Dominion Strategy Forum
Dominion => Dominion Articles => Topic started by: WanderingWinder on June 10, 2013, 06:25:11 pm
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Squire
Squire is my new favorite card. Its biggest strength lies in its versatility, which makes it a potential contributor in almost any deck, yet it is almost never the star of the show. Let’s take a look at several of its different roles:
Squire in an engine:
As Village: Squire-as-village is actually pretty bad as far as villages go, at least as the main village of an engine (somewhat similar to Shanty Town in this way). The reason, of course, is that it doesn’t draw cards. This leads it to having 20% fewer cards in your initial hand to start off a draw chain with. It furthermore hampers the efforts to draw your whole deck, as like a treasure, it counts as a ‘stop’ card. Thus, with a smithy variant, you end up with one more card than you started with rather than two, which is a pretty big deal when you are trying to run chains of actions together, and the $1 just doesn’t make up for this. It can still work if other things set up well, but it is harder to make happen than with most any other village.
But, I hear you ask, what about Fishing Village? Fishing Village also only gives you $1 and 2 actions on its turns and doesn’t draw cards, and it’s like the best village there is! What gives? Well, fishing village gives you the bonus twice, but actually more important, it is effectively a Bazaar on the second turn. Bazaar is a 5-cost card, and a pretty good one (and note that you have the full 5 to start drawing things with on the second turn). There is a squire-village tacked on the front to draw it DOWN to 3-cost (along with it missing the shuffle a bit more and being slightly delayed)! So when you look at it this way, it makes squire-as-village look pretty bad. And I think it is fairly bad, though not terrible.
Of course, there are other things to do in an engine with squire. Mostly this is using it as double-buy. How often do you need that many buys? Well, not *that* often, but it can often be useful. This is particularly true when you are trying to buy engines off of cheap components – and squire is one of these, so that is more often than normal. It also has nice synergies with cost reducers, principally highway, in this sense.
Squire for Big Money:
Yup, squire has a place in the big money deck. Let’s look at it first of all as a silver-gainer. Against bureaucrat, it gives you $1 more, but the silver isn’t top-decked, and you don’t get the attack. Against Jack, you get $1 for the filtering and drawing and trashing. Against explorer, you usually end up with $1 less. In general, these are all ‘disadvantage to squire’. But these cards cost a fair bit more than squire. Okay, except jack (which has numerous advantages), they aren’t very strong, either. Actually the best comparison is ironworks, which is exactly the same upon gaining silver.
But this isn’t the whole story. Squire once again has versatility. For the big money deck, this usually won’t mean the buys. But the actions option can be pretty useful here. The thing is, the biggest downside of all those cards mentioned above is that they are terminal. But squire doesn’t have to be. If it collides with one other terminal, it can still be a copper. And with two, it can be quite a boon. So it plays really well in those BM decks where you’d like to play a decent number of non-terminal-draw actions – decks which feature e.g. militia, merchant ship, marauder, monument (what is it with the ‘m’s?), cutpurse, swindler, fortune teller, or even other silver-flooders. Generally, in this kind of deck, you can have cantrip-with-bonuses, usually either some lab or peddler variant, but while this is still possible here, it tends to be slightly less effective, as this pushes out the squire’s usefulness. As normal, it’s all opportunity cost here. In any case, such decks with take the silver-flood-ability of squire when it doesn’t come with other actions and use the village-ness when it does.
Slogs
Perhaps the best use of squire is in the slog. It looks like there are two good options here: +buys (and gain lots of coppers), or gain a silver. Actually, you almost always want to take the silvers. I actually must admit, I have gotten this wrong a lot. Okay, first thing’s first: you are generally just trying to maximize your money per hand in a slog, so more or less we can just look at money density. The thought I had was that more coppers are going to be more resilient than silvers to the bloating of a deck, because each extra green card has less of an overall impact. This trend is true generally, but 2 coppers can of course *never* produce a higher money density than 1 silver – it’s the *same* amount of money but with an extra card. So generally, you want the silvers. The exceptions to this rule are if you want to run something which cares about copper (potentially apothecary, coppersmith, counting house), something very unusual with piles running out, if you want to use at least one of the extra buys on something other than copper, or for a card like Gardens. With gardens, 4 isn’t much harder to hit with coppers than silvers, and you get an extra card for points at the end.
Why is Squire a particularly good card here, when the other silver gainers mentioned above aren’t considered magnificent? Well, for one thing, those cards aren’t terrible. For another, it’s cheaper. This helps a lot in comparison to explorer, which you normally don’t want to spend the time to get many of. It actually helps a fair bit in comparison to the others as well, as it is not unusual to miss $4 relatively often in such decks. And against them, it also provides $1 of cash, which is pretty big in a slog deck. Finally, you can use its own excess buys to pick up something like 3-6 of them really quickly, and this just gets you lots more silver a lot quicker.
General Considerations:
Squire, more than any single card, can empty piles really fast. This is mostly because it has the 2 buy option, but the cheapness of the card itself also helps quite a bit. You can singlehandedly run 3 pile in 12ish turns fairly consistently (though you really don’t want to do this, as most often one of these needs to be curse, and you end up with 1 VP…). So you have to watch out for piles chomping down fast. Indeed, I have launched an assault through *all* the ruins in only a couple of turns to end a game in a flash before.
Squire can also be trashed to gain any attack card in the supply. This actually ends up being not a very useful ability – the thing is, by the time you get the trasher, the squire, and manage to get them together so that you can trash the squire, it usually would have been easier to just buy the thing. But okay, there are still some cases where this can be potent – most notably, if you are wanting to trash *everything* via chapel, or even more to the point, watchtower, which in hand turns $2 and a buy to any attack in the supply, topdecked. On the attacks side, it can be a quick way to gain Goons and especially Scrying Pool and Familiar. Actually, because you *have* to gain an attack, it can sometimes (quite rarely) be a downside, as you can’t say junk deal squires on some boards without having to gain thieves. Mostly, though, this ability is a nice little bonus to a deck where there are attacks you would like to gain already, trashers you would like to use already, and squire is relatively useful and a card you at least wouldn’t mind having in your deck already. It’s rarely something you want to go out of your way for.
Works with:
Watchtower
Jack of All Trades
Solid non-drawing Terminals
Highway
As icing and glue in an engine
Slogs - Duke and Silk Road and especially Gardens and Feodum
Conflicts with:
Terminal draw Big Money
Most engines without other villages
Usually not a bad card, but can be pushed out if there is something better – opportunity cost.
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First comment to mention Feodum!
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First comment to mention Feodum!
Does Squire have any advantage here apart from being a Silver gainer? What makes Squire better than Jack or Bureaucrat or Trader? OK, maybe it's unfair to demand it improve upon Trader.
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It's interesting, because at first glance it looked like such an engine card to me, like it was basically just a slightly different Hamlet, offering +buy, virtual coin, and +action... everything engines want! And of course, it is nice in engines and in many of the same ways as Hamlet, but yeah, it's not actually such a star there at all.
But really, it's a Slog/Rush card, for use with Feodum, Gardens, Silk Road, and Vineyards.
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First comment to mention Feodum!
Does Squire have any advantage here apart from being a Silver gainer? What makes Squire better than Jack or Bureaucrat or Trader? OK, maybe it's unfair to demand it improve upon Trader.
Flexibility, speed, and price. You can piledrive Squires without worry about collisions, you can do it quickly using its +buys, and it's cheap. But no... there's no beating Trader for Feodum support.
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It's amazing in Gardens games. They each give you a coin, and you can get a lot of buys from them. One time, I played a squire for actions, a squire for buys, another squire for buys, and bought a gardens and four copper.
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First comment to mention Feodum!
I didn't get that in there? XD Fixing shortly.
By the way, I've never actually *done* that - how does it work? Something like Step 1: Buy as many squires as possible, as fast as possible. Step 2: Buy as many feoda as you can, always gaining as many silvers with the squires as your hands allow (and poaching provinces when possible?) Step 3: Continue gaining as many silvers as possible, and pick up the odd province and duchy here and there?
How strong is this? I mean, I would guess it beats most big money, but I would think it would lose to most engines. Of course, the three pile threat will be big, so maybe not?
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How strong is this? I mean, I would guess it beats most big money, but I would think it would lose to most engines. Of course, the three pile threat will be big, so maybe not?
I think that's right. Looking over my Squire/Feodum games, I don't see any where my opponent went engine and I responded with a pile of Squires, so it must never have looked very good to me.
If your opponent mirrors, then I think you want all the Squires you can get, but otherwise you don't need all that many. Here's a semi-mirror where we started by running out the Squires and the rest of the game played like a rush: http://dom.retrobox.eu/?/20130603/log.5101a6c4e4b02b7235c3860f.1370325572311.txt
Here I stopped at 4 Squires vs. Boodaloo's BM-nothing: http://dom.retrobox.eu/?/20130410/log.5101a6c4e4b02b7235c3860f.1365641703322.txt
And this one I bought 6 Squires and lost to a BM with hoard that sniped 4 of my Feodums: http://dom.retrobox.eu/?/20130330/log.5101a6c4e4b02b7235c3860f.1364708572853.txt
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Hoard is a pretty good counter to alt-VPs because sniping start to look pretty nice when it comes with a Gold (or maybe more).
I don't see how Squire is good for Vineyards. Is it just because is a resonably spammable action?
About the article directly:
"+buys (and gain lots of coppers), or gain a copper."
last word should be silver, and I would also say "buy lots of coppers" instead, because it makes the distinction of the two options clearer.
It seems that at some point you are recommending against Squire for Duchy/Duke, but I'm not entirely sure, and I think it would be best to mention it a little bit before the "works/conflicts with" part.
I would add that is pretty good for Goons, even if you cannot trash it to get Goons (of course it you can, is a lot better). It can give you actions if you need them, and also plenty of buys for the big turns to pay off a lot, and also, its really cheap so its a nice buy for those mid-to-end-game turns when you need to acquire some points to manage the VP difference when 3-pile is close.
I think its also pretty good for Wharf engines, because Wharf draw is so good that even the village that doesn't draw can make it work pretty well, and the fact that you can get lots with Wharf's +buy makes the engine construction way faster, giving options like Wharf/Wharf+Squire/Wharf+2*Squire/2*Wharf, which is pretty good to avoid wasting money and smoothing the engine-building. Since you are not wasting money, the +$1 comes in pretty handy, and I would consider using Squire ahead of Native Village for building a Wharf engine (although possibly combining them is better?).
Finally, I would point out that is pretty nice for 5/2 opengins, especially when you get a nice $5 terminal. There are not that many 2s that you want on most 5/2s, and the ones that you do want, is because they probably dominate and you would get them for 3 in many cases (Chapel, Fool's Gold). This one has its own little "useful contribuition" that you almost always want, together with Haven and Hamlet.
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Hoard is a pretty good counter to alt-VPs because sniping start to look pretty nice when it comes with a Gold (or maybe more).
I don't see how Squire is good for Vineyards. Is it just because is a resonably spammable action?
It's cheap and gives buys. And can be nonterminal or even a village. But I don't think this merits special mention.
About the article directly:
"+buys (and gain lots of coppers), or gain a copper."
last word should be silver, and I would also say "buy lots of coppers" instead, because it makes the distinction of the two options clearer.
Thanks! Fixed.
It seems that at some point you are recommending against Squire for Duchy/Duke,
What makes you think this? I wasn't trying to give that vibe at all, and I don't see it when I am reading it. I am suggesting going for silvers in slogs rather than copper. Maybe the above error threw you off, and it's better now that that is fixed?
but I'm not entirely sure, and I think it would be best to mention it a little bit before the "works/conflicts with" part.
I would add that is pretty good for Goons, even if you cannot trash it to get Goons (of course it you can, is a lot better). It can give you actions if you need them, and also plenty of buys for the big turns to pay off a lot, and also, its really cheap so its a nice buy for those mid-to-end-game turns when you need to acquire some points to manage the VP difference when 3-pile is close.
