 70
Things: 98
Other cards: 3
Victory conditions: 14, counting eliminating all other players
Cards with cornervalues: 55
Cards borrowed from other Dvorak decks: 5

Archival

We've got 99 cards so far - maybe we should archive off every hundred into its own linked page, to stop the main page from getting too heavy. I suppose wait until we have 120 or so, so that the page doesn't look too blank when we archive it. --Kevan 12:16, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Almost 150 now. Zaratustra 21:07, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

Infinity

Is the deck supposed to be one of each of an infinite number of cards, an infinite number of each of a finite number of cards, or an infinite number of infinitely many cards? This would effect the probability of things like getting two Annoyance cards on top of the library, etc. MagiMaster 06:36, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

The way I see it, it's an infinite number of different cards, one each. We think of the number as infinite because there's no limit to the number of cards we can create and we'll only be playing some of all the different cards at a time anyway due to physical or engine constraints. BiggerJ 09:00, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

That was my thinking as well. --Kevan 12:41, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

Backdoor Special Rules?

Maybe this is just me seeing things from a Nomic perspective, but cards like Rules Misunderstanding and There are 10 kinds of people in the world are Actions which create ongoing effects - effectively it's adding a special rule to the game. Is this good or bad?

It seems a bit untidy from the player memory perspective (most Dvorak decks and similar card games require that players only have to read the cards on the table to find out what's going on), and also a bit overpowered - if a Thing adds an ability or restriction to the game, there are all sorts of ways to destroy or remove or reword that Thing. But if an Action says "Until a winner ith declared all playerth mutht thpeak like thith.", there's nothing that any player can do to reverse that, unless there's a rare "terminate all background effects" card (which might never get drawn). We could spiral out into card mechanics that add and remove background effects, as we did with tokens, but should we nip it in the bud instead? --Kevan 09:37, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

Since there is currently no penalty for breaking or forgetting these rules players could slowly faze them out with no ill effects. Also if such a card is destroyed is it still binding? --Ryan 1729 10:39, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

If these cards were Things, then their effects would immediately stop being binding upon destruction; Things only have an effect while they remain in play. The rules have no specific opinion about an Action that says "for the rest of the game, X", but given that the Action card doesn't say "until this card is somehow removed from the game, X", I think most players would interpret the effect as continuing. --Kevan 10:48, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

Rules Misunderstanding has been changed. Zaratustra 14:45, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

Well, in the "thpeech" card example a player could just say "I am the winner" and (depending on interpitaion) negate the effect.(Note: I did not see this possible loophole when creating this card.) We could reclassify these cards as things that are immediately moved to the discard pile after being played to achieve the same effect. (Interestingly no one has complained about my equally if not more indestructable "Catch 22" card.) --Ryan 1729 12:24, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

Things that move immediately to the discard pile and leave a ghostly permanent effect would give exactly the same problem; you have ghostly permanent effects floating around that players have to remember the exact wording of, and which they can't do anything to destroy. It would be better to have these rules written on Things which stay in play.

(And for what it's worth, I'd say that the common-sense game rule interpretation of "all players must thpeak like thith" is "anyone who doesn't is therefore no longer a player".)--Kevan 12:39, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

"Catch 22" Is in fact destructable with any of {Wrath of Bucky, Brazen Buckyism, Wikipedia Says It's True} and probably others I'm not remembering.

Alphabet coup

As of addition of card "Fun Time!" it is now possible(though very unlikely) to win using card "Alphabet coup." --Ryan 1729 12:03, 7 March 2007 (UTC)