Ascension is officially* my favourite modern** deck-building game (the genre started by Dominion).

The game was designed by a guy who had been a U.S. Magic: The Gathering champion, to try to capture more replayability by harnessing a quasi-drafting style of play.

http://ascensiongame.com/files/2015/05/Ascension-article.pdf

This article is not about that. It is about the play balance of cards, and how you may be able to use math to help predict what works and what doesn’t.

It was in an article about Magic: The Gathering that I first heard about this, about ‘boons’ http://mtgsalvation.gamepedia.com/Boons, where the original designers came up with the idea of trading one mana (and a card) for three of something. Unfortunately, the 3 of somethings ended up being quite unbalanced, with respect to each other, so they ended up restricting or stopping the print run of most of them.

They had some more success with their ‘1 mana per attack/defense’ rule for creatures, with an ostensible balance with Fireball/Disintegrate, where you had to spend one mana per damage dealt.

Anyways, back to Ascension. You may recall from Dominion, the Fibonacci series for costs of Copper/Silver/Gold/Platinum:

Copper: cost 0 for 1 purchasing power
Silver: cost 3 for 2 purchasing power
Gold: cost 6 for 3 purchasing power
Platinum: cost 9 for 5 purchasing power

This works because in a normal length game, as your deck gets larger, you get about as much total purchasing power from each copper as you would from Gold:

Start of game: EEECCCCCCC -> (3.5/hand)
Turn 1,2 buy silver: EEECCCCCCCSS -> (4.58/hand)
Turn 3,4 buy silver: EEECCCCCCCSSSS -> (5.36/hand)
Turn 5,6,7 buy silver,gold,gold: EEECCCCCCCSSSSSGG -> (6.76/hand)
Turn 8,9,10 buy gold,gold: EEECCCCCCCSSSSSGGGG (7.25/hand)
Turn 11,12,13 buy gold,province,province: EEEPPCCCCCCCSSSSSGGGGG (6.95/hand)
Turn 14,15,16,17 buy duchy,duchy,province,province, ending the game (assuming 2 or 3 players).

Each copper is used ~6 times, silvers are used 5+5+4+4+3 = 21/5 = 4.2 times, making them worth ~8.4 each. Gold is used 3+3+2+2+1/5 = 11/5 = 2.2 times, making them worth ~6.6 each.

So, this shows:
1) The coins are approximately balanced
2) Early game silvers help more than other coins, assuming the game is as short as possible.

So, really back to Ascension now. Apprentices are the clear analogue to Copper, Mystics the clear analogue to Silver. I’m guessing they considered having an analogue to Gold either overpowering or boring, hence the fact that Landtalker only appears once in the deck in the standard set. (The higher cost and rune production cards in Ascension are quite interesting in that they get non-linear after a cost of 6 (perhaps to accommodate the 7 and 8 ‘automatically get or defeat something’ cards).)

That’s it for now!

*And unofficially…
**Magic: The Gathering is currently considered ‘old-school’, and also is a ‘collectible trading card game’.