| The Retain keyword is similar to the effects from Treasury or Mandarin in Dominion, where you put some card(s) back on top of your deck during clean up if you meet the condition. Treasury especially is also a cantrip, so it doesn't use up space in your hand on the next turn. Innate of course doesn't have a precedent in Dominion, since you don't keep your deck around between games. Ethereal could - there's no technical reason you couldn't print a Dominion card with text like, "During clean up, trash this card if you would discard it from your hand". I don't think there are any such cards, and I suspect they'd be generally worse in Dominion than Ethereal is in StS. Actually, having a deck of cards using in junking attacks with that text separate from ruins and curses might be interesting - curses that trash themselves, so you could hand them out a lot more aggressively without destabilizing the entire game. Dominion's traveler cards were Donald X's attempt to make cards that change during the game, though of course Slay the Spire can push that idea much further. Artifacts and States are a little bit like the Watcher's stances, but less deck-defining. You generally don't build a deck around having a particular artifact or state, but you can use them to get a little extra juice. I agree, limiting your plays each turn (either with mana or dominion's limited actions) does a lot to change the texture of a game. The Ascension family of deckbuilders where you can just slam your whole hand down every turn tend to leave me underwhelmed. I don't mean to rag on StS for being unoriginal, quite the opposite, it's great. |