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1

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Neat and potentially useful card interactions

« on: July 16, 2021, 11:52:44 pm »

Livery + Academy + multiple buys

I had an irl game recently where this combo came up. I was the only one who noticed the Livery + Academy combo, and I was producing Villagers so fast, I only had one Village in my entire deck, and the rest of my Action cards were terminal, AND I was drawing my deck every turn, and I was STILL getting Villagers faster than I was spending them.

As previously noted, villagers come fast and furious in most Horse games. Sleigh and Cavalry become Labs with some Patron-like flexibility. Livery goes cantrip with one >$4 gain and reaches Champion level with additional gains. Even Groom and Hostelry can generate a few Acting troupes over the course of the game. Even Scrap can generate a lot of villagers to significantly impact the game (e.g. trashing a silver at the end of each turn can give you a villager and a horse to increase odds of successful draw the next turn). Event the events are mostly strong. Ride converts buy and coins to actions and draw which is usually a winning trade. Stampede is basically like playing two Acting troupes while demand can turn $4 cantrips into a cantrip + most of an Acting Troupe.

End of the day, Horse is a cantrip that is cheap to acquire. Academy makes cheap cantrips really powerful. Whether it is gaining Pixies/Wisps, Horses, or maxing out Stonemason/Butterfly Way. Heck I have even bought 4 Ruins to trash out with Chapel  just to enable a megaturn.

Academy is one of those things that combos with most anything so it combos with nothing. Oddly enough, plentiful village gains and other cheap +action (e.g. Kc, Champion) are one of the few compelling reasons to skip Academy. Otherwise, Academy seems to make just about all other action cards to undergo a fairly dramatic power boost.

2

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Neat and potentially useful card interactions

« on: July 05, 2021, 12:33:48 am »

Ways are phenomenal for most cards with below the line in-play text.

Bridge troll becomes highly flexible as an optional highway. Groundskeeper can become both payload and draw for an Owl or Mole drawing deck. Goons becomes much more tolerant of low village setups as Pig/Mole/Mule/Ox and works quite well as Owl for the self-counter and VP boost. Haggler can lead to idiotic numbers of gains if you swap cash for being non-terminal.

Even way of the Frog can be killer (e.g. spiking more VP off something like Necropolis/Goons).

3

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Neat card interactions that were useful in the game you found them in.

« on: May 12, 2021, 09:30:51 pm »

Possession + Way of the Butterfly was not cute.
(You return opponent's cards to supply gain cards for yourself)

pretty nasty actually

Procession + anything that can get cards out of your deck without trashing is pretty bad.  Masquerade and Ambassador, especially in 2-player, can be pretty brutal.  "Alright, let me just go ahead and Ambassador 2 Colonies here ...".  But at least with those you can protect yourself by just not buying those cards.  Nothing you can do to prevent a Way from being used ...

Actually, you can't always protect yourself from Ambassador or Masquerade. The Possession player can buy multiple copies of Masquerade and/or Ambassador and pass them to the other player during a normal turn--if the Possession player can then play Possession on the same turn, the other player has no time to get rid of the cards that were just passed to them.

If the Possession player buys Masquerade or Ambassador then it just allows their opponent to buy Possession and do the same thing first; it's super risky...

The "safest" option is to gain two of the cards during your turn, hand one over, and then Possess.

The other option is to just build up huge numbers of Possessions, wait until the other guy Greens out and then send over the cards. Even if they hit you, you at most lose a Possession per turn and even that is unlikely to be all that harsh if they have substantial green in deck (particularly if your deck cannot hit $8).

If both players never green, you can burn down the entire Possession pile and stare at each other until, maybe, someone three piles.

I never understood why we did Possession. It is a wildly fiddly card, it is extremely high variance, and it leads to a lot of unfortunate mixed equilibria where the "correct" response is either a never ending game or where you end up playing a highly glorified rock-paper-scissors match. At this point we should really just errata it into something that is such a giant noob-trap and strategy killing blackhole.

4

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Neat card interactions that were useful in the game you found them in.

« on: May 12, 2021, 08:45:44 pm »

Tactician + way of the animal that draws 2 cards + KC gives a guaranteed double tactician and it's actually easy to pull of and really strong

Same for Way of the animal that's a cantrip too!

