Age 1 Tier List

All cards in Innovation serve some purpose. Some, however, are more powerful in more situations, and others are less powerful in fewer situations.

This ranking attempts to categorize every base Innovation card into four “tiers”. Although every game is unique, and different cards are more important at different times, this ranking considers each card’s average utility in the average 2-player base game. It asks, “How often do I prefer to draw this card, as opposed to my opponent, and how important is that to me?” Sometimes, the most important card for you to draw is Feudalism. Usually, it’s something else.

Top Tier: These are cards to actively seek out because they can form the backbone of your tableau. They are real gamechangers, and almost always either very helpful to you, or very important to deny to your opponent. If the icons permit it, you’d like to use these dogmas as much as you can.

High Tier: These are cards that you are quite happy to draw. They might be a bit more specialized than “top tier” cards, or they might lose their value faster, but they are still important and you would much rather see them on your board instead of your opponent’s. Their dogmas are likely almost always preferable to the basic actions (e.g., drawing), often because they are strictly superior.

Mid Tier: These are solid cards that are OK to meld onto your board, but not part of a long-term plan. Their dogmas aren’t especially powerful, but still better than the basic actions. Mostly they are vehicles to more powerful cards.

Low Tier: These cards are rarely, if ever, useful. Their icons are probably their most redeeming factor, as their dogmas are either extremely specialized or all-around weak, barely better (or sometimes even worse!) than the basic actions. They are the first ones to be returned, and you are probably happy to meld this onto your opponent’s board instead of yours.

Note that not every Age has an equal number of cards in each tier. Age 1, for example, has a rather lopsided distribution. Within each tier, the cards are only very roughly ordered, as individual circumstances at that point far outweigh the differences in the cards.

Top Tier

Mysticism
Metalworking
The Wheel
Sailing
Clothing
Pottery
Domestication

The precise order of these cards is subject to disagreement, but there is no question that these seven cards stand head and shoulders above the rest of Age 1. They can be roughly categorized as such:

	Useful now	Useful later
Scoring	Metalworking, Clothing	Pottery, sometimes Metalworking
Board-building	Sailing, Domestication	Mysticism, Sailing
Hand-size	The Wheel	Mysticism, The Wheel, Metalworking

Note that Mysticism and Metalworking appear in multiple categories: Mysticism simultaneously builds your board and your hand, while Metalworking simultaneously scores and builds your hand (with the added bonus of drawing non-castle cards).

The only one of these cards that really needs support is The Wheel, since all it does is draw you cards and you probably want to do something with those cards. But it’s a great support card and still useful later on.

Finally, note that although Domestication is superficially quite similar to Sailing, it ranks lower for a few reasons:

1. It is less useful later on when you have unwanted 1′s in your hand;
2. Being forced to overmeld Domestication (with Agriculture, perhaps) is much more painful than overmelding Sailing, because all of the Age 1 green cards are fantastic; and
3. It is less easy to share it vindictively, as your opponent needs a bad low card in hand to be hurt by the forced meld.

That being said, Domestication is certainly a better way of melding the cards in your hand and offers more control over what gets melded.

High Tier

There are no Age 1 cards here, since none of the Mid Tier cards are really comparable to the Top Tier.

Mid Tier

Tools
City States
Masonry
Archery
Agriculture
Code of Laws

Of these, Tools and City States are probably the closest to being promoted to High Tier. Tools is a tempting tech jump, but there’s simply not enough in Age 3 to justify leaving all of Age 1 and Age 2 to your opponent. Using Paper to jump to Age 4 and meld Gunpowder is a real game-changer, but Age 3 by itself is probably not worth it unless the rest of your Age 1 hand is even more bleak. In such situations, I tend to draw for Tools, and if I still can’t find anything then I’ll jump to Age 3 and hope for something good.

City States is a nice hold-in-your-hand surprise for your opponent, ideally to grab one of the above Top Tier cards. Archery is similar, but for catching up in tech, and so suffers because there are a lot more ways to catch up in tech than in board power.

Masonry is useful only for Monument, but the pitfalls of that have been described earlier. Agriculture has lovely icons but is severely outclassed by Pottery until quite a bit later in the game. (Plus, its icons are in the wrong color.) And Code of Laws segues perfectly into Paper, except, you know, you can’t count on actually drawing Paper. Still, it does build your board, even marginally, and the tuck alone is sometimes (though rarely) worth spending an action.

Low Tier

Writing
Oars

These cards are actually most useful if you can share, since then you’re drawing two cards instead of one. Otherwise they are extremely weak, useful pretty much only for their icons (and even then, they are unspectacular). There aren’t enough good cards in Age 2 to justify Writing (which is essentially just a draw action), and it expires stupidly fast. And the Oars attack is perhaps only useful in the late game if you somehow know exactly that they have a big card with a crown on it. Compared to the other things you could be doing, it’s just not worth keeping on your board.