Graverobber: Graverobber's end-game uses are straightforward (Graverob your Minions/HPs/Witches/etc to Provinces), but methinks it has potential to be a mid-game card as well: that is, a card that you can build a deck around. The tricky part is getting enough actions. It would be cool to Graverob your Estates to more Graverobbers, for example, but Estates are Victory cards. Perhaps Shelters are Action cards? I guess we'll see!
Poor House: I like this card a lot. One thing that is lacking in Dominion are Thronable cards that give you +Coin more than +$2. Harvest is the closest thing so far, with an honorable mention to cards like Baron, Mandarin, and Merchant Ship (all of which are underrated, IMHO). I've played games where my deck was built around KC/Harvest, and I was able to hit $11 for a Colony almost every time my KCs and Harvests collided. KC/Poor House also has potential, but what really sets Poor House apart from Harvest is that it's so cheap! You might not even need the KC at all. Just get some Poor Houses, Villages, and cards that trash or discard treasures (Spice Merchant, Stables, Warehouse, Secret Chamber, etc), and that may be all that you need. Works with Remake, Upgrade; Conflicts with Trader, IGG, Mountebank.
Sage: It looks to me that Sage will be joining Dominion's crowning combo-putting-together cards, which are so far Haven and Scheme. Scheme works best in the mid- to end-game, when you have powerful Actions that you want to play every turn (KC, Followers, etc), but it doesn't work to put Treasure Maps together, for example. Haven suffers for the opposite reason, that you can't play your Haven'd card at all until the next turn. Sage is unique in that it works exceptionally well in the early game. If you open Treasure Map/Sage and buy another Treasure Map on turn 3, you could very reasonably match your Treasure Maps on turn 4, something that was all but unheard of before. Paired with a cheap money card (like Poor House), Sage can also work wonders with Tournament. Another combo that should be
exquisite is Sage/Conspirator; not only will your Sages find your Conspirators, but they will also help activate them for you! The cycling aspect is nice, but it's not something I would rely on. Conflicts with early greening.
Feodum: I'm always glad to see alternate VP cards. This obviously has a useful interaction with Trader; a Trader/Feodum rush could easily break 6 or 7 VP per Feodum. However, like Silk Road, in the absence of activator cards (like Trader for Feodum and Great Hall for Silk Road), I think Feodum will end up being used mostly for just tie-breaker points. Using Feodum to gain Silver is overrated. If you open Feodum/trasher, there's only a 30% that your Feodum will collide with the trasher on our first reshuffle, and if they don't collide, Feodum is as dead as a card can be.
Cultist: It looks like a Witch with some extra gizmos going on. I'm not sure what to think about the "You may play a Cultist from your hand" part… have we ever seen a card that gives you a virtual +1 Action that can only be used on one type of card? A Cultist rush could be confusing to keep track of when interfaced with cards like King's Court and even Village. Cultist chains have the risk of being even more annoying than Minion chains. Everything on this card except the "+2 Cards" is something unseen to this point in the land of Dominion. The Trash bonus looks like it could be used in an end-game explosion: Play a Village, Graverob your Cultist to a Province, and then continue with your turn as usual.
Ruined Market: So now we know what 50 of the 113 "mystery" cards in Dark Ages will be (500 total – ~352 kingdom – 35 randomizer). The other 63 are presumably the Shelters. Ruins could actually come in handy, though; in a game with King'sCourt/PirateShip but no +Buy, for example, a hand with KC/KC/PS/PS/RuinedMarket would be a whole lot better than KC/KC/PS/PS/Curse. Ruins can also serve as fuel to your Graverobbers. And like Donald said, I certainly wouldn't want to be the Cultist player in a Fairgrounds game!
Squire: Nice thematic play on Trusty Steed! I think this will most likely be used for the "gain an attack card" portion, especially on a 2/5. Open Graverobber/Squire, then Graverob the Squire to a Graverobber and gain a Familiar. Only problem is that it might prove difficult to get the squire to collide with a trashing card (except for Hermit). However, in a Possession game, methinks the Squire will be well-worth the trouble. If you use it solely for the +Actions, it is inferior in most regards to Crossroads. However, if you can attain a critical mass of Squires, they could be used to complement either a Poor House (with the actions) or a Feodum (gain the free silver) deck.
