Has anyone tried to divided the market deck by price of the items?

I was thinking of having one deck of items and allies that cost between 1 and 5 gold, one deck of items and allies that cost between 6 and 9 gold and then a final deck of items and allies that cost 10+.

Certain challenge cards let you draw cards from the market deck and I was thinking that if a green challenge lets you draw a market card you can only draw cards from the cheapest market stack. If a yellow challenge lets you draw market cards you can draw from the middle or cheapest deck and if a purple card lets you draw market cards you can draw from the most expensive deck all the way to the cheapest.

Let me know if you have tried this or something similar or if you haven't tried this let me know what you think of the idea.

Sounds like a perfectly serviceable idea to me. As is, the level of challenge providing the draw is mostly evened out by the amount of gold a hero trying that challenge is likely to have. A hero pulling from the green deck is unlikely to have 10g to buy an item with, even if he draws such a thing, whereas a hero who has 10g to spare at the of a hat is probably at least in yellows, if not blues.

But using this idea to reduce wildly inappropriate draws and ensure a hero actually gets an item that's both affordable and useful doesn't sound half bad to me. I might try it in the future, but let me know how it works out if you try it first.

Thanks for the feedback Steve-O. I'm going to try this next time I play Runebound (hopefully next weekend). I'll let you know how it goes.

This variant sounds great!

I'm positive that it fixes ugly situations: if heroes can get powerful items too early the game becomes unbalanced and less funny.

My doubts are about markets. How so you decide wich deck to use in a city? A high level hero could be interested also in low cost cards, too. After all, cheap allies are always a goof meal for dreagons...

Fingolfin80 said:

That's a good point. I suppose you could keep track of the highest colour challenge a hero had defeated thus far and allow him to draw from any deck equal to or below that level, corresponding to the system King mentioned. Or you could just allow a draw from any pile. Sure a fresh hero COULD draw from the big expensive pile, but he almost certainly wouldn't be able to buy whatever he draws.

On the other hand, allowing a hero to choose any pile means if a hero got lucky and built up 9 or 10 gold in a few lucky green encounters, he could draw from the big pile and be guaranteed to get something more powerful than his "current status" would otherwise indicate. Not game breaking (since the same scenario can happen per standard rules anyway) but it certainly runs counter to the apparent purpose of this house rule.

Steve-O said:

I had never really thought about that. It was my intention to let any hero draw from any deck he wishes when in the market. My main reason for creating this variant was so that a low level character could draw something he could afford and so a high level character could draw something that would be useful to him.

But if you wanted to you could easily restrict the heroes in the exact way that Steve-O mentions. And that should take care of any problems you have with green heroes amassing wealth. I've never had this problem myself. Every time I get any amount of gold saved up the assassin on the lose comes out and wails on me and there goes all my gold.

What about limiting the draw according to experience counters? Not sure about the count, but say at least three counters before drawing from anything the but the lost cost deck. Perhaps 6 counters before going up one more deck category beyond that. Just a notion.

JCHendee said:

Well, I think that money is the better a limiter when it comes to marketplace. To have eight coins or so means to have won four or five green chellenges at least, but likely more 'cause if you get injured you have to spend money to heal. With that amount of experience it's natural for me to start with yellow challenges after have bought one good item/ally or two middle-low items/ally. If I can financially afford the aquire then it's not a gamebreak, in my opinion. The problem is if a challenge gives me an object for free, than I can have a strong free object AND one good item/ally or two middle-low items/ally. This house rule avoids this scenario, wich is great, but I think that the market should be left free, as TheKingOfBlades said.

for the items that get placed in market stacks at the start of the game I was thinking that Dawnsmoor, Forge, and Nerekhall should start with an item from the cheapest deck. Then Greyhaven and Riverwatch start with an item from the middle deck. Then Frostgate and Vynelvale start with a card from the most expensive deck.

Fingolfin80 said:

Traps & Terrors tilts the gold gained a bit, though it depends on how many challenge based supplements are in the decks.

Fingolfin80 said:

I'd agree, sort of (I have my own market variant). But that's not really what the topic is about, and everyone's got that option anyway.

ASIDE: Might be interesting to look at various market variants side by side, comparing how the division of decks is done... item/ally type, cost, attribute type supported, melee type supported, city divisions, etc... there's been a lot of them.