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Dominion General Discussion / Re: Homage to the Best Card
« on: April 13, 2021, 02:50:55 pm »
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Dominion General Discussion / Re: Minor note about new printings
« on: November 01, 2020, 12:38:00 pm »- Noble Brigand has been rephrased so that it has a dividing line before the when-buy ability. To get the text to fit on the card, it says "do its attack"; this means, do the above-the-line part except for the +$1.Why??
Noble Brigand: Action - Attack, $4
+$1
Each other player reveals the top 2 cards of their deck, trashes a revealed Silver or Gold you choose, discards the rest, and gains a Copper if they didn't reveal a Treasure. You gain the trashed cards.
----------
When you buy this, do its attack.
I like the other tweaks, but I don't see the point of this.
It makes perfect sense. Like other on-gain/on-buy effects it is separated by a dividing line. Even more important, in our playing groups it happened more than once that we forgot this ability because it was hidden in a wall of text.
It's definitely going to cause more confusion about whether you can react with Moat etc. to buying Noble Brigand.
Just remind them that it's when you play an attack card. You're not playing it when you gain it.
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Dominion Articles / Re: Dominion Cap Management (Unfinished)
« on: October 13, 2020, 04:15:07 pm »I disagree. I am doing much more planning ahead now than ever before. I also think the article (or at least the idea behind it) is quite good.
I am planning ahead but that is increasingly turning into background calcs through a massive exposure to what good play typically looks like, knowledge of the endgame scenario that I want to move towards, and just general principles of clicking on good cards as often as I can. All of that goes into play of my immediate next turn, with the short term goal of expanding as much as I can. Basically I prioritize short-term goals more (immediate next turn) the earlier the gamestate unless I have a good reason not to, or if I can't do that then I just try to improve my overall deck.
I appreciate the compliment by the way. Thanks.
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.
You're correct but that takes a lot more words to describe for really only a marginal increase, it would be better withheld for some advanced discussion I think.
Today I would tell an intermediate player to:
1. Memorize the cards so they stop looking at them and instead just know what's in front of them, to synthesize plans a lot better. I don't think someone can be good without automatically knowing in a snap moment what a card does in their head.
2. Start thinking about the immediate next turn gameplan as often as possible (encouraging both planning and deck tracking).
2B. This would include thinking about drawing deck and abusing gain and play if possible.
Really from there it's a direct line to playing as best as a person possibly can. The exceptions will be smaller and easier to learn from.
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Dominion Articles / Re: Dominion Cap Management (Unfinished)
« on: October 11, 2020, 10:52:10 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.
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Dominion Articles / Re: Hermit
« on: October 11, 2020, 10:48:36 pm »
Do people still think about Hermit primarily as a gainer and not primarily as deck acceleration tool? I think the outlook is changing now, but has more to do with increased exposure to top-level play with the Dominion Discord than it does with this article being written.
Looking at this article again, I wish it was shorter. I won't change anything but I'd cut the MS Hermit combo and just focus primarily on the Madman gain and play abuse.
Also since you're all reading this, feel free to send me a DM or reply here about what you'd like me to write about next. I'm open to suggestions.
Looking at this article again, I wish it was shorter. I won't change anything but I'd cut the MS Hermit combo and just focus primarily on the Madman gain and play abuse.
Also since you're all reading this, feel free to send me a DM or reply here about what you'd like me to write about next. I'm open to suggestions.
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Dominion General Discussion / Re: Homage to the Best Card
« on: April 23, 2020, 10:57:56 pm »
BGG be like
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General Discussion / Re: STAR WARS
« on: January 01, 2020, 08:08:32 am »On the bright side, I'm all for more female actors in just about any role, particularly the main role, and I thought Rey was pretty well acted. Not so sure about some of the supporting actors, although it's difficult if you're given corny lines.
The actors were great and did a good job with what they were given, both here and in the prequels (with the exception of Natalie Portman).
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General Discussion / Re: STAR WARS
« on: January 01, 2020, 07:39:37 am »
9 was really really bad.
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Dominion League / Re: Season 37 - Signups
« on: November 19, 2019, 09:29:09 am »
Returning player
Dominion.games: Seprix
Discord: Seprix#9268
Timezone: America/New York (EST)
Season 34, A Division, demoted at 4th (tied with Tracer, lost to tiebreaking match). Looking to rebound.