Hermit: Huh. Hermit is the first Dominion card that allows you to trash a card that's not in your hand (excluding Native Village). Hermit may be the answer to the difficulty of matching benefit-on-trash cards (like Squire, Feodum, and Graverobber) with a trasher, which was most likely going to be one of the trickiest aspects of Dark Ages. Hermit is terminal, though, so it won't be possible to use multiple Hermits on the same turn in the absence of an action increaser (and it will also require you to waste even more buys to gain your Madmen). One other interesting thing is that you can Hermit all of your non-Copper junk cards into more Hermits, which you can then use to either continue cleaning your deck, or turn them into a critical mass of Madmen. Hermit will be a hard card to pass up on most boards.
Madman: My discussion of Hermit brings me to Madman. The most obvious use here is to gain a critical mass of Madmen, then use them to set off a megaturn. Heck, even 3 Madmen, assuming relatively lucky shuffle luck, could draw your entire deck: if you start with 5 cards (1 of them being Madman), play the Madman to draw up to 8. The next Madman would draw to 14, and the next to 26, the size of most well-groomed decks. It is vulnerable to discard attacks; a hand with 2 cards and a Madman is the same as a hand with 2 cards and a, well, level 2 city that trashes itself. The fact that gaining Madmen slows down your deck development (by forcing you to lose a buy) is IMO a wise choice by the game architects, because it will make Megaturn strategies more reasonable for opponents to combat. Madman is a helpful card even in non-Megaturn decks, but the opportunity cost of gaining it is so high that if you don't use it to anything more special than a Tactician, you may as well have bought a Silver instead of that Hermit.
Rats: I've gotta say, this has good thematic flavor. Other than it being a fast, non-terminal trasher, though, I don't really see the point. The benefit-on-trash portion is not very impressive; it's basically the same as playing the Rat, except you don't trash a card or gain another rat. I guess you could have a marginal benefit if you use Hermit to trash the Rat from your discard pile, but Hermit is a terminal action, so it probably wouldn't do much good. (I'd much rather trash a Cultist and draw 3 cards instead of 1.) You could also screw yourself up if you draw a hand with, for example, 4 Rats and a Province. For what it does, I'm not sure why this card costs $4; it seems more like a punishment than anything. I guess to use it effectively, you'd have to open with it, let it eat your deck, and then purge them away when you're finished using them (which will be quite the feat). But that just seems like too much trouble. I must be missing something.
Pillage: Woah, a strong attack with an even stronger benefit-on-play. This will make games slow down a lot, because you can basically prevent your opponents from buying that last Province. It can also be Graverobbed and Top-decked to perpetuate the attack. Heck, if you can Throne the Pillage (or play a Village followed by two Pillages) and if you happen to have a Watchtower in hand, you can basically be guaranteed at least a Province on your next turn (or a Colony barring your opponents from playing Pillages).
Spoils: A one-time-only Gold. For what it is, seeing that it's only gained as a "prize" from other cards, it's not bad at all. It looks like fun.
Shelters: The biggest card that will benefit from Shelters is Fairgrounds. 10 Kingdom Cards + Prov/Duchy/Estate/Curse + Gold/Silver/Copper + 3 Shelters = 8 Point Fairgrounds! Even if Fairgrounds is not present, in most cases, I would choose to start with Shelters rather than Estates for the following reasons: Necropolis will allow for a slightly higher terminal density (although this could be dangerous because you can have only 1 Necropolis); Overgrown Estate has a nice on-trash effect (the same as Rats); and, quite frankly, they look more fun than Estates. I think Hovel is a red herring for early greening; a deck with 2 Golds and a Hovel is still stronger than a deck with 1 Gold and an early Province. This isn't to say that I would
always choose shelters, of course: in a Remake/Menagerie game, for example, Estates are probably better because they can be remade into Menageries, and in a game with no trashing abilities and a strong big-money enabler (e.g. Embassy), Estates do still have marginal value for tiebreaker points.
