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Dominion General Discussion / Re: How do you play double-Jack?
« on: August 22, 2015, 11:06:57 am »I look for powerful Kingdom Treasures if Jack is on the board, namely Counterfeit, which fills in all the things Jack can't do very nicely. I haven't tried Jack/Treasure Trove yet, but that might be interesting.
The reason why Jack does so well with itself is that it's constantly adding Treasures to your deck, so a light engine really is not going to draw your deck. Look for ways to take advantage of Jack's "up to" style of drawing (like Fishing Village), or just resign yourself to hoping Jack doesn't collide with whatever else you throw in there.
Very, very few of them are any good outside of niche cases. Counterfeit is extremely good with just about any treasure gain, though I will grant that de-coppering the deck is bigger for Jack than most (as is the +buy).
Treasure trove looks to be fairly self-limiting. First it has the opportunity cost of it not being a duchy, this is pretty huge if you hit early $6 (common for Jack). Second,gaining the functional equivalent of two silvers isn't that wonderful, not only is the gold delayed a turn, but it comes with copper dilution.
You're really understating how good Treasure Trove is in BM decks. You can't say gaining the equivalent of two silvers a shuffle isn't that good, when the whole reason Jack-BM works is because.. it gains two silvers a shuffle. Plus a Gold and a Copper is more useful than two Silvers, really - you can potentially sift past Copper or sift into Gold using Jack, making it marginally better.
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Other cards like Venture or Royal Seal are not actively bad with Jack, but Venture has less green to sift (this hand) and Royal seal is less useful if the only things to top deck are treasures. Loan, flips fewer estates than normal, will quickly start discarding silvers, and of course will flip the odd Jack.
Loan is pretty decent as an opener with Jack. Don't really care what it flips honestly; people overstate how bad it is to have Loan flip something you wanted honestly, and it thins your deck of Copper which Jack can't do.
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Coin of the realm is worse with Jack as you lose the space efficiency, and have a flood of cards when you really want reliability or megaturns lining up.
What? Why would you want a megaturn with a Jack deck? A Coin of the Realm or two is just fine - you just reserve it and use it to resolve collision. It lets you run a few extra terminals. Nothing wrong with it.
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About the only ones I could see would be something like Hoard - you can afford sooner greening when you can Jack away estates; but I'm skeptical or Harem - very nice to have to play with when you have a 1 point differential (e.g. he kept an extra estate, I can buy the Harem, be up a point, and have better odds of hitting Duchy/Province next turn). Even these are pretty weak stuff.
You wouldn't Hoard Estates for Gold as often as you'd use it to keep your money density up as you buy Provinces and Duchies. Works pretty well. These aren't exactly game breaking combos but you're understating their value.