Dominion Strategy Forum
Dominion => Dominion Articles => Topic started by: Titandrake on March 05, 2017, 10:03:53 pm
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I think people should be writing more articles about Adventures and Empires cards, instead of advice getting scattered in singleton posts across 20 different threads. I haven't played much Empires yet, so I figured I'd try to spark discussion around Adventures first. (I was planning to cover every card and event, but there are a lot of Adventures cards.)
Reasonably confident in these claims, but there's definitely room for these opinions to move around.
Coin of the Realm: Very good +Actions card for engines. The 1 turn delay on the first CotR is a little annoying, but between CotR acting like +3 Actions and only needed to take the actions when you need them, you should definitely pick up a few early if you need the actions. CotR staying out of your deck until you need it is a big help. Even if you're overdrawing, you shouldn't call excess CotR to get the extra $1 coin you get from playing it, it's not worth the inconsistency.
Travellers in general: Look, just go read DG's article instead, it's better than these blurbs.
Page Line: By themselves, they enable a plan of getting 1 Champion to turn all your Warriors into attacking Labs. I've never seen that plan vs a deck that didn't go for Champion, because Champion is so good that it enables a bunch of ridiculous things. Opening 1 Page almost always right, opening 2 Pages is insane, never getting the 2nd Page at all is ballsy because Warrior trashing Warrior kills you completely in that case.
- Page: Cheap cantrip, easy to pick up if you have extra buys later on, okay Silver replacement on engine boards if you don't have extra buys, and Champion boards are basically always engine boards. Keep extra Pages as Pages and move them towards Warrior when you're about to get Champion out.
- Treasure Hunter: The middle child of the Page line. The first play is good to get some early Silvers in, letting you focus buys on the Action cards, but past that not so much. Upgrade to Warrior ASAP. Occasionally you can try to do something goofy with alt-VP like Feodum or Gardens, but that's usually a sign of desperation, not a game plan.
- Warrior: Most Pages end here. You don't want too many of these until you get Champion out, at most 1 or 2. Remember the attack scales on Travellers you have in play, play Pages before Warrior if the attack's still relevant.
- Hero: The other middle child. The problem is that this usually caps at +$2, gain a Gold, which isn't good enough in most Champion games. If Platinum is in the game, maybe it could be okay.
- Champion: Get one, then make sure you can't draw it dead. Drawing it dead is often a 2-5 turn delay on playing it. For the lower rank Travellers, you can often risk it because you have more than 1, but that stops holding true for Champion.
Peasant Line: Still don't have a good handle on these, but also very good. Really you should just read DG's article instead. Almost always open 1, almost always pick up a 2nd so that you can keep a Disciple around, 3rd and up can be worth gaining in some games but 2 Peasants is a good baseline.
- Peasant: Gives +Buy, which can be surprisingly relevant early when picking up the 2nd Peasant. Sometimes there's no other +Buy source and that's good enough. (Teacher is only kind of a +Buy source, because even though it has a +Buy token, the +Card or +Action token need to be placed first.)
- Soldier: Can be a massive source of income if there are Attacks in the kingdom, or if you can play a ton of Soldiers in the same turn.
- Fugitive: The middle child of the Peasant line, never really does much.
- Disciple: Can snowball pretty hard - a deck that draws reliably can gain the Action card it want, a deck that can't doesn't always have a choice. You really want to have a Disciple and a Teacher at about the same time.
- Teacher: Playing Teacher is straightforward, in that the choice of token and card isn't too hard at the time you call it, but building your deck up to that point is where the card gets very hard. Tokens encourage getting a lot of a specific action, and you need to keep this in mind as you're going for Teacher - it affects your deckbuilding decisions throughout the entire game.
Ratcatcher: Nice opener. Don't try to keep it on your Tavern Mat until you hit Estate. Calling it to trash Copper (and getting the Ratcatcher into your next reshuffle) is a lot better. Doesn't really do much late game. A Ratcatcher's value is based solely on how many rats it catches (how many cards it trashes), has no benefit outside of trashing so blindly buy a bunch of them.
Raze: Another $2 cost trasher that's worth opening. It's hard to get punished for buying too many Razes because you can always trash the Raze itself.
Amulet: Often worth opening. It's either 1 or 2 Amulets in most games and I don't have a good handle on when the 2nd is bad, because it does take up terminal space. Silver gain is a surprisingly relevant way to get more economy into your engine without spending a buy.
Caravan Guard: One of those cards you pick up when you don't want to buy Silver. The reaction matters a bit, but not a lot. In strong engine games, you need to remember that you only get Caravan Guard money every other turn at best.