I'm looking forward to what Dark Ages's Village (other than Ruined Village) will look like. Some guesses:
Silver Dollar Village ($3 Action): +2 Actions. Reveal you hand. +Cards equal to the number of Silvers.
Roman Village ($4 Action): +2 Actions. Each other player gains a Ruins.
Squatter Camp ($3 Action): +1 Action, +1 Card. You may trash a Ruins from your hand. If you do, +1 Action.
Now that Squire has debuted, I wonder if that will be the only Village in Dark Ages.
Another random card guess:
Plague ($5 Action): +3 Cards. Each other player gains a Ruins. When you gain this, gain a Curse.
or maybe
Plague ($5 Action): +1 Card, +1 Action. Trash a card from your hand. Each other player gains a Ruins. When you trash this, gain a Curse.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Altar: So, basically a $6 version of Expand. I imagine that it costs $6 only so you can't Alter cards into more Altars. I'm sure Altar has its place, but I don't see myself buying it over Expand on most boards.
Armory: A very straightforward card. An upgraded Workshop like Ironworks, with Ironworks' distinction being that it is non-terminal for actions, and Armory's distinction being that it topdecks your card rather than discarding it. This could be especially useful in games that involve thick decks (cursing games, games without trashing, etc).
Band of Misfits: It's interesting how the working says "costing less than
it" rather than "costing less than
$5"; this prevents any Highway-type gizmos. I assume that if you use this as an action-victory hybrid card, it will become no longer a victory card after the game ends, since at the end of the game no card is in play (except maybe Durations?). The main use I see for this is as a highly adaptable card, like Steward (and now Squire, etc). Early in the game it can be a Chapel or a Cutpurse; in the middle of the game it can be a Bridge or a Militia; and in the late game it can be a Secret Chamber or even a Noble Brigand. It will also serve well in Village/Smithy-type engines; it can serve as either a Village or a Smithy, depending on what you drew. I think this will be a very fun card to play with!
Bandit Camp: Now we see one of Dark Age's villages. It seems very straightforward if you are going for a Spoils-based strategy. I think I would take a Bandit Camp over a Bazaar in most games: Bazaar is $1 now, but Bandit Camp is $3 later. (Of course, Bazaar would still be preferable if you have a very high Action density and your average card value exceeds $3.) Certainly it's a "nice" alternative to Pillage.
Beggar: Have we ever seen a card more suited for a Gardens game? This is
awesome for that purpose! It also seems to have a nice attack-counter ability, similar in principle to Jack of all Trades. If you're not going for a Gardens strategy, I don't know if I've ever seen a better activator for a Spice Merchant! Heck, you could build an entirely sub-$5 engine out of just Spice Merchants, Beggars, and a Village of your choice. Band of Misfits couldn't hurt, either!
Catacombes: Meh, to be honest I'm not digging this card in general. It does help cycle your deck, but it's still non-terminal like Smithy, Margrave, and Torturer. However, unlike Catacombes, Margrave and Turturer have an attack built in, which of course helps a Big Money-type strategy. One card that Catacombes counters extremely well is, of course, Rabble, as you can now discard all of those disgusting green cards that your opponent kindly top-decked for you. Catacombes could also be preferable to the other card-drawers in an Engine-based strategy, as it lets you find the action cards you need to continue your chain. But in general, I still think I would prefer a Warehouse and a Smithy to a Catacombes.
Count: I
LOVE this card! It looks like so much fun to play. A King's Courted Count would be soooo awesome! There are so many awesome things about this card that I can't even list them all here! There's some pretty epic stuff you can do if you play lots of counts in a row (gaining +$3 each time), get a hand full of Count-gained Coppers and some trash-for-benefit cards like Cultist, and then trigger the "trash your hand" option! Heck, if you chose to top-deck some cards from your hand, you can do some planning so that when you trash your Cultist, you can still continue your turn. It also has a nice synergy with Spice Merchant, which can trash all those Coppers that Count made you gain.