Dominion.games: Seprix
Discord: Seprix#9268
Timezone: America/New York (EST)
Season 34, A Division, demoted at 4th (tied with Tracer, lost to tiebreaking match). Looking to rebound.
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Dominion Articles / Re: A Different Way To Look at Dominion
« on: November 18, 2019, 07:13:11 am »
None of this is new strategically, and the idea sometimes falls apart when we start talking about really consistent money strategies, but overall the idea is there, and you'd expect some exceptions with a concept article.
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Dominion Articles / Re: Dominion Cap Management (Unfinished)
« on: August 14, 2019, 10:38:29 am »I'm not sure why you need to say things like "Dominion is a game of skill", this feels like it isn't actually saying anything.
Maybe I could cut that, makes sense now that I think about it.
Quote
The time cap doesn't seem very useful to me. You have to consider when the game ends, but uniquely this depends way more on your opponent than anything else. These are useful questions to ask but it isn't like you have "time potential" or "time cap" or anything. It's more about whether you have inevitability or not.
Given I can't really say anything about Time except generalities, yes it makes sense it's not very useful to you or probably to anyone for that matter. But it is an essential and perhaps the most essential part of the game, and games in general. Maybe Time doesn't slot itself into caps well in general. Maybe I didn't visualize it well enough and it works fine from another angle.
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For Oppression, it seems very very similar to the opposite of consistency, and an example like Ghost Ship may be better than junker example. If you are Ghost Shipped every turn your deck can still be consistent, it's just that your deck is consistently performing terrible.
This section still needs its own slot, because the ability to stop the opponent is as important as the ability to start up your own deck. They're both different things, even if the end result is similar. But yes, the consistency definition isn't incredible. Mostly in general the entire thing will need rewording and reworking whenever I feel like it, but the thing is mostly here already. It won't hold up to lawyering but it'll hold up to casual thinking, and honestly that's good enough for me at the moment.
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It seems weird to define Draw without considering whether you can play the draw. Every other cap has the property that you can increase it by itself without worrying about the other caps, and your deck will get better. Of course, your deck is better if you coordinate how you're trying to improve each of the caps. But Draw feels like it isn't an example of this.
Well you do consider whether or not you can play the draw. You don't think about the caps in isolation, I'm just highlighting what they each do. In addition, you can increase the Play Cap (Action Cap really, I still wince at the name Play but I wanted to separate the concept of villages from cantrips) significantly by adding tons of villages but that's not actually improving the deck per se if there's nothing to play with all of those actions. But maybe the caps should each stand on their own. Sure they lose their purity but maybe it's more practical.
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I don't think you want to define the Kingdom as a separate cap. You want keep it at the level of, the Kingdom defines the upper bound of every other cap and decides which ones you prioritize. It feels like needless notation to describe this as a "Kingdom cap".
Caps. Not cap, caps. Everything your deck can do is limited by what is possible in the Kingdom. It's the deck's box within the meta-box of the particular Kingdom, which is what you are saying, just less granular at the Kingdom level. I probably said Kingdom Cap but it's made up of all of the individual caps, and perhaps potential is a better word overall anyways. Better for imaging.
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The general feeling I got was that I don't feel like I learned anything.
I wouldn't expect you (or anyone worth their salt) to learn anything at all from this article, so not really surprised in the slightest. I'm just pushing forward an idea of thinking about the game, and whenever I tackle the prospect again I might toss all of this out entirely or build on it. The final goal is creating a Universal Theory on Dominion, and this is just a potential brick in that wall.
It makes sense to break down Dominion into its parts, and what I eventually want to do is to use those parts to build bigger things, and who knows, maybe this helps AI at the end of it all. I'm trying to put universal logic into a game that seemingly has no universal logic at all conceptually. I'm just some idiot trying something, hopefully it works out in the end, or at least helps someone else work something out.
The general feeling I got was that I don't feel like I learned anything. I think it would be stronger to give examples of how you increase / decrease different caps.
As a relatively new player, I've even been thinking about writing an introductory guide to getting better because many Dominion guides seem to ask good questions but not answer them. I know many of them can't easily be generalized, but some can be generalized.
So, what happens if there isn't draw? Am I playing just big money with a few payload action cards? Is +Buy still worth going for if there is no draw? What about if there is trashing?
What if there isn't a village? How many terminals on average should I aim for? Does that change if I can trash?
