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1

Dominion Articles / SaunaVanto --Draft--

« on: February 19, 2019, 03:11:32 pm »

Looking for feedback and also to make this shorter:

SaunaVanto

It’s uncommon to completely ignore the SaunaVanto pile, as it performs three deck control functions that you need most games (Thinning, Draw and Village). It’s reasonably likely to be the best or only source of one of these effects, but that doesn’t necessarily focus the board around it or make the split(s) important. SaunaVanto’s dirty little secret is that it’s actually pretty mediocre at each of its functions, and its main advantage is that it does them all. Often, when these effects are either optional or available somewhere else, it’s best to ignore the pile, going for those other sources of Draw, Thinning and Village or building a deck that doesn’t need them. Another consideration to that end is that an opponent going for Saunas sees the Avantos faster if you follow suit, likening contesting them to the classic “City Trap.”

That said, playing around the pile looks a little different depending on which effect you’re relying on. So when SaunaVanto is your:

Trashing: You normally grab an early Sauna along with a Silver or two. Optionally, you could take a single Silver and two Saunas, but these two options trash at a similar speed and the Silvers usually do more for you than the Saunas do (until the Avantos are revealed). Sauna’s trashing is slow and unreliable at first, but significantly faster once you’re drawing more cards, so the plan tends to be to make up for the slow initial Thinning with one or two big trashing turns later on.

Draw: This is what the pile is best at, but it takes a while to start doing it, (which is the main factor behind that “City Trap” comparison from earlier). When drawing cards is the main thing you need that pile for, the Saunas are not a priority and they’re often outright skippable. Instead, build a deck that hits $5 consistently and see what the opponent is doing. If they buy the Saunas, you’re probably positioned to get more Avantos than them. If they don’t, then you can either focus on some other source of draw, or commit harder to a moneyish strategy that doesn’t really need it.

Village: Understand that the pile is an unreliable and inefficient Village (you need to line up three cards from the pile in the right order to get plus one action). If the terminal payload is so strong that the Village is mandatory and SaunaVanto is your only option, then make sure you get one or two Saunas, but do consider if there’s some other strategy available that doesn’t need a Village. Leaving the pile uncontested for your opponent means they will have that Village effect if they pursue it, but it will be slow to set up, so perhaps you can take enough of a lead that it doesn’t matter by that point.

2

Dominion General Discussion / Mistakes We're still making in 2019

« on: January 30, 2019, 09:56:30 am »

Hey guys,

I would appreciate it if anyone who has time would answer this survey on common Dominion mistakes people are still making.

I'd like to take the responses I get and do a writeup analyzing common skill plateaus and trends beyond the basic level:

https://goo.gl/forms/Sg40DzEnR12p9mGy1

3

Variants and Fan Cards / Decadent Nobility

« on: August 30, 2018, 09:42:14 am »

Having thought about this a little more carefully it doesn't really work.

Here was my thought: I played a kingdom where Bridge Troll was the endgame payload and the only draw/village was City Quarter. It was really interesting because you got this powerful effect, but the card that enabled it didn't help you pay off the debt, so I was trying to brainstorm a way to emulate that in a card/event.

4

Dominion Articles / Groundskeeper-- Draft

« on: August 22, 2018, 09:11:30 am »

Groundskeeper

Groundskeeper is a difficult card to evaluate and an essential one to understand. It has very high scoring potential, and the pile is often hotly contested. Boards which play to its strengths often see it deplete, and winning the split can be game-decisive.

To avoid burying the lede for anyone who has the question “should I go for Groundskeeper,” It’s a very strong card. You need a compelling reason to ignore it.
Yet, while Groundskeeper helps you win the game with your deck, it does not help you build it.

Let’s start by talking about two Dominion basics Groundskeeper challenges:

One: Taking longer to build your deck risks an opponent getting a points lead, and making that up usually means depleting key piles (like Province) yourself, further hastening the game end. Groundskeeper scores points disproportionate to how much it lowers piles.

Two: Points usually make your deck worse.
Groundskeeper doesn’t change this directly, but your Groundskeepers will eventually score points, so gaining them is tantamount to scoring points that don’t hurt your deck.

