Dominion Strategy Forum
Dominion => Rules Questions => Topic started by: surfKraken on September 17, 2017, 02:42:10 pm
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Hi, I have Seaside and base and have played a dozen games or so. I've researched around and can't find an answer for my question, so I'm posting here.
With Poacher, what is the advantage of discarding??
If I have curse or victory cards in my hand, they are not used anyway and get discarded at the end of the turn regardless.
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It is meant usually as a disadvantage. The longer the game goes, the weaker Poacher gets. That is the whole point of the card. If you have green cards to discard anyway, good for you, but you might not. So always be careful not to get too many. Like if you get 9 Poachers, your opponent might just grab the last one to make your 9 Poachers worse.
There are several scenarios where this might even help you though.
1.) Tunnel: You can discard it to gain a Gold
2.) Draw-to-X like Library, Watchtower and Jack of All Trades: These draw dependant on your hand size. So you can discard a bad card to hopefully draw a better card instead.
3.) Menagerie: You can discard duplicate cards to draw more with Menagerie
There might be even more scenarios, these 3 were the obvious ones to me. One thing you can also do is when you have drawn your deck and some good cards are unused like let's say 2 villages. Then you can use Poacher to discard 2 villages and play another card that draws one card to guarantee that you start next turn with one village.
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If you don't have Curses or Victory cards in your hand, you have to discard something useful.
Also, even if you are discarding a Curse or a Victory card, it can hurt you if you draw more cards after that and trigger a reshuffle, because if those cards are in your hand at the time, they don't get shuffled in, but if they are in the discard pile, they do. For the same reason, the discarding ability can actually be beneficial in rare situations if you manage to discard something you don't want to use this turn, but you still want to shuffle it in (such as an extra terminal Action you couldn't have played anyway).
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Thanks for the replies. I'm understanding that it's kind of negative and kind of strategic. It's hard to think ahead that far(for me, at this point)when the deck or discard pile get thick:p
But I'm getting it. Thanx for the help.
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Another one that's tough to set up but feels great when it works is Native Village.
When you're ready to start buying Provinces and you can draw your entire deck into your hand, you can use Poacher to discard a Province you got earlier, then play Native Village to set it on the mat and out of the way for the rest of the game if you don't pick it back up from the mat.
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Thanks for the good tip. I'm always stoked when Native village and Pirate ship are in the kingdom cards because they're so fun.
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Look at Warehouse from Seaside. It makes you discard 3 cards. Definitely not meant as an advantage; if Warehouse instead just said +3 cards, +1 action; then it would be a ridiculously overpowered card. So in general, cards can have both bonuses and bad things to balance them out.
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There's a card in a later expansion called Haunted Woods, which forces you to put all of your unplayed cards from your hand onto the top of your deck before you ever get to the Clean-up phase -- this is definitely bad if those unplayed cards are Curse or Victory cards. Poacher and other cards like it are helpful counters to this attack card.
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For a more complex example, consider a situation where you have a treasure map and 5 cards in your discard pile, one card in your draw deck, and a poacher, lookout and treasure map in hand. You can play a poacher, draw a card, and discard the treasure map. You can then play the other lookout and trigger a reshuffle of 7 cards from your discard pile into your draw deck. The lookout trashes one, discards one, leaving 5 cards in your draw deck with a good chance of pairing the treasure maps.
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It's a real dozy when you have to discard 3 cards to that many piles in 5p or 6p games! Discarding 1 card alone can be sucky!