I think its also pretty good for Wharf engines, because Wharf draw is so good that even the village that doesn't draw can make it work pretty well, and the fact that you can get lots with Wharf's +buy makes the engine construction way faster, giving options like Wharf/Wharf+Squire/Wharf+2*Squire/2*Wharf, which is pretty good to avoid wasting money and smoothing the engine-building. Since you are not wasting money, the +$1 comes in pretty handy, and I would consider using Squire ahead of Native Village for building a Wharf engine (although possibly combining them is better?).
Finally, I would point out that is pretty nice for 5/2 opengins, especially when you get a nice $5 terminal. There are not that many 2s that you want on most 5/2s, and the ones that you do want, is because they probably dominate and you would get them for 3 in many cases (Chapel, Fool's Gold). This one has its own little "useful contribuition" that you almost always want, together with Haven and Hamlet.
None of these things is really incorrect, but I am not trying to list out all the interactions - I mean, I could list out at least a dozen others of this quality. So mostly I am trying to get archetypes and specific spectacular interactions (like watchtower). I mean, these things you would just generally expect, more or less from general principles, and if I've written things right, you should be able to work those out from reading the article.
If I listed everything, the article would be way too long to read.
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It seems that at some point you are recommending against Squire for Duchy/Duke,
What makes you think this? I wasn't trying to give that vibe at all, and I don't see it when I am reading it. I am suggesting going for silvers in slogs rather than copper. Maybe the above error threw you off, and it's better now that that is fixed?
I think this made it: "With gardens, 4 isn’t much harder to hit with coppers than silvers", which made me think that for $4 alt-VP slogs (Gardens and possibly Silk-Road) Coppers may be a better choice at some point, but for the more expensive alt-VP (basically Duchy/Duke) you'd rather have the Silvers. I think it would be good to clarify what to recommend for each of Garden/Silk Road/Duchy-Duke/Curse slogs, and I think its Copper for the first two and Silver for the last two (that's what I currently understand from the article, although I cannot say it states it categorically other than for Gardens.
None of these things is really incorrect, but I am not trying to list out all the interactions - I mean, I could list out at least a dozen others of this quality. So mostly I am trying to get archetypes and specific spectacular interactions (like watchtower). I mean, these things you would just generally expect, more or less from general principles, and if I've written things right, you should be able to work those out from reading the article.
If I listed everything, the article would be way too long to read.
Ok, its true I went a little far with the list, but I thought Wharf was worth mentioning because it goes against what you specifically indicate that Squire is usually bad as a Village. As I said, getting the +Buy from the drawer gives the money you get from Squire more valuable.
Goons I also put it in the list because is the case in which you do want to use all those buys in an engine, but yeah, is probably too particular.
In any case, is your article, I just throw suggestions, catch the ones you think serve you well.
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Trashing squire for some attacks is pretty good in the mid game. A big shot here can be a scaling TfB. Take Upgrade. In the mid game, where you can expect to draw your entire every other turn (i.e. before you have a reliable draw deck) you may find yourself with a spare $2. Using his on Squire can be extremely cost effective. Next time you pair the Squire with Upgrade, the Squire becomes say a Rabble and a Village. You just gained 6 value off $2 and a "+1$" action. This is quite strong. There are boards (like Margrave/Fishing village/Upgrade) where I'd often be tempted to spend $5 as a Fv/Squire knowing that next turn the Squire becomes Margrave/Fishing village.
Which is one of the potentially strong bits about the on-trash benefit of Squire. It will often net you $3 coin in value when you trash it (making a worthless late game Chapel into a pseudo-Expand), with a Remodel or Upgrade type card (e.g. Governor, Develop, etc.) you get 5 coin of free value (if you have a $5 attack). My favorites here are Salvager - I spend $2 now to make $7 over the next two plays - and Squire is good for setting up engines where I can Salvage twice, Forge (either Forge Squire + 5 to make 7 so I can say gain Kc/Develop the Forges later or Squire + Goons direct to Province) and Procession - +2 coin and pick a very nice combo of buys, silvers, or actions, gain $3 action and gain a $5. If there are any decent $6 actions as well, well this just becomes a quick path to insanity.
Long story short, with the right attacks on the board (e.g. Ghost Ship, Rabble, Margrave) any action trashing can make Squire a really nice value adding strategy. With scaling TfB's (e.g. Bishop, Salvager, Forge, Expand), Squire can add a lot of value one turn delayed. With Procession this just enters the realm of insanity, you can potentially gain 12 in value (2 silvers, a 3, and a 5) - allowing you to non-terminally gain the ingredients needed to Forge a colony or a Province + Gold.
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Nice article as usual. A few questions/comments:
1. As jomini said, I think you're underselling the usefulness of the on-trash ability for engines. Sure it's great with Watchtower, but it's only slightly less good if you're drawing a lot. Plus, since you have that extra squire floating around that it going to turn into an attack card eventually, you have a slightly better village density.
2. You should say it "works with" draw-to-X, since there the lack of +card isn't a big deal.
3. Does it really "conflict with" terminal draw big money? Sure you can draw it dead, but you don't actually draw *that* many cards in this way. You draw at least twice as many cards live as dead, and a reasonable amount of draw cards at least have a semi-remedy for dead draw (Library, Embassy, Vault, Catacombs) It's probably not the best opening, but it seem like it should be better than Silver/Silver in a lot of cases. It might not be the greatest strategy ever, but I don't think the synergy with drawing terminals is much worse than with non-drawing ones.
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Maybe it's just me, but squire looks like it should compete with fishing village for best draw-to-x-engine village, especially when your draw is watchtower (whether or not there is an attack present). The lack of $1 the next turn is unfortunate but the buy option for later seems like it would really help you in maintaining your engine in the endgame. Maybe not though (I'm just now into the "really get better at dominion" stage).
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Maybe it's just me, but squire looks like it should compete with fishing village for best draw-to-x-engine village, especially when your draw is watchtower (whether or not there is an attack present). The lack of $1 the next turn is unfortunate but the buy option for later seems like it would really help you in maintaining your engine in the endgame. Maybe not though (I'm just now into the "really get better at dominion" stage).
The big thing for Fishing Village isn't the coin on the next turn, but the free action on the next turn.
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Maybe it's just me, but squire looks like it should compete with fishing village for best draw-to-x-engine village, especially when your draw is watchtower (whether or not there is an attack present). The lack of $1 the next turn is unfortunate but the buy option for later seems like it would really help you in maintaining your engine in the endgame. Maybe not though (I'm just now into the "really get better at dominion" stage).
The big thing for Fishing Village isn't the coin on the next turn, but the free action on the next turn.
Oh yeah that's huge, since it means you have two shots to find your branching action with your terminal draw effects.
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First comment to mention Feodum!
Does Squire have any advantage here apart from being a Silver gainer? What makes Squire better than Jack or Bureaucrat or Trader? OK, maybe it's unfair to demand it improve upon Trader.
It's non-terminal, I just played a game with Jack and Squire. And playing with one Jack, a few squires let me get 17 Silvers pretty quick...I forget exactly how quick. But I liked it.
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Just played a Chapel/Squire/Familiar game....
Never have I seen the curse pile emptied faster in a real game of dominion. I think I had 3 Familiars in deck at the end of Turn 6 with a deck that could play each of them every turn. My opponent went the traditional route through potion. I shudder to think how fast they'd go with both players going the Squire route.
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I just realized that the on-trash ability is really, really weak in most cases, since even if you manage to connect Squire and your trasher, it's not very good because you are trashing a good card instead of a junk card, which means one more junk card in your deck and one less good card in your hand. You can probably just buy another Squire that turn, so it's as if you just bought the Attack card and did nothing else, and you spent both of your opening buys doing that; double Silver would have been better almost certainly.
It can be worth it with trashers that trash more than one card (especially Chapel, Forge and Count which trash an unlimited number of cards) or if getting the attack early is very important and not very likely to happen through normal means. But usually, it's a trap. And I just got trapped last game.
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I just realized that the on-trash ability is really, really weak in most cases, since even if you manage to connect Squire and your trasher, it's not very good because you are trashing a good card instead of a junk card, which means one more junk card in your deck and one less good card in your hand. You can probably just buy another Squire that turn, so it's as if you just bought the Attack card and did nothing else, and you spent both of your opening buys doing that; double Silver would have been better almost certainly.
It can be worth it with trashers that trash more than one card (especially Chapel, Forge and Count which trash an unlimited number of cards) or if getting the attack early is very important and not very likely to happen through normal means. But usually, it's a trap. And I just got trapped last game.
You can also pair it with upgraders like Remodel or Governor (especially your opponent's). Or cards with more restricted trashing, like Jack, Hermit, or Death Cart. But yeah, it doesn't quite shine for trashers which are designed for removing junk.
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It can be worth it with trashers that trash more than one card (especially Chapel, Forge and Count which trash an unlimited number of cards) or if getting the attack early is very important and not very likely to happen through normal means. But usually, it's a trap. And I just got trapped last game.
Chapel doesn't trash an unlimited number of cards. It trashes up to 4 though, which is usually enough.
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I just realized that the on-trash ability is really, really weak in most cases, since even if you manage to connect Squire and your trasher, it's not very good because you are trashing a good card instead of a junk card, which means one more junk card in your deck and one less good card in your hand. You can probably just buy another Squire that turn, so it's as if you just bought the Attack card and did nothing else, and you spent both of your opening buys doing that; double Silver would have been better almost certainly.
It can be worth it with trashers that trash more than one card (especially Chapel, Forge and Count which trash an unlimited number of cards) or if getting the attack early is very important and not very likely to happen through normal means. But usually, it's a trap. And I just got trapped last game.
My initial impression was a bit biased because the first game I played with Squire I was able to use the on-trash ability to great effect. There was Forager, and once I had trashed out all the starting cards and was drawing my deck, I could trash a Squire, use the buy to get a new Squire, and gain a Knight. Since then, however, it really hasn't come up as often as I'd have thought.
The big things I think are that:
1. You need to be drawing a lot of cards so that spending 2 cards out of your hand is not a big deal)
2. You need to have buys to spare. if you end up buying the Squire for $5, you might as well have just bought the attack.
3. You need the attack to be something you want en masse more so than wanting them soon. For example, it's better to just buy your Mountebank to get it fast, but if you're building your engine off lots of Rabbles or something, you can get them via Squire.
4. You need to actually *remember* that Squire has that ability. Since you're not using it primarily that capacity that often, it's easy to forget!
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The way I see squire's on trash effect is that sometimes it's cool, but mostly not a big deal. It's cool with Scrying Pool and Familiar. It's fun with Goons. But otherwise you rarely trigger it on purpose unless maybe its a Dark Ages only game with things like Procession. That's actually probably the best case for it.
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Works with:
Watchtower
Jack of All Trades
Just curious if there's any particular reason these two make the list but Library doesn't?
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Works with:
Watchtower
Jack of All Trades
Just curious if there's any particular reason these two make the list but Library doesn't?
Watchtower is an obligatory mention because it lets you trash Squire immediately when you buy it. If you open Watchtower, you can pretty much guarantee getting any attack card you want on the second reshuffle. Most notable are Familiar (no Potion needed!) and Goons.
JoaT also has the ability to trash Squire alongside the fixed draw, so maybe that's why it's mentioned. I'm less certain about that.
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It's amazing in Gardens games. They each give you a coin, and you can get a lot of buys from them. One time, I played a squire for actions, a squire for buys, another squire for buys, and bought a gardens and four copper.
A single Beggar can almost do the same as the three Squires in such a case. :P
(Though one could say that Beggar-Gardens is "more than amazing", so your claim may still stand...)
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It's amazing in Gardens games. They each give you a coin, and you can get a lot of buys from them. One time, I played a squire for actions, a squire for buys, another squire for buys, and bought a gardens and four copper.
A single Beggar can almost do the same as the three Squires in such a case. :P
(Though one could say that Beggar-Gardens is "more than amazing", so your claim may still stand...)
Just because Squire is good for Gardens doesn't mean Beggar isn't. Beggar is probably the best card in all of Dominion for Gardens.
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It's amazing in Gardens games. They each give you a coin, and you can get a lot of buys from them. One time, I played a squire for actions, a squire for buys, another squire for buys, and bought a gardens and four copper.