   
Groundskeepers are Delayed Scoring

The key to timing Groundskeeper gains is looking at the card as alt VP. A deck that has/plays more of them has a higher point ceiling, so around when you would start buying VP cards, pretend Groundskeeper is green.
Essentially, it’s a cantrip worth VP equal to the number of VP cards you expect to buy (with it out) by the end of the game. On boards where you can gain only one of those per turn, you can usually expect that to be 2-6 VP, depending how your draws go.





Reading Groundskeeper Kingdoms- Does the Split Matter?


It’s important to acknowledge how skill-rewarding Groundskeeper is. Everything about the card is contextual, so we can’t give you much in the way of hard-and-fast prescriptive advice that won’t be wrong as often as it’s right. Above all, the presence of Groundskeeper rewards good game sense and an accurate read on your win condition.
That said, there are certainly some things that are helpful to keep in mind.

Groundskeeper’s greatest synergies are multiple gains and reliability (by which I mean being able to play Groundskeepers consistently).
Obviously, multiple VP gains per turn scores more points, but being able to gain multiple Groundskeepers per turn also makes them more important (as they are likely to score more points before Provinces empty).
If multiple VP cards or Groundskeepers are gainable per turn, or the decks are reliable enough to play all/most of their Groundskeepers every turn, the split will probably play a huge role in the outcome of the game and should be prioritized accordingly.

While Groundskeeper increases point ceiling without decreasing deck capability, it doesn’t do anything to increase capability. You should usually build your deck to be as good as it’s ever going to be (other than points you’ll score) before you start buying Groundskeepers.

At the same time, mind the split. On boards good for Groundskeeper, they will often pile out, and sometimes it’s worth delaying other deckbuilding to make sure you get enough of them. Whether or not the split matters, and how much you can afford to lose it by are very game-specific, but usually come down to how impactful each copy will be (which comes back to number of gains and deck reliability).


Playing Groundskeeper Games: A Field Guide to Aggressive Gardening

Keeping Groundskeeper in Check With Pressure:


When deciding how to play around Goundskeeper and how to interpret your win condition at any given point, consider the following.
Firstly, given enough time, having/playing more Groundskeepers pretty much always wins because of how they raise your point ceiling. Secondly, Groundskeeper’s greatest practical advantage is scoring (delayed) points without making your average turn worse.

It should come as no surprise then that a Groundskeeper deck’s greatest threat is endgame pressure. In other words, Groundskeeper doesn’t have its usual advantages if the game is over (or close to it) by the time  you have to put VP in the deck, or at least have it there for very long.
 In the rare situation it’s possible to empty Provinces over the course of a couple of turns (a la a “megaturn” like with Bridge Trolls or Horn of Plentys), Groundskeepers might not have time to pay off. That’s an extreme example to illustrate the point that Groundskeeper gets worse the less time it has to build up and score points.

Understand though, that ignoring Groundskeeper to pressure piles is an “all-in” proposition-- if you can’t make good on that threat and end the game before someone gaining Groundskeepers has time to catch up, they will likely outscore you.

How Many Groundskeepers do I want? Mirror Versus Non-Mirror:

In a vacuum, you want all of them, as many as you can get. But as with every other aspect of the card, there are some considerations.
The earlier advice of playing with and against pile pressure applies to Groundskeeper mirror matches as well. If both players are going for Groundskeeper, the pile usually empties and always gets low. Even when the split is important, a three-pile ending is something to watch out for before you gain the last one.


It’s also important to have an accurate read on how your opponent intends to win. Even when Groundskeepers are the best strategy, focusing on them in the wrong way can lose you games. Namely, if you play to them the same way you would in a mirror.
Outside of a mirror, it’s not necessarily a good idea to get all ten Groundskeepers when fewer could outscore whatever the opponent is doing. There’s the obvious limitation of how much time it takes to empty them by yourself, but it can also be unwise because emptying the pile potentially hastens the game end, which Groundskeeper usually doesn’t want to do against non-Groundskeeper decks.

To further explain the card and its nuances, we’re going to give some concrete tips using gameplay examples for context.

