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Dominion Articles / Storyteller
« on: August 27, 2018, 01:40:11 pm »


Storyteller is a card unlike anything else in Dominion, being the only card to let you effectively spend your economy for massive amounts of non-terminal draw. In doing so, Storyteller both spends whatever virtual economy you’ve built up so far (the card itself providing $1, making it a cantrip when played alone) while letting you play up to 3 of your treasures.  While this effect seems counterproductive at first glance, +1 card is almost always preferable to $1 as long as you still have cards to draw. Provided your drawn card is better than a Copper, turning your economy into cards will almost result in a better turn overall.

Weaknesses and Basic Strategy

Storyteller is a card that, at worst, plays itself as a cantrip, while potentially being one of the strongest sources of non-terminal draw in the game. What weaknesses could the card even have? In a vacuum, not many. Provided you’ve trashed your Coppers and Estates, 3 to 5 Storytellers and an ample supply of Silver or Gold can be the sole source of draw in a thin deck that consistently draws itself. Being able to consistently acquire 10-20+ card hands non-terminally is a major boon, allowing you to spend your terminal actions on attacks or powerful payload cards such as Bridge.

On weaker boards, it’s a perfectly valid strategy to build a ‘Storyteller + Big Money + X’ deck, ‘X’ being a particularly strong terminal and/or a +buy card to take advantage of the massive hands this deck can generate. While most Storyteller-BM-X strategies can easily beat traditional BM, against more traditional forms of draw, Storyteller/BM decks will often fall behind when ran entirely unsupported. There are two main reasons for this: speed and reliability.

Storyteller’s speed weakness is rarer, but simple. Storyteller decks aim to consistently draw most or all of your deck. When Storyteller is both unsupported and up against strong draw alternatives such as Wharf, Storyteller decks can have a hard time keeping up with the latter’s explosive tempo. Other forms of non-terminal draw such as Hunting Party and Alchemist can also threaten Storyteller’s viability on certain boards. Since Storytellers require both the card itself and 2 or 3 treasures to draw effectively, it can sometimes be quicker to simply buy and use other sources of draw over Storyteller (and its fuel) and when aiming to build a deck that draws itself.

However, more important than this is Storyteller’s reliability problem. Storyteller decks are completely dependant upon having a Storyteller in their starting hand; while 4 Silvers and a Storyteller is a fantastic opener, 4 Silvers and a terminal is just a Big Money variant - slow and unimpressive. Even all of the strategies written in this article fall to pieces without access to a Storyteller in your opening hand. This makes Storyteller decks more prone to dud than other conventional draw engines. The best way to combat this is simply to have 1 or 2 more Storytellers than you’d otherwise need to fully draw your deck - having to play 1 or 2 Storytellers as cantrips every turn is well worth having a deck that runs consistently.

Supported Storyteller

Like most cards, Storyteller’s strength in comparison to other draw sources depends upon the rest of the kingdom. While there are many cards that interact with Storyteller directly, letting you further capitalize on the card’s strengths (more on those later), the strongest synergies are those that patch up Storyteller’s weaknesses, its speed and unreliability.

Storyteller with Savers

For a Storyteller deck to avoid dudding, you need an opening hand of money and a Storyteller. Since money is a pretty easy thing to consistently draw, getting a Storyteller into your hand every turn will effectively negate a Storyteller deck’s chance of failure almost completely. Cards that can consistently put Storytellers into your hand every turn such as Haven, Scheme, and Save can let you fully draw with near 100% consistency, provided you still have ample Storytellers in the rest of your deck. In the absence of traditional saving cards, you can use cards such as Courtyard and Count to topdeck a Storyteller once you’re done drawing, or simply use supplemental Duration draw such as Haunted Woods to increase the likelihood of drawing a Storyteller in your opening hand.

