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2451

Help! / Re: To Rebuild or not to rebuild…

« on: March 17, 2015, 01:39:59 pm »

You're not making a lot of sense here. Tournament doesn't cost $5, it costs $4. Any time you can buy a Farming Village, you can buy a Tournament instead.

My hands got ahead of my brain here - I meant to say "in the absence of Tournament, if you didn't hit $5". some other hypothetical kingdom. There's a point where if you add more Silvers, you're just making it less likely that you'll hit Rebuild in a shuffle, but you still want to hit either Silver or Rebuild or both every hand. Farming Village effectively increases the odds of hitting both cards. I think there's an argument for it, just not a very good one.

2452

Help! / Re: To Rebuild or not to rebuild…

« on: March 17, 2015, 11:30:26 am »

The point of Farming Village here isn't really to be a village, but that it lowers your Victory card density without slowing down your cycling. Every Farming Village is both a non-Victory card spot in your deck, and it also guarantees a card that's worth *something* enters your hand. On this board in particular, I guess Tournament is going to be better most of the time, but if you didn't hit $5, Farming Village is a pretty good consolation prize. It'll either get you money to hit $5 next time, another Rebuild to speed your deck up, or whatever your terminal of choice is on the board to slow your opponent down.

Perhaps it's not really that good, I could be dumb here. Rebuild isn't exactly my specialty.

2453

Help! / Re: To Rebuild or not to rebuild…

« on: March 16, 2015, 03:33:10 pm »

You're implying "not Rebuild" is ever really an option...

Seriously though. Rebuild is going to win on most boards, and I think this is one of them. Cards like Farming Village are tailor made to play in a Rebuild deck. You have the rare opportunity to Rebuild into Province with a card that isn't Duchy (I would argue you *always* buy Fairgrounds on 6 against someone who isn't playing Rebuild). Farming Village is good in a Rebuild deck (keeps VP in the deck), Cutpurse is great for hitting $5 and stopping your opponent from doing so, Lookout can rid you of a few Coppers, and the Rebuild player is going to be able to Tournament faster.

A really good player could carefully make the engine win some of the time, but I wouldn't take the engine bait here. I'm kinda lazy I guess.

2454

Dominion General Discussion / Re: herald is so good

« on: March 16, 2015, 01:13:29 am »

Thread necro time.

Does anybody else see Herald's overpay as, "You want to win this split so badly that you're probably going to overpay anyway, so here's an extra treat for when you do"?

About 20% of the time, I see it like Inn - I really want to play a junker or a trasher once more this shuffle and I'm willing to use my Buy to accomplish that. Or maybe it's a mostly BM deck and I could get a Province if I overpay $2-3 this turn. The other 80% of the time, it's just gravy when a Herald chain is definitely the right way to go. It's a card you want for $4, more than Stonemason is a card you want for $2 or even Doctor for $3 (though I buy Doctor on 3/4 decently often).

2455

Dominion Videos and Streams / Re: Dominion Live Streams

« on: March 15, 2015, 11:33:50 pm »

I'll be streaming for like an hour tonight. Listening to some Boards of Canada and playing a few games. Long day of work, so I'll make some strategic mistakes and probably lower my rank, but yay streaming.

http://www.twitch.tv/chrisisme2791

Edit: Give me a minute or two, Twitch is giving me problems.
Edit2: Cool, fixed it I think.

2456

General Discussion / Re: Overhearing casual dominion players

« on: March 15, 2015, 11:10:03 pm »

I despise Ascension. I just hate it. Everything I like about Dominion is gone in Ascension. Two competing resource cards, a completely random and unpredictable Supply, no ability to plan a deck archetype at all with any consistent chance of winning. Dominion has luck, that you're in complete control over, in many ways it's a probability manage ment game. Ascension presents no option for that - it's just incredibly swingy.

It's a running joke in my group of friends to propose playing Ascension, to piss me off.