The more reliable the decks are, the more the split matters: 
If both players play all their Groundskeepers every turn and Josephine gets 6 of them to Martin’s 4, her estates are worth as much as his Duchies and double-Duchy turns are worth almost as many points to her as double-Province turns are to him. She is in a much stronger endgame position.
   
When Choosing between 1 or more Groundskeeper(s) and Province (or something to get you a Province), weigh points gain against reliability:


Anna has no Groundskeepers, but bought the first Province last turn. Her opponent Destry hits $15 with three buys and considers his options.

If Destry only gets 3 Provinces to Anna’s 5 because he goes for Groundskeepers and she doesn’t, he needs 13 additional points to win. He probably needs at least 4 VP cards to win anyway, so he must have on average 2 or 3 (2.5) Groundskeepers in play across all his VP gains to win with a Duchy (instead of the Province), or an average of at least 4 in play per VP card to win with an Estate.

So what should he do? I have no idea, and neither do you.
Because it depends on a lot of context I haven’t given you--   how likely either deck is to stall, which/how many VP cards he expects to gain before Provinces empty, could she 3-pile if he lets her start her turn with a points lead.

Again, the minimum number of VP cards he’ll probably need to gain is 4, so if he can play all of his Groundskeepers every turn and still do that, buying 3 Groundskeepers will maximize his score, effectively gaining 12 points versus Province-Groundskeeper for 9 points.
If he will miss out on playing one of his Groundskeepers once or twice, it’s closer, but still slightly in favor of triple Groundskeeper to maximize score, and we get closer to Province-Duchy being best the less reliable/more “sloggy” his deck is (how unlikely he is to play the Groundskeepers).

With multiple VP card gains per turn, the Groundskeepers obviously look a lot better. We do some more Groundskeeper-favorable math, but again, weigh the possible points against how much harder the extra VP cards make it to keep playing our Groundskeepers.



Signs not to Go for Groundskeeper:

No single condition makes Groundskeeper ignorable. Rather, these are factors that make the card weaker and steer you away from it.

In an unreliable/”sloggy” deck with single VP gains per turn, or in the face of a viable rush to the game end, buying Groundskeepers is often a waste of time.


Single-gain games usually reward speed over point ceiling, playing away from Groundskeeper’s strengths.

Similarly, as mentioned before, a “megaturn” deck that empties provinces over the course of one or two turns can often outpace Groundskeeper’s potentially higher but more gradual scoring. Note that adding Groundskeepers doesn’t hurt that deck, but it doesn’t help build it faster.

Junking attacks. No deck likes being junked, but Groundskeeper strategies can suffer more, needing both reliability and multiple VP cards to maximize value. I would say Swamp Hag is particularly brutal, but honestly they all kinda put the screws to yioux about the same without strong trashing.

If you take nothing else from this, understand that we’re talking about specific situations where Groundskeeper is weak, and you need to look for reasons not to buy it-- most of the time it plays a pivotal role in the game’s outcome and shouldn’t be ignored.

5

Dominion General Discussion / Question- What is an Engine

« on: July 25, 2018, 02:25:31 pm »

Just want to get some feedback from different voices. Put an Engine in Dominion into words as best you can:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1efjKpTpZoYOxlwtHwmSiBLxSdXxCZ17_IpTjB84LrjE/viewform?edit_requested=true#responses

6

Dominion General Discussion / Dominion Anime Protagonists Unite!

« on: July 19, 2018, 11:27:51 am »

Remember how in Yu-Gi-Oh, what the cards actually did would vary for the protagonists episode by episode?
culminating in this  famous episode?



Let's do that with Dominion, I'll start:

"With Masquerade, I pass you the Feodum I gained with Salt the Earth, which trashes another Feodum from the supply gaining me another point chip and forcing you to gain three silvers!"

"King's Court my King's Court my King's Court my Distant Lands, scoring a total of 27 points!"

"But your final mistake was playing your Catapult. You launched your Ill-Gotten Gains into my hand, unknowingly gaining a curse, and I revealed my Mint to gain another Ill-Gotten Gains and give you the last curse! Farewell."