Storyteller with Gainers

Why worry about having to buy all of your Storyteller fodder when you can have cards give you boatloads of treasure for free? Silver gainers such as Jack of All Trades, Amulet, and Masterpiece can fill your deck with excessive amounts of Silver incredibly quickly. This usually isn’t a good thing, since Silver is an engine-clogging stop card in every other scenario. Storyteller, however, lets you turn your Silvers into incredibly potent non-terminal draw (Silvers effectively becoming Laboratories when fed to a Storyteller), while still providing fantastic economy from the Silvers you don’t need for draw. Not needing to buy your Storyteller fodder lets you build at an exponentially faster rate, letting you spend your payload on more Storytellers or powerful actions. While rarer, Storyteller becomes even stronger when on the board with gold gainers such as Soothsayer or Bandit. Governor is an especially strong card with Storyteller, since it can both gain gold non-terminally and remodel them into Provinces in the late game. This being said, it’s still important to not over-gain treasures in a Storyteller deck. Thoughtlessly gaining loads of Silver or Gold will still clog your deck, making it hard to actually find your Storytellers to play.

Storyteller with Kingdom Treasures

Storyteller is one of the three cards in the game (along with Black Market and Villa) that can put Treasures in play during your action phase, giving your action cards access to Kingdom Treasures’ special effects. Not only are most Kingdom Treasures simply much stronger cards overall when played as draw rather than as payload, but certain treasures can prove incredibly strong when played during your action phase. Feed Storyteller a Quarry? Your Workshops can now gain Grand Markets. Feed Storyteller a Royal Seal afterwards? Your Workshops can now topdeck Grand Markets!

Bank is an especially notable example of this - any treasures fed to Storyteller count as ‘in play’, and therefore add to Bank’s total value while also helping you fill your hand with even more treasures to boost Bank! While this still takes some build-up without support, Bank-Storyteller can lead to explosive results when paired with +buy cards. Simply feeding 4 Storytellers 3 Treasures each puts all your Banks at $13 and counting, disregarding any treasures still in your hand! Platinum, while lacking any special effects, also deserves a special mention. Though expensive and hard to connect with Storyteller, Storyteller/Platinum provides near-unrivaled drawing power that can easily facilitate game-winning megaturns.

Storyteller with Virtual Coin

Storyteller has mixed results when played with ‘virtual coin’, the economy generated by cards such as Market and Monument. Unlike treasures, you can’t control how much of your virtual coin is spent; you spend it all, then draw accordingly. Non-terminal virtual coin usually works quite well with Storyteller decks, as they can be played similar to treasures and generally benefit from being played as draw. Terminal coin-generating actions don’t work at all; the moment you’re spending actions to draw with Storyteller, you’re missing out on one of the card’s biggest strengths.

 Cantrip money from cards such as Peddler can situationally benefit Storyteller decks, though you lose a noticeable degree of control when utilizing these cards in a Storyteller deck. Did you play 6 Peddlers, then draw a Storyteller? It doesn’t matter how many more cards you need to draw, you’re spending all $6 or not playing the Storyteller at all. This isn’t to say that Storyteller and cantrip money are completely incompatible. Rather, caution is required when playing Storyteller with cantrip money. Think carefully when playing coin-generating actions before your last Storyteller. In some cases, it might be worth not playing your last Storyteller at all if you’d spend more coins than your drawn cards could get back.

Storyteller without Trashing

At first glance, you’d think Storyteller would be a significantly worse card with no trashing - after all, it’s harder to align your Storytellers with your Golds with 7 Coppers and 3 Estates in the way. And while this is true, these 10 junk cards also apply to every other player in the game, no matter what cards they decide to go with. As well as using Silver and Gold to increase handsize, Storyteller’s Copper-to-cantrip effect lets you cycle through your Coppers if need be. While using Storyteller as a glorified Forum isn’t ideal, it makes drawing 4 Coppers and a Storyteller often preferable to drawing 4 Coppers and a Smithy.


Overall, Storyteller is a fascinating and versatile card - its reliance on vanilla Treasures makes it at least a semi-viable option in any kingdom, though depending on its support and competition, Storyteller can be totally dominant, completely outclassed, or anything in between. While Storyteller decks build and play quite differently from anything else in Dominion, the classic rules of building and balancing a coherent deck apply just as strongly. Knowing when to go for Storyteller, along with how to build your deck around Storyteller, can spell the difference between an awkward pseudo-BM deck and a spectacular 20-card megaturn. 

