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51

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Multiplayer Transition

« on: February 23, 2013, 02:42:02 pm »

1. Because the amount of regular kingdom cards doesn't vary based on the group size, there is a wider distribution of sought-after cards (4-3-3 or 3-3-2-2 rather than a 5-5 even split). This I would presume effects cards you want a lot of, particularly if you can chain them together (minions, cities, etc.) and they are therefore weakened if other people go also go for the same cards and thus you get fewer of them in your deck. It also hurts if you are trying to build an engine and there is a part or parts that others want also.

I think the bigger problem is that (for instance) a 5-5-0 split plays so differently from the 5-5 split we're used to.

Take Minion. Lots of times you actually can't build a very strong engine with 5 Minions. In 2P that usually doesn't stop you from trying: if the opponent gets the rest of the Minions then hey they'll probably be stuck with the same problem. We say Minion engines are very strong because uncontested they are typically very strong, and if they're contested in 2P the point is moot.

But in 3P you can be in the situation of having to play that 5 Minion engine against a player who didn't have to buy any Minions. On the other hand if nobody else wants to join you in 5-Minion hell, maybe you benefit. They might not contest you at all until it's too late.

Accordingly, I think flexibility gets a lot more important. If possible one should delay the decision of whether to contest the split. You could perhaps say that with more players, each individual player has less control over the game, so they have to play more reactively.

52

Dominion Articles / Re: Trader

« on: February 11, 2013, 12:32:36 am »

The discussion so far has centered on using Trader exclusively in Money games or as a defense against Curse-givers.  I feel this doesn't fully capture some of the intricacies of this card.  In particular, one item I think is absent from this discussion is trash-for-benefit cards.  Apprentice clearly comes to mind. 

Apprenticing Silvers is pretty weak sauce. It's like, wouldn't you rather have played a Lab or a Stables? Unless you really wanted to be rid of that Silver, but then why were you playing Trader in the first place? Lab and Stables are fine cards and all but it's not such a great day for Apprentice when it's outclassed by these.

Apprenticing your Trader after you've gotten some use out of it might be nice, but Silver bloat is likely to keep your Apprentice away from better targets (including the Trader) so is it worth it?

53

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.

« on: January 28, 2013, 11:34:32 pm »

I'm not limiting myself by not doing cards - it's the opposite. Cards are strictly a limitation.

I don't mean to beat on this dead horse but this brings up a more abstract question about your game design philosophy.

Orson Welles had it that "The enemy of art is the absence of limitations." And to me Dominion absolutely exemplifies this. Take Treasury, which as you mentioned earlier, is sort of like a permanent Duration card. Instead of writing up new rules for a new card type, you shoehorned it into the rules framework you had. And from this you get depth: it develops interesting interactions with discard attacks, it's a guaranteed target for Thrones or Graverobbers or whatever, all kinds of stuff. I think it's reasonable to say that a lot of the nuance in Dominion comes from stuff like this.

So this isn't a criticism of course; obviously however you think about game design, it works! And of course it's not like deckbuilders are the only game format that provides some basic structure to work from. But I'm surprised to hear that after your Dominion experience you find "limitations" to be a dirty word. Do you feel like pushing against boundaries is a major part of your design process? Or is it the sort of thing where like, your game mechanics are ultimately going to limit you no matter what you do, so you might as well carve out as big of a design space as you can?

54

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.

« on: January 20, 2013, 09:45:39 am »

Are there any interesting mechanics that you considered but didn't wind up using? Off the top of my head (just to save you the trouble of repeating yourself) you've mentioned:

* Duration cards that last longer than one turn, which were considered too confusing to mix in with Seaside
* A second resource, which obviously appeared in a very limited form as Potion
* Something like a board, which you say is better used for a spinoff, rather than an individual card that might not be bought and then why did you bother setting the board up.

You've probably mentioned some others in the Secret History articles but I can imagine where many ideas were probably abandoned too early to have ever had a place in one of the sets during development.

55

Dominion Articles / Re: Death Cart

« on: January 15, 2013, 09:26:17 pm »

Ah, evidently I'm not keeping the arguments straight too well; sorry for the confusion.

