Age 3 Tier List

Previously:

• Age 1 Overview / Tier List
• Age 2 Tier List

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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. 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

Machinery

No Age 3 card even comes close to the power of Machinery.  It is an ultimate shutdown to both hand-size strategies and tech, and it remains a powerful weapon throughout the game.

Machinery is really the best counter to Fermenting, but if they’re drawing big with Fermenting you are probably not going to have the leaf advantage to steal their hand.  So more realistically, it is a counter to The Wheel, Mysticism, and Paper.  But it’s also very useful against tech: Printing Press, Mathematics, etc. can all be caught off guard by a surprise Machinery.

Now, yes, you do give compensation in the form of your highest cards, but:

1. Maybe you have no cards in hand;
2. Maybe your highest card is a lot lower than his cards;
3. Maybe your one crappy 5 is worth all of his 4′s.

The first time I use Machinery, I like to meld and execute it on the same turn so that I can get maximum surprise value out of it.  You don’t want your opponent to see Machinery coming and get rid of his hand before you’re able to steal it.

Subsequently, Machinery left out on your board is a gigantic threat to your opponent.  Unless they can get leaf superiority, they can’t risk building up their hand.

Finally, the “score a card from hand with a Castle and splay your red cards left” dogma is kind of unnecessary.  Scoring dogmas are always nice, but you could leave it off and Machinery would still be a strong card.  And a splay-left is not terribly useful at this point in the game.

High Tier

Optics
Alchemy
Paper

Optics is your standard “draw-and-meld”, always a strong dogma, except it has the added bonus of scoring points for (possibly) you and (possibly) your opponent.  Ignoring the card removed for the achievement, Age 3 has 4/9 cards with Crowns on them (note that you can’t meld Optics with Optics!), Age 4 and 6 have 4/10 cards with Crowns, and Age 5 has 5/10 cards with Crowns.

So in Age 3, you’re scoring 4 points 45% of the time and losing a card from your score pile 55% of the time.  Assuming you have 1′s in your score pile (and you don’t already see all the crown cards gone), this is a good deal to take because you’re netting 1.25 points on average.  This doesn’t sound like a lot, but:

1. If you’re behind on points, there’s no chance of you giving away points.
2. If you’re at 11 points, and have claimed achievements 1 and 2, gaining 4 points is considerably more important than the possibility of losing 1 point, because it represents the next achievement.

That having been said, be very careful about executing Optics when:

1. you are ahead in points;
2. you don’t have low cards in your score pile to give away;
3. you are sharing it with someone who has fewer points!

Finally, Optics, like most other draw-and-meld cards, is very powerful when shared if you can “stack the deck” by returning certain cards.  It is doubly effective: you can force your opponent to cover up a good card with an obsolete/inferior card while simultaneously transferring you a card from their score pile.

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Alchemy is paradoxically one of those cards that gets better with fewer of its dogma icon on the board.  With only the two castles from Alchemy itself, it is a simultaneous “meld-and-score-from-hand”, the only one in the game and quite useful for simultaneously teching up and scoring.  The process of claiming achievements is intentionally designed to take three steps: score, tech up, and claim; with Alchemy potentially handling two of those steps, you can get through the whole process in a single turn.

With three castles, Alchemy is even better than a draw-and-meld, since you get to choose what card you want to meld, and then score a card on top of that.  Of course if you have no hand, then Alchemy is just a draw-and-meld, a fine dogma, especially considering it’s even a mild techer.

With six castles, Alchemy starts to get ridiculous, since even if you have no cards in hand, Alchemy is a draw-and-meld-and-draw-and-score, and you even get to choose which you want to meld and which to score.

With nine castles, Alchemy will probably cost you your hand.  But who knows!  Maybe you’ll be lucky and evade Colonialism and Gunpowder.