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Dominion Articles / Settlers/Bustling Village
« on: June 12, 2018, 03:09:00 pm »
Oh look it's another Empires article by this nerd again

In all seriousness, I've noticed that none of the split piles have gotten any love, so what better place to start than one of the (arguably) most niche ones?



The Settlers/Bustling Village split pile is a strange set of cards. To a new player, they seem strong, albeit a little gimmicky. However, once a player gains experience in how a good dominion engine should be built, it's easy to regard the pile as antithetical to a consistent engine, and therefore not worthwhile. While it's true that the Settlers/Bustling Village pile is highly situational, and quite often a waste of resources to go for, that is not to say that the pile never has its uses. In the presence of the right cards (or more importantly when certain cards are absent), running down the Settlers/Bustling Village pile can be the key to creating a consistent, powerful engine in kingdoms that could otherwise not sustain one.

Weaknesses

To understand the S/BV pile's inherent failings in an engine (and how to work around them), one must simply evaluate the card at face value. First, Settlers: on its own, it's a useless cantrip. With a copper in your discard pile, it becomes a pseudo-vanilla money cantrip - going off of Poacher's value as $4 with a downside, an activated Settlers is, at first glance, a $4.5 card bought at $2. Not bad, right? Then there's Bustling Village: on its own, +1 card,+3 actions, the same effect of playing two vanilla villages consecutively. Useful, but a little weak for a 5 cost. If Bustling Village picks up a Settlers, it becomes +2 cards, +3 actions - an even stronger variant of Lost City, which itself is a major power card for engines. If the subsequent Settlers picks up a Cooper, then you have +2 cards, +3 actions, +$1, which appears utterly absurd for a mere 5 cost card. In a vacuum, these cards seem perfectly strong, albeit unreliable, but simply buying out the pile brainlessly comes with 3 fatal flaws.

1) To maximize the potential of the pile, you need to keep Coppers in your deck. One of the first major lessons of building a good engine to remove your Coppers and Estates as quickly as you can, without irreparably harming your economy. However, once you remove your Coppers, you also remove Settlers' only potential benefit to your deck, rendering it a useless cantrip. While useless cantrips can still have benefits in edge cases (City Quarter fuel, Enchantress fodder, Vassal/Herald targets, etc.), spending money and buys on a card that will almost never help you is a severe opportunity cost, and usually a waste of time.

2) The S/BV pile only reaches its full potential off a filled discard pile. This means that when playing with a thin or empty discard pile, your deck will be noticeably weakened, and more than likely play far less effectively than any other engine. Sure, when you draw all your Bustling villages with a discard pile full of Settlers, your engine will work fantastically, but that's hardly something you can rely on happening consistently, and maximizing consistency is one of the most important parts to engine building. Your Bustling Village engine will work really well sometimes, but you're far better off to have an engine that works all the time.

3) An optimal engine will draw most or all of your deck. Therefore, an optimal engine will be played with an empty discard pile 80-100% of the time. Therefore, if your engine is working as it should be, you will almost never be able to reap the benefits of the S/BV pile. And if your discard pile is usually full...well, you either built your engine wrong, or are you're in a slog-type junker game in which building a coherent engine was near impossible anyway.


So, knowing these 3 weaknesses, why would this be a pile you'd ever want to go for?

There are two possible answers to this question, so let's start with the simpler one.


I really need the +3 actions!

On boards with incredibly strong terminals and no other villages, it can sometimes seem tempting to drain the Settler pile just to get those all-important +3 actions, discard pile benefits be damned. While this is certainly a viable reason to drain the pile, be very careful when going for this. In order to get to the Bustling Village pile, you first need to spend $10 and 5 buys on cards that, for the most part, will rarely help your deck. While you spend your buys and economy on the Settler pile, your opponent can happily spend the time simply building up their own economy in anticipation. If you're not prepared, your opponent can simply buy out the Bustling Villages with his superior deck once you've revealed them, giving them free reign of the terminals and leaving you with an incredibly lackluster deck. Because of this, never go for the S/BV pile without the ability to gain settlers both quickly and with minimal expense to your deck quality. Multiple buys are the easiest solution to this, though Talisman and Ironworks can both act as stackable gainers that don't rely on multiple actions to work. Even then, make sure to intersperse your Settler purchases with economy building - once the Settlers are all gone, you need to hit $5 as consistently as possible (maybe even $10 with two buys). There's only 5 Bustling Villages, after all - getting at least 2 or 3 of them should be your highest priority.