56

Dominion Articles / Re: Death Cart

« on: January 15, 2013, 07:26:49 pm »

But I think you get the wrong takeaway out of it. You buy moneylender (and not all that often anyway) primarily to trash copper, not for the economic benefit. Why? Because you want the copper out of your deck.

I think this is kind of unfair to both cards. The copper-trashing is why you would buy Moneylender over Silver. The economic benefit is why you would buy Moneylender over, say, Spice Merchant. Now it so happens that Silver is in every game but Spice Merchant isn't, and that's why with Moneylender we usually wind up asking "What's that copper trashing worth to you?" rather than "What's a terminal Silver with a shelf life worth to you?"

But Death Cart isn't directly comparable to Silver; in fact it's not comparable to much, especially not at $4. Baron and Gold and Moneylender, but it's pretty far from any of those. Its economic benefit is genuinely impressive and is definitely a big part of why you're buying it over whatever other option you might have.

Here's an interesting thought experiment. After you play and trash your Death Cart, would you consider buying another one, along with two Ruins? I think this is often worthwhile, even though it undoes all the junk-Action trashing you've been doing. (In fact I think Death Cart can be a great use of a spare $4 buy late in the game; sort of like you might buy a Feast to turn into Duchy).

But  keeping the original Death Cart around and not gaining those Ruins sounds even better, especially if you're focused on getting rid of junk! Now suppose your deck control is such that you could have guaranteed this, by buying 2 $2 Actions somewhere along the line to keep the Death Cart alive (i.e. you're certain they would successfully collide). Why not do this? If you have the buys, it's not really any more expensive than buying a new Death Cart, and the Actions are probably better than Ruins.

57

Dominion Articles / Re: Request: Winning the Curse War

« on: December 16, 2012, 09:38:21 pm »

Scheme is pretty good. You can either use it on your Curser or on a Reaction (especially if you're keeping good track of your opponent's deck and you know when the Curse is coming).

The pithy term for what SirPeebles talked about is cycling. Even something as simple as Caravan can have an impact by helping you move through your deck faster. (Of course if you're playing with Witch you run the risk of drawing Caravan dead.) It's also a good way to play your trasher more often if you have one; or any other strong cards you might have.

Also bear in mind it's not just about winning the Curse split. Of course you know this, or you'd have bought three Sea Hags in those games you cited. Winning the split is great but beyond a certain point it isn't worth buying more Cursers which will be crummy when the Curses run out. Good enablers let you hold up your end of the fight but are still valuable after the Curse war is over. Your Scheme can find another target, your Warehouse can sift through all those Curses. It's way better than having a bunch of lousy Cursers with nothing to give out. (Another option is to trash your Cursers when you're done, using a good TfB card. Cultist seems to beg for this.)

58

Dominion General Discussion / Re: "Copycatting"

« on: December 15, 2012, 10:48:54 am »

In Dominion, sometimes there is a right and a wrong strategy, and in those cases, good players will both wind up choosing the right one. (Although they'll usually differ on the details to a greater or lesser extent, even if only because you each have to make the best of your own shuffle luck). If your opponent is not knowledgeable enough to understand this, I would not worry too much about his opinion of your play.

I've certainly been playing games where I thought my opponent needed a certain card for a deck and I was reluctant to buy it myself, knowing that the opponent would probably copy. I usually buy it anyway and so does the opponent immediately after, leaving me still unsure whether I helped them or not.

Usually I try to be philosophical about this. I'm trying to improve my game, which means playing against and beating stronger opponents, not weaker ones. If giving my opponent a little hint makes him play better, hey, that's good for me too.

It's the same reason I try to resist going for unsound trap strategies. I play as though my opponent is a very good player. If it turns out he is a weak player, I should still beat him anyway; I don't need to practice my beating-up-on-weak-players strategy in order to beat those guys. (Admittedly, this mindset is a carryover from chess, where the luck element is so small that weak players don't pose nearly as much of a threat as in Dominion. So the logic is a little suspect here.)

But then I don't have a particularly impressive rating to protect either.

59

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Stash in an IGG game. Discuss.

« on: December 12, 2012, 09:39:00 pm »

A straight Stash strategy is bad enough on a generic BM board. Here your cycling is going to be glacially slow due to Coppers and Curses, which means fewer Stash turns. If you're going to spend $5 on a Silver you hardly get to use, seems like it might as well be the one that gives out Curses.

