Judging any card

You’ll be offered hundreds of cards across a game. The skill isn’t knowing all of them — it’s having a quick, honest test that any card can be pushed through.

The five-second test

Ask, in order:

1. What does it really cost? Printed price + 3 MC for buying it (+ the card’s requirements — can I even play it soon?).
2. What does it really pay? Production × generations remaining, or VP, or TR (remember: TR is a point and income).
3. When does it pay? Now, every generation, or only at the end?
4. Does it fit what I’m already doing? A fine card that fights your plan is worse than a plain card that feeds it.
5. Would the money do more as a standard project? 14 MC is always a temperature step. A card must beat the boring alternative.

If a card survives all five, keep it. If it stumbles on two or more, let it go — even if it’s pretty.

Requirements are real costs

A card that needs oxygen at 9% when oxygen is at 3% is not a card yet — it’s a hope. You’ll pay 3 MC now to maybe play it in five generations. Only keep requirement-heavy cards when the requirement is close, or when you control the track it needs.

VP-per-MC: the endgame yardstick

Late in the game, everything simplifies to points per megacredit:

• A greenery via standard project: 23 MC → 1 VP + 1 TR (+ oxygen) ≈ 2 points for 23 MC, plus placement bonuses.
• A temperature via asteroid: 14 MC → 1 TR = 1 point for 14 MC.
• A city: 25 MC → no points by itself; worth it only with greeneries around it.
• A VP card: read its ratio honestly. 12 MC + buy cost for 2 VP is fine; 20+ MC for 2 VP with no other effect is usually worse than a greenery.

From roughly ten megacredits per point, the endgame market is fair. Cheaper than that is a bargain. More expensive needs a side effect (TR, income, a milestone it unlocks) to justify itself.

The classic traps

• Big, expensive, impressive, slow. A 30+ MC card that doesn’t affect TR or your income needs to win the game to be worth it. It usually just wins applause.
• Production you can’t use. Energy production with nothing that consumes energy converts to heat — fine, but then value it as heat, which is slower.
• Cards that help both players. Anything that raises a global parameter you don’t score, or draws cards for the table, plays for the game, not for you.
• Hoarding “for later.” A hand of 12 clever cards cost you 36 MC to assemble. Later usually never comes.

Blue cards: engines with a clock

Blue action cards (use once per generation) are rented, not owned: their value is uses remaining × value per use. A card that makes ~2 MC of value per activation is excellent in generation 4 and nearly worthless in generation 12. The same is true of anything that accumulates (animals, microbes).

The community has actually done this math card by card, and the pattern is clean: most action and collector cards need 3-6 activations to break even. So the test is one sentence:

Count the triggers. If the generations remaining can’t deliver the card’s break-even number of uses, it’s a pure loss no matter how exciting the ability reads. (And for the anchor: a point is worth about 5 MC — a card delivering points cheaper than that is good almost regardless of how.)