Also works with a +1 card token on Tac so he can trigger off a Throne. Rc/card tokened Tac can let you play Tac unlimited numbers of times.

I am less convinced that Kc/Ways of Tac is all that useful. After all, Kc/Smithy gives you one fewer card of draw without the penalty of tossing your entire current hand or having to wait until next turn. Kc/+2 cards is actually very easy for drawing deck most of the time.

Maybe +$ actions are cheap. Maybe Tac is the only +buy. But it seems like the majority of Kc/Tac/drawing Way boards would be far better setup for just using Kc to play through.

I would be more inclined to do this with draw to 6 or discard & draw 3. Being able to draw after discarding can let you use treasures and lots of other good stuff while also starting out with a large hand.

5

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Annoying and potentially harmful card anti-synergies

« on: March 05, 2021, 11:56:33 am »

Stealing the Zombies from the trash?

You can also use any sort of TfB and gain back the trashed component with Rogue. For instance, if you are running Apprentice for big draw. A few Rogues let you gain $6 feed (e.g. Gold) from the trash to turn into draw. All told if you play Apprentice(G) -> Rogue you net +3 cards/+2$ which is on net what you get from Hunting grounds, Bazaar, and a +1 coin token on either. Apprentice is particularly good as you can trash back Zombies. There, of course, a million odd other useful combos for trash diving (e.g. Small castle, Groundskeeper/action-VP/trashing) so that you may want to go Rogue even without ever pulling out a Zombie.

Even absent a combo, it can be pretty decent if the other guy opens Necromancer to open Rogue in hopes of shutting down his early trashing and leaving him with a dead card throughout the game. It is not like the Zombies are all that terrible to have in your deck and it only takes 3 plays to clear them out.

6

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Neat and potentially useful card interactions

« on: February 22, 2021, 12:46:53 am »

played a 4p game with IGG and Trader. Didn't really think about how Trader can actually kinda block the attack of IGG and skipped it. Took the bulk of the 30-deep curse pile.

Yup. Trader has three good functions in IGG games:
1) Blocking the Curses before they come in
2) Trashing the Curses if they do make it into your deck
3) Turning your IGGs into five Silvers.

4) Turning coppers into Silvers if you have <$3
5) Piling out the silvers to end game (e.g. in a 3 player game with 40 silvers you can expect Silvers to get significantly depleted with just 2 or 3 Traders each).

7

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Neat card interactions that were useful in the game you found them in.

« on: February 08, 2021, 09:38:58 am »

In games with Night cards, Capitalism + Kiln can easily gain copies of your Night cards, since you can simply choose to play Kiln as your last Treasure

Even without Nights, Capitalism is killer with Kiln. You can much more easily use Kilns to gain Kilns and spike a bunch of functional gold. You can gain any engine components with +$ trivially (e.g. Bazaar, Paddock) and you can gain treasures in much greater quantity easily. E.g. something like apprentice/Plat/Kiln can alternate Kiln/Plat during the buy phase for mass gain of Plats.

One of the more interesting ones I did was a Donate/Capitalism game with Kiln and Feodum. Opened Feodum/Donate, got a Kiln, Capitalism, another Kiln, and then mass gain of Kilns/Silvers while buying Feoda and Provinces.

8

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Why is teacher a reserve?

« on: December 04, 2020, 06:31:01 pm »

The most obvious thing is that you can leave him on the mat indefinitely with Reserve.

Once you have learned all Teacher's tricks you really have minimal use for having him in your deck and he becomes just another dead, high value card (e.g. like say Pooka or Altar when they are no longer useful trashers). A duration version would be inferior because you would have to draw it every turn.

And you often do not want to waste time getting all 4 tokens out. Champion makes +action pretty useless outside of edge cases like Snowy village or Diadem. +Buys are normally not worth a lot with Kc/Squire in the mix or something like Festival/Margrave. Even +card and +coin can be worthless (e.g. Festival/Lib and mass Hwy's respectively) rarely. Far more often you are getting close to game end and the odds of Teacher being the last stop card in your hand are not worth the highly marginal utility of one or more tokens. Sometimes, you can build a whole deck off just a couple of cards (e.g. Minion/Peasant/Soldier/trashing) and have no logical place to stick the other tokens.