60

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.

« on: December 12, 2012, 08:31:08 pm »

What's the weirdest fringe situation you learn about from playtesting broken cards, that we never experience? I'm guessing you have like ten pages of advice on what to do in games where, say, Gold is likely to run out, even though the rest of us have seen that situation about twice in our lives?

Similarly is there any sort of borderline-fringe stuff that you got good at because of playtesting, but you think it really helps you and maybe we should learn it? A few expansions ago I'd have said "Silver-based economies" as an example but I guess those have gotten pretty mainstream; we've all learned our lesson. Weird Duchy rushes or something like that, maybe?

61

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Now that Dark Ages has been out for a while...Thoughts on cards?

« on: December 08, 2012, 07:18:42 pm »

Fairgrounds/Knights makes for some crazy games; extra variety but you can't count on keeping it. I'm tempted to think it's not reliable enough to assume you'll wind up with a ton of variety in the end; but it doesn't matter, you can't let your opponent get all the Knights uncontested.

62

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.

« on: December 08, 2012, 11:19:32 am »

How do you feel about coop games? I can't recall hearing you talk about any (of yours or other people, except for Mage Knight in this thread, but I think you were just talking about the HP mechanics and stuff). I'd have thought you would be all over this because of your feelings on politics. Or is the whole "quarterbacking" issue an even worse form of politics for you that you don't want to touch?

Edit: I guess Infiltration has some coop elements? I haven't gotten to play it yet but I got the impression it was mainly adversarial.

63

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Tactics

« on: December 07, 2012, 10:10:45 am »

....

Okay, so we're assuming the draw pile has remaining a bunch of Coppers and 1 good card right? For concreteness, say it's N Coppers and a Bridge, and you have a Village and Wishing Well in hand. Your only goal is the get the Bridge. There are 4 possible locations of the Bridge.
1. The Bridge is first. Here the order you play doesn't matter.
2. The Bridge is 4th or later. Again it doesn't matter.
3. The Bridge is third. If you play the Village first then Wish for the Bridge, you get it. If you play the Wishing Well first and wish for a Copper you get the Bridge as well. In both cases you got the same thing.
4. The Bridge is second. If you play Village first, you get the Bridge and 2 Coppers. If you play the Wishing Well first and wish for Copper you get the Bridge and 1 Copper.

So it seems like if the only thing you care about is getting the Bridge, then it doesn't matter. However, if you have a different objective, like maximizing the expected number of cards you draw, playing the Village first should be better.

Case #2 actually does matter, you get 2 coppers where I get 3.
Also, you can't count them all as equals because there are way more bridge=#4+ scenarios then bridge =#2

If not getting the bridge implies that the amount of coppers is irrelevant, and/or Bridge & 2 coppers is worth tons more then bridge+copper, playing the village first is better. But that I dare to call an edge case.

Did you really mean case #2? If Bridge is 4th or later, then it doesn't matter because you can't get the bridge no matter what order you play the cards in. Either way you end up with 3 Copper (assuming you Wish for Copper).

But the premise of this puzzle is that you really want your Bridge this turn. So you would not wish for Copper if you played the WW last, you would wish for Bridge. And then in case 2 you would only get 2 Copper.

The point of Stef's strategy is that it still maximizes the odds of getting your Bridge, which is the main priority; but it also maximizes the amount of Copper you can get without compromising your Bridge chances.

64

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Not triggering reshuffles

« on: November 27, 2012, 07:40:43 pm »

Definitely play the Witch. Your choice is between playing it on this reshuffle or on the next reshuffle. Early cursing has greater impact.

This is exactly the point. You pass up playing a card once now in order to avoid the situation where that card misses the reshuffle and you won't get to play it later? Does not compute.

Hell, at least if it misses the reshuffle, you won't have a dead Witch taking up handspace at any point along the way. And you have two cards' worth of extra cycling which might help you get your second Witch play sooner. And you will have zero possibility of missing the subsequent reshuffle. So even if early cursing weren't preferable to delayed cursing, this is really bad in principle.