7

Variants and Fan Cards / Delusion

« on: June 25, 2018, 11:34:43 pm »

My goal is for at least one person to get the reference

8

Dominion Articles / Contraband

« on: June 15, 2018, 09:43:00 am »

Hey guys, I'm writing an article on Contraband for the strategy blog and I thought it would be good to get a few more eyes on it before it's ready to publish, so let me know what you think!

I'm trying to trim this to 500 words if I can (self-imposed limit because I don't want it to be too long) so I purposely left out things I consider edge cases, but I definitely want suggestions if they come to mind!

Goal: Help new players understand why Contraband is usually a bad idea and experienced players recognize situations where it isn’t.

Contraband-A-Ban-Ban

Often ignored, Contraband is considered by many a weak card. A lot of the time it is, but that’s to the extent that Dominion has strong and weak cards.
What Dominion really has are commonly applicable and rarely applicable cards, and the best players look out for all possible advantages, all the time, on every board.

Contraband is guilty until proven innocent in terms of utility-- it’s unwise to start your game plan by dreaming up uses for Contraband. Rather, one should identify their deckbuilding and endgame goals, then decide whether or not Contraband is an enabler.

Limitations- Why don’t you buy Contraband more often?

It’s rare for an opponent not to have some idea of what your goals are based on what your deck is doing, and by extension what the best card for your deck would be.This applies to every phase of the game (this is especially true for money-focused decks that don’t interact with much of the Kingdom).
Counting on your opponent making a mistake is a bad strategy-- And relying on Contraband for payload is usually just that.
Playing more than one compounds the problem, making the card inherently unreliable, as you rarely want more than one.
At its worst in the in the endgame, as your opponent almost always knows which green card you need to buy.


A $5-cost card that doesn’t help you get control of your deck has the onus to deliver significant payload. Contraband does, but with the restriction that you’re required to do the second-best thing with your turn. If there’s one clear best thing, the opportunity cost is that thing (because a $5 buy probably could have advanced you toward it somehow).

For example, when you and your opponent are fighting over the last Avanto, Contraband probably isn’t welcome in your hand.
Whereas you’re usually much more content having to buy Blessed Village instead of Worker’s Village, or two Markets instead of a Grand Market.

Strengths and how to capitalize on them:

It’s cheaper than Gold, with the added benefit of plus buy. Non-terminal plus buy and significant non-terminal payload are kind of rare-- Contraband is both. making it an efficient means of picking up two or more cards per turn if you don’t particularly mind which ones they are.

-Situations to capitalize on these strengths
-Boards with many useful supply piles (no clear best choice, you’re just shoving awesome stuff into your deck).
-A way to profitably trash the Contraband once you’re done building.
-Events you want to buy

It’s also worth noting the advantage you have by giving your opponent as little information about your hand as possible. This means you normally play it as your first treasure, and that it’s weaker when you need to reveal cards from your hand mid-turn, like with Menagerie or Legionary.

Conclusion:
Contraband is terrible in big money decks and terrible on boards with a few piles key to a clearly dominant strategy. However, on boards with multiple build-routes/useful components, it’s an extremely efficient means of shoving them into your deck en masse.

The key thing to remember is that Contraband helps you build your deck, it does NOT help you win the game with your deck,

9

Dominion General Discussion / Question- which one tilts you?

« on: May 28, 2018, 04:44:57 pm »

Show of hands here-- which one is more frustrating,
You getting a bad draw or your opponent getting a good one?

Just curious how people feel about this (and we're not talking about how they're the same thing).

10

Dominion General Discussion / To Those Who Deny Undo Steps Online

« on: April 27, 2018, 06:52:13 pm »

I've had a hunch for a while, one more about people than Dominion, but now I have some numbers suggesting it too, and those are 100% Dominion.

See, I have a blanket policy of blacklisting anyone who denies one of my undo steps for any reason. Granted, I don't request dubious ones (yes, subjective, I know-- not the point of this post), but as you can imagine, I have a decently long blacklist at this point.

I recently searched the Scavenger Leaderboard to compare it with my blacklist and not a single one of them is in the top 1000 players.

I play a LOT of games, against players of all skill levels, and it's easy to notice that skilled players tend not to deny undos very often. Do I have confirmation bias? Sure.