Dungeon: Really good at digging for the card you want, I think even better than Warehouse, which is already a pretty good card for this. Generally want 2-3, past the 3rd is often a bit much but can be right in junkier games. Has a bit of a Cartographer effect - a few Dungeons let you pretend like your deck is thinner. Not as good as trashing, of course, but sometimes you don't have trashers in the game.
Gear: There was a lot of buzz about Gear-BM during preview time, but I haven't played a lot of those games. Maybe I've been playing too many engine-happy players. Very tricky card to play correctly, but it's a very good opener. You can be a bit looser about buying more terminals with Gear, but note that if you set aside terminals too often with Gear you'll make cards miss the reshuffle more often.
Guide: Guides are insurance. Guides are not a strategy by themselves. Don't buy too many of them, and don't be afraid to call Guide aggressively. If you're borderline on whether to call Guide, you should just call Guide.
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I don't disagree with much, but I'd like to add some comments of my own.
Coin of the Realm: Very good +Actions card for engines. The 1 turn delay on the first CotR is a little annoying, but between CotR acting like +3 Actions and only needed to take the actions when you need them, you should definitely pick up a few early if you need the actions. CotR staying out of your deck until you need it is a big help. Even if you're overdrawing, you shouldn't call excess CotR to get the extra $1 coin you get from playing it, it's not worth the inconsistency.
CotR is especially good with terminal draw for two reasons:
- It adds a lot of reliability to a deck with terminal draw. Compare a Village + Smithy engine with a CotR + Smithy engine. The CotR deck might have ~2 more stop cards (compare playing three CotR each turn with playing one Gold) and need an extra Smithy to draw them, but it has an easier time kicking off from a 5-card hand: all you need is one Smithy in the first 5 cards and two in the first 8 cards. With a Village + Smithy deck, you need a Village in the first 5 cards, a Smithy in the first 6 cards, two Villages in the first 9 cards, and two Smithies in the first 10 cards. Even in kingdoms with strong villages, you generally want a couple Coins of the Realm for reliability.
- You get to draw the cards before you decide if you want to call a Coin. If you aren't drawing your deck (yet), you can conserve Coins when you don't need the extra actions.
Coin of the Realm also flourishes in kingdoms with +buy, so that the opportunity cost of gaining additional Coins is low. When terminal draw and +buy are combined (Wharf, Margrave, Council Room, Ranger), you need a compelling reason not to go for CotR.
Page Line: By themselves, they enable a plan of getting 1 Champion to turn all your Warriors into attacking Labs. I've never seen that plan vs a deck that didn't go for Champion, because Champion is so good that it enables a bunch of ridiculous things. Opening 1 Page almost always right, opening 2 Pages is insane, never getting the 2nd Page at all is ballsy because Warrior trashing Warrior kills you completely in that case.
The Page line is rarely ignorable, but it can happen. I've ignored Page in a game with Governor and won the turn after my opponents played their Champions. So, if the game is fast enough, and the power cards are $5+ non-terminals, Page isn't great. But, you won't lose many games if you always open with a Page.
- Hero: The other middle child. The problem is that this usually caps at +$2, gain a Gold, which isn't good enough in most Champion games. If Platinum is in the game, maybe it could be okay.
Hero can definitely be strong with Platinum or some kingdom Treasures. Hero can gain Fortune! Bank is great with the Page line. Gaining multiples of Crown, Horn of Plenty, Charm, Capital, or Harem can be powerful. Sometimes, the Gold gaining is strong, too (with some trash for benefit). The kingdom needs to have good draw to make it worth it to turn a Warrior into a Hero, though.
Peasant Line:
- Disciple: Can snowball pretty hard - a deck that draws reliably can gain the Action card it want, a deck that can't doesn't always have a choice. You really want to have a Disciple and a Teacher at about the same time.
It's worth mentioning that you don't always want to exchange your Disciple for a Teacher. I'm not an expert on this, but there are two things I think about:
- Will the game last long enough to get value out of my Teacher? Teacher is slow. It does nothing the turn you play it. So, if the game might end in 2 turns, you need to weigh two turns of a Disciple with a single turn with a Teacher token in play.
- Do I have enough action cards to get value out of a Teacher token? Maybe it will be worth it to get a Teacher in the future, but you don't have more than two copies of any particular action card. Well, keep the Disciple around for a turn or two to remedy that issue.
Ratcatcher: Nice opener. Don't try to keep it on your Tavern Mat until you hit Estate. Calling it to trash Copper (and getting the Ratcatcher into your next reshuffle) is a lot better. Doesn't really do much late game. A Ratcatcher's value is based solely on how many rats it catches (how many cards it trashes), has no benefit outside of trashing so blindly buy a bunch of them.
