Mmm...personally, I'm excited about people, and not so excited about stuff like cards that talk about vote totals or nomination pools. Edward equipping a Meeple Launcher is exciting because it's people mixed with people.
Put another way, if you were to make a board game about Magic The Gathering, you'd reference characters from the original game, maybe you'd reference some of the more charismatic designers ("Mark Rosewater is !@#$#$ insane" etc), but a square that says "you need to mulligan twice: go back two squares" is...kinda unexciting. You're using the game mechanics of the source material as flavour for another game, and game mechanics don't make very good flavour.