A single Beggar can almost do the same as the three Squires in such a case. :P
(Though one could say that Beggar-Gardens is "more than amazing", so your claim may still stand...)
Just because Squire is good for Gardens doesn't mean Beggar isn't. Beggar is probably the best card in all of Dominion for Gardens.
Of course it is. As I tried to indicate with the bracketed part, Squire is still very good Gardens support, but I don't think I'd call it "amazing". How often do you have three Squires in hand in a Gardens rush? At most once per game, I think. And with only one or two in hand, it's closer in strength to Woodcutter than to Beggar.
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It's amazing in Gardens games. They each give you a coin, and you can get a lot of buys from them. One time, I played a squire for actions, a squire for buys, another squire for buys, and bought a gardens and four copper.
A single Beggar can almost do the same as the three Squires in such a case. :P
(Though one could say that Beggar-Gardens is "more than amazing", so your claim may still stand...)
Just because Squire is good for Gardens doesn't mean Beggar isn't. Beggar is probably the best card in all of Dominion for Gardens.
Of course it is. As I tried to indicate with the bracketed part, Squire is still very good Gardens support, but I don't think I'd call it "amazing". How often do you have three Squires in hand in a Gardens rush? At most once per game, I think. And with only one or two in hand, it's closer in strength to Woodcutter than to Beggar.
The power to be non-terminal with 2 in hand, as well and the ability to gain 3 cards per turn instead of 2 makes it way stronger than Woodcutter as a Garden Enabler.
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The power to be non-terminal with 2 in hand, as well and the ability to gain 3 cards per turn instead of 2 makes it way stronger than Woodcutter as a Garden Enabler.
It is also way easier to load up on Squires than either Beggar or Woodcutter, which is important. You deplete the pile faster for a rush, and also start pounding earlier on Gardens. In non-mirrors, I would say Squire/Gardens is waaaay better than Woodcutter/Gardens (which is on itself not too good) and possibly a bit faster but less scoring than Beggar/Gardens. If Squire and Beggar are on the kingdom, I would probably open with 2xSquire to try to get some double Beggars and deplete Beggars faster.
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The way I see squire's on trash effect is that sometimes it's cool, but mostly not a big deal. It's cool with Scrying Pool and Familiar. It's fun with Goons. But otherwise you rarely trigger it on purpose unless maybe its a Dark Ages only game with things like Procession. That's actually probably the best case for it.
This. Procession is a arguably the best way to make use of Squire's on-trash effect. Especially with a $3 Action you want on the board.
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The way I see squire's on trash effect is that sometimes it's cool, but mostly not a big deal. It's cool with Scrying Pool and Familiar. It's fun with Goons. But otherwise you rarely trigger it on purpose unless maybe its a Dark Ages only game with things like Procession. That's actually probably the best case for it.
This. Procession is a arguably the best way to make use of Squire's on-trash effect. Especially with a $3 Action you want on the board.
I think Watchtower is better.
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Seems to me that Watchtower is best at enabling "Squire as an expensive attack for $2" because there's no need to connect. The other trasher that hits Squire easier than most: Hermit. I don't think it deserves mention in the article because on most boards it's not really a direct synergy with Squire. You still need an attack strong enough to be worth gaining this way.
But reading this thread and thinking of Hermit did lead me to play around with Yet Another Madman Megaturn (tm): Hermit/Squire/Goons. Works a lot like Hermit/Market Square but might actually go off faster. The idea is to empty the Hermit and Squire piles with all those gains and buys while gaining 4-5 each of Madman and Goons, maybe more if your opponent doesn't mirror. Some of the Goons can be gained during the megaturn with leftover Hermit/Squire pairs, if you have enough Madmen to draw them, so Goons are sort of the last priority to gain in a non-mirror. The megaturn is just draw everything, play all your Goons, empty the estates to end the game and rake in enough VP chips to win. I tried maybe 10 games against bots and was consistently able to end it on turn 12 or 13 with 40-60 points, depending on how many Goons I played. Not sure how the mirror would go though, Hermit split would matter a lot, and with both players gaining Goons quickly you'd have to watch out for the chance to empty that pile, maybe even earlier than when you'd have the coin and buys/gains to drive the Estates.
If that's already a known thing, then I guess I'm the only one who learned something today. If not, I suppose I've contributed something but it's not like Goons needed more help :) Obviously in the context of general Squire discussion this is very much an edge case, but I hear f.ds is okay with edge cases.
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Sounds nice, but after Goons attack, Madmen is really impaired for drawing. You would need some extra drawing to get you started.
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Yeah, Hermit/MS and other Madman megaturns have the same issue with discard attacks, except obviously the board's guaranteed to have one here. But how likely is the opponent to have an engine that plays the discard attack every single turn by 12 or 13? I think much like Hermit/MS, you might have to wait a few turns for a full hand and then go off, but 40+ points and 3 empty piles as late as turn 17 is likely still a win.
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Yeah, Hermit/MS and other Madman megaturns have the same issue with discard attacks, except obviously the board's guaranteed to have one here. But how likely is the opponent to have an engine that plays the discard attack every single turn by 12 or 13? I think much like Hermit/MS, you might have to wait a few turns for a full hand and then go off, but 40+ points and 3 empty piles as late as turn 17 is likely still a win.
With Hermit/MS, you want to wait until you get two Madmen in the same hand according to the article. That's probably true for other Madman megaturn strategies, too, and it requires some luck to connect two Madmen when you aren't hit by Goons. Even if that fails, you can always try your luck with a single Madman hand if you have to, but you don't have too many chances to fail at that.
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It might be less risky to try a single Madman here due to deck size... Hermit/MS per the article wants a ~29-card deck when it goes off. Hermit/Squire/Goons is at most 27: 7 copper, 10 Hermit/Madman, 10 Squire/Goons (depending on how many of each you've changed over). It could be significantly fewer if the opponent is also buying Hermits and/or Squires, or if you leave a card or two behind and plan to get them on the megaturn (you'll have plenty of buys/gains).
You also don't necessarily need Hermit as trasher on the megaturn itself, since you can pick up Goons on earlier turns. So the "have exactly two more Madmen than Hermits" rule from Hermit/MS doesn't apply; you're free to put more Madmen in your deck.
Still, if I saw support for a discard-attack engine on the board, I'd think twice about this combo just like I would about Hermit +MS/Bridge/Coppersmith. I think it's cute, and could dominate some boards on which it appears, but of course it has weaknesses just like pretty much every combo.
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You could also get turn like Squire for actions, Goons for attack and you then even play another Goons/Squire/Hermit. This would probably slow down the engine whilst not slowing you down by so much.
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But no... there's no beating Trader for Feodum support.
[/quote]
Masterpiece
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Squire, more than any single card, can empty piles really fast.
Stonemason, anyone? 4 buys of $4 empties the pile, and then some.
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About trash-to-gain-attack: Sure, you wouldn't buy a trasher and a Squire *just* to get an attack card. But Squire is still Squire, and you probably wanted to have a trasher anyway. In just about any TfB game, your Squire is both a good target *and* a nice way to prevent yourself from running your deck dry of Treasure cards - this is especially something that needs careful attention in Bishop games. Another plus for Bishop games is that you might be able to trash your Squire on another player's turn (if it's a good idea given the circumstances).
This card does almost everything Pawn does - the only thing it can't do is the +card, and it can't do +action +buy together - big deal. It's hard to justify Pawn against a Squire, unless you're playing with KC or something, and then it's a better last-resort target.
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But Squire is still Squire, and you probably wanted to have a trasher anyway.
That's two arguments against the on-trash ability. You want the Squire, and you want to use the trasher for something else.
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But Squire is still Squire, and you probably wanted to have a trasher anyway.
That's two arguments against the on-trash ability. You want the Squire, and you want to use the trasher for something else.
Oh come on we already know this is less than high odds setup - you need something that can trash actions and a worthwhile attack. Of course the ability is situational - but it isn't exactly uncommon. Upgrade, Butcher, Bishop, Apprentice, Remake, Salvager, and Governor all get a lot out of free $4 or $5 attack cards even if you just feed the attack cards in turn into the TfB. Now yes there is a lot of trashing that doesn't go after Squire - Loan, Spice Merchant, Moneylender, etc. but enough does, and more importantly enough does and can go after whatever you get on trash.
Do I buy Squire solely for the on trash option? Yes. It is effectively a one shot gold for $2 when I have a reliable engine, scaling TfB, and don't need the buys or +action. I've dumped it into a Fishing village/Upgrade/Hunting grounds engine just so I could upgrade the Squire into a Sab and then Upgrade that into gold or Hunting grounds. I would not have touched it otherwise (I believe we had Haven and Market or something for $2 buys and +buy).
I mean come on, I'll buy Embargo as a one-shot silver for $2 in a well running engine and embargo the curses if I have the action balance and the card draw to sustain the engine. Buying a one-shot gold for the same price is a no-brainer. Either can get me to double provinces a half turn faster by letting me gain an extra component next turn.
The big problems are that some of the expensive attacks - like Mountebank, Witch, Soothesayer, and Cultist need to be gotten fast before they bury you (if you lack strong trashing) so silver gets there first. But a lot of attacks work much better in the slower, but stronger build up. Getting to a single Torturer is often just an expensive Militia/Smithy combo, one Rabble is junk if I've trashed my green or it is Shelter game - but it works green as cheap draw (a shuffle delayed) that really slows the end game, and of course Minion is nice with silver, but going the trashing route allows you to need far fewer Minions and to build value from Squire plays during the Minion chain.
The real strategic decision is deciding if you can shrink your deck fast enough to make Squires into one-shot golds a shuffle delayed or if you will get buried by the delay. Of course this is the same decision we make about a lot of cards - Altar gives you $5 next shuffle for trashing a copper, Money lender gives you $3 right now; now granted Alter can also trash other things, but we will often buy Altar even after our estates are gone or we want to keep them (e.g. using Barons as payload on an engine), so the trade off of good cards later over cash now is not foreign.
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Well, obviously if you're already at the point where you don't need your trasher for anything else, Squire's ability gets a lot better since it is no longer a card that you trash instead of a junk card.
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It is effectively a one shot gold for $2
Would you mind to explain that a little more? I really don't get it ...
I could upgrade the Squire into a Sab and then Upgrade that into gold or Hunting grounds
Doing so, you spent 2$, an additional turn, two uses of a 5$-cost and two slots (Squire, Sab) to gain a 3$-card and a 6$-card. That's not so bad, but it is definitely not what a one-shot-gold does, I mean we are talking about something similar to spoils, aren't we?
And I can't see any striking similarity between squire and spoils.
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tC: Consider the following. I'm playing engine and building to $22 coin per turn. I get my engine up to something reliable and have $7 and 2 coin.
Imagine I spend that on Bazaar and Embargo (turn 1). That gets me directly to $10 where I can buy two $5 components the next turn (say Bazaar and Rabble on turn 2).
Now imagine I spend that on Bazaar and Squire (turn 1). Next turn I trash the Squire. I can now buy a $6 (like Hunting Grounds or Altar) and pick up a Rabble. In this case, Squire has acted like the functional equivalent of a one-shot gold on turn 2.
But what if I don't want the attack (e.g. Torturer against a Tunnel opponent)? Well if I have:
1. Scaling Tfb I'm using.
2. A reliable enough engine.
3. Enough spare action balance.
Then we can imagine the following as out baseline: Turn 1 buy $5 (like Bazaar) & Estate (and yes this can be the best thing to do). Turn 2 Salvage the Estate, now we can buy two $5 (say Bazaar/Merchant ship). Turn 3 - we have $9 to spend ($2 coin from new Bazaars and $2 from Mship), buy a 5/4.
What happens when we use Squire instead? Turn 1 - buy Bazaar/Squire. Turn 2 Salvage the squire (by Bazaar/Mship), gain Torturer. Turn 3 Salvage the Torturer now we have $14 to spend.
But is Salvager a special type of scaling TfB? No. We can do the same thing with Expand. With the estate we can turn it into a $5 (say a bazaar) on T2. We still have $8 to spend so we could get another $5 (Mship) and buy a silver. On T3 then we can Expand the Silver to a $6, and have $9 to spend. We can then gain up $15 worth of cards on T3 with reasonable restrictions.