Relatedly, one of the nice things about callable reserves is that you can bank them for later for cards that care. Most obviously this happens with Hop. Say I setup some sort of engine, leaving the Teacher on the mat gives me an 8th distinct card that I can call back only when needed to spike my "in-play" numbers. A few other, far less useful, cases are out there (e.g. maybe getting the count right for a Leprechaun or retriggering a Magic lamp with Treasurer).

 Lastly, there is the tactical case. Suppose you 3 Smithies and 3 Margraves in deck with Academy completed. If you draw none of either the first time after playing Teacher, you benefit by waiting another turn to make sure that you put +cards on whichever you draw the subsequent turn. Shuffle dynamics can get hairy, but in general, it makes no difference when in a shuffle you call a Teacher unless it is the turn you will shuffle. In some cases it can be worth it to wait to see what you draw because adding a +card to Village or Walled village does not matter if you have equal numbers of both in your deck and equal numbers left in the piles.

9

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Neat and potentially useful card interactions

« on: November 13, 2020, 09:04:43 pm »

There are 220 matches for the word "count" in this thread, but not a single Count interaction. Time to change that!

Count/Crossroads or Count/Shepherd

Count is amazing for those strategies where you build your drawing engine from green cards:
- efficiently trash away your starting Coppers
- gain Duchies to fuel your engine and maintain a lead
- kickstart your next turn by putting a Crossroads/Shepherd on top of your deck!

Count is actually not that great at trashing away your starting coppers. An average hand is CCEXCount where X is one of your openers or your other T3/4 buy. Assuming you want to keep both E and X that means that Count kills 2 coppers per play as a terminal. Which is on par with all the other 2 copper trashers ... but is a terminal $5. Worse, you will quickly have fewer turns where you can safely trash 2 coppers and eventually you will have several coppers that Count simply cannot eliminate. When you have other copper trashing you normally want it for a Green/Count engine.

Don't get me wrong, Count is a trasher of coppers, but when you actively want the estates his trashing is even slower than normal. It is something like four shuffles to get down to 2 coppers which is about what you can manage with Moneylender.

That being said, even inefficiently trashing coppers is enough to enable things like Shepherd or Xroads, particularly as Count can smooth out early cash flow, top deck whiffs, and then gain duchies.

For Count combos I have always loved Tomb. Pretty much any engine setup can turn Count into an unbounded golden engine with Tomb. Count/Beggar/Village/Tomb? Well that's 12 VP/turn. Lost arts/Count/Silk Merchant? Not too hard to hit 7 VP/turn. Even something simple like Tr/Count can churn 3VP/turn or more and still let you buy cards.

10

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Neat and potentially useful card interactions

« on: October 09, 2020, 03:04:51 pm »

probably known but rats / way of the horse is pretty fun

I prefer it with Magpie. In a no treasure deck, it makes every Magpie into +1.5 cards for the rest of the game.

For Rats I think the bigger combo is with Butterfly. You likely are not going to keep mass gaining/returning Rats, but being able to turn a copper into a $5 once a shuffle is pretty huge.

11

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Neat and potentially useful card interactions

« on: October 01, 2020, 02:57:31 pm »

Black Cat/Way of the Frog.

Top deck the black cats.

They don't give out Curses unless you play them as themselves. You can set them up to be in your hand for the next turn but your hand size will take a hit until you activate them.

Depends on the engine. If my village is Recruiter (say I am running Cats/Recruiter/Explorer) I really should be putting any extra Cats back even it costs a Villager most of the time. Similarly, having a +action token on them makes it even better as they can give you a village effect on the Frog turn. Or you might have ways to start with bonus actions (e.g. Prince, Mastermind). Then of course you have the million and one ways to creating a reliable draw deck (e.g. Scheme, Count, Travelling fair) that utterly does not care about 3 of your 5 starting cards.

The real clutch, though, is top decking them near game end. I have dropped 5 on deck top because my opponent could score no more than 6 VP a turn and that was not enough to win (you can actually end up in a degenerate state for Frogging Cats like this with a stalemated game).

12

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Is Library a sifter?

« on: October 01, 2020, 02:37:09 pm »

Ehh I have used the sifting quite often. First there are the obvious combos: Bustling village, Swashbuckler (if this or Lib came out of the BM deck), Mountain village and the like.

