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1

Dominion General Discussion / Re: How is Vassal (with suitable support) not overpowered/undercosted?

« on: February 02, 2024, 03:29:35 pm »

Vassal is far less reliable than Conspirator. You also seriously misevaluate terminal Silver, no way you would ever pay $3 for such junk.

I would say that Vassal is differently unreliable than the Conspirator.  Conspirator is basically all-or-nothing; once you've got it going, it goes indefinitely, but if you don't you've got a dead turn.  Vassal is easier to get up to a 5 or 10% chance of hitting than Conspirator is, harder to get up to an 80-90% chance, easier to get up to 100% but that won't last unless you have a way to turn $ into VP without adding greens to your deck, and can take the occasional miss more easily.

No, no way I would pay $3 for a terminal silver, that's true.  (Well, unless I had a lot of VP-on-buy effects).  I could get a regular silver for that value, of course I wouldn't pay $3 for a terminal silver, and I never said I would.

But if I had it in my deck for some reason and hit it with a sentry?  It would be a very non-obvious call whether to trash it or not.  And if I only had $2 and it was that or nothing...again, a non-obvious call.
And that means that it may very well be viable as the low end of a $3 card.

I constantly overvalue Vassal, I want it to always work.But terminal space is limited and Vassal gambles with that valuable resource.
So I totally disagree, Vassal is virtually always inferior to Conspirator.

Well, that's really the question: How limited is terminal space?

If you can get an extra terminal space for the price of a silver, that doesn't really seem that limited.  Especially since getting one village for every 2 or 3 vassals will probably be enough in many engines.

I mean...it's definitely a resource, but one that seems to be costed as significantly cheaper than cards (the upside to your gamble).

That's only if Village is also in the kingdom. Not all kingdoms have a lot of free villages around.

The questions around Vassal are basically,

* how much gambling can I afford with my terminal space?
* can I expect to usually play all my Vassals before I draw my deck?
* Is there a better effect to use my terminal space on?

I do think there are boards where Vassal is better than Conspirator, but it's primarily on boards where you can set-up the topdeck to reduce the gambling risk (i.e Sentry, Artisan, etc.), and on board where it costing $3 vs $4 actually matters (enough +buy). The fact that you have to gamble with Vassal is what makes it hard to just shovel into decks  - when Vassal misses it really sucks.

2

Dominion Articles / Re: The Clashes - A Summary

« on: October 05, 2023, 12:42:15 pm »

How has no one mentioned the "reveal an attack" part of Battle Plan yet? It's a pretty relevant part of the card, if you're going for Clashes and pick up Archer and Warlord it can be a Lab fairly often. When you're under Warlord attack you want draw from all the different places you can manage.

3

Dominion General Discussion / Re: strategies to win more online dominion games?

« on: June 21, 2023, 06:24:02 pm »

Everything is context sensitive but there are a few principles that tend to hold up.

Decks that draw themselves (engines) tend to be better because they draw newly bought cards faster, which lets them improve themselves faster. The limit on how big to build them depends on context for how fast you can improve your deck (how good the draw is). Expansions tend to push towards engines because playing engines is fun.

Trashing is a good way to make a deck that draws itself since you'll have fewer cards to draw. Trashing in Dominion usually makes your current turn worse and future turns better, and in practice, this is usually worth it, but it can depend. Sometimes the draw is really good and then trashing matters less. Sometimes the trashing is too slow and then you don't want to trash as much. "Trashing a junk card = gaining a draw card" is not really accurate, but is approximately close enough to keep in mind.

Dominion matches are very rarely about "my opponent did A, I will do B to counter it." Most of the time it's "A is the best thing to do, how can I do it best?". Questions like "is draw better than trashing" aren't really helpful because the answer usually turns into "does it let you do A better?"

The Dan Brooks "20 questions" chart still holds up pretty well IMO. Usually the important parts of a kingdom are "how many cards can I gain per turn" and "how much can I draw here"

4

Other Games / Re: Celeste

« on: June 08, 2023, 01:04:32 pm »

If you haven't played the Strawberry Jam mod yet, it's very good, I recommend it a lot.

It's split into 5 sections, and roughly, Beginner lobby = as hard as A-sides and a few B-sides, Intermediate lobby = as hard as Farewell, and then it scales up from there. It's not expected that you finish the whole thing but even Beginner + Intermediate was a lot of content for me.