Expanding the Squire also gives us a Bazaar and we can buy Mship/Silver. However on T3 we can expand the attack up to $8 and have $11 to spend on cards.
Okay so that is baseline.
What happens if I just give you a spoils on T1 and we don't have scaling TfB?
T1: $10, buy Bazaar/Mship.
T2: $10, buy Bazaar/Mship.
T3: $13 to spend
Now obviously, it takes a good engine to get this sort of thing going, but one way to look at is that it gives you a one-shot gold delayed by a turn. The fact that it is useful of its own right in engines (if you fail to line it up with your scaling TfB) is pure gravy.
Doing so, you spent 2$, an additional turn, two uses of a 5$-cost and two slots (Squire, Sab) to gain a 3$-card and a 6$-card. That's not so bad, but it is definitely not what a one-shot-gold does, I mean we are talking about something similar to spoils, aren't we?
And I can't see any striking similarity between squire and spoils.
Oh come on, if I had a Spoils in hand I'd have picked up an Upgrade and Upgraded it into a Hunting Grounds/Gold. Squire was better than that in this instance.
The net effect, if your engine can support it, of buying Squire to trash and then feeding the attack to your scaling TfB is very often at least a one-shot gold a turn delayed, sometimes it is one-shot Plat in terms of how quickly it ramps up your card acquisition power. Sure it isn't precisely the same as Spoils, but then Chancellor isn't the same as a Silver for a lot of cases. Playing a Chancellor has around the same net effect of playing a Silver; using scaling TfB on a Squire can have around the same net effect of getting a free Spoils.
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Of course there need to be attack cards worth gaining, and a $6 card worth gaining. I've never seen any of this come into practice because it's just a pain to constantly line up two specific card if unless you already have a good engine going. And if you have a good engine going chance are a real Gold will help more than turn delays of fiddling with Squire and Upgrading them into things.
Maybe I'm wrong. I just have never ever seen this kind of thing be more effective than just buying components.
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@jomini: Thx for your detailed answer :) I do now understand, in which kind of situations you see squire as a one-shot-gold.
You precisely described the necessary effort to make it work, but it seems to me like you underestimate it:
if your engine can support it, of buying Squire to trash and then feeding the attack to your scaling TfB
I highlighted all the required ingredients, and I agree with KingZog both here:
I've never seen any of this come into practice because it's just a pain
and here:
Maybe I'm wrong. I just have never ever seen this kind of thing be more effective than just buying components.
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@jomini: Thx for your detailed answer :) I do now understand, in which kind of situations you see squire as a one-shot-gold.
You precisely described the necessary effort to make it work, but it seems to me like you underestimate it:
if your engine can support it, of buying Squire to trash and then feeding the attack to your scaling TfB
I highlighted all the required ingredients, and I agree with KingZog both here:
I've never seen any of this come into practice because it's just a pain
and here:
Maybe I'm wrong. I just have never ever seen this kind of thing be more effective than just buying components.
I've opened Watchtower on a Goons board with Squire before. So not to produce TfB fodder, but somewhat as a magical one-shot Gold-and-a-bit. And it is rather brutal. I could imagine there's some potential to add a TfB into the mix too in a setup like that.
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@jomini: Thx for your detailed answer :) I do now understand, in which kind of situations you see squire as a one-shot-gold.
You precisely described the necessary effort to make it work, but it seems to me like you underestimate it:
if your engine can support it, of buying Squire to trash and then feeding the attack to your scaling TfB
I highlighted all the required ingredients, and I agree with KingZog both here:
I've never seen any of this come into practice because it's just a pain
and here:
Maybe I'm wrong. I just have never ever seen this kind of thing be more effective than just buying components.
I've opened Watchtower on a Goons board with Squire before. So not to produce TfB fodder, but somewhat as a magical one-shot Gold-and-a-bit. And it is rather brutal. I could imagine there's some potential to add a TfB into the mix too in a setup like that.
Watchtower is special because it's effect is instant. You don't need to wait a shuffle and line up the two cards. So in the case of Watchtower I agree the on-trash ability is great and can be really useful.
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@jomini: Thx for your detailed answer :) I do now understand, in which kind of situations you see squire as a one-shot-gold.
You precisely described the necessary effort to make it work, but it seems to me like you underestimate it:
if your engine can support it, of buying Squire to trash and then feeding the attack to your scaling TfB
I highlighted all the required ingredients, and I agree with KingZog both here:
I've never seen any of this come into practice because it's just a pain
and here:
Maybe I'm wrong. I just have never ever seen this kind of thing be more effective than just buying components.
I've opened Watchtower on a Goons board with Squire before. So not to produce TfB fodder, but somewhat as a magical one-shot Gold-and-a-bit. And it is rather brutal. I could imagine there's some potential to add a TfB into the mix too in a setup like that.
Watchtower is special because it's effect is instant. You don't need to wait a shuffle and line up the two cards. So in the case of Watchtower I agree the on-trash ability is great and can be really useful.
Plus, it's guaranteed to hit the Squire and it's not something you could have used on an Estate in your deck instead.
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@jomini: Thx for your detailed answer :) I do now understand, in which kind of situations you see squire as a one-shot-gold.
You precisely described the necessary effort to make it work, but it seems to me like you underestimate it:
if your engine can support it, of buying Squire to trash and then feeding the attack to your scaling TfB
I highlighted all the required ingredients, and I agree with KingZog both here:
I've never seen any of this come into practice because it's just a pain
and here:
Maybe I'm wrong. I just have never ever seen this kind of thing be more effective than just buying components.
I've opened Watchtower on a Goons board with Squire before. So not to produce TfB fodder, but somewhat as a magical one-shot Gold-and-a-bit. And it is rather brutal. I could imagine there's some potential to add a TfB into the mix too in a setup like that.
Watchtower is special because it's effect is instant. You don't need to wait a shuffle and line up the two cards. So in the case of Watchtower I agree the on-trash ability is great and can be really useful.
Plus, it's guaranteed to hit the Squire and it's not something you could have used on an Estate in your deck instead.
Squire is an ok $2 card even if you never trash it. If you do trash it, it magically becomes an Attack card, most likely $4 or $5 in value, in addition to any other TfB effects your trasher may have. It's a good target for Upgrade or Junk Dealer. It's also a good target for Graverobber or Altar. It's only a so-so target for Remodel, unless there's a really nice $4 card on the board.
If you have Chapel, then spamming Squires can be the most reasonable way to gain attacks - $5 and a Squire will get you $6 and 3 buys, after all. Steward works too. Gain Silver from Squire early, or +2 actions if you're at risk of a terminal collision, or go for the buys when your trashers are ready for the Squire fodder.
Would I go out of my way trying to Forge or Expand a Squire if I didn't want the Squire for anything else in the first place? Well, no, but it's an ok $2 card, and it might be worth buying at the $3 mark often enough.
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Of course there need to be attack cards worth gaining, and a $6 card worth gaining. I've never seen any of this come into practice because it's just a pain to constantly line up two specific card if unless you already have a good engine going. And if you have a good engine going chance are a real Gold will help more than turn delays of fiddling with Squire and Upgrading them into things.
Maybe I'm wrong. I just have never ever seen this kind of thing be more effective than just buying components.
Upgrade/Chapel/Squire with any $5 attack. If you open 5/2, why on earth wouldn't you get to Gold via trashing the Squire? I can't imagine getting to $6 as fast while thinning down that much; not to mention that I get a freebie $3 (e.g. Silver). Other options, like Develop/Chapel can also get you built up faster with Squire.
The big thing is that using scaling TfB with Squire is a tactical trick that happens some games but not others just depending on how your early shuffle luck went. For instance, you hit $7 in your engine with 2 buys you can grab the gold, but that delays you on buying components just as much as Squire. Going Squire (which isn't that bad even in engines that have better parts)/Component lets you go just a half turn faster.
Minotaur:
Remodel though works in two other ways with Squire. Firstly, for an engine it is virtually always a good move to Remodel copper -> Squire. Squire's main weakness is the lack of +card, but when you are effectively decreasing deck size getting it, you are doing well. The other big thing is that Remodeling silver can be a strong option, particularly if you have strong engine options.
Much better, I find, is Butcher. Butchering Squires into Squires (and estates into Squires) gives you nice coin. Any $4 or $5 attack can then be Butchered into a Province every other turn; late game you can either splurge on Butchering attacks or just spending mass coin. The fact that Squire is equal price to Estate and $2 up from copper make a lot of the Scaling TfB better. Even something like Develop really likes adding Squire to board - Silvers can now be useful $4s and Squires, with attacks you can get a lot of value out.
Though as you say, none of this is compelling of its own right, but I'd say at least a fifth of Squire boards make these sorts of things somewhat viable.
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Of course there need to be attack cards worth gaining, and a $6 card worth gaining. I've never seen any of this come into practice because it's just a pain to constantly line up two specific card if unless you already have a good engine going. And if you have a good engine going chance are a real Gold will help more than turn delays of fiddling with Squire and Upgrading them into things.
Maybe I'm wrong. I just have never ever seen this kind of thing be more effective than just buying components.
Upgrade/Chapel/Squire with any $5 attack. If you open 5/2, why on earth wouldn't you get to Gold via trashing the Squire? I can't imagine getting to $6 as fast while thinning down that much; not to mention that I get a freebie $3 (e.g. Silver). Other options, like Develop/Chapel can also get you built up faster with Squire.
Because you aren't getting a Gold via trashing Squire. You are going through a process that takes a really long time. Probably longer than it takes Transmute to get a Gold.
So I need a strong trasher, Upgrade/Remake/Remodel, Squire, a $5 attack to what? Get a Gold? at the earliest you get to use this Gold by your third shuffle. And that assumes you open Squire+trasher, collide the two turn 3 or 4, then collide the attack card the next shuffle. And if you open chapel, my guess is that there is a better source of money on the board than Gold. Something like Bridge or Conspirator or something. Even if there's Grand Market, my guess is it's faster to just thin your deck and buy the GM's with $. Keep you attack cards you buy, keep the squires to gain silver and for actions, now you have more components in less time because you spent your time using your trashers to thin as opposed to gaining Gold.
I've played I don't know, 3000 games combining IRL and goko. Dark Ages was my very first expansion too. I have never, ever seen squire trashing to gain attack cards to then upgrade them as anything but a cute trick you can do once in a while under specific circumstances.
The big thing is that using scaling TfB with Squire is a tactical trick that happens some games but not others just depending on how your early shuffle luck went.
Exactly, it's a tactical trick. It happens, but really it's just so slow to turn you Squire into Golds. Transmute is bad, this is worse for Gold gaining.
For instance, you hit $7 in your engine with 2 buys you can grab the gold, but that delays you on buying components just as much as Squire. Going Squire (which isn't that bad even in engines that have better parts)/Component lets you go just a half turn faster.
That's why when I hit $7 early, I still buy the component. It does way more good than the gold. Like, way more. And if it's an attack, chances are you want to play it, not turn it into a gold. Buy the component, play the attack, Gold always comes later in an engine. Or even when there are even mildly strong attack cards.
Though as you say, none of this is compelling of its own right, but I'd say at least a fifth of Squire boards make these sorts of things somewhat viable.
On a fifth or Squire boards there may be attack cards worth gaining. But really, with trashing already at hand you won't need to trash Squires to get the $5 cards. It's those Estates taht stop you early on, and if you trash them you're fine. So use the Upgrade to turn the Estate into a Silver, keep the Squire for your engine and buy the attack card. I think the key word here is "somewhat." Just buying the cards is already "mostly" viable, so a somewhat vialbe trick that requires luck in essentially useless. Never mind the whole thing about not trimming you deck when you use your trashing ability to trash the Squire.
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Trashing a Squire to get an attack is only sometimes good. Certainly you want to be sure you're playing that attack at least once, if not twice. But if you have +buys, getting a Squire or two here and there can help. It's usually difficult to have too many Squires, so it shouldn't be that hard to force a mid-game trasher collision or two while having a Squire or two left over for +2 actions for your Rabble or Torturer or whatever. This wouldn't be worth the trouble if Squire weren't already a decent $2 card that both helps you buy itself, and play terminal-draw Attack cards you might gain with it. And it helps you recover from buying it instead of a Silver, though waiting a shuffle for it could hurt sometimes.
