Trinity
- Each turn the player may place one card face down into one of three piles: Military, Politics or Magic. (The names of these three piles can of course be exchanged for something more appropriate. Their names also don't matter at all when judging if the resource system is good or bad.)
- Each pile represents the players advancement, level, in that particular field. For example, 5 cards ion the Military pile makes the player Military Lvl 5.
- Since there is no gold cost of cards you need to match it's level requirement to be able to put it into play. An elf with Military 3 would require the player to have a Military pile with 3 or more cards in it.
- Piles are not depleted: If the above elf is played any number of new cards that cost Military can be played from hand as long as the player has attained the correct Military level. Example, if the player is Military Lvl 5 he can play any amount of cards from his hand that cost Military 5 or less.
- Re-allocation: One per turn a player may move one lvl form pile x to pile y. To do that she discards a lvl from x, and then takes another lvl from x and puts it on y instead.
It's hard for me to say why I find the idea appealing, and that is a sing of trouble since all sound ideas should be explainable and clear.
Pros I can think of is that it maybe leads to less mess on table, maybe frees up more cards to play with from the deck and - this is the only thing that is certain - it opens up a 3-universal-currency pricing model, where a card could "cost" any one of the 3 disciplines (let's not talk about combos yet). That said, it isn't apparent that that would be a good thing - what does actually become more interesting in the game by us doing it? Maybe resource management feels more meaningful with this suggestion, but is it really? If so, how? I'm not sure. Only other thing that also seems certain is that not-depleting the piles will enable players to get away with more action, and also value each card in hand more since that will be the main limitation eventually. (But the no-deplete rule can be applied to our current system already if we want it...)
Cons: The whole idea is a con if there isn't a good reason to add 2 more "currencies" than the current one.