2457

Dominion Articles / Re: Combo? Stonemason/Stables

« on: March 15, 2015, 02:45:11 pm »

Stonemason has similar, if not more, synergy with Spice Merchant in this case. Overpay to get 2 Spice Merchants and a Stonemason, and you can thin your deck of Estates *and* Coppers while getting some early +Buy / nonterminal draw to set up your engine. It's slower than other trashing methods, but there have been games where Spice Merchant is the only source of +Buy and I feel this would help.

2458

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Card Sleeves

« on: March 15, 2015, 11:46:33 am »

Well, someone already necroed this thread, might as well ask about it here.

I don't "get" sleeve-ing Dominion cards. Like, what's the point? For MTG and whatnot, makes total sense. Cards are commodities, they're a simple investment to preserve card value. But Dominion cards aren't. It's $300ish to replace an entire collection of Dominion cards.

The main benefit I see is that it's easier to overhand shuffle sleeved cards, and if you spill beer you're less immediately fucked than if you spill them on cards. And those are nice benefits, but I would have to give up binder storage to sleeve cards, and I don't have a reason good enough to justify doing that. I'd love to hear one, preferably coupled with a good card storage solution, but it just doesn't seem right for me.

2459

Dominion General Discussion / Re: small but useful tactics tips

« on: March 15, 2015, 11:33:34 am »

Biggest tactic tip I can think of is to not let the amount of money you have be the sole deciding factor in what card you get.

It's a big hang-up to get over, as people want to maximize their value, and you have the psychological sensation that since you get rid of all your money at the end of the turn, it's wasteful to not use it all. But sometimes you really do need to buy Bridge at $8.

For a really dramatic example, I was playing a Hunting Grounds / Bazaar / Pawn Colony game last night, and I had something like 20. I wanted Platinum to hit at least $25 every turn, but I also wanted an extra source of +Buy so I could get more than 2 cards, as I only had one Pawn. But I couldn't get myself to buy Pawn for $11, instead going for a single Colony, and that ended up costing me the game.

2460

Dominion General Discussion / Re: 'VP nerf' house rule

« on: March 15, 2015, 11:29:40 am »

I think I'd just prefer not making every game a Colony game. Alt-VP becomes viable or not viable depending on the set - the presence of Colony / Platinum is part of the set, really.

In Big Box, you've got Vineyard, which can sometimes hold its own in a Colony game, and Gardens, which really can't. That's all the alt-VP, right? I don't think you need a big adjustment for that.

2461

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Making A Themed Fan Expansion for Friends

« on: March 15, 2015, 11:20:45 am »

I don't think Joker should block attack cards only. If he did, it would make him a white knight protecting people. I can imagine that such a protector-reaction would generally be an interesting idea ("no player is affected by the attack"), but it hardly fits on a card representing someone you dislike.

This is a valid thematic point. Joker will take some more work / thought, and I might just leave him as a terrible card.

----

Any more thoughts on Lounge? It seems somewhere between Oasis and Fishing Village, which was kind of the intent. $1 money, $1 action for no draw and an even smaller handsize. A tier worse than Horse Traders too. It's just really weak in some specific situations and decent in others.

----

So here's a few more cards to consider as well.

Name: Flake
Type: Action
Cost: $3
Effect: +3 Cards, +1 Action, Trash this card.

Thematically, it's a representation of all of those really cool but unfortunately super busy people we've met at university. School sucks you away from fun a lot, and we've all been this guy, but when they're around everything's much better, and they always seem to know everyone. So a one shot double Laboratory seemed like a cool concept.

In the early game, imagine opening with this and a low cost power card like Remake, Sea Hag, Ambassador, even Chapel. You can sacrifice a Silver to get a guaranteed early play of your power 4 with a good Buy phase to boot. That's awesome. And I could see this being a neat card to inject into an Engine if you hit $11 in the later parts of the game. I'd say it's too strong, but it's got quite the opportunity cost, I guess.