If I have $4 and two buys, there would probably have to be a strong $4 card on the board to make me skip double Squire (or a nice $2 card like Haven, depending on the board).
I would not pay $2 for an Estate you can trash to gain an Attack card, but that isn't what Squire is, either. I agree that trying to TfB your Attack card for a Gold is a bit of unpredictable gymnastics that *could* happen that way, but not exactly a plan or anything.
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Because you aren't getting a Gold via trashing Squire. You are going through a process that takes a really long time. Probably longer than it takes Transmute to get a Gold.
Not at all. Transmute requires you to:
1. Buy Potion.
2. Use a buy (early) on a 0P card.
3. Save a green.
4. Collide a green/Transmute
5. Use an action.
It slows you down in multiple ways. Squire, unlike Potion, is not a dead card. At worst it is a copper. This makes a big difference when you are going to engines, but unlike Transmute if you don't collide it, you still are pretty close to hitting $5. With Transmute you are carrying around three dead cards (potion, transmute, estate) waiting for the collision, with Squire you are carrying one at most. Transmute requires you use a $4 buy - something you virtually never see on a junk I-just-trashed-two-cards hand while Squire is just $2.
So I need a strong trasher, Upgrade/Remake/Remodel, Squire, a $5 attack to what? Get a Gold? at the earliest you get to use this Gold by your third shuffle. And that assumes you open Squire+trasher, collide the two turn 3 or 4, then collide the attack card the next shuffle. And if you open chapel, my guess is that there is a better source of money on the board than Gold. Something like Bridge or Conspirator or something. Even if there's Grand Market, my guess is it's faster to just thin your deck and buy the GM's with $. Keep you attack cards you buy, keep the squires to gain silver and for actions, now you have more components in less time because you spent your time using your trashers to thin as opposed to gaining Gold.
Okay Upgrade Chapel going for GM:
T3/T4: Most likely hands are something like CCCEChap/CCEEUpgradeC/C. We trash CCCEE, gain a Silver, buy a Silver.
Now our deck is C/CCCESSChapUpgrade
T5: CCCSChap - Trash CCC.
T6: EUpgradeSSChapC - Trash E -> S, trash C
T7: SSSUpgradeChap - Trash Chap (gain Silver) buy Gm.
T8: SSSSGmUpgrade - Buy Gm
T9: SSSSGmGmUpgrade - Buy Gm x2.
T10: SSSSGmGmGmGmUpgrade - buy Gm x2
Note The Upgrade was never "wasted" on a copper it always hit a leftover estate, the Chap never collided with the Upgrade and this gets us to a T6 Gm.
Now with Squire:
T3/T4: CCCEChap/CCEEUpgradeC/C. Trash CCCCE, buy Sqr. Deck: CCCEESqrUpgradeChap
T5: CCESqrChap- Trash CCESqr. Gain Sab
T6: UpgradeCESabChap: Upgrade (Sab -> Gm), trash CE
T7: UpgradeGmChap: Upgrade (Chap -> S) -> Gm buy Sqr x2.
T8: SqrSqrGmUpgradeS: Upgrade (Sqr -> S/Sab) -> Gm -> Sqr (gain S): Buy Gm.
T9: SqrSSUpgradeGmGmSab: Gm -> Gm -> Upgrade (Sab -> Gm) -> Sqr (gain S): buy Gm.
T10: SqrSSUpgradeGmGmGmGm: Gm x4 -> Upgrade Sqr (S/Sab): buy Gm x2.
Sqr gets its first Gm a turn earlier and ends on T10 with the same number of silvers plus a Sab that can either be played or turned into a freebie gold. And I gave both sets as close to the same shuffle luck on T5/6. Alternatively, Sqr has the option of skipping silver entirely and having far fewer stop cards at the expense of pounding Gm a turn or two slower. Upgrade/Chap/Sqr is just as fast as going for the money direct. Squire's silver gaining coupled with its cheap price and bonus gain on TfB lets you make up a slow T6/T7 with strong T8/T9. Now sure, if there is some better source of action-cash, then go for that ... but if the action cash costs $5 or $6 and your ultimate deck doesn't want silver, then Sqr can well be faster and better.
I've played I don't know, 3000 games combining IRL and goko. Dark Ages was my very first expansion too. I have never, ever seen squire trashing to gain attack cards to then upgrade them as anything but a cute trick you can do once in a while under specific circumstances.
Wonderful, and we care why again? 95% + of my Goko games don't require me to play in top form to win, IRL is higher with my wife and gaming friends, but you just don't need to play that well in the bulk of your games. The point is, shuffle luck sometimes hands you bad odds. You open Chapel/Upgrade and draw ChapEEEC on your first hand. Do you not get rid of the Chapels? Do you buy a Silver on 5C/Upgrade the next turn? Do you then save a copper on ChapCCCC the following turn? Squire is a tactical trick to remember when playing on boards where draw slots are less valuable (either through heavy trashing or easy drawing) than value gain.
Another easy example is something like Butcher/Scrying Pool. Will I mass Butcher coppers & estates to Squire? Yes. Will I, once I have a reliable draw deck with the Pools butcher a couple of Squires into Sabs and then Butcher those into Provinces? Yes. Particularly if there aren't other good +$ actions, I will take a turn delay over trying to fit gold into a Pool engine. Will I go engine with Butcher/Pool/Squire without an attack out at all? Sure, but if I'm deciding between two options of close value, the possibilities of even a crappy attack are worth recalling.
Exactly, it's a tactical trick. It happens, but really it's just so slow to turn you Squire into Golds. Transmute is bad, this is worse for Gold gaining.
No on your life. Transmute is massively slower. T3/4 to buy. T5/6/7 to get the gold. And it sucks down one of your better opening hands - a $4. It actively anti-synergizes with anything else that wants to preferentially trash estates (Salvager, Upgrade, Butcher, etc.) and is actively hurt by stronger trashing.
Squire shares none of that. At worst you carrying around one dead attack you are afraid to play. The better your trashing is, the easier it is to line up Tfb (Sqr -> Stuff); stuff -> better stuff. It works well with Salvager and Remake and you can even pick it up off of $2 hands (e.g. CCCCSteward).
If I'm deciding between something like Sqr engine/strong trashing and slog/Sqr I'm certainly going to see what options I have with attacks and TfB. In a close matchup between spamming Silver with Squire (or say Squire + B-crat), I can be swayed towards engine if there is a strong attack (e.g. Rabble) or a strong setup for leveraging a weak $5 attack (e.g. Butchering Sabs into provinces).
That's why when I hit $7 early, I still buy the component. It does way more good than the gold. Like, way more. And if it's an attack, chances are you want to play it, not turn it into a gold. Buy the component, play the attack, Gold always comes later in an engine. Or even when there are even mildly strong attack cards.
So why not get the Sqr/Component mix instead? Why not, if you then no longer need the Squire, but do need $, turn the Squire into a Gold?
Squire/scaling TfB/crappy $5 attack is a push towards going engine. If you do get $7/$3 instead of $5/$5 you can use Component/Squire to become Component/Gold rather than having just Component/Silver or Gold/Silver (or with a more flexible TfB, like Butcher, you can turn it into Component/Component).
On a fifth or Squire boards there may be attack cards worth gaining. But really, with trashing already at hand you won't need to trash Squires to get the $5 cards. It's those Estates taht stop you early on, and if you trash them you're fine. So use the Upgrade to turn the Estate into a Silver, keep the Squire for your engine and buy the attack card. I think the key word here is "somewhat." Just buying the cards is already "mostly" viable, so a somewhat vialbe trick that requires luck in essentially useless. Never mind the whole thing about not trimming you deck when you use your trashing ability to trash the Squire.
Depends on what I want to do. Take Remake, I can't buy actual value on a hand of RemakeEECC. So I can go E->S x2, buy Sqr. Sqr is no worse than a copper and with Remake having just punching two of three E -> S, I'm really unlikely to draw CCCESqr. However going Sqr -> attack is quite likely. Sqr here is literally competing against buy nothing on the inevitable $2 hands Remake gives you regularly. Buying able to get something out of those $2 is pretty good. And again even as a crappy Necropolis, Squire is not bad on these types of boards.
Regarding the deck thinning thing, eh not if the attack has draw. I have a hand of SquireRemakeSCC. Okay what are my options? Well I could:
1. Skip the Remake and gain a silver/buy a Margrave.
2. Skip the Remake and buy Margrave.
3. Remake CC
4. Remake CC buy a Sqr
5. Remake CC buy a S
6. Remake SqrC buy Sqr, gain Margrave, gain Silver.
7. Remake SqrC, gain Margrave/Silver, buy Silver
Option 1 nets me -1 cards, -1 a, and +$2 effectively.
Option 2 nets me -2 cards, -1 a, and +$0
Option 3 nets me -2 cards, +0 a, and -$2
Option 4 nets me -1 cards, +1 a, and -$1
Option 5 nets me -1 cards, +0 a, and +$0
Option 6 nets me -2 cards, +0 a, and +$1
Option 7 nets me -2 cards, -1 a, and +$2
For + 3 card attacks, almost invariably the move that makes your ability to draw deck go up the fastest is to kill the estates and then to preferentially turn Sqr into attacks and buy more Sqrs rather than just dumping coppers. Yeah luck can change if this actually works, but on balance I'm going to spend most of my plays on option 4 (if I'm deficient on action balance) and option 6 (if I'm about where I want to be on balance or expect to get there before the shuffle) with a few shots of option 7 nearing game end when I'm looking at getting $16 in deck total vs just $15 (or similar breakpoints). Your expected time between shuffles is the same if you burn two cards or you had (net) 2 draw. If I have something more useful than silver at $3 (like a village or maybe even Great Hall), then trashing the Squire, gaining a cantrip, gaining the Attack and buying a replacement Squire makes deck effectively thinner than just junking the copper (we'd have an option 8 of -3 cards, +0 actions, and -$2 which is obviously better than just trashing CC - option 3).
And while something like Remake is good here, even stuff like Steward or Chapel can make Squire stronger this way. I open Chapel/Silver. I hit ChapelSilverCCC, well that sucks - no attack for me and I have all those crappy estates ... but I get the Squire while tossing coppers. I then have the option of making a SCCSqrChap hand later into Sqr/Attack - and net trashing 2C or trashing 2C and buying Sqr or S.
Margrave, Torturer, and especially Rabble all make a strong case for killing the Squire - they very often make your deck effectively smaller than just trashing a C instead. Minion and Scrying Pool are special cases, but can make it massively better to trash the Squire than the coppers and just buy your way to $5. Cultist, Gship, and the odd Knight are less persuasive, but they can be the right move if you have a good $3.
About a fifth of boards with Squire are ones where the on-trash is something to consider. If Squire/trashing/attack is already a no-brainer, then we are talking about tactical play. What is the best way to gain the attacks. I found that be non-obvious. Is it better to open Potion/Silver or Trasher/Squire on a Pool board? Not an easy call. If I'm got some other potion, like Apothecary, that goes towards getting Pools with a Potion even if I have to delay trasher purchase. If I have a strong enough setup, I may just forget potion entirely (e.g. Remake/Scheme/Goons/Pool is a 0 potion game where I spam Squires and remake them into Schemes/Goons after I get the first Pool off my Squires). Likewise, if I come down to end game, what is a better shot with a spare $3 bucks if I need to dip into the duchies? Going for Silver for more buying power? Getting an estate for tie breaking if I make even on duchies & provinces? Or grabbing an extra Squire so I can trash it to a $5, draw the attack, and then trash it into a duchy?
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I've played I don't know, 3000 games combining IRL and goko. Dark Ages was my very first expansion too. I have never, ever seen squire trashing to gain attack cards to then upgrade them as anything but a cute trick you can do once in a while under specific circumstances.
Wonderful, and we care why again? 95% + of my Goko games don't require me to play in top form to win, IRL is higher with my wife and gaming friends, but you just don't need to play that well in the bulk of your games.