5

Let's Discuss ... / Re: Let's Discuss - Archer

« on: November 13, 2022, 01:03:13 am »

As for what card to hide,

• If you have a duplicate you should hide neither of them because you can't stop a discard anyways.
• You should just assume your opponent can see your hand and not try to play mindgames or bluffing games. Maybe there is a small edge case where it matters, but information in Dominion is really cheap / lasts 1 turn. So just assume you'll be left with the worst 4 card hand possible given what you pick and find the least bad option.

6

Let's Discuss ... / Re: Lets Discuss - Townsfolk

« on: March 14, 2022, 04:48:54 pm »

The Townsfolk is certainly an interesting pile, I'm mostly unsure its worth picking up the first card Town Crier which may be the worst pile topper in the expansion.

This definitely isn't true, I'd give that honor to Tent. It's totally fine to open Town Crier, playing it as a cantrip if it collides with your other action and a +$2 if it doesn't. Then you generally play it as a cantrip later in the game, but that's fine, by then it's already done its job of helping you get to $5. It's only a problem if you expect to both need expensive actions and are action limited, then you'd rather have the Silver, but even then I've liked opening it just to have some control over the Townsfolk pile.

The monolithic Townsfolk deck is to get as many Elders as you can, try to line up Elder-Blacksmith to do "draw up to 6, +1 Card, +1 Action", then Elder-Townsfolk to play them as Conspirators. It's not that great (draw-to-X is just less good than a dedicated draw deck), but it makes its own money and in the absence of other options it can be pretty effective.

7

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Really not a fan of voyage turns

« on: March 06, 2022, 09:39:28 pm »

I won't deny that it makes it take longer to get back to your turn, but I don't see how you can argue Voyage turns don't serve much purpose. Between:

* attacks and cards that give VP tokens or Coffers (like you mentioned)
* gainers like Sunken Treasure, that come in the same pile
* duration cards setting up next turn
* trashers that make your turn worse anyways
* generally getting to cycle 5 cards through your deck

it's not too rare to have something worth doing on Voyage turns.

8

Puzzles and Challenges / Puzzle from Galactic Puzzle Hunt

« on: August 10, 2021, 07:31:23 pm »

Figured I would share this in case people didn't see it a few weeks ago. (I know there's a decent overlap between puzzlehunting and Dominion, but it's not a full intersection.)

https://2020.galacticpuzzlehunt.com/puzzle/action-adventure

9

Dominion Articles / Re: Knights

« on: July 19, 2021, 02:08:16 pm »

Knights don't really need a nerf. They slow the game down but the same is true of pretty much every attack in the game, and I think the average Curser is more of a bother than Knights are, assuming you pick up Knights as defense.

From a flavor perspective I'm pretty sure Knights are down to take whatever - it depends how idealistic you want your medieval flavor to be.

10

Dominion General Discussion / Re: New online version of Dominion (with neural-network based AI) from Temple Gates

« on: May 20, 2021, 01:34:36 am »

So the AI cheats? It plays a few turns ahead and makes decisions based on that?

Not really? I mean, it doesn't know exactly what shuffle it's going to get. It just simulates a bunch of potential shuffles based on what happens if it makes certain moves and then picks ones that made it win more in those simulations.

OK, that's fine for shuffles. But say it plays Wishing Well, or decides whether it's going to play Wishing Well. What then?

I guess I don't really understand what cheating you think could be happening. It plays Wishing Well, it runs some search, it guesses the card it thinks will give more win rate.

I think the confusion here is LastFootnote thinking you're referring only to future shuffles, while I assume you mean to also re-randomize the shuffles that already happened (which, practically, would mean re-shuffling the deck before each simulation).

IMO, though, properly re-randomizing unknown info is subtly difficult, both from an algorithmic perspective and to code it without bugs.

At first it seems simple enough to just randomize everything it doesn't know before each simulation: the order of its deck, the contents & order of its opponent's hand, deck, and discard (and possibly other things I'm not thinking of). But actually it can know something about these:

• The top few cards of the decks may have been revealed for various reasons.
• The opponent may have revealed their hand at some point.
• etc.

Even trickier: it's possible to make inferences from the opponent's play about certain things that aren't actually known. e.g. If the opponent didn't play an action last turn, they probably didn't have their Smithy in hand; but this is just because we're assuming something about the opponent's strategy, because it would have been legal for them to not play it.

To do this all optimally is (I think) comparable to playing poker, and having it mixed in with all the other parts of Dominion makes it extra hard.