But referencing my blacklist against the leaderboard with zero overlap is also pretty convincing that denying your opponent an undo step betrays a lack of confidence in your play. That lack of confidence in turn suggests a deficit of skill, but that's to be expected if you create negative play experiences for yourself and your opponent.

So if you're one of these people, holding yourselves back with a toxic attitude toward the game and your fellow players, I want to challenge you to reconsider. Next time you're thinking about pressing "deny," think twice. Grant the step and see how much better your games get, and how much better you get as a player.

11

Dominion Articles / Villa Quarry: A PSA

« on: April 26, 2018, 10:15:28 am »

As the title suggests, I mean this post as more of a PSA on an interaction I think catches some people by surprise than an exhaustive strategy exploration.
In fact, you could argue this is more of a rules clarification than anything else, but I think it has enough examples/applications to warrant its own post.

With two Quarries in play (or any other way to make Villa cost $1 or $0), gaining Villas becomes a positive feedback loop limited only by the remaining Villas in the supply.

If they cost $1, gaining them consumes nothing, and if they're free, gaining one nets you $1 for the turn.

The only strategic implication I want to get into in the main post is that when these options are available, you can assume the Villa pile will be empty at any given point.

This has some obvious utility for winning on a 3-pile ending, and sometimes enables a "mega-turn," but if we want to get more specific or there are other ways to play around this, feel free to comment below!

I'm sure there's plenty to talk about here that would be better placed in a full-fledged article on Villa, but that's not the idea behind this post, so take from it what you will.

12

Dominion Articles / Fortress Big Money

« on: April 02, 2018, 11:26:30 am »

Fortress Big Money



With our most recent episode of the podcast out, I wanted to clarify a reference we made to one of the staple strategies in high-level Dominion counterplay. I figured most people knew about it, but it looks like some aren’t aware of the power combo.
That’s okay though, it’s why we do what we do. It doesn’t mean we’ve failed, it just means we need to slow down and take a step back (only been teaching domindion for like a month or something so it’s understandable if some people need to catch up). I’m going to start with the basics here. I think most of us know that drawing cards is powerful, and actions win games, but you never know who’s reading (who knows, maybe I’ll even read this before I publish).

We’ll start by talking about something else. My qualifications for this are that I’m very good at Dominion (I played in the gencon qualifier last year and I own all the expansions).

What’s the goal of a big money deck? Obviously, it’s to buy 5 of the 8 provinces before your opponent can do whatever it is they’re doing. Doing this is a strong play. It requires and showcases a level of drawing and buying that separates a good player from a great one.

Why is fortress so good for this? Why wouldn’t you just buy a silver? You can’t buy provinces without coins, and getting 5 of them requires 40(!!) coins at minimum. You get money by drawing cards, and drawing cards can be a pain.

Let’s do some math on how your first two turns break down WITHOUT the powerhouse opener of Fortress-Fortress (Fortress-Silver if you miss the shuffle):


As you can see, Silver Smithee looks like it comes out ahead most of the time, but that’s a logical fallacy.
You see, Smithey, despite being able to draw silver copper gold, could draw things dead, like estates and Semithys you can’t play now.

That’s where fortress comes in. You need 8 money, but you start out with all these cards that only give you a $1. How do you turn five of those into $8 (much less $40)?
Easy. You need more of them. Obviously, you’re grabbing an extra copper with your markets whenever you haven’t spent all your money on Silvers and Fortresses, which helps with your money density, but it doesn’t change the fact that you have only start out with 5 cards of the 8 you need.
You play a Fortress from your hand and it draws you a card. You’ve now seen 6 of the 8 cards you need. That’s where the Smitehy tree stops dead in its tracks and its why we skip that card whenever we can get Fortress instead.
The Fortress pile, however, synergizes with itself in ways we’re still trying to understand here in the top tables of the dominion community. After all, this is a game of resource management. Your cards are resources. Your money is a resource and your actions are the most important resource (with points coming in as a close second).

