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1

Rules Questions / Re: Bunch of Duration Questions

« on: November 13, 2014, 07:09:05 pm »

Another thing to consider: Chained TR/KC + Durations.

From what I understand, if you TR a TR and play one duration and one non-duration, then one TR stays out and one gets collected at end of turn. But if you TR a TR and play two different durations, then both TRs stay out. If you KC a KC (or TR), and two or more KCs play durations, then both KCs stay out. Do not neglect to consider the case of triple-(or-greater)-TR, and also do not neglect that duration leaf nodes may occur at different tree depths.

2

Dominion General Discussion / Re: What is the worst BM+X card?

« on: June 01, 2014, 11:06:59 pm »

Procession would eventually do something by accident, which may even be useful.

Walled Village. Also, Village. Wandering Minstrel.

Vineyard.

3

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Favorite Alt-VP card

« on: March 18, 2014, 10:14:40 pm »

Feodum, because it's much better at being hilarious. I mean, playing a deck with twenty silvers is okay I guess, but gaining a dozen silvers in a turn is just fun.  Most of the other alt-VP's are interesting to strategize for but the turn-by-turn is kinda tedious. I appreciate the change of pace, but I just don't get really excited the same way I do for a Feodum game.

I don't get how to play with Duke. I just can't get my head around when to start greening.

4

Rules Questions / Re: overpaying 0 with stonemason

« on: March 02, 2014, 02:58:53 am »

I'm just not convinced on this ruling; can we get five or six more people to chime in confirming it, perhaps using some sort of chart?

We've had this conversation before, and the rulebook says it.

Basically, think about this.  What does it actually mean to "overpay"?  It means to pay more than you need for it.  No matter what, paying $2 for Stonemason is not paying more than you need for it.  Thus, you're not overpaying.

You accidentally a sarcasm.

5

Dominion General Discussion / Re: What Expansions Would You Like to See Next?

« on: February 20, 2014, 12:10:51 pm »

Being would be a great start.

I would love to see cards that upgrade themselves. We already have a few examples (Urchin, Hermit, arguably Fool's Gold), but I think there's enough potential to make a full expansion without getting repetitive. You can have multi-level expansions, cards that interact with their upgraded versions. You could even have cards that upgrade to a card of a different type. An action that could replace itself with a Duchy would be wacky.

6

Rules Questions / Re: Ambassador and Ruins

« on: January 15, 2014, 09:48:52 pm »

The point you're missing is that when you return your Ruin to the Supply, it goes on top. Now the top card of the Ruins pile is the same as the one that you revealed, and your opponent can gain it.

If you did not return your Ruins card, of if you have more than one opponent, then the top Ruins card may not be the same as the one you revealed, and if not, your opponent(s) do(es) not gain it.

More generally: Looter cards say "Gain a Ruins" which makes you gain the card on top of the Ruins pile. The specific wording means that it is agnostic to which Ruins is present. All non-Looter cards like Ambassador that name a specific card, do not consider Ruins together as a class, they consider the 5 Ruins as totally distinct. Ruined Village is not "a copy of" Ruined Mine, and so forth. So, if you are somehow forced to gain a Ruined Village, you can only do so if Ruined Village is on top of the Ruins pile. Non-top cards are not considered In The Supply, and you cannot dig through them. Such an effect would fizzle as if you revealed a card whose pile is empty.

7

Dominion Articles / Re: Three Player Adjustments

« on: December 28, 2013, 04:43:12 pm »

You mentioned several aspects of there being more contention for cards, but I think it's worth explicitly addressing the fact that there's no "split." In 2-player match-ups, many times there's a battle over gaining one particular card--I'll use Fool's Gold as an example, because it's a pile you want to win and because you have different options to play it (converting to Gold or not), but the same applies to things like Duchies in a Duke or Rebuild game, Ill-Gotten Gains, and sometimes even just power cards like Hunting Party or Minion or King's Court. If you manage to split the 10 cards in the key pile 6-4 with your opponent instead of 5-5 you're at an advantage. The idea of a split is more fundamental in 2-player because every copy that you don't get is one that your opponent gets, and vice-versa.