Now you can concoct situations where it might be better to wait. Maybe rather than trigger a reshuffle with Tournament, you save that Tournament for the next reshuffle in hopes of hitting a Province. Maybe playing one Smithy with your last Action is awful and you save it for a turn with +Action. But most often if you refrain from triggering a reshuffle with one card, it's because you're worried about also losing a DIFFERENT card, from which you would otherwise benefit both now AND later.

65

Dominion Articles / Re: Combo: Grand Market and Quarry

« on: November 27, 2012, 06:34:44 pm »

For more Prosperity goodness add a vault if you whiff at $5 or need to lean on copper at an early turn. Vault autobuys GM if you discard your copper and helps you find quarries too.

Vault/GM is a power combo in its own right but I think it actually gets weaker with Quarry out, as the opponent's "discard 2, draw 1" opportunity can be unusually strong here. He probably won't hesitate to discard Coppers that he didn't want to play anyhow. It "helps him find Quarries" just as effectively as it does for you, and it's even better for helping him find his Grand Markets. The ability to automatically buy a GM is Vault's main draw, and a potent one it is, but the easier it is to buy them without Vault the less valuable that starts to look.

66

Dominion Articles / Oasis

« on: November 27, 2012, 06:13:49 pm »

Where Dark Ages forces you to consider the ramifications of replacing Estates with Shelters, Hinterlands has gently invited you to replace Silver with Oasis. Perhaps no other card yet printed fits Silver's "neutral <$3 supporting card" niche this well. As a result, this article is almost as much about Silver as it is Oasis; I'll examine the strengths and weaknesses of each. (With this said, of course it's possible to pass up both cards and buy nothing; or to buy one card early and the other later.)

First, and perhaps most obvious, is the money. Oasis gives you a card to replace itself, then effectively replaces your weakest card with a Copper. In the early game this is on average slightly inferior to Silver's flat $2, but a lot better than a flat $1 or $0. (A more nuanced look at the opening probabilities may yield further insight, and I might run some stats in the next draft if the community deems it worth making one; unfortunately I can't at the moment.)

Later in the game, the monetary values of Silver and Oasis can diverge more widely. A deck that trashes Estates might quickly find its Oases neutral or even detrimental, as it no longer has any targets which would benefit from "turning into Copper." Even without trashing, straightforward deckbuilding can often reduce the chances of Oasis finding junk to discard in a given hand. Notably, Oasis itself can interfere with another Oasis (although no more than Silver would interfere with an Oasis). For these reasons, Oasis is generally a poor fit in Big Money variants.

None of this is an absolute dealbreaker; Silver too can outlive its usefulness! But if you do opt to raise your deck's strength without lowering the proportion of viable Oasis targets it contains, you might find Oasis outperforming Silver somewhat. This could happen as a result of Copper trashing or some degree of Cursing (especially Sea Hags) from your opponent; or of buying alt-VP cards. Tunnel obviously fits here too. Another option is large hand sizes, which of course make you more likely to find junk even when there's less of it in the deck. By contrast, handsize reducers such as Militia or opponents' Bishops are very bad for Oasis.

The second point of comparison between Oasis and Silver is that Silver clogs your deck more. Silver slows down your cycling, and interferes with combos in a way that Oasis does not. All strong players have realized there are times when Silver interferes more than it helps (and yet, tragically, might still be unavoidable). Oasis is preferable in many of these situations, although it's still possible on occasion to pass over both Oasis and Silver and buy nothing. But even in games when Silver is perfectly tolerable, Oasis might be better. Oasis/Moneylender provides nice cycling for the Moneylender and enough money to transition into many different decks. Players who open Horse Traders aiming for $5 turns, or Potion aiming for Apothecary/University, may feel that their economy is really pretty sufficient; they just want to play the opener (and their $5 or $2P cards) more often.

Finally, there are the little differences, which mostly stem from Oasis's being an Action rather than a Treasure. Vineyard, Scrying Pool, and Conspirator enjoy it, while Bank does not. Against Pirate Ship it's a no-brainer. Any engine or card that can replace the card Oasis discarded will get a big boost, including Minion and the "Draw to X" family (and Scrying Pool, from some perspectives).