Um, if you're trying to make an argument that Squire trashing into attack card into Gold is a good thing to do, it actually has to be a good thing to do. Not good in the sense of "I don't play well" kind of good, but like actually good. Sure, I can win by buying only villages against Serf Bot, but that doesn't make it a good strategy.
I think my point is that it's not that you shouldn't do all this Squire trashing stuff. Of course in the examples you give I'd trash the Squire for attack cards. But what I'm also saying is that this doesn't happen that often. Between simply buying cards faster than trashing and gaining and $5 attack cards you actually want to keep and play, Gold gaining through TfB and Squire is just not that good. And when this does happen, I probably don't want Gold anyway because there is a strong engine anyway. You're overselling the amazingness of turning a Squire into a Gold over multiple shuffles.
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Trashing squire to gain attack cards to remodel them is definitely a good strategy on the some boards, but I doubt that it's good on a lot of boards. You'd need a lot of things to come together, like procession/upgrade/an engine supporting them/nothing better going on.
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Um, if you're trying to make an argument that Squire trashing into attack card into Gold is a good thing to do, it actually has to be a good thing to do.
It actually is a good thing to do in some cases. Open Upgrade/Chapel. Hit CEEEChap on T3. Upgrade is just going to kill a copper and it takes, at most, one extra turn to Chapel all your crap if you grab Squire on T4.
Likewise, if there is no action cash and I reach mid game with really strong draw (such that draw slots are cheap but cash is not), then yeah I might well be able to buy a Squire this turn and next turn Upgrade the Squire to a Silver and upgrade the attack to a Gold and then draw everything into hand. How many boards are like that? Well considering that a decent number of the strong drawing boards have things like Margrave, Pool, Rabble, etc. around they aren't exactly uncommon when Squire can gain attacks. Say I have Remake with Village/Smithy. I draw deck and have $6 to spend. I can buy a gold. Next turn I can buy a gold and a village (need overdraw of 1 to get to $9). Next turn after that I can get two golds (need overdraw of 2 to get to $12).
I instead buy 2 Squires (need an overdraw of 2). Next turn I buy a Smithy (net +2 cards), Remake both Squires to Villages. Turn after that, I Remake both attacks to gold, and then draw them playing my Village/Smithy. I buy two more golds.
Net after three turns:
No Squire: Four golds (now I'm in 2 province territory), 1 village.
Squire: Four golds, 2 villages, 1 smithy.
Not good in the sense of "I don't play well" kind of good, but like actually good. Sure, I can win by buying only villages against Serf Bot, but that doesn't make it a good strategy.
My point is, you don't even have a remotely accurate baseline. Squire trashing is faster than transmute - it doesn't take an opening buy, it doesn't compete with trashing your estates, it needs to carry one card until collision. You can get away with being this bad at gauging speed because you can beat a lot of 4000+ people pretty easily without ever even considering if using scaling TfB with Squire is a good shot.
I think my point is that it's not that you shouldn't do all this Squire trashing stuff. Of course in the examples you give I'd trash the Squire for attack cards. But what I'm also saying is that this doesn't happen that often.
Oh get over it. Squire comes up - itself, in less than 5% of games. Of those a vanishingly small number will be something like Gardens or Feodums where some of Squire's strongests synergies show. Nothing in Dominion happens that often. Squire/$5 attack/scaling TfB is more likely than Squire/Feodums, yet we'd consider anything that doesn't mention the latter on grounds of "doesn't happen all that often" deficient.
Between simply buying cards faster than trashing and gaining and $5 attack cards you actually want to keep and play, Gold gaining through TfB and Squire is just not that good. And when this does happen, I probably don't want Gold anyway because there is a strong engine anyway. You're overselling the amazingness of turning a Squire into a Gold over multiple shuffles.
I use Gold here because it is a common card with an easy to approximate value. If I want to keep and play the cards, that is just evidence that trashing Squire for attacks is valid of its own right - something people seem to be discounting.
You can do the same sorts of things to gain much needed components instead. The game that I know Squire trashing was a strong play was getting Hunting grounds out at $6. Spending $2, playing two non-terminal $5 cards and getting out $9 in value for two draw slots is pretty strong. You can just as easily butcher unwanted attacks into power $5's. Salvage them for cash. Or Forge a Silver + attack/Squire + Silver + Silver into a Province.
The ultimate point is that Squire means flexibility when you can start trashing it. Collide SCCCChap? Buy a Squire, maybe get the attack you really wanted on T5 (rather than hoping T6 hits $5 with an average value of <$1). Hit $7 right as the engine is about to kick in? Get a Squire/Component and trash the Squire for a $3/4 you want, maybe play Sab a time or two, and then convert the Sab into something useful (like say Graverob it into a Province). Even if, on average, buying direct is faster, Squire gives you options that aren't there otherwise when shuffle luck hits differently.
This, in turn tips the scales more towards Squire in an engine using scaling TfB and against other options - like Alt-VP slogs (at which Squire is very good)or using non-scaling TfB (Upgrade vs Junk dealer tips towards Upgrade when Squire is an option for busted hands). You can claim this is all trivial, but when people think the baseline for Squire and scaling TfB is worse than Transmute for a Gold, something is horridly wrong.
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Trashing squire to gain attack cards to remodel them is definitely a good strategy on the some boards, but I doubt that it's good on a lot of boards. You'd need a lot of things to come together, like procession/upgrade/an engine supporting them/nothing better going on.
Well look, how many boards are going to have Squire at all? How many of them are going to have say Squire/Gardens? The stuff you need to line up for Squire/TfB/attacks to be useful is far more likely than Squire/Gardens.
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Trashing squire to gain attack cards to remodel them is definitely a good strategy on the some boards, but I doubt that it's good on a lot of boards. You'd need a lot of things to come together, like procession/upgrade/an engine supporting them/nothing better going on.
Well look, how many boards are going to have Squire at all? How many of them are going to have say Squire/Gardens? The stuff you need to line up for Squire/TfB/attacks to be useful is far more likely than Squire/Gardens.
uh, no, squire/gardens is far more likely to be a thing than squire/trash to gain expensive attacks/remodel them into something useful
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... far more likely than Squire/Gardens.
The chance to have squire and gardens on board is: (202 choose 8 ) / (204* choose 10)= 0.00217328311,
in average this occurs every (204 choose 10)/(202 choose 8 ) = 460 games.
Open Upgrade/Chapel.
The chance to hit 5/2 on a board including squire, upgrade and chapel: 1/6 * (201 choose 7) / (204* choose 10)=0.0000143451,
you need to play 69710 games to get there. Maybe 200000 games if you need a strong attack among the 7 remaining cards. And maybe a million games if you want a useful $6 like grand market to come along (gold usually isn't that strong in these scenarios, as KingZog pointed out.)
Sure, these numbers don't prove you to be wrong in general. They just want to give you an idea why a couple of experienced posters are saying things like
I think my point is that it's not that you shouldn't do all this Squire trashing stuff.[...] I'm also saying is that this doesn't happen that often.
*Both calculations ignored Young Witch.
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I think my point is that it's not that you shouldn't do all this Squire trashing stuff.[...] I'm also saying is that this doesn't happen that often.
*Both calculations ignored Young Witch.
True, but I mean, that's still not going to change things enough to change the argument.
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While we're on the subject, I did miraculously manage the Watchtower-Squire-Familiar-Goons opening IRL. Maybe I should try that Turn4 solution as well.
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Thanks for a textbook example of how to do statistical analysis either dishonestly or poorly.
What I, explicitly said is Squire, scaling TfB, and attacks. We are comparing the frequency of two sets of boards, both include Squire, so we can drop it from our calculations and just use 9 kingdom piles, ignoring Young Witch and Black market for simplicity.
How many scaling TfB's are there? Remodel, Apprentice, Upgrade, Remake, Forge, Develop, Expand, Bishop, Trader, Graverobber, Procession, Butcher, Stonemason, and Governor. I'll skip Trader as being completely unwieldy, but that means we have 13 cards that fit the scaling TfB bill. So what are the odds that a board with Squire will contain at least one of them? 1 - odds that a board has none of them. So what is that? 194 out of 205 (I'm using the 206 count with Prince as listed in the other forum, minus one for Squire already be taken) are the odds it won't be in pile 2 (squire being pile one), 193/205 for the 3rd pile and so on. 57.5% of Squire boards won't have scaling TfB; 42.5% will.
Okay so how many of those boards will also have an attack? Roughly speaking that is just the odds that any of the seven other piles has at least one attack in it. I'll just do it up for $5 or > attacks: Witch, Minion, Sab, Torturer, Gship, Mountebank, Rabble, Goons, Jester, Margrave, Cultist, Rogue, Pillage, Knights, and Soothesayer. So the odds that pile three (order not mattering) is not a $5 attack when pile 1 is Squire and pile 2 is a scaling TfB? 189/204. Odds that none of the other 8 piles are $5 or > attacks when you have Squrie and scaling TfB? 53.7%. Thus of boards with Squire and one scaling TfB, 46.3% have at least one $5 attack or better.
Roughly then, 19.7% of Squire boards have both scaling TfB and $5 attacks.
95.6% of Squire boards will not have gardens. 4.4% will. Thus, exactly as I said, the combination of Squire, scaling TfB, and $5 attacks is more common than the combination of Squire and Gardens.
Now will all of those be viable? No. But neither will all the Squire/Gardens boards. A strong engine with Sab in it can utterly destroy a Squire/Gardens deck; only Silvers protect the Gardens and if you are gaining Silvers, Squire is not that great a Gardens enabler (maybe B-crat level at best).
But it is more complicated because one of the big reasons not to combine Squire & TfB, and go for Gold is that just gaining the attacks are better. Rabble? Almost without question it is economical to use Squire as +buy, +action, and opportunistically get Rabble. Minion? on what planet wouldn't I be Butchering estates to Squires (or Minions), coppers to Squires, and Squires to Minion/Squire or Minion/Minion? The fact that Gold can ever be competitive means that just trashing for attacks you want to mass is much better. Using Forge/Attack/Squire to gain value quick, again can be faster than building cash to buy your provinces (particularly if you aren't positioned to use the Forge to thin the Province pile quicker). Remake/Squire is just really good for building up engines if I have something I want in quantity at 3. Another complication is that Squire is just good to keep.
Now if we go down to the $4 attacks where I can do things like Remake two Squires into Fishing Villages, gain two Spies, next turn Remake two spies into two Libraries. Spending $4, playing a $ twice, and using up two draw slots to get $16 worth of very useful Engine components beats the crap out of buying Silver, Fishing village, or not trashing the Squires.
So why don't people need to use this to win in their 30,000 or whatever games? Because a board that includes attacks, scaling TfB, and Squire is already, by definition, a very rich board. You have a lot of strong combos sitting there with anything. Do you have draw? You have the potential to go for a draw engine. Do you have alt-VP? You have potential to go silver splurging. Do you have Peddler? Now there is good way to use a completely different Squire/Scaling TfB synergy.
So, yes, I remain completely unconvinced by appeals to elite authority. As a benchmark Squire -> scaling TfB -> Gold just is nowhere near as slow as Transmute; the fact that a good player thinks it is says that good players don't even need to know how fast the on-trash option is - the board is rich enough for a win most of the time even without it.
Squire/scaling TfB/attack is much more common than Squire/Gardens, but the latter is going to be dominant much more often than the former. How often will taking the TfB option prove to be better than others? Maybe 10% of the time it shows up strong players will acquire an edge against other strong players by going for it. How often will Squire/Gardens offer an edge to one of those same players? Never. If Squire/Gardens is worth doing, only the rarest of boards won't also have it being dominant.
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that's nice, but my post was based on experience. I have considered a squire-tfb thing before, but I'm not sure I've ever done it. Mabye once. I've done squrie/gardens about 5 times though. but i see why you're not convinced! that reminds me of lookout...
A strong engine with Sab in it can utterly destroy a Squire/Gardens deck
man, sab is awful. it's way more likely that an engine is simply faster than squire/gardens rather then being the better choice because sab would threaten the gardens deck.
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that's nice, but my post was based on experience. I have considered a squire-tfb thing before, but I'm not sure I've ever done it. Mabye once. I've done squrie/gardens about 5 times though. but i see why you're not convinced! that reminds me of lookout...