I know it's hard to give very specific answers to these questions, but I think there are general answers to at least some of these.
I'll work on this next, I think. This "article" is more arm-chair stuff, but if the arm-chair stuff isn't helpful to practical situations it's not really any good at all, is it? And maybe this will help with the seeming struggle more than breaking the game down. Who knows, I'll give it a shot.
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Dominion Articles / Re: Dominion Cap Management (Unfinished)
« on: August 09, 2019, 11:05:32 am »Are cards gained for sake of their price worth an extra question in the Gain section? Such as gaining Ill-Gotten Gains or Border Villages primarily to feed them to Upgrades and Recruiters?
That's more for very specific cards that care about the price of cards, and some of them do not even gain stuff, such as Recruiter. I don't feel it's particularly relevant, but maybe I'm wrong.
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Dominion Articles / Re: Dominion Cap Management (Unfinished)
« on: August 08, 2019, 12:03:28 am »Is "tempo cap" the same as "time cap"? You suddenly mention the "tempo cap" at the very end without discussing it earlier.
I originally called time cap tempo cap to be more pretentious and then decided the allusions to chess wasn't worth the potential confusion, I'll go and change that, must have missed it
UPDATE: changed the ordering of one of the caps, changed some wording and in that case added some humor, and removed all instances of 'thusly'.
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Dominion Articles / Dominion Cap Management (Unfinished)
« on: August 07, 2019, 09:20:00 pm »
(A lot of what is going to be said will be already known or understood in a general sense by good players, although perhaps not put into words, or maybe not put into the same words. My hope with this article is to perhaps give someone another way of thinking about the game, or to help them break through and improve in how they approach each game. In addition, the article is unfinished and I would like some feedback on it and which direction to take it.)
Cap Management
Dominion is a game of skill, chance management and cap management.
Dominion is a game of skill because there are usually a lot of options in each game and deciding what works and what doesn’t and in what order the things happen in is something that is only acquired with knowledge and finesse. Dominion is a game of chance management because of shuffles and randomness, and sometimes someone has to make an educated gamble in order to potentially win. It is important to understand game positioning and what riskier/higher reward plays are. These are things everybody worth their salt knows already.
Dominion is also a game of cap management. A cap is to put simply, potential. A low cap doesn’t have very much potential, and a high cap has a lot of potential. How the deck actually performs will depend on a number of factors, but it is always within the constraints of the cap. Think of it like a volume knob. The speaker's sound can get as loud as anywhere within the knob's range, but it cannot exceed the maximum range of 11 on the volume knob. A deck can go anywhere within its cap, but it cannot go any further than that cap.
In each game, there are seven different caps to constantly keep track of within the game, and the decks will often only be as good as the lowest cap, or perhaps higher ceilings from other caps will help to overcome the lowest cap through interactions. Knowing these seven caps and how they affect gameplay will be instrumental in becoming a better Dominion player. The seven caps in no particular order are Time, Draw, Plays, Gains, Scoring, Oppression, and Consistency. In addition, it’s important to note that in all games, your opponent has every cap that you do. Remember this for later.
Each cap will be briefly explained with the mindset that they should be approached with, and then how exactly this information will help is up to you. Each cap affects the other caps in some form or another, and it is often important to remember that they interact together in much the same way as cards interact with each other. It is crucial to know how to form relationships between objects, and it is why a lack either of familiarity with cards and strategies, or lack of ability in drawing relationships will make the ideas presented useless.
Time
Time is the average time allotted to each strategy per player before the game ends, and perhaps the most important metric in Dominion. Time is also the most complex cap, constantly changing as the game continues. Because of this, there is no feasible way to measure time analytically in a given game, and it must be done instead with experience and guesswork. Each strategy will take a certain amount of time, and each decision will either take the same amount of time or more, depending on whether that decision was a mistake. In addition, the game itself can decide that the strategy chosen will go faster or slower than usual, based on draws or general luck.
Remembering that your opponent has every cap that you do, your time cap is directly affected by all decisions your opponent makes, and his time cap is directly affected by the decisions you make. This is because choices exist, and any decision anybody makes will have a chance to be reacted to (barring game ending choices) which will change the dynamic of the game entirely. If an opponent commits too hard to Provinces too soon, there is a correct play that will give the time cap advantage to the other player, and an incorrect play that will give the time cap advantage to the opponent instead.