67

Dominion Articles / Re: Combo: Grand Market and Quarry

« on: November 27, 2012, 02:29:26 pm »

If it isn't too far off topic, I've found Royal Seal a surprisingly potent GM enabler, great for winning the split. Of course being able to topdeck GMs is fantastic, but even topdecking money provides a great little speed boost. And since Silver is more useful than usual you have no reservations about buying more Royal Seals with your Royal Seals, allowing the card to define your deck much more than it typically would. (There is probably a broader category of strategies that start with Royal Seal-BM or a variant thereof, and use it as a base to load up on $6-7 cards; but I've had no luck mapping that category out.)

I'm sure that either of these combos would go nicely with TfB once the Treasure's job is done and it's starting to get in the way of your Grand Markets.

68

Dominion Articles / Re: Band of Misfits

« on: October 26, 2012, 02:41:25 pm »

Some other thoughts on <$5 cards that go with BoM. These categories overlap in some deep ways.

• Cards that are strongest for a limited period of time. Coppersmith and Baron are good openers but sometimes weak later. Remodel and Tournament have late-game utility but sometimes aren't so good early. Use BoM to cover both! Other people have mentioned early-game trashers, another good example.
  
  
• Cards with conditional benefits that depend on shuffle luck; even if they're too unpredictable to warrant buying the card itself. Shanty Town in an engine. Thief on the off chance you've been counting your opponent's cards and you know there's a Gold there. Any combo without an engine to support it (someone mentioned Throne Room). Weak but occasionally-useful cards like Cellar or Crossroads. Counters like Watchtower against Militia, or Wishing Well against Ghost Ship.
  
  +Buy sources, especially weaker ones, belong in this category AND the category of cards that are only good for a limited time. In the early game an extra buy often goes to waste, but in the late game you don't want to spend a $7 turn on a Herbalist or something. So what do you do? Of course you buy BoM in order to use it as Herbalist only on turns where you need +Buy. Later you can conveniently pick up one or two real Herbalists with the +Buy from BoM; and then you'll have a full engine with BoM tossed in for reliability!
  
• Strong, especially non-drawing terminals, along with nonterminals to use as a "backup plan". Do you want to buy tons of Militias and not worry about collisions?  (Or buy ANY militias in a 4P game BoM has it covered!
  
  You could do this cheaper with Scheme but Scheme isn't always available. Scheme is also a little less powerful I think. Sometimes it comes up before your Militia and you have to wait; sometimes it comes up after your Militia and you don't get an extra attack. And when they come up at the same time, it's a plain +1/+1, whereas BoM presumably gives you some cantrip benefit on the side. I don't know if all of this justifies costing $5 instead of $3 but it's better than nothing.
  

69

Dominion Articles / Re: Altar

« on: October 17, 2012, 11:23:32 pm »

The beauty is that you just need to hit $6 once and then don't really need any money until you can consistently draw your whole deck.

Which is nice, since focusing on engine building would let you play Altar more.

So what helps get you an early $6? Here are the major contenders I can think of (I'm sure others can think of many more).

• Baron looks fantastic. Use your engine to help connect Baron to Estates later even if you start trashing them. It's probably often easy to build an engine that can overdraw to re-discard the same Estate repeatedly. Late-game Altars can gain you your payload as well as your engine if necessary, and Baron's +Buy can provide Coppers to trash with Altar if you run low.
• Quarry looks strong too. If you want to prioritize engine building over an economy then you might really need some help hitting $5, especially on Altar turns. Yeah it can't buy Gold but it's an Altar game: most likely you have good Actions you're happy to buy? Later you can trash the Quarry to Altar if you want.
• Mining Village looks plausible enough. It can be an engine piece, and you probably won't feel as bad about trashing your first one to buy the Altar as you would in a game with less card gain. These decks really want to end the game in a big flurry of Duchy gains and Mining Village trashing which will leave the deck in shambles; I'll leave it to better players to decide whether this is a positive or a negative.
  
• Count and Death Cart look good. Again, these decks will implode pretty quickly on command (especially Death Cart).
• Mandarin is an interesting question. It slows your opening down when Altar needs speed. On the other hand it would enjoy an engine game, and if you want Altar it's likely because there's something else interesting at $5 which you might happily buy on turn 2 after Mandarin.
  