---

Name: Businessman
Type: Action - Attack
Cost: $5
Effect: +$2, +1 Buy. [dramatic horizontal line] While this is in play, when you buy a card, each player with 4 [3?] or more cards in hand discards a card from their hand.

This card needs work, and might just not be a workable concept. The idea is that it's a Goons or Merchant Guild or whatever but as a discard attack. This produces some weird but workable interactions with Moat, Secret Chamber, Horse Traders. The problem is, at "with 4 or more cards", it's all but a worse Militia (though the Buy is nice), and at "with 3 or more cards", you can leave people with a 2 card hand. It's difficult to get +2 Buy, as you need a fairly specific kind of deck to hit that consistently, but if you can, that's just cruel and you can do it every turn. Any tweaks would be appreciated. Maybe it's fine as an almost worse Militia that gives you an extra Buy you feel obligated to use.

Theme wise, one of our friends is really good at money. Does budgeting for campus clubs, always seems to find funds somewhere for our club projects, and is generally just financially oriented. He's also got this kind of secret agent / covert operative vibe, like he could take people down if he needed to. Seems like a legitimate use for a discard attack. And the more things he gets for you, the better, right?

2462

Game Reports / Re: Open double silver vs. open Sea Hag/silver

« on: March 15, 2015, 10:54:02 am »

I think I would have opened Sea Hag / Silver, gotten a Feast on the next shuffle, then 2, maybe 3 Wharfs. You can't lose the Curse split 10-0 and still win the game very often.

If I didn't want Sea Hag, I would have opened Feast / Silver, because that Wharf is super important and you never know how long Hag will deny you that $5 hand. It's not terribly unlikely that you'll get a hand of Feast / Copper / Copper / Copper / Junk either, which makes up for the lost Silver.

I think you mostly had bad luck in your game though. Don't know why your opponent bought a second Hag.

2463

Dominion Videos and Streams / Re: Dominion Live Streams

« on: March 10, 2015, 10:57:19 pm »

I'm gonna play some Dominion. I'm tired, so that means I'll probably make big mistakes and overlook huge strategies in kingdoms.

http://www.twitch.tv/chrisisme2791

2464

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Dominion Rebalanced?

« on: March 09, 2015, 06:25:59 pm »

A lot of attempts to "balance" Dominion are really misguided, and done by players with an incomplete understanding of the game. Banning Chapel from a tournament is just ridiculous.

Chapel's price makes sense, when you realize price is not entirely a function of power - it's a function of when the card should be available for use. Making Chapel cost $3 doesn't make the card any worse at what it does, it just makes it so you can't get it when you open 5/2, which adds a ton of variance. Chapel should be available at the start of the game for everybody, so it's a $2.

I don't really think I'm good enough at the game to suggest balancing changes, but if I had to, I would probably see if there is some way to tweak Rebuild slightly.

2465

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Remodel/Vault category - let's give it a name!

« on: March 09, 2015, 12:01:53 pm »

Alternatively, we could just acknowledge that these are two separate categories (trash-for-benefit and discard-for-benefit) that happen to have a property in common that Donald finds useful from a design standpoint.

I'd also argue cards like Courtyard and Mandarin are "soft terminals" or "supercolliders" or whatever, because they allow you to topdeck a terminal you can't use that turn. But I guess that's juts three separate categories.

I think there is value in thinking of terminals from this paradigm. There's a difference in the number of other terminals you can buy when playing Envoy versus Courtyard - Envoy is a very hard terminal, Courtyard is a somewhat soft terminal. The softer the terminals you have, the more terminals your otherwise mostly Big Money deck can handle.

2466

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Remodel/Vault category - let's give it a name!

« on: March 09, 2015, 10:59:11 am »

"Spammable Terminals" isn't quite right.

How about "Soft Terminals"? Like, they can collide, but it's not too bad.

I like Soft Terminals. For example, Horse Traders is a soft terminal because it already makes 2 cards in your hand dead cards. Storeroom is a soft terminal because it gets value from any card in hand, including dead terminals. Etc etc.