Presented below and in all future cap types will be general questions to ask subconsciously while playing, from the very start of the game to its conclusion.
How fast can the game possibly end to the best of your guessing ability?
How fast can the game reasonably end? Is it time to score? Do you have time to build more?
If behind, does scoring prolong the game and give a real chance or does it just make you lose later?
Answering these questions is going to be difficult a lot of the time, because the answer is dependent on the other caps.
Consistency
The next cap is Consistency, which more or less defined as how predictable the turns will be on average. A lot of things will increase Consistency. Removing bad cards increases Consistency, as does adding good cards. Set-ups and cards such as Summon and Captain can increase Consistency. Simultaneously, adding stop cards such as Provinces will increase the amount of chaos in the deck, and will then decrease the Consistency cap. There is value in getting the deck over-consistent in order to hold more stop cards, but always be mindful of how much time is left.
Again we are presented with a number of questions.
How likely is it that you can do everything you want to do?
Is the deck going to get reasonably more consistent if you continue to build?
Is the added consistency going to matter more than the time left?
Can building continue to consistently handle more green?
Oppression
The Oppression cap is perhaps the least important cap on average and is in some ways the opposite of consistency, but it can sometimes be absolutely crucial. To put it simply, the Oppression cap measures how hard you can grind the opponent's deck to a halt. Usually this means attacks such as Cultist and Mountebank, but also devious pins and some Possession tricks to guarantee bad turns forever, to name a couple of examples.
How bad is the oppression? Is it ignorable?
Will the oppression affect the Time cap?
Is it worth giving out oppression yourself?
Draw
The Draw cap is simply how many draw cards are in the deck. Drawing the deck and increasing handsize are both very important things to do. Whether the cards are playable due to being terminal are not is not what the Draw cap worries about, but only whether or not it has that potentiality to draw cards. Some simpler questions:
How strong is the draw?
Is it terminal? How much draw can you actually play?
Play
The Play cap is to put simply, the amount of cards you can play that can do things. This includes cantrips, terminals, action increasers such as villages and even non-action cards like Scepter and Vampire. Anything the deck can play, the Play cap has covered. If the deck has a multitude of terminal cards in it, the Play cap will go down because there are cards that cannot be played. The Play cap will then go up if there are villages added. Remember that this is simply a measurement of what can be played if the entire deck was laid out; it is not a measurement of consistency! Also, sometimes it’s perfectly okay to have a bad Play cap in a sloggy game because the terminal cards are not likely to connect.
Once more, questions:
How many terminal cards can you play?
Would your deck perish if it didn’t have access to enough villages?
How many non-terminal cards can be played, and does it make the deck better when added?
Gains
The Gain cap is how many cards the deck can gain on a given turn. This includes buys and cards like Workshop and Bureaucrat. Some gains are good and some are not so good. Pretty straightforward. Making it a bit more complicated is that some gains matter more than others, but this will be up to the player to decide whether say, Beggar’s coppers are any good. Again, there are a couple of questions:
How much can be gained, and does the deck even want it?
Will the gained cards lower the Consistency cap?
Can the deck gain and play cards?
How much does the deck rely on buys, and does it have sufficient economy to realize the potential?
How do the Gain caps play into time left?
Is there a pileout?
Scoring
Finally, the Scoring cap, which is an approximation of what the deck can realistically expect to score. It is very important to consider the Consistency and Time caps when considering the Scoring cap, especially with the presence of Alt-VP but also with general timing of when to pull the trigger. Final questions:
How good are Provinces? Can multiple Provinces be gained?
How good is the Alt-VP? Is it strong enough to withstand a Province rush? Can it withstand a pileout?
What does the deck want to do, and what is actually possible?
All of these questions should be running through a player’s head as he plays. Some questions are easier than others, but all of them will be at one time crucial to ask.
Kingdom Caps
Complicating things further, all seven caps also exist within each Kingdom. If standard caps measure deck potential, it makes sense that each Kingdom has potential as well. Some Kingdoms have no villages, some Kingdoms have no trashing. All personal deck caps are then restricted by the seven Kingdom caps which exist. As an example, there may be strategies within the Kingdom that increase the consistency cap but take such a long time as to be impractical to realistically pursue. Rushes also are a violent way in which the Kingdom Time cap will slap down any potential deck ideas. For it to work though, the opponent has to actually pursue it!