And it would be really easy, when programming this, to accidentally leak info that the AI is not supposed to have. The safest way might be a sort of clean-room approach: only provide the AI with public info, from which it would create a new game state. (The easier and more bug-prone approach is to copy the game state and try to scrub hidden info out of it.)

That said, if the objective is just to make a fun AI opponent for an app, none of this is too important. I mean, if it's just playing strategies like BM+Smithy, then whether it plays Wishing Well optimally or legally doesn't even matter.

Doing it optimally is a somewhat difficult programming question. But I think you could just assume 0 info about the draw deck and reshuffle it at the start of each simulation. You'd lose a bit, but that wouldn't be a big deal until you got to the point of the bot trying to play engines (at which point you've already done quite well as an AI programmer)

11

Dominion General Discussion / Re: New online version of Dominion (with neural-network based AI) from Temple Gates

« on: May 19, 2021, 04:30:54 pm »

So the AI cheats? It plays a few turns ahead and makes decisions based on that?

Not really? I mean, it doesn't know exactly what shuffle it's going to get. It just simulates a bunch of potential shuffles based on what happens if it makes certain moves and then picks ones that made it win more in those simulations.

OK, that's fine for shuffles. But say it plays Wishing Well, or decides whether it's going to play Wishing Well. What then?

I guess I don't really understand what cheating you think could be happening. It plays Wishing Well, it runs some search, it guesses the card it thinks will give more win rate.

12

Dominion General Discussion / Re: New online version of Dominion (with neural-network based AI) from Temple Gates

« on: May 18, 2021, 10:44:15 pm »

So the AI cheats? It plays a few turns ahead and makes decisions based on that?

Not really? I mean, it doesn't know exactly what shuffle it's going to get. It just simulates a bunch of potential shuffles based on what happens if it makes certain moves and then picks ones that made it win more in those simulations.

13

Dominion General Discussion / Re: New online version of Dominion (with neural-network based AI) from Temple Gates

« on: May 18, 2021, 08:52:26 pm »

The devs (more specifically keldon) are in the Dominion Discord and have talked about the AI a bit there. It's all spread out (because Discord is bad at concentrating discussion) but here is the summary:

* It's inspired by AlphaZero
* There's one NN that predicts value and another policy head that picks actions.
* NN architecture is Transformer-based, right now only takes in current game state (have tried conditioning on previous buys but did not see noticeable improvement)
* At playing time it does a search rollout. Generally with their computation budget the search tree gets to a few turns out for the deepest paths (i.e. on first turn the search tree usually rolls out to the end of 1st reshuffle).
* It's all self play, no human data.
* They started with Base-only and have been slowly introducing more expansions over time (restarting bot training from scratch every time due to needing to change NN layout + not wanting the bot to get stuck on strategies that only worked in the simplified game). This might be what the CEO is talking about? That the same method is able to handle new cards as long as you let it train against itself for long enough.
* The bot is generally very good at big money + a few action card strategies, which is how I'd describe the MF bots. (But worth noting this indicates the self-play learned BM + X on its own which is a good sign.)
* For difficulty levels, they'll probably tune the amount of search it does.

14

Dominion General Discussion / Re: New online version of Dominion (with neural-network based AI) from Temple Gates

« on: May 18, 2021, 02:15:27 pm »

Someone who knows more should confirm, but my understanding is that dominion.games is supposed to co-exist with the new version. ShuffleIT promised some single-player and mobile parts that never came out. Rio Grande Games reached out to another company to make a mobile app and I believe this is that mobile app, except it'll have some cross-platform support as well according to the article.

I suspect that the competitive community won't move off ShuffleIT that quickly, but more casual players will find the app to be a better experience.

Edit: Given that ShuffleIT still lets you buy subscriptions 2 years out into the future, I assume the site is still legally allowed to operate at least that long.

15

Dominion Articles / Re: Menagerie Hot Takes

« on: March 14, 2021, 12:53:10 am »

I figured I would revisit this to correct some of the worse comments I made.

In general, "Gain X Horses" can be treated as "+X cards" for power level.

Horses are better than +X cards. The benefit of saving extra Horses makes up for the 1 shuffle delay in getting your draw.

Stockpile is insane, especially in 2 player. I'm still not sure how to play it, all I know is that if you play against someone who skips it you tend to win. My suspicion is that early on, you want to get all your Stockpiles off the mat before your reshuffle, but after you get a few, you only want some in the reshuffle.