The reason Alchemy isn’t higher is because it will eventually run into those red cards, and once you do you’re often left with little choice but to manually draw through them while your opponent has teched up to 5 or 6.  But it’s quite useful all game long, even from the higher ages, especially once the red cards are confirmed to be gone.

Plus, a shared Alchemy is a hilarious way to destroy your opponent’s hand.

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Paper is another mass-drawing / mild-teching card, made worse by the fact that you have to have your cards splayed left plus another card that helps you splay left more colors than just green and blue.  It segues beautifully into Invention, and is a killer combo with Code of Laws and Philosophy, but that requires you to have some pretty bad cards on your board.  That being said, a 5-card drawing Paper will help you find good replacements for those cards pretty quickly.

Mid Tier

Compass
Translation
Education
Medicine
Engineering

Compass is basically the ultimate counter to the Fermenting/Reformation combo, as well as Machinery.  Otherwise it is fairly useless because of the compensation clause; note that red doesn’t have leaves, so they’ll always at least be able to take a red card from you.  On the other hand, if you can set up your board such that they can only take a very bad card (or no card at all, if you have no red), then it’s a decent board-destroyer.  It can also be used to fuel your own leaf strategy.

Translation is useful for some shenanigans with your score pile, though of course the bigger your score pile the less interested you are in eliminating it.  Sometimes you have some really good cards in there and you don’t think you’re contending for achievements anyway; more commonly, it is a sneaky way to grab an extra achievement (World).  All else being equal, it’s preferable to keep crown cards in your score pile for this reason (e.g., give away Masonry instead of Oars).  Alternatively, you don’t have to meld your score pile to claim World, though that requires you to either be quite lucky or have few cards on your board.

Education is a good way to tech up fast at the cost of score.  To make it worthwhile, you probably want to score two cards from the next age that you and your opponent are on (e.g., with Agriculture, Chemistry, or Optics), claim an achievement, then Education into a 3-age tech lead with plenty of cards left in the supply between you and your opponent.  It’s not the easiest thing to set up, however.  If you take too long, you end up losing score while not getting much of a tech advantage.  Education is sort of a one-time techer, so you really have to make the most of it and get several ages ahead, otherwise your opponent will just quickly catch up.

Medicine is a sneaky way to steal high score cards from your opponent, useful against something like Chemistry or Evolution.  But it doesn’t get particularly strong until your opponent is scoring very high cards, and until then it usually only translates to a 2-point gain or so.  It is mainly useful when both of you are contesting achievements.  And it becomes a real beast in multiplayer, provided you have enough leaf advantage and low cards to give away.

Engineering is a bit of a paradox.  You need to have more castles than your opponent, but it’s not worth the trouble if your opponent has few castles.  Plus being so far ahead in castles is a little dangerous, what with Gunpowder right around the corner.  Accordingly, it’s most helpful when you have a lot of splay-lefts that give you a slim castle advantage against a high castle count.  It wipes the entire board, which is a lot more devastating than Gunpowder board-wise because they can’t choose to give you some other card to prevent you from scoring their key cards like Fermenting and Machinery.

Low Tier

Feudalism

Poor Feudalism.  It gets lampooned in the header of every single one of these tier lists.  But you know, its reputation is well-deserved.  It steals only the worst cards.  This would be mediocre even in Age 1.  In Age 3 it is just a joke.

I mean, just compare it to Machinery.  Instead of taking your opponent’s entire hand, you take a single card, probably one of their worst.  And the fact that you can splay yellow and purple left is almost an insult, given that it comes way too late to be useful, and that yellow and purple are the two worst colors to splay left.

This is around the point where I usually say, “so it’s only useful for the icons”, but even its icons are awful!  At this point there is little point to melding castles (if anything, it’s just more exposure to Gunpowder), so basically its only use is a single leaf.  I would gladly meld this all day every day over any purple card on my opponent’s board.

Really, it hardly deserves to be even in the Low Tier.  Perhaps there should really be a basement tier, a place where Feudalism and Miniaturization can commiserate with each other.