Smithy’se problem is that it consumes the resources it needs, actions. Market’s issue here isn’t that it consumes resources, but it doesn’t create the resources you need to play more of them. It says plus action on it, but a good Dominion player is tracking how many actions he plays per turn versus his available pool and realizes he’s not actually profiting when he draws and plays a fortress. If you’re not making actions, you’re losing actions.
Obviously, Fortress creates value in this situation by not only refusing to consume actions, but adding them to your pool.

We have this theory from Dominion called opportunity cost (which is way too complicated to go into here so just google it or something), which states that any time you buy a  Market, it could have been a Fortress. So every time you play that action, it’s like you lose an action you could have had.

Now that we’ve established that, let’s come back to how a Fortress big money deck wins the game (and it does).
Smiethy showed us some cards but didn’t quite get us to Province. Fortress, on the other hand doesn’t have that hard cap of how many you can play.
Playing 3 or 4 of them means that you’ve seen more than enough of your deck to buy a province, and possibly enough to grab an extra duchy or silver too!

Let’s do some math on Fortress:
 

The other strength of Fortress is that cards like Swingler, Knights and Rogue actually INCREASE the number of Fortresses in your deck, making it possible to own the entire Fortress pile by turn 4 or five if you plan correctly.

Now getting into exactly who wins the game based on how the Fortress split goes is well beyond the scope of this article, but hopefully now you understand the strategy and how it applies to games of Dominion for epic comebacks.

Check out the episode in question below and happy holidays, everyone!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmXmjOxKMTg

13

Dominion Articles / Dominion Coaching Series: A tip for getting better

« on: March 29, 2018, 09:26:35 am »

Let's talk about another game I play quite a bit, Overwatch.
If you're not familiar, it's a competitive FPS game, so there's a lot of strategic and mechanical execution involved in whatever it is you're trying to do.

Naturally, one of the best ways to get better at that game is to record your plays and watch them back. I do that sometimes, and I make so many more mistakes than I realize in the thick of it.

I use Nvidia Shadowplay for that and it's a cinch to set up and use (if you don't have an Nvidia graphics card, there are plenty of other easy pieces of recording software out there).
I decided to record some of my games to put up on youtube. The idea being that people seem to want to see more play-by-play in high-level Dominion.

Dominion is different from Overwatch, right? There's no mechanical performance or reaction time required of you (unless you're revealing Moat to Minion 8 times a turn) so we figure there's no need to remove yourself from a hectic context. We remember the game, right? We know what we did right, what we did wrong, why we lost, why that shuffle went badly, etc.
WRONG

Just like my Overwatch vids, watching my Dominion games, I make so many more mistakes than I realize. You kind of assume that someone who publishes footage of themselves playing something is pretty good at it, right? That's why they're publishing their footage, but I think it works the other way around. I think analyzing your play in third person forces you to be a little more self-evaluating, which eventually leads to a more analytical approach to the game.

So, here's my challenge to you: record a game. You don't have to talk during it if you don't want to. Just record yourself and watch it back. There's plenty of easy ways  and a quick google search will give you several options for it on your machine.

Watching it back, you'll have more time and hindsight for things like shuffle tracking, tracking your opponent's deck, optimizing mid-turn play, endgame evaluation, you know those nebulous concepts that win games of Dominion and inspire 3000 word articles? Read the articles, sure. But I think watching your games back is the best way to apply them to a real game.

In fact, let's take this a step further. Send me your gameplay (preferably upload it to youtube and send me the link, but if you want to get it to me some other way that's fine).

If you don't want them to go public, let us know and we won't make a video about it. And if you don't want to share them at all, at least watch them back for your own benefit.

I just started uploading games (you can check out my videos in the link below but I'd like to do some play analysis videos.
Adam Horton will do these with me as well when he's not too tied up with the Making Luck podcast we do, so let's get better at Dominion. All of us, as a community.

Email: jakeschwartz38@gmail.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jake.schwartz.3139
Youtube:

14

Dominion Articles / How I Learned to Quit Bellyaching and Love the Hex

« on: February 23, 2018, 10:00:40 am »

Title's a bit of a misnomer here, admittedly (unless you get the reference, in which case you know exactly how I feel about it).

See, Adam Horton and I are doing a card-by-card Nocturne discussion/review for the next episode of the podcast (if you haven't checked it out yet, here's the latest episode: ).