A strong engine with Sab in it can utterly destroy a Squire/Gardens deck
man, sab is awful. it's way more likely that an engine is simply faster than squire/gardens rather then being the better choice because sab would threaten the gardens deck.
Yeah, a lot of things may sound amazing in theory, but in practice they are not very good. And of course it depends on who you're playing with. Your IRL opponents may not be that strong, so in that case TfB+Squire may be a good thing. Like silverspawn said, he's reminded of lookout and how he got into a big argument saying it was better than ambassador (That's what you said right? I wasn't a part of that discussion). I've said crazy things too.
And yeah, Sab is not a good example because the time where it's good is usually when KC or TR are around. Otherwise it's to slow. If you go sab, he just uses Squire to gain Silver and doesn't care that you took Sab. Sure it's worse, but you took a worse strategy too by going with Sab. Plus he'll just empty the Estate faster when you hit Silver and Gardens.
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funny enough i dont think i ever actually said it like that...
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funny enough i dont think i ever actually said it like that...
That would be funny if you never actually said it. :P
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my original claim was that it's "the best 3$ trasher", but amb doesn't trash :) and then I was mostly arguing that you can't know that amb is better, because people kept comparing it to amb
for what its worth i still think lookout is slightly underrated.
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that's nice, but my post was based on experience. I have considered a squire-tfb thing before, but I'm not sure I've ever done it. Mabye once. I've done squrie/gardens about 5 times though. but i see why you're not convinced! that reminds me of lookout...
Yet I have done it and won against folks who are by far and away better players than 4000+ on Goko (that being the most common cutoff point where folks are afraid to play below when I last visited Goko).
I mean the fact that you've done it "maybe once" tells me that this cannot possibly be pushing you to eke out the maximum on a board. Procession, itself should be viable with Squire once every 2000-2500 games. Wt should be viable around once every 750. Squire/Rabble/Strong trashing works much of the time (crappy village/strong trashing/Rabble is quite viable on its own, being able to get Rabbles for $2 is just gravy). And so on.
A strong engine with Sab in it can utterly destroy a Squire/Gardens deck
man, sab is awful. it's way more likely that an engine is simply faster than squire/gardens rather then being the better choice because sab would threaten the gardens deck.
Sab is utterly amazing against coppers/$2/Gardens. Every play of Sab kills a Garden in those circumstances. Assuming your opponent tries to rush, they will end up holding 10 starting cards, 8 Gardens, 8 Estates and 10 Squires, if they pull 14 coppers (half a copper per card bought) that makes each Garden worth 5. Every single play of Sab then is a net swing of at least 4 VP. You can counter this by using Silver gaining, but you need as many Silvers as Gardens to bring the Sab down to a two VP swing; where playing the Sab twice is still better than a Duchy.
Herbalist, Candlestick maker, Pawn, Hamlet, and Squire all are sometimes viable with Gardens; they are all vulnerable to Sab, particularly in a slog setup. Now sure if there are viable $3 or higher cards to enable Gardens then you just add those in and Sab starts being pathetic.
Against most decks Sab does suck entirely, but when you have very high odds of killing VP every turn it changes the dynamic. Ever more marginal engines become viable - if only by making the Garden player take some silvers and lowering the terminal point threshold the engine has to cross.
If you wait to get silvers until I buy the Sab, then I wait until you have just shuffled your bloated deck (say when you have 4 or 5 Gardens). Any silvers you gain hit the discard and I have extremely good odds of killing two or more Gardens (better than Kc/Sab in an engine vs engine dual of killing a Province) before I start tripping on Silver. Killing two Gardens is better than a Province.
Yeah, a lot of things may sound amazing in theory, but in practice they are not very good. And of course it depends on who you're playing with. Your IRL opponents may not be that strong, so in that case TfB+Squire may be a good thing. Like silverspawn said, he's reminded of lookout and how he got into a big argument saying it was better than ambassador (That's what you said right? I wasn't a part of that discussion). I've said crazy things too.
My irl gaming group is better, by far than most of the leader board on Goko. Largely, Goko, like ISO before it, rewards you most heavily for playing well rapidly. You can build your rank much higher by playing significantly faster while trading off small marginal improvements to your win rate.
And yeah, Sab is not a good example because the time where it's good is usually when KC or TR are around. Otherwise it's to slow. If you go sab, he just uses Squire to gain Silver and doesn't care that you took Sab. Sure it's worse, but you took a worse strategy too by going with Sab. Plus he'll just empty the Estate faster when you hit Silver and Gardens.
Don't be absurd. The only thing that matters with Sab is what are the odds that it will hit various cards. In a deck clogged with medium values cards (e.g. silvers, villages, draw, golds, and provinces) your odds of hitting his VP are low, even with Tr/Sab. Most likely you will kill a Silver & a component. a component. Say they have 2 silvers, 4 villages, 1 +buy, 2 Tr, 1 attacks, 1 trasher, 5 draw, 2 golds, and 2 provinces. On average each Sab will hit his provinces just 1/10, going to Tr-> Sab hits is just 1/5. When you do hit a province, the VP loss is just 3 VP (Province -> Duchy) and next turn it goes up to 2/11 or 4/11 with Tr (when he has 4 Provinces). In an engine with Tr, Sab is having a good day when it kills 2 VP a turn on average.
Against Squire/Gardens, the only cards that protect the Gardens are Silvers. If you have a Silver for every Garden, that just means a Garden dies every other turn on average. When a Garden dies, it drops at least 3VP and more likely 4 or 5. Also fun, eac h silver means you decrease the card count by 1 (it could have been two coppers with +buys), so having 8 silvers means 8 fewer cards and pretty much 1 less VP from Gardens even if I never buy the Sab. Towards end game, Sab competes with Duchy and killing two Gardens (or forcing all of them to be 1 point less valuable) is vastly better than Duchy. Either Squire dips into Silvers before they get Gardens and bloat their deck (likely a -8 or -16 VP move) or they are vulnerable for a shuffle of a bloated deck.
This is why Princess/Sab can be a thing. You skip all the keep mid-range stuff (Tournaments, villages, silvers, etc.) and gun down Provinces, Duchies, $5 actions, and the odd Gold. Given how many fewer cards in a Tournament deck (or one that can compete well with it) are $5 and up, you get hits at a rate comparable to or better than Tr-> Sab.
Giving out an Estate for a Garden does make the game 1/2 a turn (as Squire/Gardens should be averaging $4/2 buys most hands) faster; on the flip side with 5 VP Gardens (something you should expect if they go Squire/Gardens and binge on copper) you just dropped the number of provinces you need by just about 1 (the estate in a rush scenario was always going to end up in his deck, so you are killing 5VP vs 1/2 a turn less of building; not a bad trade at all).
Oh, and word to the wise, when you are trying to talk up your experience it is best to actually know how the interaction you are pontificating on works. Sab hitting a Silver can gain exactly 3 cards: Poor House, Copper or Curse. Estate is worth $1 less than Silver and you will never get a an estate from Sab off a Silver.
This is why I don't buy your fallacious appeals to authority. You claim to never have seen the TfB options as viable, but you don't get basic card interactions correct. I think that merits a bit of skepticism about how your experience is informative about what is generally viable.
Regardless, the point is still the same. A number of Squire/Gardens boards will have much stronger and dominant strategies. Beggar/Gardens for instance is massively better. Rebuild. Library/strong trashing/other +action/+cash cards. Attacks that discard down to 3/engine. Horse Traders/Duke. The point still is the same, scaling TfB/attacks/Squire will show up a lot more than Squire/Gardens. Both are wildly statistically unlikely when looking at all possible games, and neither of them are so dominant that they are auto-plays. Both are things to consider about Squire and things that inform you which way to go on things. Gardens
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okay, how about we stay kind and just do a sample match? I propose this Kingdom:
Squire, Gardens, Saboteur, Village, Smithy, Feast, Vault, Haven, Stash, Harvest
I play Squire/Gardens, you play an engine that tries to stop me by using saboteur - ?
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This is why I don't buy your fallacious appeals to authority. You claim to never have seen the TfB options as viable, but you don't get basic card interactions correct. I think that merits a bit of skepticism about how your experience is informative about what is generally viable.
I will no longer discuss the Squire subject with you. You have lowered yourself to personal insult. I've never said my authority is better, just that I've played a lot. I trust the physicist on physics related topics because he has experience with the subject. You may also have authority in Dominion, its not exclusive. And I never said you shouldn't do TfB Squire stuff, just that it is not a strategy on its own and even when you can do it, it hasn't had an impact in my games for me or my opponents.
EDIT: And the fact that I made a mistake by saying Silver>Estate with Sab is just a mistake. It's not grounds to say I don't know anything.
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Let's stop this discussion topic and move on.
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Let's stop this discussion topic and move on.
Hooray for the intervention of authority!
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Silverspawn:
I'm not sure how viable that is as an engine board, Squire is the only +buy (card inefficient and helps the 3-pile), there are neither gainers (and I grant most gainers make Gardens more powerful) nor trashing, and the payload actions are fairly weak (Vault is decent, but not the greatest), and while Haven is helpful for the engine, it can also be good to the Gardens setup.
Would you give the same board with one of the useless cards (like Stash) being replaced by strong trashing (say Steward or Remake)?
My point is just that there are counters to Gardens/Squire and just like using scaling TfB isn't an assured thing, neither is Squire/Gardens. I could just as easily have cited something like Margrave where you don't get to $4 without Silver and suddenly that engine setup looks better than spamming the Gardens for some set of engine enablers.
Zog:
Oh please, it is not ad hominem. You have been doing nothing but appealing to the authority of your copious number of games played. If those experiences are valid evidence for an argument, then they should readily translate into accurate syllogistic expressions. You've been freely saying things that either actually trying to play the combo (e.g. Remake/Squire/Rabble/$3 village) or simple inspection says are not so. You've told us that Chapel/Upgrade/Squire is slower than Transmute to gold. You've told us your deck gets thinner by trashing something other than a Squire without taking into account $5 drawing attacks. You've told us that a counter cannot work because Sabbing silvers goes to estates.
I have no idea how good a player you are but I'd guess everyone on the board is at least top 10% in the world; plenty of people have extreme amounts of tacit knowledge that lets them play extremely well without explicit analysis. I fully expect that when you play a board you will not make the same mistake, the tacit knowledge works for a lot of things. It is my guess that most people on this forum are better tactical players than I am unless I court a headache and track entire decks ... but tacit knowledge isn't transferable and tactical play doesn't (completely) identify the best strategy on a board.
My hunch is that when you play 90+% of your games you are sufficiently endowed with tacit knowledge and tactical skill that you can win a very high percentages without maximal play. Playing Squire differently along the lines I've suggested it should be considered would affect about 20% of your Squire boards. In those games it might, drive a good player's win loss rate down 10%. If you are already at 66% win rate, that moves you up to a 69% win rate for that subsection. Squire will be in 5.8% of your games (slightly higher with Yw and Bm). So only 1.16% of your games will have Squire/TfB/Attack or so. Let's be generous to me and say that half of Squire/TfB/Attack games make it the better strategy. So now we are talking about 0.58% of your games. Of course you will only win 3.3% more of those. So now we are talking about .019% of all your 3000 games will change a win to a loss.
Net result, if you are the strong player in the stats above, even if I am totally correct; you've lost about .57 games by being wrong. Finding that type of margin needs well over 10x as many games as you have played to be statistically significant. The better player you are (after some threshold), the less information each of your games contains about the cards and the more it contains about you. A good player is more likely to win in general, so how often you win with a given strategy needs multiplicatively more games to tease out the card affects from your personal skill.
So when does the combo matter? When your win rate is a lot lower. The closer you are to 50%, the bigger the impact of small changes in optimization. Somebody who doesn't have your tacit knowledge and tactical skill will be a lot more likely to pick up wins by better seeing possible Squire strategies. Likewise, when you power pair with folks who also hit high win rates eking out smaller skill differentials makes for stronger play. This is why I'm very leery of appealing to thousands of games by a single player, or even a small group of players, player tactical skill can easily dwarf smaller, but significant strategic signals.
