Here's a bold statement: Counting House is underused.
Since it's a 5-cost, it makes sense that Counting House is not a good buy most of the time since other 5-costs are just so good. Strategies that revolve around Counting House, however, always seem to be discounted
immediately. It's almost never used in a serious game. That seemed suboptimal.
So why do people ignore Counting House so often?
First is that there is no easy baseline to compare the card to. Here are a few games I played of Counting House against Smithy-Big Money with colonies game. Since Smithy-Big Money is weaker when it needs to pick up plats, and the ease of skipping from gold to plat makes counting house stronger, this seems to be a decent starting point.
http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201205/18/game-20120518-175523-7d768fa8.htmlCounting House keeps up surprisingly well for much of the game, though it still loses.
http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201205/15/game-20120515-211525-21ecbcaa.htmlTrying again, Counting House loses to Smithy, again, by only a narrow margin.
http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201205/15/game-20120515-212817-a8347a96.htmlOn occasion, Counting House can narrowly win.
**Note about game logs.
The verdict of about 10 games is that Counting House will lose to Smithy-BM and all the like. Perhaps with some more enabler micromanagement it can win more frequently, but so far it looks like a washed-up Wishing Well: usually too much effort for such a small reward. While you probably could use Counting House in a deck that's having trouble hitting 9 and treat it like a mostly used-up Moneylender, it's likely that a second of whatever other Big-Money enabler you're using would be better and cheaper.
So: if you're just using Counting House for the occasional very high +coins, you see it will fail in nearly every common decktype.
With Big Money, almost any decent, smithy-style enabler will do better.
With an Engine, you're better off trashing those coppers.
With Big Draw, it does absolutely nothing.
If you're trying to use it in a game while also trying to rush for duchies, it will fail.
There are some extremely rare exceptions to these principles, which are mentioned later.
So how can we ever use Counting House?http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201205/19/game-20120519-074816-fc6e07f4.htmlWith the 4 best enablers for counting house, you can somewhat consistently grab 4 colonies by turn 14-16, and often 8 by turn 19. In long games, with worker's village or pawn support, you can sometimes double-colony to make up for early round dead turns.
Here's a real-game example.
http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201205/29/game-20120529-101631-cef8810b.htmlThe House works as a centerpiece. It's a deck type all on it's own. And like Outpost, it can be a card that can win you the game if you recognize when to use it.
Playing the House - The EnablersYou'll either need to spend turns buying coppers, get +buys, or gain them.
A Counting House-centric deck functions best by utilizing early-round +buys to get Coppers (or more Houses) as often as possible. The reason for this is that if you draw 2-3 plus buy cards in the first turns of a round, that is, before you draw most of your Counting Houses, you've increased the value of
every Counting House in the rest of the round by 3-4, assuming you used your regular buy on copper as well. Sacrificing one turn and gaining coppers for an entire improved round? That's like a beefed-up Tactician.
With a deck large enough to prevent you from having to reshuffle again, you can then buy a Colony, or sometimes even two, for every Counting House that remains in your deck.
Hamlet, Worker's Village, and Pawn are the best sources of +buy if all you care about is getting more +buy. You really don't care about boosting your average money when playing the House. You care more about boosting your decksize to reduce reshuffles, and increasing the average number of buys you'll get before drawing your Houses. And you care a lot about making double-colony turns possible.
The first few rounds you'll want to obtain as many +buy cards as is possible.
The problem with Gardens-type cards like Woodcutter and Bridge is that they are almost all terminals. They look helpful- and they are- but not late-game. When you get them early on in a round, you can't get more than one +buy from it. This means you will never be able to get a +buy on a Counting House turn if they are your only source of +buy, which means no double-colony.
Double-colony not only feels good, but often it's necessary to lock down a game. You almost need a double colony turn at least once, or at least a colony-province turn, to make up for the fact that on some turns, potentially even your second-to-last turn, your buys might just be a handful of Copper.
However, while woodcutter and the like shouldn't be massed, they remedy the hardest part of using Counting House with something like Hamlet: reliably reaching 5. In an absolute worst case scenario, you can buy a single silver and wait, or if you're really gutsy, you can just buy coppers and enablers for 4-5 rounds. With enough coppers and careful enough reshuffling, you're mathematically guaranteed to hit 5 after about 6(?) such turns. Also note that because hitting 6 is completely unhelpful, any number of turns spent buying silvers instead of an enabler
should probably hurt more than help.
Learning to CountThe other major problem with Counting House is figuring out how to use it. Counting House has a lot of variability, and if you aren't careful about when you trigger your reshuffles and or don't track the number of houses you have left in your deck, you can lose valuable turns when your coppers are high-powered by triggering reshuffles too early. (One reason why Cellar is better than Warehouse for this kind of deck.) Will playing that worker's village for the extra copper this round will mean you'll miss the colony next hand?
Be sure to keep track of how many 5-card hands you will end up drawing before the reshuffle.
The Warehouse Question I'm going to change gears now and talk about commonly thought-of strategies for Counting House. And most of them boil down to: how hard should you try to skip through the initial dead turns of a Counting House deck?
I believe the answer to this is that you shouldn't try to at all. Unfortunately, the dozens of games I played aren't nearly as good as simulator data, but if you listen to my logic, you'll see why reshuffling often is a bad idea.
Warehouses might help you skip a dead turn now, but they'll also introduce the next one faster. They increase the total number of reshuffles over the span of the game and these always are followed by a bad turn.
If your need to power up your Counting House by the extra $1 by discarding and replacing coppers (opportunity cost versus silver) is so great at any given point in the game, you've probably already lost. If you need to avoid a bad turn so badly, you've also probably already lost.