Trashing from your starting hand is a restriction. You want your Ratcatchers early. The longer you wait, the more likely it is that a junk card is never in your starting hand. For this reason, Ratcatcher isn't great at dealing with Curses.
Raze: Another $2 cost trasher that's worth opening. It's hard to get punished for buying too many Razes because you can always trash the Raze itself.
"Worth opening" doesn't fully capture how you ought to play with Raze (or Ratcatcher) in the kingdom. Raze and Ratcatcher are cheap, non-terminal trashers that pretty much never get in your way. If these are your only source of trashing, you want to buy 2-4 of these in the early game. If you have a spare $2 and a buy, pick one up. It's not crazy to see the Ratcatcher or Raze piles empty in a 2-player game. Raze is useful in the lategame, to protect against dud turns. You can Raze a redundant junker or Potion or Raze itself to dig for the card you need to keep going.
Dungeon: Really good at digging for the card you want, I think even better than Warehouse, which is already a pretty good card for this. Generally want 2-3, past the 3rd is often a bit much but can be right in junkier games. Has a bit of a Cartographer effect - a few Dungeons let you pretend like your deck is thinner. Not as good as trashing, of course, but sometimes you don't have trashers in the game.
It's often worth it to have alternating Dungeons even when you don't have junk cards in your deck, to increase your reliability of kicking off. Consider the classic Village + Smithy engine. Finding the cards to kick off out of 7 cards is much better than out of 5 cards. Breppert has done some eyebrow-raising simulation to demonstrate this.
Gear: There was a lot of buzz about Gear-BM during preview time, but I haven't played a lot of those games. Maybe I've been playing too many engine-happy players. Very tricky card to play correctly, but it's a very good opener. You can be a bit looser about buying more terminals with Gear, but note that if you set aside terminals too often with Gear you'll make cards miss the reshuffle more often.
Gear BM is rarely the best thing on the board. Opening Gear is a good option on most kingdoms, as you note. Having alternating Gears in the endgame is also helpful to add reliability to your deck. You can use the Gears to make sure you next turn begins with a Storyteller or Scrying Pool in hand. Powerful. Plus, you can set aside green cards to keep them out of your deck (like Haven).
Guide: Guides are insurance. Guides are not a strategy by themselves. Don't buy too many of them, and don't be afraid to call Guide aggressively. If you're borderline on whether to call Guide, you should just call Guide.
Guide is also a great counter to handsize attacks, especially Ghost Ship. It's also a great counter to Haunted Woods. In kingdoms with these kinds of attacks, getting at least two Guides is highly recommended. Otherwise, buy Guides when the opportunity cost is low.
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This is exactly the kind of deep analysis I come to f.ds for.
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I've never seen that plan vs a deck that didn't go for Champion, because Champion is so good that it enables a bunch of ridiculous things. Opening 1 Page almost always right, opening 2 Pages is insane, never getting the 2nd Page at all is ballsy because Warrior trashing Warrior kills you completely in that case.
I tried writing a page article after writing the peasant article and the page is actually lot harder to detail. There seem to be a variety of quite distinct decks that suit the champion line and a lot of decks that fall through the cracks and are definitely better without it. I'd say that the danger signs for the champion would be a kingdom with no trashing and no way to strongly outscore an opponent once the champion is in play.
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Don't always go for champion if there is no draw(besides warrior) and there is no trashing. Stopping at hero can be right in many BM games.
- Will the game last long enough to get value out of my Teacher? Teacher is slow. It does nothing the turn you play it. So, if the game might end in 2 turns, you need to weigh two turns of a Disciple with a single turn with a Teacher token in play.
- Do I have enough action cards to get value out of a Teacher token? Maybe it will be worth it to get a Teacher in the future, but you don't have more than two copies of any particular action card. Well, keep the Disciple around for a turn or two to remedy that issue.
I would add will keeping this disciple give me enough pile control to end the game in a few turns.
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Dungeon: Really good at digging for the card you want, I think even better than Warehouse, which is already a pretty good card for this. Generally want 2-3, past the 3rd is often a bit much but can be right in junkier games. Has a bit of a Cartographer effect - a few Dungeons let you pretend like your deck is thinner. Not as good as trashing, of course, but sometimes you don't have trashers in the game.
It's often worth it to have alternating Dungeons even when you don't have junk cards in your deck, to increase your reliability of kicking off. Consider the classic Village + Smithy engine. Finding the cards to kick off out of 7 cards is much better than out of 5 cards. Breppert has done some eyebrow-raising simulation to demonstrate this.