• Cache and even Beggar are intriguing but probably not worth it. I don't place a lot of stock in Altar deck thinning even if you do manage to grab Altar on the first reshuffle, so these would really hurt. Although once you have Altar to take care of the serious deck building I imagine you safely can, and probably should anyway, spend a turn to buy Spice Merchant or Loan or Warehouse; perhaps the problem could be controlled this way.
  
• Contraband looks decent. Very likely you can take Gold if Altar gets blocked; and on a good Altar board there's likely something good at $5 if you don't hit $6. Later you can trash the Contraband. But I always want Contraband to be good, so I'm biased.
  
• Vault of course is absolutely reliable for hitting $6 and can work well with engines. But Vault might just compete with Altar, especially without +Action: do you need two different cards that give reliable $5 turns?
  
• Merchant Ship and Wharf are pretty decent I guess? Both good BM enablers so you have to watch out for that, but also sometimes you would like to have lots of them.
  

On the flip side, Altar seems to be rather in competition with a card like Horse Traders, which provides a legitimate alternate road to $5 hands but doesn't really help hit $6. I can't think of many other cards that help you hit $5 but not $6 (well, Feast and University) but I'm sure they exist. Obviously Altar also tends to compete with strategies that don't involve building a strong conventional early economy at all: Chapel, Potion, etc.

I think the most effective use of Altar is to use it gain your big $5 engine piece while spending your small amount of coins on the $3-4 piece until you can consistently draw your deck and play the Altar every turn.

Based on this, a few other combo ideas occur. Menagerie will love Altar's deck thinning, ability to gain lots of variety, and maybe even its handsize reduction. Of course lots of cheap good engine pieces are good here: Hamlet, FV, Watchtower, Squire (which could also be trashed into an Attack by Altar). But even typically weaker ones (Courtyard, Moat, Shanty) can be strong when paired with a plentiful power $5; and a $2 price point might be a perk while your economy is weak.

At least one Scheme is probably a must-buy. At minimum, if it gets you even one extra Altar play in the phase while you're setting the engine up, then you'll make up for the buy you spent on the Scheme so it's basically free.  But beyond that, Scheme provides an alternative way to play the Altar every turn without getting an engine running quickly. This would, I imagine, let you use the Altar for some engine-incompatible plans (e.g. Dukes), or plans that just don't get your engine humming very quickly (City engines, and maybe some other super strong all-$5 engines where the payload is the only cheap card involved). Note also that an extra, permanently topdecked Scheme can be used as guaranteed Altar food, if that's worthwhile to you.

Altar robably goes well with Double Tactician under the right circumstances too. It probably gets rolling about as fast as most other Double Tac decks, since they all have to get a good payload assembled and buy two Tacticians. And once it starts you need very little or no more card draw because you're trashing almost as fast as you gain; so unless you're getting attacked your deck size will stay pretty close to what Tactician can handle.

It could maybe work well with Hermit/Madman: it's undoubtedly a great excuse to skip buys. Might help if your favorite $5 card gives +Actions to play both Altar and Hermit in the same turn?

70

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Dominion: Legions

« on: October 17, 2012, 10:35:47 pm »

Ok, I hadn't been thinking of it in those terms. What if I changed it to:

Fortifications
Cost:3
[Action-Reaction]
+1 card
+$2
Discard 2 cards.
--
When another player plays an attack card, you may reveal and set this card aside. At the start of your next turn, +$1 and return this card to your hand.

Does this seem more balanced?

Beggar is also a terminal Gold for what it's worth.

71

Dominion Articles / Re: Semi article:Develop

« on: October 14, 2012, 02:40:21 pm »

I think there's a lot more to be said, but one thing is that it's nice to have a continuous range of flexible cards at various price levels, not just a pair like $4/$6. Developing a $5 into GM/Conspirator sounds great but where are all of those $5s going to come from, when you're filling your deck up with GM/Conspirator? (OK it's not so bad in this specific case, because GM/Conspirator is quite strong and it doesn't clog up your deck; but with other combos this could be an issue.)