Then there is the utility of balancing your draw. Mv is an extreme example of this, but in general, you want to draw villages before terminal payload. With Mv you can use all of your draw slots to hit Mv and then pull payload out of the trash. Two Libs can draw 14 cards which lets you hit say 6 terminal payloads (e.g. Gladiator, Animal Fair, Count, Goons) and this is much more likely if you don't have to waste say 2 of your first 4 draw slots on payload you might be able to use. I will routinely skip my terminals to hit my villages on the first run through and then draw all of them on the second. For some setups this is just crazy more efficient (e.g. Native village is much more valuable if you can play 6 in a row than having to use 1/2 to take something off the mat or risk stranding one of your villages for the turn). And of course there are things like Golem/non-terminal (e.g. Golem/Candlestick maker) where you pretty much always want to dump non-Golems to play more Golems. And sometimes your "village" needs a specific combo (e.g. Horse + Procession) and you benefit from fishing for one component over the other.

Then there are combos were order matters. Skipping your Masquerade to draw & play the Militia first is often a far superior move. As are things like getting down Priests before other trashers (e.g. Priest/Fortress/Junk dealer), Liveries before gainers (e.g. Iw/Livery), or attacks before Soldiers.

Then there is the whole defense against useless actions. Ruins for instance. But also actions not worth playing any more (e.g. Chapel) or too dangerous to play (e.g. Hermit with piles approaching).

This is all sifting in some fashion. And I do something from this list most every game (the most common being flipping a terminal in hopes of hitting a village I need to play the terminals already in hand).

If you really want the value of the sifting to be clear, think of a Village/Goons/Donate/Advance setup, you will have no non-actions, treasure is pretty much useless for bootstrapping, and you want lots of efficient draw: would you take Scholar or Lib for your draw? The sifting makes this no contest for me.

13

Let's Discuss ... / Re: Let's Discuss Hinterlands Cards: Develop

« on: September 28, 2020, 06:57:34 pm »

One fun game I had a while ago I managed to hit KcDev$5$4Gold (I think I had Watchman or something to set it up). This allowed me to go Kc-> Dev (gain a Kc/$5, G/$4, Dev/D), leaving the Duchy on bottom.  We had either Tower or Tomb out so I was rolling a decent number of points in a golden deck.

And this is the real crazy strength of Dev. You can double the total value of cards in your deck in a single turn while having exquisite opportunities to down piles or hit points. The only Remodel-esque card that comes even close to the potential value gain is Displace. Yeah not every board is setup for Dev, lacking a $4 or a $7 makes it a lot harder to get great value out. Yeah the value gain is finicky, but provided you can draw deck and run two Devs, you can often gain huge amounts of options in the late game (e.g. threaten to gain Devs to snap up 8 cards to pile out, churn a $4 to two $3s & a Gold which can later become a Duchy).

The real question I typically face is the second Dev. Do you get one on T3 so you can pop a second estate on T4? Do you wait until you can draw through?

Absent stronger trashing and more powerful gaining, Dev is a very rarely a bad opening or late addition to an engine.

14

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Help me understand missing the shuffle

« on: September 15, 2020, 01:35:31 am »

Missing the shuffle may also mean that your cards collide (e.g. two terminals) or are useless in hand (e.g. Moneylender with no coppers in hand). You buy cards to have some effect and the vast majority of the time you want that effect as frequently as possible. Openers typically hit abut once every other hand for something simple like Silver/Militia, if you miss the shuffle they hit once every four turns.

Cards missing the shuffle also depends on how long before you shuffle again. For instance a T4 Witch misses the shuffle (she draws your 11th card and then shuffles for the next card to draw). However instead of seeing her once every 4 turns, you will see her ~2/5 because the shuffle is short (only 5 cards on deck top if you bought on T3).

If you are trashing down or otherwise drawing deck, missing the shuffle becomes less important. If you have 6 cards, missing the shuffle drops you from 5/6 to something like 2/3 (or 4/5).

Some cards are much more important for missing the shuffle. For instance villages. If you have no draw deck, you want to think very hard about playing a village for just +1 card. Odds are you get a copper and the difference between $3 and $4 is not worth all that much, but stranding a village in the discard means your terminals are more likely to collide and you are less likely to kick off an engine. On the flip side, some cards are great to miss shuffles. Secret passage, for instance, can bottom deck green so instead of seeing it once every four turns, you see it once every eight. Even something like Iw can benefit from missing the shuffle (e.g. the villages are empty but Fisherman is out so getting Fisherman in half your shuffles is better than getting nothing or Silver in all your shuffles).

