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The Tabletop Game:

  • Game-Breaker: The game is, as mentioned, very well balanced, but this trope comes into play during most fan debates:
    • Mountebank, Witch, and other potent attack cards are the most common targets for the term. This is probably because they become more powerful the more players are in the game.
    • Masquerade seems to have been inserted purely to counter curses. Using it, it's possible to be the only one who gets cursed, but at the end, be the only one without a curse. Though like any card, this depends on luck. Masquerade suddenly had its value hiked up when someone noticed the King's Court - King's Court - Goons - Masquerade combo.
    • King's Court is part of numerous game-breaking combos, but those combos are very unlikely to come together because they rely on so many cards. For instance, 2x King's Court + 3x Bridge equals an instant win - but drawing that exact 5-card hand is difficult.
    • Procession and Horses together can result in one massive turn that will drain three piles and end the game. The Procession can be played on Horses which gives +4 Cards, +2 Actions.. and a $4 card can be gained, which can be another Procession. The Processions can also be played on themselves to get $5 cards. And unlike other megaturn strategies, this one is fast - sometimes being able to end the game in less than 10 turns.
    • Chapel, Steward, and other cards that can easily trash cards from your hand can turn into this with skilled enough players.
  • Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Japan loves deckbuilding games to the point they made about a dozen of it, licensed or otherwise. The Touhou Project version is licensed, while the meido one, as well as several more by Arclight... probably not.
  • High-Tier Scrappy: Several attack cards are hated for being not only powerful, but miserable to play against:
    • Mountebank has an oppressive attack that gives opponents two junk cards — a Curse and a Copper. Not only does the junk pile up fast, but it can keep handing out Coppers even after the Curses run out. While you can defend against the attack by discarding a Curse, this may mean forfeiting a chance to trash it. As a result, it's a centralizing card that tends to turn games into slogs. It was so disliked that the second edition removed it and added a reworked version in the form of Charlatan, whose attack only gives one Curse and can't do more damage once the Curses run out.
    • Ghost Ship won a poll for the most hated attack cards, and for good reason — it not only forces opponents to reduce their hand size to 3, but makes them put cards on top of their deck. So while discard attacks at least let you discard dead cards, Ghost Ship forces you to either weaken your current hand or make subsequent draws worse. This effect was so annoying that the second edition removed Ghost Ship without replacing it with a "fixed" equivalent.
  • Low-Tier Letdown:
    • The number of underwhelming cards in it contributed to the poor reception of Alchemy. Many of them (including all the entries on this list) suffer from having a Potion in their cost, which makes them awkward to buy, and their effects aren't worth it at all:
      • The Philosopher's Stone is a terrible Treasure whose payload slowly scales with the amount of your deck that you have not drawn or played this turn. The former means that it works badly with engines, and the latter means that you're almost always better off just taking something else, even if it's just Gold.
      • The Golem suffers from an awkward effect: you reveal cards until you've revealed 2 non-Golem action cards, discard the rest and play the 2 action cards in any order. There are two problems with this: The first is that because you have little control over what you get, the card is liable to end your Actions phase prematurely by forcing you to play Action cards that don't provide additional actions. You may also be forced to play a detrimental action, such as trashing a good card. The second is that it's hard to play multiple Golems in one turn, as they can't play other copies of themselves. This means that your overall amount of terminal space can be inconsistent, and multiple copies of Golem will have diminishing returns. Also, if you reveal and discard other Golems, you might be out of viable targets in your deck or discard pile by the time you draw back around to them.
      • Transmute is a clunky trash-for-benefit card that isn't very good at its job because it's inflexible and will gain you stop cards: trashing unwanted Actions will give you Duchies (worth 3 points, but otherwise mostly useless), and trashing unwanted treasures gives you more crappy Transmutes. And while trashing an unwanted victory card for a Treasure (which means you can ditch your starting Estates for Golds) is nice, it doesn't come close to making up for the card's other shortcomings. As the cherry on top, the Potion cost gives it the dubious honour of being a trash-for-benefit card that forces you to add a junk card to your deck to buy it in the first place.
    • Several cards were removed from the second edition of Dominion due to being underwhelming:
      • When Duchess is in the kingdom, you get one for free whenever you buy a Duchy, which means that the card had to be weak. Even with that in mind, it's thoroughly unimpressive because it amounts to a terminal silvernote  with a weak Symmetric Effect that benefits both you and your opponents. There's rarely any reason to buy it beyond "well, it's better than nothing".
      • Navigator is a terminal silver whose deck manipulation is too inflexible to be worth it in most cases, since you have to either put back all the five cards you draw from your deck or discard them all.
  • Memetic Mutation:
    • Seven is the loneliest numbernote 
    • But Gold is goldnote 