General Cap Principles
Work backwards. Start with what you know, and use those conclusions to form conclusions about other caps. For example, it is impossible to ascertain when to accurately score without knowing the opponent’s caps.
A higher Oppression cap generally means a higher Time cap.
The second player inherently starts with a lower tempo cap, but how big this gulf is depends on how quickly the decks can become consistent. Higher consistency means the second player has an even lower tempo cap, and then they may have to commit harder to risky plays in order to jump back into the game.
The opponent has every cap that you do. Because of this, all caps are inherently reactive. Know your opponent’s caps. One cap may be less of a problem or more of a problem based on what the opponent’s plan and caps are, and it is important to change strategic directions accordingly.
For example, if the opponent decided he wanted to rush single Provinces instead of building the deck for longer, the appropriate reaction could be to not touch the Provinces at all for a higher time cap; This allows higher scoring with Alt-VP later which otherwise may not have been feasible. It may also instead be correct to follow with the Provincing because it is the only way to score and the time cap is against you.
Another example: The opponent has over-extended his terminals and there’s only one set of villages in the Kingdom. The winning play could be to snatch up all of the remaining villages and give the opponent a permanent lower Play cap.
Cap Management
Dominion is a game of skill, chance management and cap management.
Dominion is a game of skill because there are usually a lot of options in each game and deciding what works and what doesn’t and in what order the things happen in is something that is only acquired with knowledge and finesse. Dominion is a game of chance management because of shuffles and randomness, and sometimes someone has to make an educated gamble in order to potentially win. It is important to understand game positioning and what riskier/higher reward plays are. These are things everybody worth their salt knows already.
Dominion is also a game of cap management. A cap is to put simply, potential. A low cap doesn’t have very much potential, and a high cap has a lot of potential. How the deck actually performs will depend on a number of factors, but it is always within the constraints of the cap. Think of it like a volume knob. The speaker's sound can get as loud as anywhere within the knob's range, but it cannot exceed the maximum range of 11 on the volume knob. A deck can go anywhere within its cap, but it cannot go any further than that cap.
In each game, there are seven different caps to constantly keep track of within the game, and the decks will often only be as good as the lowest cap, or perhaps higher ceilings from other caps will help to overcome the lowest cap through interactions. Knowing these seven caps and how they affect gameplay will be instrumental in becoming a better Dominion player. The seven caps in no particular order are Time, Draw, Plays, Gains, Scoring, Oppression, and Consistency. In addition, it’s important to note that in all games, your opponent has every cap that you do. Remember this for later.
Each cap will be briefly explained with the mindset that they should be approached with, and then how exactly this information will help is up to you. Each cap affects the other caps in some form or another, and it is often important to remember that they interact together in much the same way as cards interact with each other. It is crucial to know how to form relationships between objects, and it is why a lack either of familiarity with cards and strategies, or lack of ability in drawing relationships will make the ideas presented useless.
Time
Time is the average time allotted to each strategy per player before the game ends, and perhaps the most important metric in Dominion. Time is also the most complex cap, constantly changing as the game continues. Because of this, there is no feasible way to measure time analytically in a given game, and it must be done instead with experience and guesswork. Each strategy will take a certain amount of time, and each decision will either take the same amount of time or more, depending on whether that decision was a mistake. In addition, the game itself can decide that the strategy chosen will go faster or slower than usual, based on draws or general luck.
Remembering that your opponent has every cap that you do, your time cap is directly affected by all decisions your opponent makes, and his time cap is directly affected by the decisions you make. This is because choices exist, and any decision anybody makes will have a chance to be reacted to (barring game ending choices) which will change the dynamic of the game entirely. If an opponent commits too hard to Provinces too soon, there is a correct play that will give the time cap advantage to the other player, and an incorrect play that will give the time cap advantage to the opponent instead.
Presented below and in all future cap types will be general questions to ask subconsciously while playing, from the very start of the game to its conclusion.
How fast can the game possibly end to the best of your guessing ability?
How fast can the game reasonably end? Is it time to score? Do you have time to build more?
If behind, does scoring prolong the game and give a real chance or does it just make you lose later?
Answering these questions is going to be difficult a lot of the time, because the answer is dependent on the other caps.