So your deck is the following:
2 Curses
7 Coppers
2 Mountebanks
1 Gold
2 Silver
5 Smithy
6 Village
2 Market
You want to maximize the the average (mean) $ output and Mountebank plays for this next turn. You have two options
(1): Add 4 Villages and 4 Smithies to your deck.
(2): Have a duration Dungeon down.
Which one do you choose?
So if you don't add anything you average $11.3 and 1.05 Mountebank plays
If you add 4 of each component you average $15.08 and 1.47 Mountebank plays
If you add the duration Dungeon you average $15.18 and 1.51 Mountebank plays
Spoilers continued (I'm not going to make everything black)....
This is obviously a rather thick deck, so the importance of Dungeon is magnified, but also note that your chance to draw deck given the existing set-up is 0% (you're 2 cards short), but adding 4 Villages and 4 Smithies remains worse than having just a single Dungeon down. I don't have the other numbers or time currently in front of me, but until your deck gets very, very, very thin it remains better to have a Dungeon down every turn rather than having extra components for a long time.
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Opening 1 Page almost always right, opening 2 Pages is insane, never getting the 2nd Page at all is ballsy because Warrior trashing Warrior kills you completely in that case.
I don't know what "insane" means here. Insanely good, or insanely bad?
Treasure Hunter: The middle child of the Page line. The first play is good to get some early Silvers in, letting you focus buys on the Action cards, but past that not so much. Upgrade to Warrior ASAP. Occasionally you can try to do something goofy with alt-VP like Feodum or Gardens, but that's usually a sign of desperation, not a game plan.
I think it's worth noting, even in a short blurb, that gaining a lot of silvers is often bad, especially for a deck focused on getting to Champion. As far as silver flooding strategies go, Treasure Hunter is a fine flooder.
Ratcatcher: Nice opener. Don't try to keep it on your Tavern Mat until you hit Estate. Calling it to trash Copper (and getting the Ratcatcher into your next reshuffle) is a lot better. Doesn't really do much late game. A Ratcatcher's value is based solely on how many rats it catches (how many cards it trashes), has no benefit outside of trashing so blindly buy a bunch of them.
Raze: Another $2 cost trasher that's worth opening. It's hard to get punished for buying too many Razes because you can always trash the Raze itself.
I think it's fairly important to point out that Raze is usually better than Ratcatcher, because early on many people believed the opposite. Trashing from your starting hand is a big restriction.
Dungeon: Really good at digging for the card you want, I think even better than Warehouse, which is already a pretty good card for this. Generally want 2-3, past the 3rd is often a bit much but can be right in junkier games. Has a bit of a Cartographer effect - a few Dungeons let you pretend like your deck is thinner. Not as good as trashing, of course, but sometimes you don't have trashers in the game.
One thing worth noting, having a thinner deck in the early game means you also have less terminal space. Don't buy lots of terminals if they're just going to collide every turn.
Gear: There was a lot of buzz about Gear-BM during preview time, but I haven't played a lot of those games. Maybe I've been playing too many engine-happy players. Very tricky card to play correctly, but it's a very good opener. You can be a bit looser about buying more terminals with Gear, but note that if you set aside terminals too often with Gear you'll make cards miss the reshuffle more often.
When you first buy gear, you commonly encounter this decision: Should I set aside junk, making both the junk and Gear skip the shuffle? The answer is almost always yes. By making 2 junk skip the shuffle, that's like getting +2 cards next shuffle without even spending an action.
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Opening 1 Page almost always right, opening 2 Pages is insane, never getting the 2nd Page at all is ballsy because Warrior trashing Warrior kills you completely in that case.
I don't know what "insane" means here. Insanely good, or insanely bad?
Insanely bad. It's hard for me to come up with a case where you really need 2 Pages in your opening deck, there's almost always either a $3/$4 cost to open with, or an important $5 that pushes you to open Silver.
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Opening 1 Page almost always right, opening 2 Pages is insane, never getting the 2nd Page at all is ballsy because Warrior trashing Warrior kills you completely in that case.
I don't know what "insane" means here. Insanely good, or insanely bad?
Insanely bad. It's hard for me to come up with a case where you really need 2 Pages in your opening deck, there's almost always either a $3/$4 cost to open with, or an important $5 that pushes you to open Silver.
There's a nonzero number of boards where the first 3 buys should be Page / Page / Donate, or your $4 buy should be Stonemason / Page / Page. But generally if you want 2, you get the 2nd one in the first reshuffle, not in the opening.