3-player lacks that symmetry between your deck and your opponents'. First, there's no way to have a completely symmetric split because 3 does not divide 10. The closest you can get is 4-3-3. You can't try to tie, because there is always a winner.

Second, it's no longer the case that the number of copies you snag is directly related to the number of copies your opponent snagged. In 2 players, if you got 4 Fool's Golds and the pile is empty, then you have fewer FG than your opponent because he got 6. There is a direct connection between you have and what your opponent does not, and vice-versa. This means in general the same deck will be facing similar opposing decks. In 3-player, this statement is not true. If you get 4 of the FG's, the split could be 4-3-3, or it could be 4-6-0, so it's possible for the same deck to be facing different competitive landscapes. In fact, in that last case you could end up with only 4 FG's and still be going up against a non-FG deck, a situation that doesn't occur in 2-player.

And on that note: Third, denying a card is less important if both your opponents are fighting over it. In 2-player, even if you don't want Fool's Golds for yourself, you still want to gain a few to deny your opponent from getting all of them because fighting against a 10-FG deck is difficult. In 3-player, if you ignore FG your opponents will probably have 5 each, which is more manageable to beat.

8

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Diggers: Some of the Worst Designed Cards?

« on: December 26, 2013, 12:10:47 pm »

If you count digging attacks, there's also Saboteur.

Digging-for-X is a tricky mechanic. I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with it, and I don't think the list of Diggers is any more or less balanced than your average random 10 cards (aside from Rebuild being an outlier). However, I do think that designing digging cards takes extra design considerations, because there are some potential traps to it.

The thing with Diggers is, you don't get to pick which card is actually Dug. With a KC or a Throne Room you can choose any Action you have in hand, and you know exactly what it's hitting when you play it (edge case: chained TR/KC + draw cards). By contrast, with Golem, you don't know exactly what action it's going to hit in general. You don't get to pick that turn. They way you choose which action to play with Golem, is by being extra selective about what actions you acquire in the rest of the game.

And that's really the big issue surrounding Dig-for-X: They exert a disproportionate influence on the composition of the rest of your deck. Hunting Party is monotonous, because you can't just splash in a minor utility card because that makes HP choke. Golem is fine, but you have to be careful and not let the riff-raff in. Venture and Adventurer are both basically crap unless you can clear out your Copper. With other cards you have different ways of dealing with this. Like the aforementioned TR/KC, you can have some mediocre actions lying around and use sifting or draw to make sure you KC the action you want. Golem, there's no way to deal except exclusivity.

Personally, I don't there's a problem with how the digging mechanic works. I like the change-up in how you have to strategize your deck, and plan ahead to a larger extent than normal. If they were more common I might start feeling constrained, but as-is I don't have an issue. Hunting Party is the only card where I feel that Digging causes a problem, because it wants your deck to be monotonous. Golem, I think the card's issue is cost, and Digging is completely unrelated to it being underused. Rebuild, Digging ups the power but I don't think that it's central to the card's problem. Sage I think is under-rated, and Adventurer is situational but not bad.

9

Dominion Articles / Re: Butcher

« on: December 17, 2013, 10:30:19 am »

My engine definition is: With an engine, you can play the same cards more often than if you wouldn't have built an engine.

This lines up with my alternative "reshuffle frequency" definition.

10

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Donald X on Rebuild

« on: December 17, 2013, 02:54:56 am »

In fact, gaining an Estate just like Baron would make the most sense. Conceptually, you're rebuilding Nothing (worth $0) into an Estate.

11

Dominion Articles / Re: Butcher

« on: December 17, 2013, 12:18:51 am »

A good definition of Engine should also include bad ones. This seems dumb, but a deck doesn't have to be successful to be considered an engine. It can be bad and an engine, it's just a bad engine.

I think of an Engine as a deck that tries to play lots of cards. Usually actions, but some engines are built to draw money by playing lots of draw cards, and some engines have alt-treasure or alt-VP components, so I wouldn't exclude them either. Just, lots of cards. Lots of them. So many cards.