Consistency
The next cap is Consistency, which more or less defined as how predictable the turns will be on average. A lot of things will increase Consistency. Removing bad cards increases Consistency, as does adding good cards. Set-ups and cards such as Summon and Captain can increase Consistency. Simultaneously, adding stop cards such as Provinces will increase the amount of chaos in the deck, and will then decrease the Consistency cap. There is value in getting the deck over-consistent in order to hold more stop cards, but always be mindful of how much time is left.
Again we are presented with a number of questions.
How likely is it that you can do everything you want to do?
Is the deck going to get reasonably more consistent if you continue to build?
Is the added consistency going to matter more than the time left?
Can building continue to consistently handle more green?
Oppression
The Oppression cap is perhaps the least important cap on average and is in some ways the opposite of consistency, but it can sometimes be absolutely crucial. To put it simply, the Oppression cap measures how hard you can grind the opponent's deck to a halt. Usually this means attacks such as Cultist and Mountebank, but also devious pins and some Possession tricks to guarantee bad turns forever, to name a couple of examples.
How bad is the oppression? Is it ignorable?
Will the oppression affect the Time cap?
Is it worth giving out oppression yourself?
Draw
The Draw cap is simply how many draw cards are in the deck. Drawing the deck and increasing handsize are both very important things to do. Whether the cards are playable due to being terminal are not is not what the Draw cap worries about, but only whether or not it has that potentiality to draw cards. Some simpler questions:
How strong is the draw?
Is it terminal? How much draw can you actually play?
Play
The Play cap is to put simply, the amount of cards you can play that can do things. This includes cantrips, terminals, action increasers such as villages and even non-action cards like Scepter and Vampire. Anything the deck can play, the Play cap has covered. If the deck has a multitude of terminal cards in it, the Play cap will go down because there are cards that cannot be played. The Play cap will then go up if there are villages added. Remember that this is simply a measurement of what can be played if the entire deck was laid out; it is not a measurement of consistency! Also, sometimes it’s perfectly okay to have a bad Play cap in a sloggy game because the terminal cards are not likely to connect.
Once more, questions:
How many terminal cards can you play?
Would your deck perish if it didn’t have access to enough villages?
How many non-terminal cards can be played, and does it make the deck better when added?
Gains
The Gain cap is how many cards the deck can gain on a given turn. This includes buys and cards like Workshop and Bureaucrat. Some gains are good and some are not so good. Pretty straightforward. Making it a bit more complicated is that some gains matter more than others, but this will be up to the player to decide whether say, Beggar’s coppers are any good. Again, there are a couple of questions:
How much can be gained, and does the deck even want it?
Will the gained cards lower the Consistency cap?
Can the deck gain and play cards?
How much does the deck rely on buys, and does it have sufficient economy to realize the potential?
How do the Gain caps play into time left?
Is there a pileout?
Scoring
Finally, the Scoring cap, which is an approximation of what the deck can realistically expect to score. It is very important to consider the Consistency and Time caps when considering the Scoring cap, especially with the presence of Alt-VP but also with general timing of when to pull the trigger. Final questions:
How good are Provinces? Can multiple Provinces be gained?
How good is the Alt-VP? Is it strong enough to withstand a Province rush? Can it withstand a pileout?
What does the deck want to do, and what is actually possible?
All of these questions should be running through a player’s head as he plays. Some questions are easier than others, but all of them will be at one time crucial to ask.
Kingdom Caps
Complicating things further, all seven caps also exist within each Kingdom. If standard caps measure deck potential, it makes sense that each Kingdom has potential as well. Some Kingdoms have no villages, some Kingdoms have no trashing. All personal deck caps are then restricted by the seven Kingdom caps which exist. As an example, there may be strategies within the Kingdom that increase the consistency cap but take such a long time as to be impractical to realistically pursue. Rushes also are a violent way in which the Kingdom Time cap will slap down any potential deck ideas. For it to work though, the opponent has to actually pursue it!
General Cap Principles
Work backwards. Start with what you know, and use those conclusions to form conclusions about other caps. For example, it is impossible to ascertain when to accurately score without knowing the opponent’s caps.
A higher Oppression cap generally means a higher Time cap.
The second player inherently starts with a lower tempo cap, but how big this gulf is depends on how quickly the decks can become consistent. Higher consistency means the second player has an even lower tempo cap, and then they may have to commit harder to risky plays in order to jump back into the game.
The opponent has every cap that you do. Because of this, all caps are inherently reactive. Know your opponent’s caps. One cap may be less of a problem or more of a problem based on what the opponent’s plan and caps are, and it is important to change strategic directions accordingly.
