Dominion Strategy Forum
Dominion => Rules Questions => Topic started by: Slice7 on July 30, 2022, 07:48:11 pm
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Can you trash everything with Donate?
The text and the FAQ for Donate states that you draw your entire deck into your hand, then can trash any number of cards from it. This means you can trash every thing and give yourself a hand of 0 cards. Since you'd still have the debt (most likely) from buying Donate, you cannot by additional cards and are softlocked. The simulator replicates this behavior - with a Turn 1 Donate, the bot simply plays until it buys all 12 Provinces (or otherwise ends the game).
Is this an intentional softlock? If not, is there a way out of it?
More realistically, a similar lock could be achived by playing mutliple copies of hand-size independent discard attacks (Taxman, Cutpurse) on a small Copper hand.
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Yes, you can trash everything with Donate. As far as I know, there's no way out of it; you just have to not buy Donate and leave yourself with debt you can't pay off.
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Ambassador (http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php/Ambassador), Embassy (http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php/Embassy), Mountebank (http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php/Mountebank), and Messenger (http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php/Messenger) can get you out of it. But nothing you can do without some help from opponents.
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Ambassador (http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php/Ambassador), Embassy (http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php/Embassy), Mountebank (http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php/Mountebank), and Messenger (http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php/Messenger) can get you out of it. But nothing you can do without some help from opponents.
And Charlatan
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More scenarios, however unusual/unlikely:
* You had Durations in play that couldn’t be trashed to Donate.
* Sacred Grove (The Mountain’s Gift)
* Greed (from a Doom Attack)
* You already bought Exploration
* You had a sizable cache of Coffers
* Bargain + a Way (best candidates: Butterfly, Monkey, Mule, Seal, Sheep; Mouse with an appropriate target; Chameleon would require the opponents to buy Bargain as much as 4 times)
* Ally: Crafters’ Guild, League of Bankers
* You already Prince’d a payload card.
* You can potentially win all the Baths points.
* Certain other Landmarks also make it possible that an unwise opponent ends the game with a lower score than you.
* Variant of the original problem in which you trashed all payload (and even all Actions), but held onto a gainer such as Devil’s Workshop
I came up with a couple other weird ones, but they boiled down to one of the above or already posted situations.
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* Sacred Grove (The Mountain’s Gift)
Or opponent plays Sacred Grove so much that you get 3 Will-o'-Wisps from Swamp's Gift, and then a Gold from Sky's Gift. (Or just Will-o'-Wisp plus the right Way).
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Can you trash everything with Donate?
The text and the FAQ for Donate states that you draw your entire deck into your hand, then can trash any number of cards from it. This means you can trash every thing and give yourself a hand of 0 cards. Since you'd still have the debt (most likely) from buying Donate, you cannot by additional cards and are softlocked. The simulator replicates this behavior - with a Turn 1 Donate, the bot simply plays until it buys all 12 Provinces (or otherwise ends the game).
Is this an intentional softlock? If not, is there a way out of it?
More realistically, a similar lock could be achived by playing mutliple copies of hand-size independent discard attacks (Taxman, Cutpurse) on a small Copper hand.
I doubt it's intentional, but yes, you can end up screwing yourself that way. But it's not really an issue practically speaking because you'd have to consciously choose to screw yourself over that way. It's not something that your opponent can force on you. And, honestly, at that point you'd have no one to blame but yourself
Taxman's attack only hits you if you have at least 5 cards in hand, but yes, Cutpurse can theoretically leave you with no money. But that's not really much of a problem in practical terms, because by the time your opponent's bought multiple Cutpurses, you should really have some other cards that give you money, either other Treasure cards or Actions cards with +coin (possibly including Cutpurses of your own). So, for that play to consistently lock you out, you'd have to have made some really serious mistakes
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Actually, it can potentially be a good move to softlock yourself by trashing your deck, in rare situations:
Assume there's only one Province left, you can't buy it on your turn, and your opponent has trashed down their deck down to only a few Possessions and Villages with Donate, remaining in debt. If they will certainly be able to use your deck to gain the last province for a win before your next "own" turn, then donating your entire deck guarantees you a stalemate instead of a certain loss.
It might also be possible for this to be a good move in order to get an insurmountable lead due to Tomb (and thus a stalemate), if you would certainly lose without the Tomb VPs.
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Actually, it can potentially be a good move to softlock yourself by trashing your deck, in rare situations:
Assume there's only one Province left, you can't buy it on your turn, and your opponent has trashed down their deck down to only a few Possessions and Villages with Donate, remaining in debt. If they will certainly be able to use your deck to gain the last province for a win before your next "own" turn, then donating your entire deck guarantees you a stalemate instead of a certain loss.
It might also be possible for this to be a good move in order to get an insurmountable lead due to Tomb (and thus a stalemate), if you would certainly lose without the Tomb VPs.
Generally with Possession, as soon as your opponent is taking more turns with your deck than you are, anything you can do to hurt the ability of your deck to do anything besides play more Possessions hurts your opponent more than it hurts you, and so donating down to a deck that can't repay the debt is pretty often a reasonable move (and putting Possession on your ban list to avoid getting these games is an even more reasonable move).