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526

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.

« on: July 11, 2014, 03:06:00 pm »

I was wondering if you could explain the reasoning behind the wording that makes prince not work with one-shots and duration cards. Were certain one-shots too powerful when princed? Were durations just too confusing to resolve with prince?

It is just the usual lose-track rule, really.

No, the usual lose-track rule doesn't ever stop a card from being played, as discussed at length in the Prince thread:

Yes it does. Prince loses track so it cannot set aside. Then "play the set aside card" loses meaning if we interpret that as "the card set aside last time I told you to set aside something". I think the parenthesis clarify that.

Only the parantheses make Prince stop playing the card, otherwise it would continue playing it in spite of having lost track of it. "At the start of each of your turns, play that Action" (namely the Action card that was set aside when Prince was played) has a well-defined meaning, no matter where that card is now. Just like Throne Room plays the "lost" Feast from the trash the second time.

Prince-MV would be strictly worse (due to no buy) than Prince-GM

Trashed MV gives an extra action compared to GM.

Oh, right.

527

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.

« on: July 10, 2014, 12:44:59 pm »

If you could trigger a princed MV every turn, that would be OP. The difficulty of actually putting Prince-GM into play is not trivial; it's possible with cost reduction but it's not easy.

However, if Prince merely plays the card every turn (including one-shots) and doesn't explicitly bring them back from the trash, you'd only get the $2 bonus once, just as it works with TR or KC.

Right, you could still only trash it once per game. So Prince-MV would probably be weaker than Prince on another $4 Village (except WV), i.e. rather underpowered. 

528

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Zero Dollar Card?

« on: July 10, 2014, 12:39:20 pm »

that might be ok but i still dont see the reason this has to cost 0$ it could also cost 2$ and so would not be a simple way to get down two piles at the same time with just enough buys. also with some buys and trader in hand this could be overpoverd.

Yes, there's a good reason not to do $0 kingdom cards. A $0 cantrip would also make Goons even stronger.

What about Oasis without the $1?

(Ninjaed) As another $0 card? Oasis without the $1 would almost be "strictly worse than buying nothing" (a cantrip with a penalty); I don't think I'd ever buy it. This could be another Ruins. 

529

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.

« on: July 10, 2014, 12:02:58 pm »

I was wondering if you could explain the reasoning behind the wording that makes prince not work with one-shots and duration cards. Were certain one-shots too powerful when princed? Were durations just too confusing to resolve with prince?

It is just the usual lose-track rule, really.

No, the usual lose-track rule doesn't ever stop a card from being played, as discussed at length in the Prince thread:

(...) I don't see why the lose track rule would not apply in your scenario with no #4.

For the same reason the lose track rule doesn't apply to a throned feast. You don't need to know where something is in order to play it. Lose track only applies to moving something from one place to another. Basically a card cannot move another card (or itself) if the target card isn't in the place the acting card expects it to be.

But one-shots would also be overpowered, especially Mining Village (if you trash it all the time, because, why wouldn't you?) which becomes almost better than GM.

Prince-MV would be strictly worse (due to no buy) than Prince-GM, but very strong indeed. But since you can already Prince GM itself after cost reduction, I don't see this as prohibitive - Prince is a $8 card, after all. I expect the main reason for the parantheses is the non-losing track when scheming a princed card, which would be quite counterintuitive and confusing. Of the one-shots, only Prince of Madman would be insanely overpowered IMO.

530

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Zero Dollar Card?

« on: July 10, 2014, 09:37:44 am »

your new version is the other extreme, it's really weak. Even just "when you gain this, gain a curse" is more of a drawback than "-1 VP".

Agreed; and the card might be balanced if it said "when you gain this, gain a curse". Then it would only take it one shuffle to "repair its own damage", instead of three.

531

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Weird "Adventure" Mode

« on: July 10, 2014, 09:25:38 am »

PS:

They have not implemented the proposed slightly more exciting adventures yet, but they did change the starting hands to 7 Coppers 3 Estates (except Dark Ages where you get both Shelters and Estates and well no doubt they will fix that).

Thanks for the info; now I can finally finish Hinterlands adventures without hundreds of zaps and with more interesting kingdoms.

It's great that they FINALLY fixed most of the starting hands. But Dark Ages is now worse than before - 13 starting cards, out of which 6 are (essentially) dead cards, might be an interesting rule change for one or two adventures, but not for all 80.
I don't understand how this could have happened unintentionally - previously, there were mostly only 3 dead cards (a mix of Shelters and Curses) in most DA adventures; they could have just replaced the Curses by Estates or by Shelters. I hope they won't take another 6 months to fix this new bug...

