A few weeks back I drafted a proposal for a "deck" for our card economy. The basic idea is this: there's a deck, it has cards in it, and you can pay some sort of fee to "draw" a random card from it, like you might in a real life card game.
It was received generally positively, but the main feedback was "we don't really know how much cards are worth, we need to let the game play out for a bit." Now that we've had the new economy for a bit, we have somewhat of an idea, but still not that much. It seems like cards are averaged at around 20 coins, but there haven't been that many trades yet. So I had a few ideas for the deck idea. We could, of course, just wait a bit longer to really see how much cards are worth, but I think there are a few other ideas to make this work. My first idea is a simple one: everybody gets a certain number of "draws" per unit of time. Once every other week, or two a month, or once a month, or something like that. The advantage is that it's easy to understand, it's just "you can draw x times every y." The problem is we still need to figure out a good value for x and y. If we set them too high, then there's a massive influx of cards and, depending on how the deck works, either (a) people just get way too many cards or (b) all the cards get scooped up really quickly and then it's just a case of whoever gets them first. But if we set them too low, then the system could become irrelevant and might as well not exist. So, that's where my second idea comes in. I think that there should be some sort of currency that is paid in order to draw cards. One option to distribute this currency is with an auction. Then we don't have to "figure out" the value of it - the value is whatever bidders are willing to pay. The other option, which I think is a great idea but might actually be a terrible idea, is to add a fifth type of card and product. The products could be paid (maybe 2 or 3 at a time, because drawing 10 cards by paying only 4 is really powerful) to draw cards from the deck. These could be auctioned like Victory cards (potentially even as separate lots in the same auction), - or they could be associated with the Ministry of Economy. That allows more officers (*cough* Notary *cough*) to be able to grant cards and encourages trading even more. The main problem I see with that is that these new cards could potentially have intrinsically more value than all other cards. We could also just not have a deck. -- ATMunn friendly neighborhood notary here :)