EDIT: I misread the card, and Count does not actually put the Coppers into your hand. It therefore will not synergize with Spice Merchant as well. Count should work especially well with Worker's Village, which provides both the actions and the buys that Count will need to be most successful. Oooh, I just can't wait to get my hands on a box of Dark Ages now!
Counterfeit: I've come up with treasure-doubling cards in my playgroup before, but never one quite like this. I guess that after extensive playtesting, Donald X's team concluded that a vanilla "play a Treasure card in your hand twice" type of thing (like a Throne Room for Treasures) was too powerful. The +Buy is a useful addition. Counterfeit should be useful both as an early-game Copper trasher and as an end-game Platinum doubler. One card that combos with Counterfeit is Spoils, since you'd have to return them to the supply anyway after playing them.
Death Cart: I'm so excited that Dark Ages is giving Dominion so many more of the much-needed Thronable Money cards! First Poor House, then Count, and now Death Cart, all with their own little unique twist. Death Cart should combo extremely well with Rats, which gives you the mid-to-late-game fuel you need to keep your Death Carts but still generate lots of money. Heck, the Ruins that Death Cart gains for you are only extra targets for Death Cart to trash! I'd take a Death Cart with Ruins over a Cache with Coppers almost any day.
Forager: This smells a lot like Trade Route, except it's non-terminal. It's definitely communal in value; one person will add a Silver and a Gold to the pot, only to see everyone else buy Foragers in response.
Fortress: And we see yet another village! There are some nifty things you can do with this card. It's a nice target for Rats if you need one, because not only will Rats replace itself in your hand, but it will not have effectively trashed another card in doing so. The same would apply to Steward when it asks you to trash 2 cards, but you have only 1 junk card. You can also do some pretty awesome Upgrading or Remaking here: "Upgrade" your Fortress to a $5 card, and then just gain your Fortress right back again.
Hunting Grounds: So now we finally have an unconditional 4 card draw. It looks to me like this will be most useful in a Big Money-type game; it gives you the draw power you need, and it can also be cashed in later for VP. Obviously, it can help in engines too, but the $6 cost may be prohibitive for gaining more than 1 or 2 by mid-game. It shouldn't bee too much of a problem finding a late-game trasher for Hunting Grounds seeing that trashing is one of the themes of Dark Ages.
Ironmonger: This sounds a lot like Tribute. I like tribute, but it's not usually a game-changing card. Unlike Tribute, however, Ironmonger is guaranteed nonterminal, which will help it run engines, set up conspirators, and so on. Otherwise, I don't think this is a must-buy.
Junk Dealer: Funny name for a $5 card; seems like "Antique Dealer" would have been more suited. Anyhow, this definitely looks like a Dark Ages-only card. Without trash-for-benefit cards that Junk Dealer can target, it's strictly worse than a Market after you clean your starting cards out of your deck. Upgrade, on the other hand, keeps working into the end-game, changing $4's into Duchies, for example. Upgrade doesn't give +Coin, but in the absence of a handsize increaser, you can't train very many of these together without trashing a card that you don't want to trash, so the +Coin won't be more than $2 or $3.
Marauder: This to me reveals how much weaker of an attack Ruins are than Curses. We saw earlier that gaining a Spoils is akin to gaining +1 Coin (Bazaar vs. Bandit Camp). So, if we think of it that way, Maurader would be roughly equivalent to a $4 card that gave +$1 and handed out a ruins. But wait: Sea Hag, which gives out a Curse, doesn't give you any benefit whatsoever, and Young Witch is a terminal mini-warehouse. Furthermore, a $4 attack that gives +$1 is Noble Brigand, which is not a very strong attack. Maurader seems like a pretty good opening to me.
Market Square: Ooh, a card that gains a real Gold, not a Spoils! This looks like a nifty way to fill up your deck with a bunch of Gold, in many ways similar to Tunnel. A Market Square/Rats opening might actually be very strong for this reason. You'd still need a way to get rid of your Rats, of course, but the Rat-powered demolition of your deck can be used to activate Market Square many times. Other than the Gold-gaining special ability, Market Square is just a Market without the money, and in most cases is equal to something like Hamlet or Pawn.