15

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Neat and potentially useful card interactions

« on: September 09, 2020, 10:47:06 am »

Pillage/Counterfeit

You are gonna lose those spoils anyways, so why not double them?
Plus the spoils return before they can be trashed.

I actually find Pillage to be one of the worst Spoils targets for Counterfeits. If you play the combo every turn, you generate a whopping $4 using up an action, a buy and four draw slots. That is literally less than could get from just carrying 3 coppers and trashing/replacing 1 each turn. You could get a second Cfeit and then try to stack 5 draw into your engine, but that comes at the explicit cost of forgoing a Pillage buy/play.

Now Pillage comes with an attack that is very nice, but that attack makes it exceedingly unreliable to line up Cfeit with Spoils. First if I hit your Pillage, you may have no Spoils in deck for the shuffle afterwards. Second I can also disrupt the combo by hitting your Cfeit and forcing you to play your Spoils once. Regardless, Pillage is strongest against engines that have few clutch components where discards hurt the most (e.g. Golem, Kc); Cfeit, in contrast, thins and tends to help you buy double components (e.g. village & Smithy) where you will have a lot of redundant turns.

Bandit camp, for instance, needs only a net of 2 cards of draw to double play Spoils. That is a far stronger combo with Cfeit. Frankly, I would generally prefer something like Capital/Cfeit over Pillage/Cfeit for payload (the former generates $7 and +2 buys on net). Even with Marauder, you still have a nice shot for thinning your deck down for an engine, and eventually the ability to generate $7 in perpetuity at the price of 1 action and 3 draw slots.

Cfeit is, in general, a very good card and Pillage is situational but not too bad. It is nice to get them and line things up, but it seems like a very poor target as primary payload for an engine and not terrible reliable in a slog (particularly if you can do something else that is less finicky about lining things up, maybe like Horse traders/Duke or B-crat/alt-green).

It might be something nice to get, but I suspect than half of boards there will be a stronger combo there.

16

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Neat and potentially useful card interactions

« on: September 05, 2020, 11:43:50 pm »

Zombie Horses

Just another Way of the Horse Combo, but I like the thematic nature of it.

Like the rest of things that play cards without actually putting them "in play" Necromancer is great for generating a Lab effect with Way of the Horse (e.g. similar to the Bom, Overlord, and Capt). Any non-duration actions in the trash, including the starting zombies, turns a Necromancer in a $4 lab. If you end up with too many Necromancers you can Zapprentince or Zmason one to increase the number of "Labs" you can play though normally I would suggest doing that to other, cheaper actions (e.g. Ruins are worth it to buy, Zapprentice, and then turn it into a 4th or whatever Zombie Destrier).

I have not tried it yet, but I presume that you can also use Necromantic Butterflies to gain $4s (and other values if you seed the trash).

17

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Neat and potentially useful card interactions

« on: July 27, 2020, 09:23:45 pm »

You typically would not need full protection then. How many Covens was your opponent averaging per turn? 1? 1.5? Blocking say every third or fourth turn will stretch out how long it takes for you to get all 10 in your draw deck.

Obviously, there are some boards where it is hard to get enough VP before your deck chokes on 10 curses and that can mean playing Coven is the best option. But in general, relatively few Dominion games take longer than 15 turns. And it is a pretty rare board that lets you play more than one Coven per turn on average but not also block them all with just two or three Guardians.

I have certainly won any number of games by getting a victory condition (empty provinces, 3-piles, >1/2 of VP) before the shuffle after the 11th play of Coven. Which I suppose is another thing to consider, if your deck is getting kinda sloggy (e.g lots of treasure), after the 11th play you may well have 4 or 5 more turns before your expected cash tanks.

A non-mirror Coven bout turns the game into a race. But that is often a winnable race, and very much so with something like Guardian where you can buy whole shuffles off a single well-timed buy (e.g. they have no draw deck and 2 Covens in hand, you buy a $6 Guardian, and they need a full extra shuffle for just that block).

18

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Neat and potentially useful card interactions

« on: July 27, 2020, 03:05:42 pm »

Guardian is surprisingly not good against Coven.