532

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Weird "Adventure" Mode

« on: July 10, 2014, 08:57:09 am »

It seems like they have introduced some other-expansion cards into some adventures now, but in such a way that you therefore can't play them if you don't have those cards as well!

Which adventures are you refering to? I've just checked most of the Base Act 2 and 3 adventures and don't see any expansion cards in there, although I have several expansions.
The only adventures I know that occasionally have another expansion's card are Cornucopia games with Young Witch (the bane is apparently randomly chosen among all cards I own), but that's been true for (at least) months.

533

Rules Questions / Re: Prince and Duration cards

« on: July 10, 2014, 06:43:48 am »

The intention is that you don't need the FAQs, but they are still rules.

I feel like I have been over this already. If you play a duration card with Prince, when you fail to set it aside on your next turn you will therefore fail to set it aside ever again with that Prince (so I don't recommend doing that). You stop playing it if you fail to set aside on the very turn you played it. That's the intention and that's my ruling. The card is not quite that clear but I can't fix it now.

Thanks for the ruling! I can't remember you having answered this specific question on f.DS, I'm sorry if I missed it.

Would you (resp. Jay) consider "fixing" the card text for any reprints or translations of Prince? You've said that you don't want errata that change the way cards are played, but such a fix would only bring the card in line with the ruling. (Probably the problem hardly ever comes up in practice because Princing Durations is so bad either way, but still...)

534

Rules Questions / Re: Prince and Duration cards

« on: July 09, 2014, 08:02:00 am »

Prince FAQ by DonaldX:
http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=11284.msg388018#msg388018

Thanks! The FAQ says

If you don't discard the Action then you stop playing it with Prince; Prince at that point is just set aside doing nothing for the rest of the game. That won't normally happen but will happen for example if the Action is a Feast or Mining Village and you trashed it, or if it's a duration card and so it stayed in play,

supporting the "natural" interpretation but not what I think is the literal reading. I would have preferred "The effect ends if ..." instead of "Stop playing it if ..." (with the same number of letters).

Anyway, a FAQ is good enough for me, so question answered.

I don't quite see the question answered from this FAQ; it doesn't explicitly state whether the Duration card is uselessly set aside together with the "dispossessed" Prince or not (the first quoted sentence, when taken literally, doesn't apply to Durations since they are discarded, only a turn late). And according to Donald, the FAQ is only meant to explain the rules, not change them.

From the card text alone, I agree with your interpretation from the OP, since the Duration is indeed discarded from play on turn P+2, and the parantheses (unfortunately) only prevent the playing, not the setting aside. (One might argue that Prince loses track of its target at the beginning of turn P+2 when it tries to play it, but the parentheses prevent Prince from even trying to play it.)
This would make Prince of Durations even worse than thought. The parantheses should really read "The effect ends if ..." or even better (to make it reasonably useful with Durations): "Don't play it if...".

535

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Cache

« on: July 07, 2014, 08:48:01 am »

In design terms, treasures don't need to be strong. They only have to be better than silver and they get bought. This is the case with stash, venture, and cache. As much as we'd like to fill our decks with exciting actions we know it doesn't always work.  Counterfeit, talisman, quarry, loan, and ill gotten gains can all in fact be worse than silver.

But Cache usually isn't better than Silver either. In BM games, buying Cache instead of Silver makes it harder to get the $1.6 per card that you need for Provinces (let alone Colonies); and in engines, you usually don't want that many Treasure cards either.
The only kingdom Treasure that's "strictly better"* than Silver is Stash, I think (Venture might not find a Treasure card in the deck).

*ignoring Feodum, of course

This isn't actually true, though. In general, buying Cache in a BM deck will help you buy Provinces and—importantly—Duchies. Cache combos with sifters, which Hinterlands is chock full of. In this regard, it is better than Masterpiece.

Yes, but sifters are abundant only in Hinterlands, not in full random games. Why do you think Cache makes it easier to buy Provinces than Silver in BM? It's another $3 spread over another two cards, corresponding to an average $1.5 per card only. Does the increased variance make up for this shortcoming?

Also, Royal Seal is strictly better than Silver, barring cost and name-specific stuff. So is Harem.

Right, I almost expected I had forgotten some; I had only considered those Treasures that DG listed. Still, Royal Seal proves that a $5 card that's strictly better than Silver needn't be any good.

you definitely want cache over silver in a duke game. you probably want cache over gold in a duke game.

Agreed. You also want Cache over Gold whenever you like to get extra Coppers, but that doesn't happen too often either. Most of the time, it's clearly worse than Gold, which isn't such a good design for a $5 card IMO.