Mercenary: It looks great, but here's what it just is: a Militia that trashes 2 then draws 2. The trashing aspect is sometimes convenient, but what if your draw is Gold, Gold, Province, Province, Mercenary? If your Mercenary were a Militia, you could have gotten that Province, but now you're screwed and have to settle for a Duchy. It's powerful with a lack of other attacks on the board, but it seems rather underpowered to me for being a card that you have to gain through special means.
Mystic: $5 for a Wishing Well that gives +$2 instead of +1 Card?
Seriously? I'm not saying that +$2 is bad, it's just that this card doesn't feel that it's worth $5. It has to be more than $3 since it's better than Silver, so that would put it at $4. This seems reasonable, seeing that one of its closest relatives, Conspirator, is also $4. I guess it's more useful when combined with a self-spy card, but it still seems overpriced at $5.
Procession: At first, I thought, "huh? Possession again?" But it's not possession; it's procession! It's a Throne Room and an Upgrade all wrapped into one nice package, all for just $4. Nifty! (Call while supplies last!) This is certainly a combo card. Procession/Graverobber/BorderVillage has got to be an epic. Also, anything with Procession and Fortress must be pretty solid; it'd be a nice way to build a Cultist or Minion or Count chain, for example. I look forward to finding combos when this card is on the board.
Rebuild: Remodel, Upgrade, Expand, Remake, Develop, and now… Rebuild! (They must be running out of synonyms at this point
) So, we now have what looks like a Mine for Victory cards. This could be a nifty way to target your Feodums, but there are unfortunately no more VP cards in Dark Ages, and by the time you get around to buying Rebuilds, you've probably already trashed your Feodums. IMHO, Rebuild seems like a card better suited for an expansion like Hinterlands or Prosperity, since it has no other interactions with Dark Ages.
Rogue: So now we have a Graverobber variant. In some ways, Rogues and Graverobbers are sort-of like Masquerades: Masquerade passes cards from one hand to the next directly, and Graverobber/Gue pass cards from one hand to another via the Trash pile. Unless you end up very lucky, especially in a multiplayer game, you probably won't see whatever it was that you trashed earlier. One of the most annoying things would be if an opponent's Rogue reveals a junk card and a Rogue from your deck, forcing you to trash your Rogue.
Scavenger: Half Scheme, Half Chancellor. These are both $3 cards, and so it makes sense that Scavenger costs $4. It seems like this card would be better if you got to put 2 card on top of your deck instead of 1, especially since it is terminal. I guess it would be okay if you played two Scavengers together, but again, they're terminal, so this would be hard to do. In a game with no Villages, if your Necropolis missed the reshuffle, I suppose Scavenger might be useful to get it back in the draw pile faster. And a Processed Scavenger isn't a horrible deal, either.
Storeroom: Half Cellar, Half Secret Chamber. These are both $2 cards, and so it makes sense that Storeroom costs $3. I'm sort-of surprised that it is terminal, but I guess that a non-terminal SC/Vault-like ability would bee too powerful. Let's do some math. Suppose that your deck is 50% Silver and 50% Victory, and you have a single Storeroom. A typical draw that has a Storeroom is therefore 2 Silver, 2 Victory, and 1 Storeroom. When you play the storeroom, you discard the 2 Victory and draw 1 Victory and 1 Silver. You then discard that second Victory for +$1. End result: a $7 hand, not absolutely terrible for a deck with such dilute money. One nice perk about Storeroom is that you can discard Copper without any fear: if you discard 3 Copper and draw 3 Victory, you can still turn the Victory cards into the value that the Copper would have been, something that you couldn't do with just Cellar.
