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Dominion Articles / Combo: Masquerade/Margrave
« on: December 10, 2011, 09:05:38 pm »
Obviously this combo needs some Villages to power it—ideally Fishing, but others will do in a pinch.
The gist of it is that the best time to play Masquerade is when your opponent's handsize has been hit by a Militia or variant thereof. There are two related things that can happen here:
So why Margrave in particular? Two reasons:
The gist of it is that the best time to play Masquerade is when your opponent's handsize has been hit by a Militia or variant thereof. There are two related things that can happen here:
- Your opponent discards their two worst cards in response to the attack, and thus is forced to pass you a good card when the Masquerade hits.
- Your opponent is wise to the possibility of (1), and therefore keeps a bad card in hand after the attack in order to pass to you... and may end up doing this even on turns when you don't end up playing Masquerade. On such turns, your discard attack is effectively making your opponent discard down to more like two and a half cards, rather than three, just to guard against the danger of passing you a good card if you do play Masquerade.
So why Margrave in particular? Two reasons:
- Margrave is the only hand-reduction attack that carries a large +cards for you. (Well, except Torturer; but obviously if you play Torturer on an opponent who thinks you're going to use Masquerade they'll just take the Curse.) This has a few benefits:
- You cycle your deck faster, which means your opponent is less likely to know that your Masquerade is stuck in the discard pile (and thus that it's safe to discard bad cards).
- It means you can play Village and Margrave and then draw into your Masquerade and play that—i.e., you have a better chance of hitting the combo, rather than having to draw Village-Margrave-Masquerade in a single five-card hand.
- On a similar note, compare the case where your discard attack is Militia: if you have two actions and Militia and Masquerade in hand, you can play Militia first and then Masquerade for the combo, but with the danger that Masquerade will dead-draw some nonterminals you'd like to play. With Margrave, your attack draws more cards than Masquerade, so you'd want to play that first anyway even without the combo.
- The biggest disadvantage to Margrave is that your opponent is choosing what to discard out of six cards rather than out of five. Fear of Masquerade doesn't eliminate that disadvantage relative to other discard attacks—they're still choosing their two good cards to keep out of six—but it does mitigate it a bit.