So, I define "Engine-ness" as the fraction of your deck that you expect to see on a turn, on average. You will note this is not binary, it's a spectrum. I think that's a good thing. (N.B. this directly corresponds with "how often does this deck reshuffle." This definition is less intuitive, but easier to calculate from game logs.)

As a benchmark, take a boring BM+X deck. It probably buys one card a turn, so on turn 15 it's got 25 cards. If it just plays money, it sees 5 cards, for an Engine-ness of 20%. If it plays a Smithy, it sees 8, for 32%. On average, a BM+Smithy deck gets an engine-ness of <30%. So we'll say an Engine has to beat that considerably.

On the other end, a deck that draws itself has an engine-ness of 100%. In fact, it's technically possible to get over 100% through heavy use of sifting cards, like a Minion deck that cycles itself more than once--I consider a card "seen" if it passes through your hand, even if you don't play it. We would call this an engine, even if it's not doing anything useful. It's not a good engine unless it's hitting at least $8, but it's still an engine. (A deck of 0 cards shall be christened "the trivial engine.")

And now let's take a look at cards that score in the mid-range, around 50%. One way to do this is with a deck with 20 cards, that goes through 10 cards a turn. This would describe a deck that on turn 15 has bought one card per turn, has trashed half its starting cards, and expects to play two villages, one smithy, and probably one or two more non-drawing terminals. That sounds middling-ly enginerific to me. Another deck that scores a 50% is one that is similarly 20 cards, and plays 5 cantrips per turn plus a terminal. That's an ok-not-great Conspiracy engine.

Either of these decks could edge up their engine-ness to 60-70% by trashing 3-5 more cards, or by gaining 5-ish cantrips, or by gaining two warehouses to sift through more of their deck. These activities are generally considered to be part of playing an engine, and possibly defining it.

12

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Donald X on Rebuild

« on: December 16, 2013, 10:09:52 pm »

One thing that I found really interesting about Donald's comments relative to this thread's discussion is how adamant f.ds seems to be on keeping a Rebuild variant.

This is a completely valid point, it's easier to focus on what's in front of us, to the exclusion of the myriad infinities of other cards that could be created.

However, I think Rebuild gets a pass on this one. It's filling a conceptual "hole" that already existed before the card came out: A Remodel specific to Victory cards, analogous to Mine for money and Procession for Actions. We may be anchoring our ideas to the version that ended up printed, but if Rebuild hadn't come out and we were spinning ideas for cards that ought to exist, this is a niche that would get brought up with regularity.

13

Dominion Articles / Re: Butcher

« on: December 14, 2013, 01:30:06 pm »

One thing TfB cards get used for is trashing Provinces to gain Provinces, in order to burn down the pile and end the game faster. Butcher clearly outshines Remodel, Expand, and Salvager for this purpose because you pocket the coin tokens.

Trashing copper with Remodel is a very marginal gain, and while sometimes it's the best play to make with the hand you drew, it means you drew a bad hand. You should buy Remodel only if you have one or more specific upgrades in mind, and only rarely will that include Remodeling a Copper. Having to use it on a copper means your Remodel missed one of its intended targets.

That said, Butcher can sensibly used on Copper slightly more often. Again, you can have specific upgrade chains in mind, but you may be planning to have a few coin tokens spare. Say, if there's a $3-cost you want to acquire in bulk, store a coin token from Butchering an Estate and then use it while Butchering a Copper. The board would have to be awkward for that to be the best use of the coin token, but it happens.

This isn't really a strategy question, but can anyone justify why Butcher gains a card up to the cost of the trashed card + coins spent, not exactly the amount?

It allows you to gain a card costing less than the one that you trashed, just like Remodel allows. You can do things like Estate -> Poor House or Border Village -> $5. There's no case where you would want to spend coin tokens and then buy down, but the extra words to prohibit that would be pointless.

14

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Donald X on Rebuild

« on: December 11, 2013, 09:12:15 pm »

Guys, I think we're getting tunnel-vision around the idea of nerfing the card. Look at Donald's quote: He's saying an OP card is OK, as long as it's interesting. Fixing Rebuild could involve making it less powerful, but it could also involve making it more interesting. You'll notice from the histories that he tends to redesign rather than rebalance. Not to put Donald's opinions up on a pedestal, but I think that tendency of his is a pretty big part of why Dominion is fun.