  • Salvaged Gameplay Mechanic: The second editions of Dominion releases sometimes rework underwhelming or overpowered cards to salvage them:
    • Thief is a very underwhelming attack card that makes each opponent reveal the top 2 cards of their deck, and if they reveal Treasures, you choose one for them to trash, and may gain a copy of the trashed cards. The problem is that this can trash Coppers, which more often than not helps the target (and you don't want Coppers for yourself, which makes playing Thief a waste if you're only hitting Coppers). The concept of a card that "steals" treasures was salvaged with Bandit, which has a "non-Copper" rider, and gives you a Gold regardless of how the attack goes.
    • Scout lets you look at four cards from the top of your deck, draw the Victory Cards, and put the rest back. This is a very underwhelming effect because (1) if you've built your deck properly, it's likely to draw nothing, (2) most Victory Cards do nothing to improve your current turn, so Scout mostly serves to make the next turn somewhat better, and (3) there are several types of junk it can't deal with, like Coppers and Curses. This concept was salvaged with Patrol, which has a "draw 3 cards" stapled onto it before Scout's effect.
    • Pirate Ship is a weak attack card that also has the problem of being a beginner trap. It wants you to use the effect of trashing opponents' Treasures often, but this means you'll probably help your them by trashing their Coppers for them. And even if you can make it produce a decent amount of money, you're better off just buying basic Treasures. This concept was salvaged with Corsair, which offers their player a decent benefit from the start and only trashes opponents' Silvers and Golds.
    • Oracle is a weak attack that has every player reveal the top two cards of their deck, and then for every player, you choose whether the cards get put back or discarded. The problem is that this isn't very impactful, and the card's secondary effect of drawing you two cards doesn't make up for it. The concept of an attack that sifts through your deck was salvaged with its replacement Witch's Hut, which has you draw four cards, then you discard two and get to give your opponents Curses if you discarded two Action cards.
    • Mountebank is an obnoxious attack card that frequently gives opponents two junk cards (one Copper and one Curse) and likes to turn games into slogs. The second edition replaces it with the milder Charlatan. It only gives a Curse, but keeps the idea of "giving opponents a Copper and a Curse" by adding a clause that when Charlatan is in play, Curses are also Treasures similar to Copper.
  • Scrappy Mechanic:
    • Potions. Many cards require you to pay a Potion in addition to coins. There are few ways to circumvent Potion costs, so this likely means having to buy at least one inflexible Potion card that can't be used for anything else. This is even worse in the common situation where only one card type has a Potion cost; if you draw the Potion and your hand can't afford the card in question, you lose the chance to gain it until your next reshuffle. There's also the bottleneck of only being able to buy one Potion-cost card per copy of Potion per shuffle, which makes it slow to acquire them in bulk unless you want to eat the opportunity cost of taking multiple Potions. Tellingly, this mechanic was never revisited after Alchemy.
    • The Possession card is hated because it lets another player use your deck against you. This can lead to frustrating game states. It doesn't help that it's so complicated that it has the longest FAQ to date. The card is so hated that it's treated as a banned card by default at Dominion Online. Even the game's designer has called it "super messed-up".
    • Certain types of attacks are pretty obnoxious to play against and can turn the game into a slog.
  • Serial Numbers Filed Off: Many of the deckbuilding games from Japan in particular are guilty of this. The Resident Evil deckbuilding game and Tanto Cuore (Dominion... WITH MAIDS) come swiftly to mind.
  • Spiritual Successor: Adventures is a sequel of sorts to Seaside, with its focus on Duration cards. Empires is a sequel of sorts to Prosperity, by re-introducing the Victory Point chip mechanic introduced in Prosperity, and introducing more very expensive and powerful cards. Plunder is a blend of Seaside and Prosperity sequels, featuring a plethora of new Durations in a pirate theme, and Loot, a randomized pile of Treasure all slightly better than Gold.

The Television Series

  • Creepy Awesome: Eightball!Claire.
  • Early-Installment Weirdness: One of the first Lower Angels seen is able to manifest wings, with Alex and Michael both noting that this is odd and distressing, implying that "eight-balls" might be evolving and becoming stronger, no Lower Angel is shown to be able to do anything close to this ever again.
  • Fridge Brilliance: Why are certain aspects of the backstory, which was covered in Legion different? The film is covering a version of the story told by the Church of the Savior, playing up certain aspects to make the people involved seem stronger or weaker, embellishments such as Baby!Alex being able to repel Lower Angels, despite never showing that ability in the series, Gabriel being defeated by a resurrected Micheal, Jeep and Charlie escaping on their own, showing plucky humans escaping with their savior rather than the truth.
  • Moral Event Horizon: David Whele killing Bixby. Not that he hadn't killed before mind you, but killing a child is pretty low just for one little mistake.
  • Ontological Inertia: The entire Series is based on the fact that just because Michael saved Alex at the end of Legion, God didn't reverse His Apocalypse on earth, the Angels still continue to attack humanity with the intent to wipe them out after 25 years.

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