536

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Hovel

« on: July 07, 2014, 08:26:17 am »

Without using overpay, Doctor is very weak at $3 (or even $2), usually far weaker even than Lookout.

this isn't true, and lookout is a weird thing to compare it too because lookout isn't very weak. doctor is swingy, but it will still catch more than one card on average, so it will kill stuff faster than lookout does, but lookout prepares your next turn, and  it's non terminal.

3$ doctor is usually worse than chapel, usually a lot better than trade route. it's usually better than loan too.

Maybe I'm undervaluing $3 Doctor. But Doctor will usually only trash >1 card if you name Copper, and trashing Copper is much weaker than trashing Estates in the early game. And Doctor's trashing rapidly decreases to < 1 card per play, while Lookout and Trade Route are viable trashers for longer (especially with Ruins or Curses around). The extra Action (+sifting) or $ are also a big plus, which Doctor doesn't have. Usually I don't want to waste an action just to trash a single Copper, so Doctor becomes a dead card whenever it collides with other terminals in the early game.
(I compared it to Lookout because it has a reputation to be weak, but you're right that Lookout is not really weak. Still, I don't think I'd ever buy $3 Doctor over Lookout.)

537

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Cache

« on: July 06, 2014, 06:05:23 pm »

In design terms, treasures don't need to be strong. They only have to be better than silver and they get bought. This is the case with stash, venture, and cache. As much as we'd like to fill our decks with exciting actions we know it doesn't always work.  Counterfeit, talisman, quarry, loan, and ill gotten gains can all in fact be worse than silver.

But Cache usually isn't better than Silver either. In BM games, buying Cache instead of Silver makes it harder to get the $1.6 per card that you need for Provinces (let alone Colonies); and in engines, you usually don't want that many Treasure cards either.
The only kingdom Treasure that's "strictly better"* than Silver is Stash, I think (Venture might not find a Treasure card in the deck).

*ignoring Feodum, of course

538

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Hovel

« on: July 06, 2014, 05:52:02 pm »

No worries. My reply was sarcastic and managed to start a debate.

I'm glad it was, I upvoted it because I thought so, and was feeling stupid after reading all those replies saying that it could very well be the right move.

To be honest, I'm not sure why people are claiming it isn't a good idea--it reduces your deck size by one, removes a useless card(and the GH itself can be handy in the right environment, like in the presence of Peddler or Throne Room), and is a better opening than Silver in games where you don't want Silver (which is a lot of them).  Not to say you should feel stupid about it, but Great Hall/trash Hovel is a better opening than it is being given credit here.

Agreed. As Last Footnote said, Donald wrote in the DA Secret History:

Hovel is the only one that changed. Originally it was an action you could trash by discarding your hand. It turned out that trashing it turn 1-2 usually seemed like the correct play, even if you drew it with four Coppers. So that was no good. Hovel as printed has nice flavor going for it; you move out of your old Hovel and into a nice Duchy.

So it was usually the right move to give up a turn just to trash Hovel; by buying Great Hall on T1/2, you can do this and get a VP to boot. (OTOH, the new Hovel trashes itself as soon as you start greening, the old Hovel would have hung around till the end without another trasher.)

An instructive comparison might be with Doctor. Killing a net 2 cards is worth $2 (the $3 being the base price for a marginal trasher). Spending $3 for that and 1 VP then seems a bit expensive.

Without using overpay, Doctor is very weak at $3 (or even $2), usually far weaker even than Lookout. Killing a net 2 cards for $2 (or even more cards for $1 each?) would be extremely strong on T1/2 if you didn't have to pay another $3 for Doctor on the same turn...

539

Dominion General Discussion / Re: New Promo at Origins...

« on: July 06, 2014, 05:24:18 pm »

I don't quite agree with #3.

"3 tells you when to set it aside again, for the purpose of bookkeeping."

3 tells you when to set it aside again so that Prince is able to play it the next turn.  It can't just be in limbo, and it can't be discarded or left in play.

I don't see why the lose track rule would not apply in your scenario with no #4.

For the same reason the lose track rule doesn't apply to a throned feast. You don't need to know where something is in order to play it. Lose track only applies to moving something from one place to another. Basically a card cannot move another card (or itself) if the target card isn't in the place the acting card expects it to be.

This. That's why Prince needs its own stronger "lose track" rule in parantheses in order not to play Feast from the trash every turn, or play a schemed card that can be anywhere in your deck. So Prince of Islands only works properly if the "set it aside" in the parantheses is replaced by (or meant to read) "set it aside this way".

The parenthetical is necessary.