Stockpile is still insane. I also still have no idea idea how to play it, but your goal is much closer to trying to get all your Stockpiles into the shuffle.

Cavalry's top portion is kinda eh. Its bottom portion is insane. Quite nice with trash-for-benefit.

Still true but I don't think I conveyed how good the on-buy effect is. It's really good. $4 and 0 net buys is a low price for getting to try to save your turn by drawing a card you need, or shuffling in cards you just bought. And the top half of 2 Horses isn't as bad as I thought it was. In Cavalry games, you tend to be overterminaled because you buy Cavs to rescue your turn, but another way to put it is that you will always use up your available actions and those actions will, at worst, turn into 2 Horses each when you play your leftover Cavs.

Groom is great with Alt-VP rushes, and even outside Alt-VP rushes, Horse gains on your actions is good, and double Silver gains for money decks isn't bad either. In engine games it's already worth opening Workshop to gain $4 cost actions, Groom is the same thing except you get Horses along the way.

Understates how good Groom + alt-VP is. It's not just good, it's centralizing. It's almost disgusting how fast mass Grooms can empty the Estate pile, or itself. Given 1 Groom + 1 Horse in hand, and an empty draw + discard pile, you can do Groom -> gain Groom + Horse -> play Horse, which loops, converting 1 action into 1 Groom gain. It's a very easy setup that makes it possible to end games out of nowhere.

Barge should usually be played for your current turn, but if it's your last action and you have a decent buy in your current hand, playing for next turn is nice.

I think that if Barge is your last action, you should default to playing it as duration and be looking for reasons why you want to play it this turn instead (normally the answer is that you really want the +Buy).

Similarly, Wayfarer is insane - it's arguably the strongest in the set. (Or at least, if you argue it is, you won't be laughed out of the room.)

Hahahahaha no if you argue Wayfarer is the strongest card in Menagerie, you'll be laughed out of the room. I blame playing too many Wayfarer-Counterfeit games at the time of writing. In terms of power, Cavalry, Stockpile, Groom is a clear top 3, and then Wayfarer vs Scrap are competing for 4th and 5th.

16

Other Games / Re: In defense of Monopoly

« on: March 08, 2021, 02:38:59 am »

Yup. Could even say 12pm forum time.

What time zone is that? I have everything set to local time right now.

17

Other Games / Re: In defense of Monopoly

« on: March 07, 2021, 02:59:09 pm »

Someone rename this thread:  "The Necro Wars".  Then everyone immediately shut up and let the games begin.  See you in 2 years.

I shall reclaim my title.

*marks March 7th 2018 on Google Calendar*

pacovf, you joked about doing it.

I actually did.

Man, imagine if I had actually noted it down on my calendar, then missed posting on the thread long enough that someone else managed to ninja me. That would be stupid.

...see you March 7th, 2021.

Nothing I could say today would change the meaning (if there is any) of this post. So I will say nothing.

Man, imagine if I had actually noted it down on my calendar too, but set the event time too late.

...I guess the next date is March 7, 2025?

18

Rules Questions / Re: using a trader on beggar

« on: October 16, 2020, 03:23:48 pm »

This is correct, when you use Trader it's a different gain, and Trader doesn't know where the gained card was "supposed" to go, so it defaults to discard. The location is only attached to the initial gain event.

19

Dominion Articles / Re: Dominion Cap Management (Unfinished)

« on: October 12, 2020, 08:03:40 pm »

Looking back on this, it was ambitious but just really not a good idea. I think now I'd argue to think of Dominion in terms of immediate next turn primarily and an emphasis on gain and play, and all of that is just much simpler to track, both for players and AI.

I'd agree with this, but I wouldn't describe it as "immediate next turn". The long term impact of your choices is definitely still important. However, the newer expansions are making it easier to turn one good turn into lots of better future turns, and a general rise in player skill is adding to this. The one-time resources like Villagers and Horses are adding to this - there are boards on the extreme end where you can do something unsustainable with, say, Lackeys villagers, and its fine because the game ends before the unsustainability kills you.

Gain-and-play is really just the most extreme case of the argument for engines, i.e. more reshuffles = the time between gaining a card and playing it gets shorter. Gain-and-play is mostly just saying that if you can you should bring that time to essentially 0.

20

Dominion Articles / The Church/Church opening

« on: September 24, 2020, 05:04:07 pm »

This is an opening that's getting popular, which I like, but people haven't really talked about it yet.