In my experience, you'll often find yourself usually discarding the 2 colonies in your hand and a single copper and replacing that with 1-2 more coppers. This is effectively a silver in exchange for having less control over your reshuffle and taking a huge risk: often you will discard a house that would have been amazing next turn, but is now completely useless because you haven't spent this turn's +buys. The situations it does help in are so minor when playing dedicated Counting House, that often even Copper would be better. That's not to even mention the opportunity cost versus other enablers. ... You're not considering using Warehouse your only enabler, right?
But axle, you say. What if I can move through my entire deck?
A similar story holds true for Hunting Party and the multiple-Golem-only-1-Counting-House strategy. These cards can discard your deck and still allow you to play Counting House, and aren't always able to draw your deck. It takes too long to set up. More subtly, you now have to spend precious turns to buy each copper since buying any other enablers will interfere with your main strategy. If the game is slow enough for this to be feasible, odds are there are cursers, and if they are fast cursers in two player, you'll want to compete for those, not solely rely on Counting House. If you are facing a bad Ghost Ship player, Counting House is likely better than Big Money, but worse than getting your own Ships.
In sum, speed through combos or particular cards doesn't work for a Counting House deck, with the possible exception of the extremely cheap, more flexible Cellar.
The House would like to be more consistent, but only one card can do that reliably.
SchemeThis is the second most useful card to use with Counting House. After copper.
Scheme
>allows you to never have bad shuffle luck and have all of your houses in the first turn of a round.
>reduces the number of houses you need to buy to 2.
>is relatively inexpensive, and you don't want silvers anyway.
>enables the House in province play because of how consistent the House becomes
http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201205/18/game-20120518-235237-ff28bef3.html>A game versus RomaNorgy. Provinces are out by turn 14, even though neither of us were playing even near perfectly. RomaNorgy thanked me after for the new strategy (which I got from O, so here's passing on the thanks).
Here's another Counting House / Scheme game that O posted:
http://councilroom.com/game?game_id=game-20120508-135528-9f887547.htmlEdited in, a month later.I spent time tearing down Warehouse because the principles behind buying it with Counting House are usually lousy. However, if you can combine it with something like Hunting Party, or you use Cellar instead of it, Counting House is almost feasible. There exist a very select handful of games that allow you to draw only your power cards, no money, and yet still be able to have exactly your entire deck discarded. And this also has to be a game without trashing and without Apothecary. To give you a idea of what kind of synergy you need to make such a deck, warehouse seems perfect for the job, yet can't do it. Perhaps you could try Cartographer, if you aren't buying any other 5-cost... oh.
There are even fewer such games when the House is actually around as an option, but in these exceptionally rare cases, it offers +7. If you're extremely careful and you know that you can support it, the House is one of the most powerful cards for pure +coin / cost. And in this case, you might even want to try comboing with Bank and Coppersmith...
AttacksAfter dismissing the idea of a 'Counting House + Coppersmith combo', the second thing people notice about Counting House is that it seems like it shouldn't be hurt much by certain attacks.
Here are games with ambassador, sea hag, sea hag, and mountebank respectively.
http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201205/18/game-20120518-191154-73b4b0fd.htmlhttp://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201205/19/game-20120519-081553-b4ff8016.htmlhttp://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201205/19/game-20120519-105915-881e827a.htmlhttp://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201205/29/game-20120529-101631-cef8810b.htmlIf you're careful enough, the House will be able to face off against the cards we imagine it should. It doesn't have a 100% winrate (see game 4), but it does hold advantage.
If there's nothing else going on or the only attack on the board is militia, goons, sea hag, or mountebank, Counting House might be a good choice. The House benefits from slow environments where the number of good turns matters more than the average of turns. It can pick up 4's, since otherwise it'll just be getting more +buy cards. Many attacks don't hurt counting house nearly as much as they hurt Smithy-BM type decks.
Notably, Ghost Ship will actually help a player going Counting House-Scheme.
http://councilroom.com/game?game_id=game-20120528-154743-b7ef5852.htmlWhen you're playing Counting House, you are also going to have a lot of turns where you'll have 4, and this means that you can use things like Militia and Cutpurse with essentially no drawback. They will help you hit the 5s you so desperately need, and avoid the 6 that temps you into buying golds. Unfortunately, I don't have solid statistics, and if anyone would like to run some, I would use them to revise this discussion.
Summary:Counting House is situational, but when the situation fits, it's amazing. Looking to make it work every turn without scheme isn't very likely, but aiming to get it to explode when you play it can pay off. An enabled Counting House is a card well worth considering.
Works well with:Scheme
Pawn / Hamlet / Worker's Village
Bridge / Woodcutter / Nomad Camp (requires careful management, decks will be more Counting House heavy)
Talisman / Ironworks / Workshop (gaining extra enablers easily is very helpful)
Ill-Gotten Gains (only if Scheme is present to reduce the number of Houses you need)
Mountebank (you can buy one too. once the curses are out, they have to choose: give you a free copper, or miss their +2.)
Feast
Gardens (rush the gardens, but don't help your opponent rush anything else. the goal is to province or colony to seal a lead.)
Things that can return a Counting House into your deck (Develop, Inn, Watchtower)
See all posts in this thread by jomini for excellent explanations of how Cellar, Haven, Develop, Multiplayer Attacks, Spy, and Cache all can help.
Conflicts with:Trashing (of note: Moneylender)
+Draw Engines
Big Money games
Lack of Colonies
Action Chains
Gold
King's Court
Possession
**Note about game logs:
I played most of these games against myself, but this should not matter since I always played optimally (playing Smithy-Big Money is pretty easy. As is Sea Hag-Big Money.) All the more complicated games are real ones, so are are the Ambassador and Mountebank ones.
