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Dominion General Discussion / Pillage pinning
« on: September 13, 2012, 02:54:37 pm »
TL; DR: I'm an idiot. This isn't a real thing. Look, a picture!
It's usually pretty hard to repeatedly Pillage your opponent -- Pillage trashes itself, and it also clogs up your deck with Spoils, making it harder to get to the Pillages that are in your deck.
We can solve that problem with Graverobber, which not only fetches Pillage from the trash, but also puts it back on top of your deck, for easy access the following turn. But we've only replaced our problem, since now we have to get repeated access to the Graverobber.
Finishing off the pin is King's Court-Scheme, which gives us four things we need: 1, a source of extra actions so that we can play both Pillage and Graverobber; 2, a way to put the Graverobbers on top of the deck so that we can repeatedly get the Pillages, 3, a way to ensure that all the Spoils we're getting from repeatedly Pillaging don't stop us from playing the pin, 4, a way to draw those Spoils so that we can actually do something once our opponent is pinned.
The actual pin:
- Draw KC-KC-Scheme-Scheme-Scheme.
- Play KC on KC
- on Scheme, drawing KC-Graverobber-Scheme
- on Scheme, drawing Scheme-Pillage-Pillage
- on KC
- on Pillage, discarding your opponent's best 3 cards
- on Pillage, discarding your opponent's remaining cards
- on Graverobber, returning 2 Pillages and some other action to the top of your deck
- play Scheme 3x, drawing three cards
Do whatever you want since your opponent has no cards. Often those three cards will be enough to get you another KC or Scheme, in which case eventually you'll be able to extend your turn to KC a Scheme and draw more non-pin cards; or those three cards will all be Spoils, so you can buy Province, or your opponent will just do this:
Otherwise, you've KC'd scheme twice and played it three times. Your deck already has 2 Pillages on top from the Graverobbers; now clean up and put Scheme, Scheme, Graverobber, KC, 3 Schemes, and 2 KC on top, in that order. Rinse and repeat; hooray! Now your friend hates Dominion!
You might say that this combo is too slow, and on some boards you might be right. Playing it solo, I was able to Pillage my imaginary opponent twice during turns 7-10, and then was able to Pillage every turn starting on 11-12, with the pin coming on turn 16-17. Turn 16-17 is obviously pretty late in the game, but here's the thing: it's pretty damn hard to buy a Province if you're getting Pillaged every turn. I tried it with Smithy-BM and even when I timed it so that I got Pillaged on the best possible turns 7-10, I never got more than 4 Provinces by turn 16 (and keep in mind that the pinner can buy Duchies once the pin is in place). I encourage you to try your favorite combo solo and see how effective it is when you lose your best card every turn from turn 12 on, knowing you will have no cards starting turn 17.
Now obviously a 4-card combo is going to come up roughly never. But it's worth knowing about. And playing through it really helped illustrate the point that getting Pillaged every turn is freaking rough -- there's probably quite a few boards that will have Pillage and Graverobber or Rogue and will allow you to do some weaker variant of the pin, not to mention multiplayer games where you might get Pillaged by multiple opponents.
We can solve that problem with Graverobber, which not only fetches Pillage from the trash, but also puts it back on top of your deck, for easy access the following turn. But we've only replaced our problem, since now we have to get repeated access to the Graverobber.
Finishing off the pin is King's Court-Scheme, which gives us four things we need: 1, a source of extra actions so that we can play both Pillage and Graverobber; 2, a way to put the Graverobbers on top of the deck so that we can repeatedly get the Pillages, 3, a way to ensure that all the Spoils we're getting from repeatedly Pillaging don't stop us from playing the pin, 4, a way to draw those Spoils so that we can actually do something once our opponent is pinned.
The actual pin:
- Draw KC-KC-Scheme-Scheme-Scheme.
- Play KC on KC
- on Scheme, drawing KC-Graverobber-Scheme
- on Scheme, drawing Scheme-Pillage-Pillage
- on KC
- on Pillage, discarding your opponent's best 3 cards
- on Pillage, discarding your opponent's remaining cards
- on Graverobber, returning 2 Pillages and some other action to the top of your deck
- play Scheme 3x, drawing three cards
Do whatever you want since your opponent has no cards. Often those three cards will be enough to get you another KC or Scheme, in which case eventually you'll be able to extend your turn to KC a Scheme and draw more non-pin cards; or those three cards will all be Spoils, so you can buy Province, or your opponent will just do this:
You might say that this combo is too slow, and on some boards you might be right. Playing it solo, I was able to Pillage my imaginary opponent twice during turns 7-10, and then was able to Pillage every turn starting on 11-12, with the pin coming on turn 16-17. Turn 16-17 is obviously pretty late in the game, but here's the thing: it's pretty damn hard to buy a Province if you're getting Pillaged every turn. I tried it with Smithy-BM and even when I timed it so that I got Pillaged on the best possible turns 7-10, I never got more than 4 Provinces by turn 16 (and keep in mind that the pinner can buy Duchies once the pin is in place). I encourage you to try your favorite combo solo and see how effective it is when you lose your best card every turn from turn 12 on, knowing you will have no cards starting turn 17.