The idea: Open Church/Church. Hope you draw a Church turn 3. Set aside a bunch of Coppers on turn 3, buying nothing, then buy a $5 cost on turn 4. If you draw a Church turn 3, you are almost 100% guaranteed to have 5 Coppers on turn 4, and will usually be able to trash an Estate as well.

It's good when: there is a $5 cost you'd really like in your deck by the end of the 2nd shuffle.

It's less good when: there is some other $3 or $4 cost you also really want early. Your expectation should be that you spend your 2nd shuffle trashing 1 Estate and buying a $5 cost. If there's an alternative card that will do more than 1 Estate trash while giving you good $5 cost odds, it'll be better.

The deceptively powerful parts: If you draw a Church turn 4, you can set aside any extra cards you don't need and they'll miss the shuffle, letting you draw and play your $5 cost faster.

Let's show a few scenarios to show how this thinner shuffle can be good.

If you draw one Church turn 3 and one Church turn 4, it's not too rare to trash an Estate, then set aside 2 cards on your turn 4 (Estate + Copper). That gives a 9 card shuffle (1 Church, the $5 cost, 1 Estate, 6 Copper, with 1 Estate trashed, and Church + Estate + Copper all set aside). If you then draw the $5 cost in your first hand of the 9 card shuffle, it'll get reshuffled at the end of that turn, you get small chances of high-rolling redrawing the $5 cost.

If you draw both Churches turn 3, you set aside your entire hand, then get 2 trashes and a $5 cost.

If you draw both Churches turn 4, you will likely miss $5. However, you can set aside your entire turn 4 hand, and your shuffle will be 6 cards (your turn 3 hand + turn 3 buy, with 2 Churches and your entire turn 4 hand set aside). You then will almost 100% hit $5 on turn 5, and that $5 cost will get shuffled in right away thanks to how thin your deck is.

In short: the open is best if you draw a Church turn 3, which is pretty common given you opened 2 Churches. If you don't do that, but draw a Church turn 4, it isn't that bad of a fail case. And if you don't draw any Churches on turn 3 or turn 4, then you sombrero-ed, which is very uncommon, and can't be played around anyways.

21

Dominion General Discussion / Re: RNN generated cards

« on: September 18, 2020, 02:25:33 pm »

One thing I heard about the MTG cards is that some of the models got too good, they would just output exact copies of existing cards due to memorization, or the new cards they generated wouldn't come up with new mechanics because those mechanics didn't appear on real cards. The entire point is that the model is trained to mimic the existing text - if it mimics it too well then you're stuck. There's a sweet spot where the model's output is coherent, but also still gets things wrong in a funny way. Training the model for longer may not give you want you want.

The state of the art language models are based on Transformer models, not RNN / LSTM. There have been past efforts at taking the GPT models from OpenAI and trying to get them to generate Dominion cards. http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=20446.msg848017#msg848017

22

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest Thread

« on: August 21, 2020, 03:23:45 pm »

Heirloom for Counting House

Ledger
Cost $2: Treasure - Heirloom
$1
You may trash this, to gain 3 Coppers to your hand.

This guarantees you can open Counting House if you want to. You can also treat it as a one-time +$3 bonus in the late game, or a way to open an expensive card if you're very desperate (Forge? Less debt on Donate?)

I considered having it gain 4 Copper to take you directly to 10 Copper for Fountain, but decided that wasn't necessary, might be a bit too much money.

23

Dominion Articles / Mandarin-Scepter Loops

« on: August 21, 2020, 05:37:34 am »

To forestall any questions: no, this will never come up in a real game of Dominion. It's fun to think about though.

Mandarin is a bad card. Scepter is an okay card, but is limited due to its only letting you replay Actions during your Buy phase. By their powers combined, you can do some funny pileouts.

The core pieces you need in the kingdom are:

• Mandarin
• Scepter
• An Action that will gain a $5 cost Action on-play, while staying in play. Without cost reduction, this basically means Artisan or Altar, although Altar requires having things to trash.
• An Action that draws cards.

The idea is that you play your turn as normally, getting a +Cards and the gainer into play. After drawing N Scepters, you play N-2 of them as Actions, play the N-1th one as the gainer to gain Mandarin (topdecking all your Scepters), then play the Nth one as +Cards to redraw your Scepters. This brings you to the same start state, with 1 fewer Mandarin and 1 Scepter in play. You can repeat this loop until the Mandarin pile runs out, and hopefully your action plays are giving you net +$ or net +buy. At minimum you are piling down the Mandarin pile.