It is necessary because without it, the duration card would still be discarded from play on the next turn.  It is not clear that Prince shouldn't resume playing it on the following turn.  I would argue that it should resume playing the duration and that this was the natural intent of the Prince card's behavior with durations -- essentially a permanent duration effect.  Which is not terribly powerful because durations are already designed to give a modest effect on two turns, and getting the effect on every odd turn due to the card itself rather than due to Prince is actually not taking full advantage of Prince's benefit.

So I'm surprised that the parenthetical was included, but it does have the effect of making Prince rather useless with a certain type of card and I guess some people will like that twist for whatever reason.

The parantheses are necessary to prevent Prince from playing Feast (or Madman, or Death Cart) every turn; making Durations useless is rather a side effect of this (presumably necessary) nerf. 
I'd also prefer if Prince worked with Durations; you could accomplish this by replacing the parantheses by "(Don't play it if it is not set aside this way)", or even shorter:

"You may set this aside. If you do, set aside an Action card from your hand costing up to $4. At the start of each of your turns, if that Action is set aside this way, play it, setting it aside again when you discard it from play. "

540

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Megaminion

« on: June 08, 2014, 05:55:44 pm »

Right now Upgrade/Fortress is unbeatable.  And when both players know that Upgrade/Fortress is unbeatable, the mirror games actually are very interesting... if you don't get 8 Upgrades, you can't pile out the Duchies in one fell swoop...

Okay, there is no mention of Duchies. The source of VP at the 7-turn end is left a mystery for the player to solve.

Yes there is. He says you can't always empty the duchies in a mirror, which implies that if your opponent tries something else, you empty the duchies.

See e.g. my old post

...

for more details (though I found it more fun to work them out myself). I hope SCSN is properly surprised, like I was when I first tried it  If the Duchies are contested, Dukes could be a reasonable substitute for the missing Duchies...

EDIT: what do you open in megaminion? stonemason/watchtower/watchtower/fishing village?

Are there shelters?

With the discussed Rats/Upgrade strategy, you need to open Rats/X to "rat-ify" your deck ASAP.
Without using the coin token, X=Watchtower is probably the best (or maybe Ironworks), but you don't need more than one; you shouldn't buy a single Treasure (nor Fishing Village). With the coin token, even Rats/Rats might be reasonable (or Stonemason/2 Rats+X on a 5/2 start).

Whether there's Shelters or Estates doesn't matter for this strategy, since they're just Rats fodder anyway...

541

Rules Questions / Re: trader with empty silver pile

« on: May 25, 2014, 05:45:18 pm »

Man... Eigensheep.  That's like, one of the best usernames I've ever seen.

I'm picturing matrices on the space of sheeps.

Math joke:
How can you get an orthogonal basis out of three sheep?
By shearing them.

(I hope this works in English as it does in German...)

542

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Revised versions of published cards

« on: May 25, 2014, 05:29:18 pm »

PS:

And at least as a thought experiment, regular Possession is actually quite interesting, with all kinds of interactions with other cards. [...]

I agree; but unfortunately Possession is real and my versions are only thought experiments. 
To clarify, I don't actually hate Possession, though I'd prefer a non-"attacking" version if it works. Self-Possession is meant to be an alternative, not a fix, for Possession.
As silverspawn wrote, Possession punishes good decks. It also increases the danger of infinite games, and has a potentially strong kingmaking effect in multiplayer: If player A goes for multiple Possessions per turn, player B has to either mess up their deck (giving C the win) or ignore the Possession (giving A the win).

self-possession doesn't have this problem, good decks get rewarded again. I actually don't think it's that great of a concept, because outpost already does it, but it does solve the problem possession has. for me it's nothing > self possession >>>> possession

I take this as a compliment.   
The card may indeed be too similar to Outpost; but maybe the much higher price (and effect) and the fact that it also works reasonably in BM still justify it. I wonder if Donald ever tried it...

543

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Revised versions of published cards

« on: May 25, 2014, 04:58:04 pm »

I'm not quite sure if these are stronger or weaker than the published version; at least the second version sounds equally "insane"...

They seem stronger. You can counter Possession by greening earlier and then make the expensive Possessions of your opponent (pun intended) worse. If you Possess yourself, you can just megaturn in several turns, and there is nothing that will stop you.

Usually, a megaturn (by definition) is a single turn; you don't want to get the cards you pile-drive into your deck. (Edge case: Merchant Ship.)
The non-countering is indeed an argument for my versions being stronger (though your opponent can still try to rush the game before you reliably draw the S-P). But on the other hand you can no longer abuse the opponents' coin tokens, TfB, Durations, Masq. etc., and you can no longer mess up their deck. Also my first version is no longer thronable; you can never get more than one extra turn per turn any more.