I just lost a game where I won the curse split 8–1. I was protecting myself from my opponent's Covens with Guardians, while she was basically unprotected and just taking the curses. But because of my Guardians, the Curse pile depleted really slowly, so my opponent's curses never actually made it into her deck at all. So the upshot was, she lost some points but not in a way that impacted her deck efficiency, while I had a bunch of duration-coppers slowing my deck down, and I lost the Provinces 2–6.

Your experience is not about Guardian being weak, it actually is quite strong, you are more describing the weakness of Coven, and particularly with how I presume you played it.

For the price of $4, a single draw slot, and two gains you can protect your deck the entire game. Guardian is even better because you can wait through a few curses before buying them or have a few curses slip through before you trash down (e.g. using Spice merchant) without bloating your deck. You need never worry about drawing them dead (like Lighthouse) nor having them out of hand (like Moat). With very few exceptions (e.g. a Lib deck), you just plan on dumping two Guardians into your deck and maybe picking up a third or fourth late game to prevent ten bloat cards from being dumped into the deck.

The problem is Coven. Losing 10 curses means you just need to win the Prov split 5:3, which should not be hard to do when your opponent has kindly bought a couple of $5 silvers. Absent trashing and buying two Covens on T3&4 you are looking at something like T 14-T15 to get the curses shuffled into the deck. Absent something else, you have lost the provinces badly before then.

Where Coven works is where you can play two per turn or more (making it around T10 - 12 to shuffle in the curses) per turn. Coven also works well when the game will last longer (e.g. Colonies, other attacks, alt-VP). As is, slowing down the cursing game just a tiny bit (e.g. in this case you could not draw deck with the Guardians), normally lets you coast to an easy victory. In many ways it is like Mountain Pass, losing a couple turns to paying down debt or to playing $5 silvers is just not worth it for <12 VP.

19

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Neat and potentially useful card interactions

« on: July 23, 2020, 03:31:47 pm »

The Bank Gamble

Draw your deck. Have 9 treasures in play, $9 to spend, and as many +buys as you can manage. Buy a Bank. Gamble. Play the Bank. It generates $10 and Gamble gives a buy. Repeat until the stack is gone.

Starting with a full Bank pile this will generate $55 and leave you with $64 which is enough to pile out the provinces if you can generate enough +buys. Even if not, you can crush a pile for no cash cost or just quickly and dramatically increase you cash generating potential or get high value feedstock for scaling TfB.

20

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Highest possible score?

« on: May 19, 2020, 07:03:44 pm »

Hm of course... 

You can even generate infinite VP off Ambassador/Grand castle/Champion. Return the Grand castle every turn (it stays in the pile due to Champion) and then buy it back for more VP. Similarly Graverobber/Cost reduction/trashing makes this work as many times as the game lasts.

21

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Is Harvest the New Scout?

« on: May 11, 2020, 09:22:12 am »

I would call Harvest the weakest card in the game, its biggest virtue is that it generates cash, which is always on the board. Mute, at least, has the virtue of being a trasher (e.g. can be used as the only option in a Familiar game to get rid of curses) and a VP gainer which are things that, rarely, can be worth spending a turn to buy if there is no other option on the board and also gets a lot less bad when you are already buying a pot for something like Familiar. Pstone is another very weak card, but it at least can be strong on 3 or 4 player games with lots of junking (e.g. Mountebank, Ambassador) and actually quite good with colonies on those boards.

Where Harvest actually gets useful is where it does something better than two silvers. Notably, it can be the only +$ option for a Lib, Owl, or other limited draw engine. These can be exceptionally powerful with strong attacks or alt-VP (e.g. Temple) allowing you to build for a long time. The discarding can also be helpful in its own right, for instance rare niches can include using it as a B-crat/Fortune teller/Rabble counter or activating Tunnels; in both cases it is normally too weak to bother but can get a lot a stronger with favorable setups (e.g. having a Squire/Lib engine against Rabble, using it with a Remodel/Courtyard/Village engine for enabling Tunnels).

I do think it might have a legitimate synergy with Village green. Search space is the same size as anything that discards from hand at start (e.g. Count), can discard multiples per play, and generates a respectable cash load while discarding. I have definitely used it as the only discarder in the game to good effect.

