Yay, lots of nice input asp.
I like the name.
Yes, so do I, even though I spelled it wrong in the huge text at first
It sounds like something Tom Clancy would write...
I'm not sure if I like the text, though.
Give from the rest of your feedback, I'll read that as you are reserved towards the way it works/
functions, and not the
wording itself.
If I had this quest, I wouldn't even bother completing it. I'd just use it as a defense mechanism to prevent my opponent from playing cards that would disrupt my strategy.
I wonder if there is a concise way to say that players bid on the cost of a card to determine whether or not it comes into play. Eg, player one could initially pay 3, then opponent raises cost to 4 to counter, and original player raises cost to 5 to keep ability to play the card.
Yes, that would be possible. In part only though. Would it be an exploit or a problem? I'm not sure, for these reasons:
1) Whatever the opponent paid, you must waste
twice the amount of resources. So, it is very costly considering you don't insta-kill the opponents card(s) - you just delay them temporarily, at a steep price. The steep price (x2) is there on purpose, and that's why it doesn't work as a true and incremental auction as you examplify.
2) It says "you must place a completion counter on the Auctioneer." meaning, you can't really choose to not complete the quest - it
auto-completes if and only if you have used it exactly three times. There is a variable called "completion counters required" and that is set to 3. Stupid as I was I never explained it: It shows us the progress level of some of the Quest types, mainly all that "collect" some kind of result. When that variable is reached the Quest is completed, and can't be continued further. (My bad though.)
3) If you use this card as defense you still pay a steep price but you also bind up a slot in your already very limited Quest deck. In most cases you won't want to fill it with badly picked Quests since you could field something in it that was actually of more use instead.
4) You using at as defense will always
slow down your pace very much: Think about it - if you want to use this to just block something expensive (and dangerous) that your opponent plays, you must refrain from using up your resources
on your own turn. When you save resources on your own turn you have to spend them to block the user on his/her, cause if you don't the you lost tempo once again. If you keep doing that you lose more and more power for each turn it happens on the table, as the opponent has played cards for way more gold.
On the other hand, even if you block whatever the opponent plays it still means that you yourself was not able to play creatures and/or magic spells during your own turn. You still lose tempo.
What is cool is that your opponent
knows that you have the ability to temp. block whatever he puts on the table. The quest is public. So, this means that your opponent could play a trick on you. Imagine a scenario where you saved 10 gold so you are able to block anything the opponent wants to play on her turn directly right after. You can block anything up to a cost of 5, since you have to pay he double of whatever your opponent played. Your opponent maybe has a card that costs 5 in hand, but she knows that she can be blocked. Instead she Plays 3 cards during her turn: C1 that costs 1 Gold, C2 that costs 2 G and C3 that costs 1G. Every time the opponent plays one of her cards you have an important decision to make: Should you block that card, and/or the next one, or maybe none of them since they are relatively low tier?
The effect you want to gain is to temporarily block something which would be of as huge benefit as possible for your opponent. Usually that means as expensive card as possible, but that does not have to be true in all scenarios - in some it would be wise to block 2 of the 3 cards above instead. At the same time you, and your opponent, are also aware that The Auctioneer can only be used up to 3 times. Meaning, the opponent could try to play mindgames with you to trick you into depleting your Auctioneer so you waste it on blocking cards that really weren't a huge loss to the opponent (and that will come back anyways if you wait long enough).
5) Related to the above: Since opponent knows that you can use the Auctioneer she will likely only play really important cards to her when she knows that you will not be able to afford a blockage of them - which is easy, since how much resources you have (used or otherwise) is always public info and can easily be counted.
All in all, I think it is hard to use this a dangerous block against a good opponent, for the above stated reasons. At least it would never work against me
Alternatively, I wonder if rather than playing on the opponent's card, you could play on your own. It would give you the ability to get rid of useless cards, but at a price, and would encourage completion of the quest.
If what I suggest above is valid then there is no reason to alter it so that you can play it on your own cards... what happens when you change it that way is that a lot of the mindgames and indirect player interaction and "cold war" disappears from the equation. You would only have to ask ourself one thing: Do I want to pay 10 to throw this card back into the draw deck OR use 5 gold to play it now OR wait and use 5 gold to play it later. The scenarios where the player would want to pay 10 to put it back into his/her own deck are very very few and would only make sense in some wicked combos (for example if you are having something that accelerates your card drawing so you are constantly having more than 7 cards in hand OR if you have some card in play that gives you something good every time a card is put into your deck). All i all I'd say the suggestion is of different nature and should be a card on it's own if it indeed can be useful in some re-occurring scenarios.