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Man, I keep liking Guide less and less. It seems like it has the potential to always be at least decent since it potentially increases your reliability by so much. But too often I buy one, put it on the mat, and never need to call it. Maybe I'm not calling it enough, but I feel like it's a card I often end up regretting that I spent a turn buying. I feel like this even happens in games without strong trashing. As a result, I've started only buying/gaining it when the alternative is to buy/gain nothing.
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Man, I keep liking Guide less and less. It seems like it has the potential to always be at least decent since it potentially increases your reliability by so much. But too often I buy one, put it on the mat, and never need to call it. Maybe I'm not calling it enough, but I feel like it's a card I often end up regretting that I spent a turn buying. I feel like this even happens in games without strong trashing. As a result, I've started only buying/gaining it when the alternative is to buy/gain nothing.
I haven't played with Guide too much, but this sums up my experience with Guide.
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Man, I keep liking Guide less and less. It seems like it has the potential to always be at least decent since it potentially increases your reliability by so much. But too often I buy one, put it on the mat, and never need to call it. Maybe I'm not calling it enough, but I feel like it's a card I often end up regretting that I spent a turn buying. I feel like this even happens in games without strong trashing. As a result, I've started only buying/gaining it when the alternative is to buy/gain nothing.
You're definitely not calling it enough. Any time you wish you could shuffle sooner or you wish your hand was better. The key is to use it liberally to accelerate cycling in components.
That said, it's pretty rarely worth diverting from some other engine component to get one.
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Man, I keep liking Guide less and less. It seems like it has the potential to always be at least decent since it potentially increases your reliability by so much. But too often I buy one, put it on the mat, and never need to call it. Maybe I'm not calling it enough, but I feel like it's a card I often end up regretting that I spent a turn buying. I feel like this even happens in games without strong trashing. As a result, I've started only buying/gaining it when the alternative is to buy/gain nothing.
You're definitely not calling it enough. Any time you wish you could shuffle sooner or you wish your hand was better. The key is to use it liberally to accelerate cycling in components.
That said, it's pretty rarely worth diverting from some other engine component to get one.
It's nice in junking and sloggy games. Also good against discard attacks (it's a very effective Torturer counter), and plays well with Outpost.
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Guide works well:
1) Against discard attacks, Ghost Ship, and Haunted Woods. Guide sits on the Tavern mat until needed to rescue a hand that's been torn to pieces.
2) When you want to rapidly cycle your deck, generally to play a junker and/or trasher more often without buying another one that will later clog your deck. Guide will usually be called whenever you don't have the key card(s) in your original hand.
3) When you have start of turn effects that decrease your hand size. Amulet and Ratcatcher are mainly what I'm thinking of, but I've even done it with Transmogrify trashing a Curse or some other junk when I didn't really care about the card I gained.
I've never been disappointed with it when I've bought it, but I generally only buy it when one of the above 3 situations makes it clear that it will be pulling its weight. I suppose I may have just used it in general to rescue myself from crappy hands in a slog, but that's not the greatest use of it and it will often sit idly by in such situations given you're not really sure if using it will actually help or not.
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Guide is best in weak engines where you're relatively (i.e. well short of 100%) unlikely to kick off.
It's not a great slog/money card--though an early one or two can still be okay to good--mostly because it's competing with Silver, and Silver is a really good card in slogs. A notable exception to this is when you have 4-cost junkers that you can open with and you just want to play them as often as possible until the Curses are gone.
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Opening 1 Page almost always right, opening 2 Pages is insane, never getting the 2nd Page at all is ballsy because Warrior trashing Warrior kills you completely in that case.
I don't know what "insane" means here. Insanely good, or insanely bad?
Insanely bad. It's hard for me to come up with a case where you really need 2 Pages in your opening deck, there's almost always either a $3/$4 cost to open with, or an important $5 that pushes you to open Silver.
I usually don't get the second page unless if i really want warrior/treasure. It is just not very likely to get it hit if you are cycling at least as fast. It's also not always worth getting over other cards if there is little draw and no trashing.
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Opening 1 Page almost always right, opening 2 Pages is insane, never getting the 2nd Page at all is ballsy because Warrior trashing Warrior kills you completely in that case.
I don't know what "insane" means here. Insanely good, or insanely bad?
Insanely bad. It's hard for me to come up with a case where you really need 2 Pages in your opening deck, there's almost always either a $3/$4 cost to open with, or an important $5 that pushes you to open Silver.
I usually don't get the second page unless if i really want warrior/treasure. It is just not very likely to get it hit if you are cycling at least as fast. It's also not always worth getting over other cards if there is little draw and no trashing.
i find that there's nothing better than 2nd page for $2-3 a decent amount of the time, so i get it more often than you. could just be a function of the page boards we've drawn since i generally agree with you!