Ultimately though, a best case scenario for Harvest is discarding 4 cards for $4. This costs you one draw slot and one action for using up a single $5 gain. You can get the same $4 for no action, two draw slots and two $3 gains. On most boards actions are more valuable than draw slots and a single $5 gain is much more valuable than two $3s. Unless there is nothing else at $5 or I really need some specific function like discussed above, Harvest will only be a viable shot when +actions are not limiting and where I need the unreliable cash now more than whatever else is on sale at $5.

22

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Fleet vs Seize the Day

« on: March 25, 2020, 06:06:42 pm »

I am still getting a feel for Carpe diem, but there are a lot of cases where I want Fleet over it.

First is when I just want insurance against a 3-pile next turn. Say my opponent can gain more cheap cards than me. Maybe I can gain 7 cards off Procession/Gainer/Buy and he can gain 9. Next turn he can pile out and win with a single estate buy. I buy Fleet. Now I have insurance for the rest of the game. Maybe my deck can buy more VP (e.g. He has an extra Workshop while I have two more golds so I can hit two provinces to his one) so this is a win for me. If I try to deal with the 3 pile threat by Seizing, then I need to green and maybe start wrecking my engine. Much better to grab Fleet and leave the engine to live another day.

Likewise, I may have a shuffle where I have leftover cash and a not-so-hot next turn lined up. Seizing could well mean that I just buy a duchy and miss out on the chance to use the bonus turn for something with a lot more points (e.g. three duchies). This is particularly true if we are running around with cards like Margrave, Minion, Gov, etc. that could help me have a non-busted turn by letting my opponent go first. A less common option would be if I have a bunch of reactions that I would rather play (e.g. set up a top deck of Black cats, Sheep dogs, and Falconers); you playing first can let me spike a lot of reactions which are particularly strong in this expansion.

And, lest we forget, Fleet lets us do things shift like cards out of VP to end the game and then back next turn to win it. Say I Stonemason two provinces. Burning 12 VP is harsh, but I can gain, say, the last 4 Kc's and end the game. I can then flip two of those Kc's into 4 duchies for a net point wash. Siezing has to keep your VP intact and leave the game in an un-ended state at the end of your first turn, while also leaving you $4 that turn to trigger a game ending turn.

Which is perhaps the biggest difference between the two. Fleet takes any spare $5 most of the time so it is relatively easy to work it into your buys. Seizing becomes a bind. Wait too long and you just get a duchy. Do it too early and you open a lot game-ending threats to the other guy that you have to honor (e.g. he can three-pile with twice as many cards left in deck as you). I suspect that there are a lot of end games where seizing would be the wrong call at $5. As your engine tanks during game end you need to seize sometime, but when is a very different buy calculus than Fleet.

23

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Not enough village in Menagerie?

« on: March 23, 2020, 09:53:20 am »

The other thing to remember is that we have a number of action cards that can now be played without actions. I built a highly effective engine in one game with Displace/Sheep dog/Falconer. I got to use Way of horse, find my Displace to gain either a Sheep dog or a Falconer.

In spite of having exactly one action, I nonetheless, was building a full engine.

Likewise, you can build a surprisingly effective engine off Gamble with the right cards (e.g. I powered up Animal fair, bought plats, and then piled out). It would be even an even stronger option with Delay out as well. Certainly something like ultrathin Goons/Treasure/Gamble would easily crush BM-Goons going for provinces.

Delay also merits special notice. If buys and draw are cheap enough, you can easily set up an engine of something like Council room/Terminal where you begin each turn with 15 cards, play a single terminal and then delay your other 2 Cr to do it again the next turn. Obviously, if you have non-terminals, this gets even easier.

I could be wrong, but I think Menage is going to be more engine friendly than most of the original block of expansions.

24

Dominion General Discussion / Re: bounty hunter is really good, right?

« on: March 20, 2020, 09:04:53 pm »

it cleans up provinces, it gives huge money spikes when you most need it, even when it doesnt give money spikes it's non-terminal, you can sacrifice a middling action card for money in the end game, you can even get that action card back if you like, etc.