For example, if the opponent decided he wanted to rush single Provinces instead of building the deck for longer, the appropriate reaction could be to not touch the Provinces at all for a higher time cap; This allows higher scoring with Alt-VP later which otherwise may not have been feasible. It may also instead be correct to follow with the Provincing because it is the only way to score and the time cap is against you.
Another example: The opponent has over-extended his terminals and there’s only one set of villages in the Kingdom. The winning play could be to snatch up all of the remaining villages and give the opponent a permanent lower Play cap.
17
Puzzles and Challenges / Re: Easy Puzzles
« on: July 12, 2019, 09:16:34 pm »Not sure if either of these actually work, but
- Innovation + Experiment
- Changeling (gaining a different card)
Those are both correct. The second answer was what I had in mind.
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Puzzles and Challenges / Re: Easy Puzzles
« on: July 12, 2019, 07:42:37 pm »
There is more than one way to send a card back into the supply. However, there is a specific way to send a card back to the supply, by gaining it from the trash.
How?
How?
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Dominion Online at Shuffle iT / Re: Shuffle IT license extended through 2021
« on: July 01, 2019, 09:27:31 am »
He's already working on updates as we speak. 
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Dominion General Discussion / Re: Strictly Better
« on: June 20, 2019, 09:38:44 am »I was talking about Coppers, not Silvers. Trashing Copper has the (big) upside of making it easier to draw, with the downside of losing some payload. Gaining a Lab, though, is the best of both worlds: you get more draw without losing that $. That's the crucial difference.
Trashing two Estates is like gaining two Labs and taking Miserable. Trashing a Curse is like gaining a Lab and taking atoken. Trashing a Lab is like gaining a Lab and then trashing two Labs.
Do you regret making this thread yet? I would!
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Dominion Articles / Re: Hermit
« on: June 08, 2019, 10:45:05 am »
Alright, I came back to this article after months away expecting to find tons of flaws. Surprisingly, there is still nothing I would change, outside of maybe deleting that Market Square part, which doesn't seem particularly egregious to me, just possibly making the article too long.
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Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Potential Duration trashers, Schwerin Cathedral
« on: June 04, 2019, 10:02:58 pm »This thread has veered into speculation about what the card might do. It's a Duration, and it has an ecclesiastical name, so seems likely to be a trasher.
So what might it be?
My own wild speculation, which might be a nifty idea for a card in any case:
Schwerin Cathedral
Action, $3
Trash up to 3 cards from your hand.
At the start of your next turn, trash the same number of cards from your hand.
that card would be absolutely busted and way better than chapel.
Not really. The second trashing is blind and forced, so this card would only really work in the early game. Chapel still works in the mid and late game if you're playing with on-trash effects and/or junkers.
Even in early game, the fact that this is a Duration means that you are more likely than not to not get to play it on your third shuffle; while Chapel usually gets played on both second and third shuffle. I think more often than not, by the time you are shuffling for the third time, Chapel will have trashed 7-8 cards, while this will have trashed 6.
Okay maybe "way better" was an exaggeration because chapel is chapel, but it would still be better than chapel, hands down. Yes please, I'll trash 6 cards in a shuffle for 100, Alex. The wording also suggests you can play it and trash nothing, so you can play it to get it out of your shuffle for free once you're done.
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Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Potential Duration trashers, Schwerin Cathedral
« on: May 30, 2019, 12:47:55 pm »This thread has veered into speculation about what the card might do. It's a Duration, and it has an ecclesiastical name, so seems likely to be a trasher.
So what might it be?
My own wild speculation, which might be a nifty idea for a card in any case:
Schwerin Cathedral
Action, $3
Trash up to 3 cards from your hand.
At the start of your next turn, trash the same number of cards from your hand.
that card would be absolutely busted and way better than chapel.
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Puzzles and Challenges / Re: Easy Puzzles
« on: May 10, 2019, 01:06:57 pm »I have my entire deck in play, and all the cards are Actions. I then buy one card, and trash everything in play. How?
Hard Mode: Find a way to trash all cards in play, with four Pearl Divers in play in addition to everything else.
Solution:
Play Black Market, buying Peasant and playing it using Innovation, play another Black Market revealing Villa and buy it, and then buy Mint and double Bonfire, killing 4 Pearl Divers.