Rebuild, by rights, should be an interesting cards, but it was solved. Tinkering with cost or action may address the undue influence it has on the game, but it doesn't impact that the card itself is solved. I think the proper way to fix Rebuild is to make it less trivial to play it correctly.

LastFootnote's point is a good one: As long as all your $5-hands have to go to Duchies and not $5-actions, your deck will be boring. Making Rebuild itself cost $6 or $3P doesn't address this problem. I'm not sure that return-to-supply fixes this either.

I think the only way to fix this issue is to let Rebuild "skip" Duchy somehow in the progression from Estate to Province. Like, I dunno, by using some sort of token or mat to less you "store up" plays of Rebuild, and then two plays of Rebuild could take one Estate directly to a Province. Or something.

15

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Which Cards are Most Under-rated / Under-utilized?

« on: December 11, 2013, 08:41:47 pm »

Library and especially Watchtower combo with plenty of cards, but they also have the issue that they actively anti-combo with quite a few cards as well. That's why they see less use.

Easy example: Laboratory. If you have 6 cards in hand, then Library is a terminal draw-2 (i.e. Moat) with sifting, and Watchtower is a terminal replace-itself (i.e. Ruined Library ). If you deck has any* other draw, it anti-combos with Library/Watchtower. Which means that you will generally choose either Lib/WT or regular draw, but not both. Players probably pick the traditional option more than they need to, but the fact that the decision exists is the root of the under-use.

* Edge cases welcome.

16

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Is there a "good" and "bad" way to Win in Dominion?

« on: December 08, 2013, 02:00:06 am »

In a mirror mega-deck game, the three-pile ending acts as a check against over-extending yourself. If you spend too long building your deck before you pull the trigger, you leave yourself vulnerable to sudden game-ends. I like this, because it means that even mega-decks have a balancing act to play. I think this makes the game more interesting. Having to navigate around the three-pile raises the skill ceiling in a mega-deck game, whereas without that constraint the game is often pretty straightforward.

17

LCG General Discussion / Re: Android: Netrunner

« on: December 07, 2013, 03:22:59 am »

I still have my original Netrunner cards from 1996. Is it compatible? What are the main mechanical differences?

18

Dominion General Discussion / Re: What do you think about the house rule...

« on: November 24, 2013, 03:09:05 pm »

It's easier to take a lead, or end the game, than it is to take the lead and end the game.

I just want to emphasize this quote, because even outside the context of this discussion, this is a critical fact about Dominion that fundamentally underpins its balance and its strategic landscape. It's one of those things that I kinda-sorta knew already, but seeing it written explicitly and concisely made me do a double-take.

19

Dominion General Discussion / Re: herald is so good

« on: November 23, 2013, 02:06:35 pm »

Herald is one of those cards where if it's present, the #1 thing I look for is a way to get my coppers out of the way. If you can get rid of around half your starting deck, Herald is an absolute beast. If you can't, then Herald is an absolute disappointment. Scrying Pool is similar to Herald for this reason. It also holds with Conspirator, but in that case it's easier to get away with just sifting.

20

Dominion General Discussion / Re: what early cards have changed the most, given expansions?

« on: November 22, 2013, 02:29:29 pm »

I think Remodel is one of those. In base set, it's usually a bad card. But expansions added :
- New good targets for Copper/Curse => $2 (Fool's gold, Vagrant, Hamlet, Squire, Pawn…). Much better than cellar or moat…
- New cards which are interesting to remodel into Province (Border village, Peddler, late game Hunting grounds), or something else (Masterpiece => $5…)
- New cards with on-trash abilities (Dark Age…)
- Overall good engine cards, and remodel is nice in engines (draw more, more choice)

I think that Remodel was criminally under-appreciated in base, but I agree that it's gotten better. Its gameplay gained a new dimension of combo potential when later expansions started included card-cost shenanigans, like Highway, Peddler, and Border Village.