I can't trash my coppers...

While rare, there are occasionally sets with an S/BV pile and no trashing, and it's these situations in which the S/BV pile truly shines. This may seem confusing at first - even with Coppers in your deck, the second and third flaws with the S/BV pile should be as prevalent as ever, right? There's no way you can't base your deck around an unreliable money cantrip! Well, while basing a strategy around Settlers' "economy" is a fruitless activity, it's important to remember that an activated Settlers is not just +$1, but rather...a handsize expander!

...A handsize expander for junk cards that won't run an engine, you mean. Who cares if you put a bunch of coppers in your hand?

Sifters care. In fact, with good sifters, problems 2 and 3 of the S/BV pile are eliminated. Who cares if your discard pile is empty when you can just put Coppers in there yourself?

So you discard your Coppers, then pick them back up again? How is this useful, exactly?

Well, to elaborate, let me give you an example.

Say you draw a hand of X, Copper, Settlers, Settlers, Warehouse (X being a useful action/treasure card you want to keep in your hand)

You play Warehouse, drawing a Copper, and Estate, and another Warehouse. You discard both Coppers and the Estate.

Your hand is now X, Settlers, Settlers, Warehouse. After playing both Settlers, you draw X, Bustling Village, and take the Coppers out of your discard pile.

Your hand is now X, X, Bustling Village, Copper, Copper, Warehouse. You play Warehouse again, drawing Settlers, X, and X.

You discard the Settlers and both Coppers, leaving you with X, X, X, X, Bustling Village. Bustling Village picks your Settler back up, which in turn returns your Copper.

Assuming both your Bustling Village and Settler hit cards you want, your new hand is X, X, X, X, X, X, Copper.

Despite having a deck filled with junk, you now have a hand of 6 powerful cards, along with 3 actions to play them!

In a regular scenario, playing two Warehouses would have left you with a hand of 3 strong actions at best. In this regard, Settlers offsets the main drawback of sifters - their handsize decreasing effect - by letting you recycle your junk to be re-sifted for as long as you have Settlers and Bustling Villages out of play! Even sifters that don't decrease handsize benefit massively from this, as your sifters can still recycle your Coppers, and thus will increase your handsize dramatically even before using +Card terminals. The strongest example of this by far is Stables. Repeatedly discarding and picking up Coppers will allow you to repeatedly trigger Stables' +3 cards/+1 action effect without consequence, allowing you to consistently draw your whole deck, while also picking up multiple Stables with no potential penalty to your economy.

While this strategy is always possible with the S/BV pile and a sifter, don't try this strategy if there is actual trashing in the kingdom. While re-sifting Coppers can allow an engine to run very effectively, it's infinitely easier and more cost-efficient just to buy one or two trashers, then remove your Coppers and Estates from your deck entirely. And if there's no trashing or sifting...well, consult problems 2 and 3, and don't invest heavily in Settlers.

What about boards with trashing and villages?

Well, the S/BV pile will hardly be a power card in these sets, but it will almost never be a pile to stay away from. As a cantrip, Settlers can't necessarily hurt your deck, so if you hit $2 and don't have anything better to grab, there's no shame in picking one up. If nothing else, a Settlers and a little bit of luck can definitely be a nice boost in the early game, letting you pick up Coppers from the discard pile as a temporary economy boost or just for more efficient trashing. In 3 or 4 player games, sometimes the Settlers pile will simply run down passively, if every player picks up 1 or 2 copies on a dud turn. In this case, it's best to treat Bustling village as a somewhat value-for-money village purchase, and a nice pickup if your deck is heavy on terminals. And occasionally, such as in the situations mentioned earlier in the article, having a couple cheap cantrips can definitely help with an engine's coherency Unless you're talking about Rats, Dominion is rarely an all-or-nothing game - if you think a Settlers or Bustling Village will be handy and have the buy/economy to spare, you might as well grab a couple.