If you can set it up in time, it also support an awesome golden deck - bounty hunter + 2 golds + silver can get you a province every turn.  You start each turn with those four cards plus the Province you bought the previous turn.  Exile that Province, buy a new Province, and start your next hand with the new Province + those four cards!  And in a colony game, you can do this with 2 golds + platinum gaining a Colony each turn!  Bounty Hunter lets you clear out your deck to get there quickly (in fact, you can buy several BH's initially, and then Exile the surplus)

Seems awfully slow. Say you open with 2 via Alms. By T4 you get a gold, exile 2 estates and get a third BH. By T6 you exile another 3 cards and get second Gold. You now have 2 golds, 5 coppers, and 3 Bh. Okay by T8 you exile 3 Coppers. T9 you exile 2 coppers. T10 you exile a Bh and buy a Plat. T11 Exile the other Bh and buy a Colony.

That puts you at turn 14 to get 4 colonies. With some of the best possible shuffle luck with one of the best possible board setups.

More importantly, this is not a lot faster for provinces. Getting 4 provinces in 14 turns loses to most BM-X setups. Absent Alms or some other option to open double Bh, this seems like it would be far too slow on its own.

25

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Top 10 best recepients for the +Card token

« on: February 14, 2020, 11:04:33 pm »

It depends on the board.

More importantly it depends on the state of your deck and when you can get the token.

For instance, Teacher often has moments were you want to dump it on whatever will let your draw deck that turn and get Teacher shuffle back in sooner. Say Teacher bottom decks and you draw 2 Rats. Putting +cards on Rats can let you play Rats more safely and shuffle through the deck that turn rather than just dropping +cards on your village and forgetting it. Drawing your deck 3 turns in a row rather than having a busted deck that takes three turns to draw is easily a win. More marginal cases are, of course, harder to pin down; but like with Prince Teacher may merit moving the token. And, of course, it goes without saying if the game is ending soon you should just be dumping that sucker on whatever keeps you afloat until next turn (e.g. 1st Teaching is +action on some terminal draw, 2nd is facing a pileout threat from either mass Soldiers or a few Disciples).

Pathfinding can, likewise, have some situational cases. The most obvious is with Villa. Dumping $8 to draw your purchases and play them immediately can be just insanely powerful. I have never done it, but it is not beyond reasonable outcomes to buy Pathfinding twice in a turn allow for a card explosion from Villa drawing into a stocked discard (e.g. something like Processing a bunch of cards, not having more draw cards to get into the discard, buying Pathfinding and Villa to get to the discard and continue the the turn, then Pathfinding something like Scheme for next turn).

I have seen far too many people add +1 card to whatever makes most since in the long term and ignoring the fact that they might not get a long term. Likewise I seen fewer people add +1 card to whatever is drawn on Teacher's first turn and regretting it.

After all, if you lose a card split 7:3, that maybe should not be your Path target even if Village is better than Smithy in general.

Likewise, maybe Oasis is not that hot, but you have Mine/Capitalism out and can turn it into a a very powerful sifter that you can mass gain quickly.

Ignoring all that, the next question is what do I gain out of +1 card. Yeah it increases your search space, but I would argue that going from 7 to 8 (Avanto) is nowhere near as good as 4 to 5 (i.e. my preferred candidate - Tr), particularly as Avanto rarely has trouble with trashing so both raw draw and draw density are not that important in Avanto decks (I can think of a lot of times when I would skip Pathfinding in an Avanto deck). In general, live draw is better than dead (Village over Smithy), and reliable benefit is worth a hefty premium (e.g. Scheme over most anything else). Effects you cannot get otherwise (e.g. any cantrip on a board with no other net positive draw) can be exceedingly powerful (e.g. Path Pearl diver so you can gain a bunch and then play a copper, silver, and gold along with a Necropolis and two Terminals). Some cards get a lot stronger with more deck knowledge - Band of misfits or Overlord work much better when you can pick your action knowing if the 5th card is going to need a village or can be a more useful cantrip.

Ultimately, you want reliability and just to get the +1 card benefit a lot. Sometimes this makes for weird choices (e.g. Fortress is massively strong on a Prssn board, even if you lose the Fort split). Other times it is trivially easy (e.g. your deck has only one action).

Remember, at the end of the day, getting the +1 card token tends not to happen quickly so be sure to account for how many you have of stuff, how many are playable immediately after you get the token down, how many you will add how quickly to your deck in the coming turns, and how many you may lose from your deck (e.g. Swindler) or your opponent gain (e.g. Jester).