I think if anything Self Possession is more stupid. It allows the person to get it first be in a huge advantage. More than normal possession, or KC or any other power card. This is just super outpost.

So what? Outpost is a mediocre $5 card, and all the other "power cards" also cost far less than Self-Possession. And I'm not even sure if (non-"Strong") Self-Possession is stronger than KC - you can't spam it at all, and usually one great turn is better than two mediocre ones.

544

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Revised versions of published cards

« on: May 24, 2014, 05:39:57 pm »

For all who hate Possession's "pseudo-attack", just replace the card by:

Self-Possession
Action-Duration, $6P
Take an extra turn after this one. This can’t cause you to take more than two consecutive turns.

Or, to still allow multiple plays per turn:

Strong Self-Possession
Action-Duration, $6P
If this is not an extra turn: Take an extra turn after this one.

I'm not quite sure if these are stronger or weaker than the published version; at least the second version sounds equally "insane"...

545

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Revised versions of published cards

« on: May 24, 2014, 05:02:09 pm »

Keep
Types: Action
Cost: $5
+1 Card. +1 Action. Discard any number of cards. +$1 per card discarded.

It's just as well that this card didn't get published; it would have been very confusing.

"I'll keep 2 cards."
"Wait, do you mean you're discarding 2 cards with Keep, or not discarding 2 cards?"

Just rename it "Discard" and it's perfectly fine. 

546

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Skip the Adventures code

« on: May 20, 2014, 03:36:41 pm »

Obv. selling promos directly makes a profit, although uh it's hard to see how that works out as well without them just being crazy expensive relative to cards from expansions. But the point to the promos isn't to make money directly, it's to promote; selling them goes against that, though that doesn't mean we'd complain if Making Fun did it. [...]

MF already does sell some of the promo cards (Black Market and Stash) for $1 each, which seems to work out fine AFAIK. (But they've kept three non-buyable promos so that you still have to do almost all the adventures to gain them all...)

547

Dominion General Discussion / Re: 206th card

« on: May 20, 2014, 03:19:35 pm »

Huh, looks like they've also released an expansion version of Intrigue (no extra base cards).

I don't really see the appeal of the Fan Edition that's redundant with the other sets. I mean I get the appeal from the publisher's perspective, but not from the consumer's perspective.

Yes, this "Fan Edition" seems a little strange - most of the Facebook comments to it are negative too. 
And yes, they recently released an Intrigue expansion version; but it seems to cost more than the old Intrigue edition did.
They have also now started to sell the new Base cards, but for the price of a full game (~25€)...

548

Dominion General Discussion / Re: 206th card

« on: May 20, 2014, 12:50:54 pm »

So this moves the promo's release date back to "completely unknown", correct?

Yes, but I've seen the final image and I bet it's being printed in the USA, so it shouldn't be that much later.

The German RGG Dominion Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/dominionwelt) announced "a new promo card" for Essen 2014, FWIW. But maybe the English version comes earlier...

549

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Is Possession an Attack?

« on: May 19, 2014, 10:33:02 am »

I think Possession would be more fair if you couldn't take advantage of duration cards (Tactician being the biggest), Masq/Amb shenanigans, or any trashing of the Possesses player's cards (with Salvager for example).

What I'm trying to say with this is: It should only let you do things the player would have done himself.


What if after the Possession turn, the Possessed player puts his deck in the exact same state as before he was Possessed? So you get the bonus from your durations, important cards don't miss the reshuffle, etc... This is awkward in real life of course, but very easy to implement online. Any Masq'd and Amb'd cards should be returned of course.

In that case, it mostly would be a glorified Workshop.

Like Davio, I'd prefer to call it a glorified (or "JoaTed") Outpost, since it can gain any number of cards. And most games have Trash for Benefit, which make it preferable to play with the opponent's deck than with your own. I wonder if a "5 card-hand Outpost" would work at Possession's price...

550

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Let's discuss - the best designed card

« on: May 15, 2014, 04:14:14 pm »

In a slightly different vein, I want to praise Chancellor and Swindler for wording choices that made Tunnel and Market Square work correctly all those years and expansions later.

(Chancellor: "put your deck into your discard pile" where it might otherwise have said "discard your deck"; Swindler: "Each other player trashes the top card" vs. "Trash the top card of each other player's deck")

Well, Tunnel could also work "correctly" with the other Chancellor wording, just differently from the way it is now (in the non-German versions ). I don't think it would have overpowered either card. But I also prefer the actual wording.