On a strong enough Develop combo board, Develop itself can often be worth gaining, so $3 is taken care of. But if you can Develop Conspirator->Inn/Develop, and next turn Develop Inn into Conspirator/GM, and continue in this manner, your engine will can develop extremely very quickly. And it's not even that Inn is such a fantastic addition to this combo (it's not too shabby but it does interfere slightly with Develop's topdecking) but mostly just that it's a remotely tolerable card at the $5 point.

Border Village is good for similar reasons: you can Develop a $5 into a topdecked BV and a Smithy and gain back your $5 (or a different one, like Duchy). Later you happily can turn that BV into a Duchy.

Naturally, there are also combos with a lot of DA cards. Anything with an on-trash bonus will have some fun here, but a few seem to be admirably suited. Developing Feodums gives you an extra Silver and some $5s, either of which can be turned back into Feodum. Rats can be turned very efficiently into $5s by filling your deck with them and topdecking $5/Develop every turn. Catacombs gives you an extra copy of whatever $4 you were Developing into.

72

Dominion General Discussion / Re: What would make Scout better?

« on: October 13, 2012, 02:46:32 pm »

Scheming Chancellor Tactician Bloke
$7 action
Discard your deck.
During cleanup choose up to five cards you played this turn, put them on your deck.

Cards with things like "discard your deck" just become stupidly powerful with Tunnel. Not that this card isn't crazy powerful anyway.

I assume he meant to use the Chancellor wording, which eliminates the ability to trigger Tunnel. But it doesn't much matter; I think it was just intended as an example, not a serious card suggestion?

73

Dominion Articles / Re: Procession

« on: October 12, 2012, 06:19:43 pm »

If we get back to the positive, we can find plenty of good situations to trash action cards. Using procession to trash ruins and shelters might be worthwhile when you consider the small bonus from the playing the action twice.

This might be too obvious to be worth dwelling on, but I think Shelters barely deserve to be mentioned here if at all. Necropolis is the only one that qualifies, and you're not really benefitting from playing it twice. At the most you'll have a use for the +2 Actions, not 3 or 4. And if you need even 2 Actions this turn, it's almost certainly because you have two other cards in your hand which make better Procession targets than Necropolis in the first place.

So in general, I think the most help you get from Shelters here is the small chance you'll draw something like Procession-Necropolis-CCC. Where at least your crappy shuffle luck isn't *quite* as crappy as it would have been in an Estate game.

74

Dominion: Dark Ages Previews / Re: Trash feodum

« on: October 10, 2012, 09:46:21 pm »

Would you mind deriving that for me?

I don't see how it can hold in general. If you're going to have 24 Silvers without any Feodum trashing, then each Feodum is worth 8VP. If you then trash one of your eight Feodums you're losing 8VP and gaining only 7 (by incrementing the value of the other 7).

If that number of Silvers seems unrealistic to you, consider 15 Silvers and four Feodums for the pre-Feodum-trashing tally. Again, trashing a Feodum is worth -1VP.

(Of course the Silvers have utility that these calculations don't take into account, but I don't really see how you can account for this and come out with such a concrete rule as yours.)

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Dominion General Discussion / Re: Bishoping VP Cards

« on: October 10, 2012, 09:31:41 pm »

Remember, Bishoping a Province (for -1VP and one less junk card) is about equivalent to Chapeling one Estate (for -1VP and one less junk card), plus $1. So any experienced Dominion player can use that as a benchmark to naively weigh the value of this move: typically fairly decent although maybe a little less impressive late in the game.

I think that viewpoint has some merit, but now, a huge list of caveats (most of which have already been mentioned). Of course you have to consider the opportunity cost for whatever other thing you could have done with that Bishop, which might have been worth positive VP. (Which is pretty important if netting positive VP from Bishop is, you know, your plan for winning the game.) And you also have to consider that Bishop lets your opponent trash a dead card as well, so it might be a wash. So these are fairly compelling arguments against.

On the other hand many decks designed around Bishop are meant to do exactly this. The Golden Deck is of course an extreme example, but not the only one. These decks will choke if they green up to any considerable degree, so Province trashing is of the utmost importance. In other words the "it's just like trashing an Estate" idea remains true, but it's a little misleading because the decks are so finely tuned that trashing an Estate is far more important than it would be in a normal endgame.