I try to keep opinions concise if they don't relate to maximizing chances of victory, because how you feel about a card is, most of the time, just a distraction in-game. So next week's episode I'll go into this much more briefly so we can focus on the cards themselves and how to use them.

That said, let's talk about the impact Hexes have on the game. Firstly, I do not have some inexplicable aversion to attack mechanics in Dominion (as if buying the last Highway or winning the Wharf split is less of an attack than playing a militia). In fact, I think an attack in the mix usually makes the game more interesting and dynamic in decision making.

Frankly, everything people are afraid of boons doing that they don't actually do, unpredictable swingy outcomes disproportionately rewarding or punishing one player over another and edging out skill in favor of rng, can actually come true through the Hex deck. And it does way too often.

So what makes hexers so different from booners?
For one thing, if inconsistency is a problem for your strategy, you just don’t invest in the booners. But the hexes are usually forced on you. Getting hit with poverty right after your Expedition turn, or Envious/Misery near the end of the duchy dance, when all that happened to your opponent was milling a card from famine or randomly shuffling his deck from bad omens --- oooh scary--- doesn’t teach you anything about Dominion, doesn’t encourage clean or optimized play, doesn’t really measure player skill very well, and most importantly, it just feels bad.

If Haunted Woods effectively makes your opponent skip his every other turn, you feel clever for identifying that and setting it up, and your opponent learns one more new thing about Dominion. You might be frustrated getting locked down by Knights spam or being hit by Legionary every turn, but hopefully you can at least appreciate your opponent’s play. Hopefully you can focus on how to avoid it in the future or how to win anyway. Not with Hexes. You’ve really got no recourse to the hex deck or metric of what you can do to mitigate its impact, or if you even need to. You just need to cross your fingers and hope for the best.
And it doesn’t feel nearly so good being on the other end of it, especially in a mirror.

You don’t feel clever, you feel lucky. Would you really rather feel lucky than clever?


Admittedly, hexes are contextual in their effectiveness, but that makes them worse, not better. Getting Locusts or War in the first few turns is brutal. Getting Bad Omens could even be helpful. Giving out a lucky Misery in an otherwise even game can help you clutch out the penultimate province with impunity. And what could your opponent have done to stop any of that? Pretty much nothing, all else being equal.

The other problem with the high variance of hexes is that they’re usually given out by attacks.

Every attack in the game is balanced around doing less for you than a similar card of the same cost because part of the payload is a negative impact on your opponent.
That means these random jabs demand you to commit resources to them before you can reasonably predict what they’re going to do. So you’re invested in this rng in the form of an otherwise weak terminal, reducing your hand size, etc.

That might even be okay if they were generally low-impact like the boons are, you could weigh out your options and decide in context whether or not it’s worth the investment. You could even do the same thing if they were all high-impact. But the hex deck is polarized between doing nothing at all and hitting you right between the legs. It might also be okay if there was some unifying theme in what the hexes did, like, "oh hexes tend to give out junk, can I deal with that," or "hexes tend to make your next hand worse," can I ignore those? But no. They’re all over the map so you have no idea what this card is that you’re choosing whether to commit to or ignore.

If you ignore Ambassador and get snowballed, or didn’t properly support your witches and lose the curse split, at least those cards are staring up at you telling you what you did wrong. At least you know you made a mistake. But the hexers? Your opponent just flips a coin at you every turn and you pray it doesn’t hit you in the eye.

Look, I know there will typically be several far more important factors deciding any given game than who got which hex. Shuffle tracking, prioritization, strategic flexibility and a smarter endgame will usually trump rng in any game of Dominion, hexes or no.

So aside from the whining, what can you take away from this to get better at Dominion, where's the insight? Maybe it's that you need to focus and play a cleaner game when hexes are out. Maybe you need to get thinner and keep better control of your deck than you'd normally care to. Maybe you need to assume at any given time that you opponent has two more points than he does (for fear of Misery) and make your endgame buys accordingly. Maybe you need to avoid going too light on payload for fear of War or Locusts stalling you a turn. It's probably just to know what you're getting into beforehand and play the best you can with how it shuffles out.