Conclusion

Overall, the S/BV pile is an outlier for understanding Dominion boards. Unlike most situational power cards, which require specific combinations of cards to be worthwhile, the S/BV pile (quite thematically) thrives off of Kingdoms in which basic engine pieces - villages and trashers - aren't there. Because of this, understanding both when and how to drain the S/BV pile, and when to ignore it entirely, will make and break the games in which this pile is present.

Synergies

  • No trashing
  • Strong sifters
  • Stables
  • Strong Terminals
  • +buys
  • Fast gainers

Antisynergies
  • No +buy
  • Strong trashing
  • Strong and/or cheap villages
  • Strong non-terminal draw

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Dominion Articles / Archive
« on: May 04, 2018, 12:44:01 pm »
First time writing one of these articles (or posting at all, usually just a lurker), so any and all feedback would be much appreciated  :)



Archive is a card that, at first glance, seems absurdly strong even for a 5 cost engine piece. On turn 1, you get a neat little sifting cantrip, and then on the 2 subsequent turns you get an even more flexible version of Laboratory, a similar 5 cost engine enabler. 2 Labs for the price of one is an undeniably strong effect for an already handy cantrip Duration, and Archive is certainly a card that will almost never outright harm your deck. However, there is a surprising amount of nuance to the card; unlike Lab, it's rarely a card you can brainlessly pile-out to your benefit. Archive's main purpose (and the amount you should buy for your deck, respectively) varies from kingdom to kingdom, and certain setups can leave Archive as either a game-winning addition to your deck or a card to be ignored entirely.

Weaknesses

So, when don't you want an Archive? Well, the card essentially takes 3 cards out of your deck (ignoring the archive itself), lets you add one of the 3 to your hand immediately, then feeds the 2 removed cards back into your hand over the process of 2 turns before finally returning itself to your deck. Thus, the situations in which Archive becomes a hindrance are when you have a deck that can't afford or simply doesn't want to be 2 cards lighter. Engines that can consistently draw your whole deck, for example, hate Archives; at that point, why bother taking those 2 archived cards one at a time when you could simply have them all in your hand at once?

Strong early trashing combined with cheaper sifting cards can also heavily disincentivize Archive pickups. Say you've trashed your deck down to 10 key cards, 2 of which are Archives. Playing the Archives will remove 6 cards from your deck (including the Archives), leaving you with only 4 cards to draw. Sure, the Archives will bring you back up to 6, but all that one of those Archives is doing is simply restoring what your hand should have originally been. Being able to manipulate what your 6 card hand will be is nice, but not usually worth the opportunity cost of two 5s, and at that point any source of draw would almost certainly be preferable. Once your trashed deck becomes clogged with green cards, Archive becomes a semi-decent pickup again just for its pseudo-sifting qualities, but at that point you're usually better off just picking up an actual sifter.

So when do you want an Archive?

As mentioned, Archive falters in decks with strong draw and efficient trashing. However, cards that can fully draw or completely de-junk your deck are far from guaranteed presences in a kingdom. Archive shines the most in kingdoms in which either consistent draw or deck thinning is lacking entirely, or when the effectiveness of your deck depends entirely upon a specific combo of cards in your starting hand. In these cases, you should base your Archive purchases around what aspect of your deck you're trying to enable, and how many Archives are needed to accomplish this goal.