The point of articles like this is to have explicit analysis so that people who don't have a wealth of tacit knowledge can see how to look at the board. Your tacit knowledge works great when playing, but when you state your impressions explicitly, they just don't measure up. You'd need to play tenfold more games to even begin to have a hope of seeing the impact under discussion.
So why bother with something that small? Largely because everything in any Squire article is going to be on that order of magnitude. Squire shows up in just a small percentage of games, single card combos are very rare in all random games. Your ability to play Gardens/Squire likely doesn't matter in a lot of games either; you could ignore the combo every time it came up and it would only effect about 7 games. Of those 7, I'd tag a WAG that at least a quarter are ones where Squire/Gardens isn't that great (e.g. Miltia/Margrave engines, Tournament games with decent setups, etc.), another quarter are likely ones where a strong player can win out with engine against a typical opponent even without engine being the best option. Your dataset isn't anywhere near large enough and your ability to deduce syllogistic statements from your dataset just hasn't been in evidence.
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Silverspawn:
please write me with a lowercase s :P
I'm not sure how viable that is as an engine board, Squire is the only +buy (card inefficient and helps the 3-pile), there are neither gainers (and I grant most gainers make Gardens more powerful) nor trashing, and the payload actions are fairly weak (Vault is decent, but not the greatest), and while Haven is helpful for the engine, it can also be good to the Gardens setup.
Would you give the same board with one of the useless cards (like Stash) being replaced by strong trashing (say Steward or Remake)?
isn't a weak board part of the point? I wanted to address solely the saboteur issue, not whether squire/gardens is good or not. Your claim was that saboteur can be a counter to it, so I must assume that it means games where the engine alone is not strong enough to beat gardens anyway, otherwise it's a worthless thing to claim.
You can have loan, would that be sufficient?
@the KingZong argument:
I don't think anything he has posted justifies the claim that he has done "nothing but appealing to the authority of your copious number of games played". Really, I think KZ is an awfully nice guy, much nicer than me for that matter.
You're backing your opinion up, but man, it's incredible how one-sided you can make something sound by making arguments for just one position. I'm not going to dissect every single point you made, but I'll give you an example.
You've told us that Chapel/Upgrade/Squire is slower than Transmute to gold.
What he said was this:
Because you aren't getting a Gold via trashing Squire. You are going through a process that takes a really long time. Probably longer than it takes Transmute to get a Gold.
and your answer, which you're now implying was correct, was this:
Not at all. Transmute requires you to:
1. Buy Potion.
2. Use a buy (early) on a 0P card.
3. Save a green.
4. Collide a green/Transmute
5. Use an action.
It slows you down in multiple ways. Squire, unlike Potion, is not a dead card. At worst it is a copper. This makes a big difference when you are going to engines, but unlike Transmute if you don't collide it, you still are pretty close to hitting $5. With Transmute you are carrying around three dead cards (potion, transmute, estate) waiting for the collision, with Squire you are carrying one at most. Transmute requires you use a $4 buy - something you virtually never see on a junk I-just-trashed-two-cards hand while Squire is just $2.
and some more stuff.
Now, there are several problems here. Firstly, KZ said "probably," which means he was never wrong in the first place, no matter how fast Transmute or Squire is. Secondly, you made a lot of arguments why Squire into Gold is better, but KZ never said it's not better, he just said it's not faster, which probably means "how many turns does it take you to gain your first gold via Transmute/Squire->Trash->Trash for benefit". That's a very different thing. And also, he was using Transmute as an example, as a method of describing the speed of Squire, he never actually cared about how fast Transmute is, so even if what he said was wrong, it's not really a big deal.
@theory: I hope your post was just a suggestion... I love these kinds of discussions though.
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isn't a weak board part of the point? I wanted to address solely the saboteur issue, not whether squire/gardens is good or not. Your claim was that saboteur can be a counter to it, so I must assume that it means games where the engine alone is not strong enough to beat gardens anyway, otherwise it's a worthless thing to claim.
You can have loan, would that be sufficient?
You are completely right that this is a marginal question. I know that a strong engine that gets unlucky, e.g. a T5 Chapel, can claw back a win after Squire/Gardens gets enough bloat to beat all the provinces; what I don't know is exactly where the line is drawn. Certainly Sab on the board increases the engine's marginal win rate where you would beat the rush but lose to the slog.
I'll give it a go with Loan, would you be free tomorrow night (EDT) to try? I'll be free then, but then I'm off to the beach on vacation.
Now, there are several problems here. Firstly, KZ said "probably," which means he was never wrong in the first place, no matter how fast Transmute or Squire is. Secondly, you made a lot of arguments why Squire into Gold is better, but KZ never said it's not better, he just said it's not faster, which probably means "how many turns does it take you to gain your first gold via Transmute/Squire->Trash->Trash for benefit". That's a very different thing. And also, he was using Transmute as an example, as a method of describing the speed of Squire, he never actually cared about how fast Transmute is, so even if what he said was wrong, it's not really a big deal.
The problem with this is that the speed, thus definied doesn't matter. Take Silver vs Transmute.
Transmute:
T1/T2: Potion/x
T2/T3: Transmute/x
Now we have 14 cards, on average we get 1 estate a hand. It is 3 hands to get through the deck so we expect to hit Transmute/Estate on T6.
Silver:
T1/T2: Silver/Silver
T2/T3: We expect to have an estate in each hand so we expect to hit 5's so we buy silver/silver.
T5: We have 4 silvers, 7 coppers, 3 Estates. We have $8 from Silver and $7 from coppers. That gives us $15 and hence an average hand of $5. Now we do have some high variance so we should expect one hand in T5-T7 to have 2 Silvers, 2 Coppers.
In other words, by this metric Transmute is no slower than Silver.
What about other cards? Chapel/Market Square is one of the fastest, most reliable shots at gold.
T1/T2: Chapel/Mrksqr
T3/T4: You have a 10/12 chance chapel is in one of these two hands naturally; if it is you have a roughly 4/11 shot that Mrksqr is in the same hand. 30% Chance of a T3/T4 gold.
T5: We dropped 4 cards, likely bought a second Mrksqr. Odds are maybe 2/3rds that you hit your gold here.
Can you do faster still? Sure Death cart is an easy Gold. Baron has good odds for gold quick, MrkSqr/Smithy/Mint(or Doc) ... but those sort of things are the absolute fastest you get and all have their own problems.
Generally, when people say Transmute is slow, it isn't that you get your first Gold on T6-T7, it is that it slows down your deck and that getting more stuff later is even slower. If speed to first gold is what he means, then again, it goes back to his sense of how things work not translating well into syllogistic statements; Transmute is a pretty much worthless benchmark for the speed to get to gold; it is about as fast as the average card (certainly faster than stuff like Spy, Hag, Oasis, Taxman, Mine, Market, Witch, Lab, or Hunting party).
The ultimate question is how how useful is Squire's on-trash setup. About a quarter of potential Squire boards have at least the theoretical ability. A subset of those will actually be somewhat viable. More often Squire/TfB/$5 will make some better option more reliable. I had a T5 Chapel that hit CCCC. I can still use Squire for Minions/Goons/Pillage/Jester/etc. I only talk about fast golds insofar as that one of the things that is easy to calc shows that Squire can be competitive. For things that are harder to calc, Squire is a lot better.
Develop/Squire/good draw attack/decent 4 is a thing. You can develop Squires into drawing attacks. You can Develop Estates into Develops, Develops into $4/Squire and Squire into $3/drawing attack. Is this faster than raw Develop? Certainly. You don't have to spend 5's on strong drawing. You can use them on payload (like Merchant Ship) or for more reliability (like Lab or Cartographer) or for accelerants (like Butcher); you can also run more Develops as Squire/Develop/Develop/C/C isn't a bad hand.
And I can go on with lots of highly degenerate setups. None of that is going to show up in just 3000 games worth of sampling. Even it it halves Zog's loss rate; he'd have to have a fairly low win rate for his experience to conclusively show one way or another that Squire's on trash benefit is not that useful. Looking for the less common Squire/TfB/$5 is going to take even yet higher data. This is why I don't like looking at single player's experiences - a good player with a bias towards or against certain strats will have their own skill swamp the effect of the strategy.
I just don't know what to tell you. Should I let drop that I play Dominion against a professional statistician from the BLS? Should I let drop my 10,000 games (though a LOT of those are pre-DA and a huge number have been where we played semi-random kingdoms)? I certainly can remember where Squire/scaling TfB/Attack has won me the game, but would I have won without it? Zog clearly thinks not, I think likely. The numbers certainly are not there to determine it. It is pretty much a worthless show stopper to say "I haven't seen X be useful in Y games" unless Y is abysmally large or your win rate is very close to parity.
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I'll give it a go with Loan, would you be free tomorrow night (EDT) to try? I'll be free then, but then I'm off to the beach on vacation.
I'm 6 hours apart (utc+2). any specific time?
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Looks like I missed you then unless you are a night owl. I'm on for another hour or two and then I'll be gone for vacation.
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Looks like I missed you then unless you are a night owl. I'm on for another hour or two and then I'll be gone for vacation.
let's do it then. I'll be in outpost
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I'm getting a javascript error trying to get Goko going. I'm seeing if Java needs an update.
For some reason I can start playing, but I get a void() call if I try to login, I'm a guest.
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you did join the game, i just didn't start because i didnt know for sure it was you. guest and all.
just join again
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up for a second shot?
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up for a second shot?
if you're actually trying to sabotage the gardens instead of outracing the strategy and adding one saboteur this time... sure
i forgot to add loan, you can't seem to read ingame chat. should i rehost it?
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okay so, summary you bought 1 saboteur in each game respectively, the first game you hit garden exactly once and won, the second time you hit it 5/5 times and lost. After what you said I expected you to build an engine that plays as many saboteurs as possible per turn, not to play a village/smithy engine that adds one saboteur. But regardless, I remain unconvinced that the card is useful without KC or at least TR
imgoingtosleepnowthough...
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I have to respond to your play. When you start poaching villages, I face a choice: add more Sabs & eat more villages (thus bringing about a 3-pile sooner) or keeping my engine balanced, delay the 3-pile, and get Provinces.
Basically each Sab I added shortened the game by one turn (Gardens & Squires are empty, you are piling villages). It costs me $8 to add a Sab/village to my engine. Each additional turn the game lasts nets me a bit north of a Province (with full deck draw at the end I was up to $16, but I wasn't reliable enough anymore). With all the Silver and Villages you had; there is no way even getting 3 Sabs up and running will pay out shortening the game.
What Sab did for me was change your play. If you had gone coppers and I had skipped Sab, you'd have crushed me. Without spamming Silvers, you can bulk the deck a lot more (you'd have gone up at least 1 point per Garden with fewer Silvers/Villages and more Coppers). I'd be tempted to not even bother buying the Sab, the fact that your Gardens are worth fewer points goes a long ways.
The second game was as I feared, without any acceleration the engine took a long time to get off the ground. When I did get going I trashed out a Gardens a hit (netting me what 4 points? each) and never missed a province buy on it. I did miss a province on my ultimate turn (I was due, I believe the next turn or so to miss, so just a slight bit early on engine failure). I bought provinces there when I failed to have +buy. Buying only one Squire meant if I needed to use it for actions or if I failed to draw it, I had the choice of getting a Sab without the actions to play it, a village, or a Province. Later, I'm looking at Province being +6 points now and Sab/Village being -4 points a turn from now. In retrospect, I think I'd have won by shifting one province buy to Sab/village, but timing that is tricky and that would have been challenge.
Squire has the option of responding to Sab with Silver gaining. This is good in that it protects the Gardens, but it does lower the number of Provinces I need to win. If you go Silvers (which does defeat Sab) in case I go Sab, then skipping Sab may well tip the engine into the lead.
As always drawing data from a sample size of two is dodgy. What would be nice would be to see how Squire/Gardens does against the same boards where the engine just tries to race to the finish.
Sorry for the lack of communication, but Goko appears to think Guests don't need to chat. I tried typing back to you, not sure if it works and I know guests are locked in the lobby. This conforms well with my expectations of Goko.