21

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Most instructive cards

« on: November 19, 2013, 10:25:24 am »

Great Hall: This is the card that actually made me realize that a cantrip is not actually drawing anything, but in fact merely replacing itself. My Ironworks-Great Hall engine was much less impressive than I thought.

Nobles: Being able to draw doesn't you until you have something worth drawing. The fact that this card competes directly with gold forces you to make hard decisions. I learned the correct answer to that decision before my peer group did, and had a significant margin of victory as a result.

I'll also echo Tactician, it made me realize that Dominion has super-linear scaling and that impacts quite a lot of long-term strategy.

22

Dominion General Discussion / Re: How strong would cards be if they were simpler?

« on: November 05, 2013, 10:03:16 pm »

I think that Library would not become overpriced or underpowered if the action-skipping part were removed. While I've used that portion of the card, I don't think I've ever relied on it.

Purely in the context of the base set, removing the action-skipping would make it slightly harder to argue that it deserves to be more expensive than Smithy. Disappearing money is not common in Base so Draw-to-X engines are more esoteric. Without Militia or Festival, it doesn't often draw more cards than Smithy does so it needs that extra edge.

23

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Thought experiment: How many Duchies?

« on: October 29, 2013, 07:26:57 pm »

My guess is that the correct answer is either 0, 1, or 10. I would have a hard time believing that, e.g., 8 Duchies is a good idea but that 9th one is just crossing the line. And 1 is only a good idea as a tiebreaker.

Having a starting deck of 13 VP cards and 7 copper would be painful. It would be the 5th turn before you could even start seeing what you bought on turn 1, and what you bought was probably a copper because your average hand value is less than $2. You would be luck to get a single Silver before your first (turn 4) reshuffle. In short, you will never buy that Duke.

Edge case: Poorhouse.
Maybe kind of not completely terrible, I guess?: Duchess, Embargo.

24

Dominion General Discussion / Re: "Fixing" Tournament

« on: October 23, 2013, 09:18:25 pm »

If you want to fix Tournament, it's important to identify what it is about Tournament that you think is the problem. There are several issues that can be had, some of which some players think are OK, or even desirable. It's perfectly possible for two players to "fix" Tournament, each in a way that the other thinks is worse than the original.

• Severe first-turn advantage: Whoever gets the first prize is at a significant advantage, due in no small part to the prizes being unique.
• Luck-based: Superior or (identical play) can lose due to shuffle luck.
• It makes the winning player win more, which is the opposite of regular dominion. By making Provinces an asset rather than a deadweight, it reverses the primary strategic consideration of the game.
• Swingy. This is sort of an undercurrent to all of the above, but you can dislike the swinginess without thinking any of the above is a problem.
• Tends towards mirror-matches, because Prizes are too powerful to ignore and because also rushing Provinces will dampen your opponent's Tournaments.
  

Of these I think (3) is the least-common complaint, and (1) is the most-common, but that's just a gut. Personally, I dislike it for (3), (4), and (5).

Removing the Prizes addresses points (1), (4), and (5). I also think it nerfs the card considerably, because the power of Prizes are a core component of the card, and it also niches it to Duchy-based strategies. I would be interested to try it, because I'm rather a fan of Duchy strategies, but it also turns such an iconic card so vanilla that I barely get excited about it.

25

Dominion General Discussion / Re: What if the Base Set was released last?

« on: October 11, 2013, 08:07:26 pm »

If they didn't exist and then came out, the following cards would:

Be blasted for being blunt, crude, inelegant ways of achieving their goal: Moat, Chapel. Chapel is obvs, Moat seems so direct compared to any other anti-attack reaction. It would probably be considered game-warping in a negative fashion too, until actual playtesting.
Possibly Village. It would be interesting to see people's reactions to a $3 village, since aside from Village itself almost every village that draws a card costs $4.

Make unique additions to the game:
Festival, actually. Considered as a village for hardcore engines, it sits at a really odd price-point and corner of design space: +buy and its own money source, but no draw? Odd.
Mine, possibly Workshop.

Seem like obvious and fitting additions to the game: Gardens, Laboratory, Smithy. I would love to see Donald's write-up of Gardens if it hadn't already existed.