An example with Inventor and Smithy, assuming you start your buy phase with 3 Scepters in hand.

1. Play Inventor and Smithy (now $5 costs are gainable from Inventor)
2. Play Scepter as anything
3. Play Scepter as Inventor, gain Mandarin, topdeck 2 Scepter
4. Play Scepter as Smithy, draw 2 Scepter + Y
5. Play Scepter as Inventor, gain Mandarin, topdeck 2 Scepter
6. Play Scepter as Smithy, draw 2 Scepter + Z
7. Repeat steps 5-6 forever.

In this example, you draw 1 card deeper and get one more cost reduction from Inventor each turn, but you aren't netting Scepter plays. However, once you draw into a 4th Scepter, you get to loop as

(start: 1 Scepter in hand, 3 on top of deck)
1. Scepter as Smithy
2. Scepter as X
3. Scepter gaining Mandarin, topdeck 3 Scepter, back to loop start.

That lets you get in other action plays, until you run out of Mandarins to gain. If you spend X on an action that gains Scepter, you can do increasingly more each loop, assuming you draw into the extra Scepters. Here is an Artisan example, where it's easy thanks to topdecking.

(start: Artisan and Smithy in play, 1 Scepter in play, N Scepters in hand)
1. Scepter as Artisan, gaining and topdecking Scepter.
2. Repeat step 1 until you have 1 Scepter in hand.
3. Scepter as Smithy, draw your topdecked Scepters
4. Go back to 1) and repeat until N = 2
5. When N=2,
   5.1 Scepter as Artisan, gain Mandarin, topdeck all Scepters
   5.2 Scepter as Smithy, draw Scepeters.
   5.3 Repeat Smithy until you redraw all topdecked Scepters, then go to step 1 with a larger N than last time.

24

Dominion Articles / Re: Castles

« on: August 17, 2020, 04:39:03 pm »

It's tricky to convey how bad Estates are to have in your deck. They're pretty bad.

There's this whole meme where Awaclus says "trashing Estate is like gaining a Lab", but it's sort of right. Imagine that instead of trashing an Estate, you gained a Lab, that was always drawn right before you draw the Estate. It you draw Copper-Copper-Copper-Copper-Lab, and play that Lab, your 1st draw is the Estate, and the 2nd draw is the card after it.

Now, if you had instead trashed that Estate, you would have drawn Copper-Copper-Copper-Copper-X, where X is that 2nd card your Lab drew.

Connecting to the Crossroads example, if you have Crossroads-Estate-X-Y-Z where X,Y,Z are not victory cards, and you play Crossroads, then you draw 1 card deeper. But if you had trashed that Estate, you would have already drawn that extra card in your starting hand. You only go net up on cards on the 2nd Crossroads you play. Crossroads is somewhere between a Cellar variant and draw engine and I think it's easier to treat it as a Cellar variant first - keeping around an Estate for your Cellar is not getting you more than about-a-Lab's worth of value.

Now, in a Castles game in particular, Crossroads is better because you're going to be spending more time greening, and Crossroads starts to shine when you have higher density of Victory cards. But that doesn't mean you should never trash your Estates if Crossroads are in the Kingdom. If you're trying to win you'll be buying VP cards eventually, and I think normally you get more value out of trashing Estates now and gaining Crossroads around the time you're first gaining Castles or Provinces. Since by that point, you're taking those Victory cards for points, you have to keep them in your deck if you want to keep those points, and Crossroads is helping mitigate how badly that hurts you.

25

Dominion Articles / Re: Menagerie Hot Takes

« on: August 09, 2020, 09:02:00 pm »

I have recently played a Colony game with Oracle. Colony, as in Platinum is fairly dominating. Yet Oracle was absolutely essential to win.
So I find the notion that cards that net draw only 1 card are somehow bad or wrong for engine play quite dubious.

When did I ever say that?

Otter: I usually don't find a use for Otter, it's pretty easy to find something better to do with your actions, but sometimes you just gotta draw.

I'm not sure if you think this, but we don't disagree that you can build an engine out of +2 Cards. Nor do we disagree that doing so can be the right play. Nor have I ever claimed that playing with a +2 Cards action is bad or wrong for engine play. I'm saying

1. That it isn't where you want to be, but sometimes you have to if the board has nothing else.
2. It isn't very common that the board has nothing else.
3. Therefore it isn't that common that you have to use Otter for draw.

And based on how you're arguing, I think you misunderstood my position.