Urchin: A weak attack that could fit into an Outpost/ThroneRoom/Masquerade pin. The main benefit of this card I guess is that it is the only way to get Mercenaries. You can always play an Urchin before playing your stronger attack since Urchin is non-terminal, and when you do, you can replace the Urchin with a Mercenary, which is a stronger attack than Urchin, but still not all that great of a card in the presence of other trashers. If you use it only for the attack ability and ignore the Mercenaries, since it is cantrip, it should benefit Torturer chains. It would also work well with Masquerade. However, it would be dangerous to mix Urchin with Margrave (my favorite +3 Cards card), because then you're basically giving your opponent a free Warehouse before they start their turn. In short, if you're looking at $3 and you don't want Silver, like Spy, Urchin can't really hurt your deck.
Vagrant: I always like little cute $2 cards. It looks like a watered-down version of Scout at a more reasonable price. I would have worded the card "Reveal the top card of your deck. If it's not an Action or Treasure, put it into your hand.", and then it could have even been included in a different expansion, but I'm sure that Donald X has a good reason for including it in Dark Ages. Like most other lightweight $2's (like Pearl Diver), if you have $2 and an extra buy, there's little reason not to pick up a Vagrant.
Wandering Minstrel: Holy moly! I don't think we've ever seen a better Scrying Pool activator than Wandering Minstrel. Not only does it clean non-Action cards off the top of your deck, but it also gives you the +Actions that you need to play all those Action cards! This should also work in Village/Smithy-type engines and also decks that rely on Poor House. Unlike Shanty Town, which seems to go out of its way to make sure that your +Actions
don't find action card, Wandering Minstrel does just the opposite. This will certainly be one of the strongest $4 Villages.
Abandoned Mine, Ruined Library, Ruined Village: Nothing terribly surprising here. Abandoned Mine really isn't all that bad; a hand with Gold, Silver, Copper, Copper, Abandoned Mine is a whole lot better than Gold, Silver, Copper, Copper, Curse. Ruined Village is a Conspirator and Horn of Plenty enabler. Ruined Library is probably the weakest of these three Ruins.
Survivors: This is really not all that bad for being a Ruins. Heck, if this cost $2, it would be a decent purchase, especially if it were non-terminal. It's a nice card to pair with Native Village, but like most other deck-spying cards that go down more than 1 card (e.g. Navigator), Native Village's +Actions come too late. On a board with an excess of Villages, I might find myself choosing to get a Survivors with no money and an extra buy. Also, I will be getting Survivors and Followers mixed up by name for quite a while I think.
Knights: Love it. This has got to be the most epic Fairgrounds enabler known to Dominion. No doubt that the attack is strong, certainly better than Swindler and Saboteur in most cases. I don't yet see the significance behind the knight/knight interaction (the "If a Knight is trashed by this, trash this card" part). A quick analysis on each of the nights is below. I have sorted them from best to worst.
- Sir Michael: Combo attacks are always very powerful. We haven't seen very many yet, but Followers is an example (half witch, half militia), and of course Followers is a very strong attack.
- Dame Josephine: VP cards can never hurt, especially in games with no alternate VP. On 4/4 Province and Duchy splits, the player who would win is the player who bought Dame Josephine.
- Dame Molly: Extra actions can never hurt, especially in the absence of traditional Villages. This tastes a lot like Necropolis.
- Dame Anna: This tastes a lot like Mercenary in terms of the play mechanic. It's fine, but I wouldn't depend on it for your trashing ability (unless it happens to be on top of the Knights pile in the absence of other trashers and you're the first player to hit $5).
- Sir Bailey: This is pretty vanilla. It's basically a cantrip knight, so it won't hurt your deck.
- Sir Vander: Sir Vander gives you a real gold! However, I would rather skip Sir Vander and just buy the Gold instead for only $1 more. It has some edge-case uses, of course, but in general, not that strong.
- Dame Natalie: Useful for picking up some Sages or Silvers or Menageries, but not much else.
- Dame Sylvia: Again, very vanilla. I wouldn't expect Dame Sylvia to be the difference between winning and losing.
- Sir Destry: Even more vanilla. I put Dame Destry below Dame Sylvia because I am in general opposed to terminal drawers.
- Sir Martin: This will only be useful in games without a source of +Buy, but since you will have only one, it's hardly better than Ruined Market.
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