Archives as collision enablers

Recommended number: 2-3

Buying a couple supplementary Archives can be an absolute godsend with Kingdoms containing collision dependent power cards such as King's Court, Prince, and City Quarter. Drawing your first King's Court with your un-trashed Coppers and Estates whilst your opponent draws it with their Lost City or Bridge is normally both utterly game-losing and (quite aggravatingly) out of your control. A couple Archives can perfectly negate this risk, either by temporarily removing your dud cards to increase the chance of ideal collisions, or by setting aside your important engine enablers to be added back into your deck once you finally draw the parts they need. While you want to keep your Archive numbers limited in these scenarios, since such engines will often end up drawing your deck once their ideal collision takes place, Archives can massively help offset the RNG factor that comes with running such collision dependent kingdoms. Don't feel compelled to only do this for incredibly expensive or vital collision cards either - semi-collision dependent cards such as Library or Legionary, while useful when drawn alone, still appreciate being Archived and added to hands that can fully capitalize on their potential.

Archives as terminal collision management

Recommended number: 1-2

In situations with no villages but incredibly strong terminal (Mountebank and Wharf being notable examples), you can use Archives to try and remove multiple terminals from your deck and feed them back into your hands one at a time, preventing terminal collision. While this strategy can allow you to fill your deck with more terminals than it could otherwise sustain, this can sometimes backfire if your Archive happens to set aside 3 non-terminals, subsequently increasing the chance of terminal collision for its duration. This risk can be circumvented with cards like that allow you to top-deck cards in your hand or cards that give you control over the top of your deck (Secret Chamber and Cartographer being strong examples of each), letting you control what cards are and aren't archived.

Archives as deck cycling

Recommended number: 1-2

While this is never something you should base your deck around, picking up an early game Archive can be surprisingly useful in decks with no sifting/trashing options and cards you want to play as often as possible in the early game, such as Miser or the Traveler lines. Being able to temporarily cut your deck size down 2 cards is a handy way to speed up your cycling rate in the early game, though in a kingdom with Warehouse or similarly potent non-terminal sifters, this strategy is far less necessary.

Archives as sifting/pseudo-trash

Recommended number: 1-5

Initially, it may seem that archive hitting your green or dud cards would be a little useless. However, if an archive hits a couple provinces near on a near-depleted draw pile, you can keep them set aside for the re-shuffle, and then harmlessly add them back into your hand as you go through your (now somewhat de-greened) deck. The same principle applies to other 'dud' cards in an engine, such as coppers, curses, and ruins. While having 2 dud cards removed only temporarily from your deck seems rather weak, buying and cycling through additional archives can help you keep 6-10+ cards of your choice semi-consistently removed from your deck. Being able to add dead cards into your hand on subsequent turns can also help fuel discard-for-benefit cards. While weaker than more conventionally powerful sifters such as Forum and Cartographer, Archives can still massively help mitigate engine junking as long as one of the 3 cards Archive finds is something you want. When buying Archives for sifting, a good rule of thumb is to base your purchases off of how many cards you'd like removed, your ability to draw/sift through said cards without Archive (after all, $5 leaves it as a pretty harsh opportunity cost), and the strength of your engine once Archive un-clogs it. Nonetheless, Archive is definitely a card you should consider in engines without trash, or simply when dealing with Province/Colony bloat in the late game.

Archives as draw

Recommended number: 3-6

To preface: do not do this unless you have to. For the many reasons listed above, relying on archives as your primary source of draw is almost always outclassed by literally any other functional +cards engine. However, in the rare occurence of Archive existing in a kingdom that thrives from large hands but has no other reliable sources of draw, buying out half the archive pile can actually be a pretty reasonable strategy. While you still want to avoid over-buying Archives over having a deck with good cards for your Archives to find, having 3 or 4 archives perpetually running will still give you a constant 8-9 card hand to work with.

Summary

Archive is a card with far more uses than it would first appear. While rarely the centerpiece of an engine, a few well-placed Archives can spell the difference between a game-winning mega-turn and a rage inducing RNG-be-damned loss.
There is little complexity to playing Archive itself, though knowing when to go for Archives, and how strongly to invest in them, is an incredibly important skill for kingdoms in which they are available.

Synergies
  • King's Court
  • City Quarter
  • Prince
  • Other collision dependent cards
  • Travelers (Page/Peasant)
  • Weak draw/sifting
  • Strong terminals

Antisynergies
  • Strong, non-terminal draw
  • Small deck size
  • A lack of strong terminals or throne room variants

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