This just struck me out of the blue.

In poker, there are 4 suits and 13 ranks that cards come in (from the 2 of clubs to the ace of spades) and then you use those cards to form hands of different combinations, which are evaluated based on the odds of that hand happening. So like, a hand of four of a kind (say four "twos") is always better than a "full house" (three kings and two aces). But within each type of hand the different ranks of the cards breaks ties.

Would it be possible to make Augments and Refinements in such a way that your outlay of items in a power can be done something like this? I'm not suggesting using suits and ranks exactly like in poker, but if there were two different categories or descriptors that every Augment and Refinement had, you could then mix and match them to form meaningful arrangements in powers. You might make the higher "rank" stuff rarer and the lower ranks more common, then you could give players the choice of making 4-of-a-kind hands for their powers out of largely common "dueces" type items, with the occasional power getting the rarer "kings and aces" stuff. Or you could choose to put like pairs of high-rank items into individual powers in order to spread the wealth a little. You could have different types of global buffs for different "hands", but the actual value of the "deuce" item is always slightly less than the value of the "three" item, etc. This way, the ultimate goal for all powers would be to have a "royal flush", you would probably take along time to get to the point with your favorite toon, and in the meantime you'd be using a lot of other "hands" to make your powers work and provide some global buffs on the side.

Of course, in a system like this, the low rarity stuff will be all over the place, and as such the 4-deuces hand is artificially high in value compared to the pair of aces hand, so you might have to redo the values of the hands.