Soft also implies a spectrum of usefulness more than "spammable" does, which implies you can buy as many as you want with no consequence.

2467

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Remodel/Vault category - let's give it a name!

« on: March 09, 2015, 10:19:37 am »

"Spammable Terminals" isn't quite right. You can't exactly spam Remodel... It just does something with the other terminal in your hand if you want. Though that is certainly a better name for Vailt, which just doesn't care about drawing anything dead at all.

"Cards that dont mind terminal collision nearly as much as regular terminals" doesn't have the same ring to it. I mean this basically applies to any terminal that does stuff with cards in your hand that could be Action cards.

2468

Dominion Videos and Streams / Re: Dominion Live Streams

« on: March 08, 2015, 11:07:21 pm »

Eh, fuck it, I'll give this a try. Here's my Twitch and I plan to play automatch games for about an hour tonight.

http://www.twitch.tv/chrisisme2791


(edit: Almost got to 5000 on Pro! Woo! But my games were largely pretty dumb and I could notice by the end of the stream that I was getting too tired to make good decisions, so I stopped for tonight)

2469

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Making A Themed Fan Expansion for Friends

« on: March 08, 2015, 06:53:01 pm »

By the way, I'm not sure if it's intentional, but actually playing a game with this card would be awful. Whenever you play an Action card, you will have to stop and ask each other player in turn order if or not they want to trash a Joker before you can go on with your turn. If you play, for example, 15 Actions and there's an opponent who has a Joker and after every Action, he spends some time (let's say, 10 seconds) thinking if or not this particular Action is the one he wants to prevent from happening, that's making your turn over 2 minutes longer than it normally would've been. And when he doesn't have it, he stops for 10 seconds anyway to make you think he has one. If you do the same thing on his turns, the game will easily take an extra 20-30 minutes just for the analysis paralysis this card creates. If it's a multiplayer game and everyone has Jokers, the length of a single turn goes up even more, and the length of an entire round just skyrockets, all the while the card's in-game mechanics are further slowing the game down.

If it is intentional, you did a great job there. If it's not, you might want to rethink this.

Yup, the design intent of the card was for it to be incredibly annoying to play with, and a huge waste of everyone's time compared to a game without Joker. A net negative contribution to the average Kingdom / game. It fits the theme of this card / person / whatever perfectly.

I'd prefer to make the card a little bit less awful, and I think making it only work on Attack cards will at least reduce the number of decisions people have to make, but at the end of the day, it's going to be a card nobody likes. It should look good enough that people think about buying one with an extra Buy or a shitty draw, but bad enough that they regret doing that.

Fortunately, every other card in the expansion is supposed to be at least interesting or fun.

2470

Dominion General Discussion / Re: small but useful tactics tips

« on: March 08, 2015, 05:20:33 pm »

This is a cool thread I'll drop thoughts in as I come up with them.

First thing I'd say is that, particularly when learning unfamiliar cards / when new at the game, it's probably better to play a sub-optimal strategy perfectly than a better strategy poorly. If the better strategy is a mirror, and your opponent knows the strategy better, it's not likely that you'll win, even if you both make a few mistakes. On the other hand, if there's a strategy / combo you know very well on the board, better than how well your opponent knows the "better" strategy he's playing, you've got a chance.

One more - in limited circumstances, naming Duchy with your first few plays of Rebuild, and buying an Estate or two, is one stupid way to win the Duchy split. If you're having enough trouble hitting $5 to consider this, the Provinces will probably wait for you, so you can focus on getting the most Duchys first, ideally ending with no Estates at all.

2471

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Making A Themed Fan Expansion for Friends

« on: March 08, 2015, 05:11:26 pm »

Card: Joker [Really the card's named after a specific person, but that wouldn't be a great thing to post online]
Type: Action / Reaction
Cost: $2
Effect [Action]: Trash a card from your hand. Gain 2 Coppers, putting them into your hand.
Effect [Reaction]: Whenever an opponent plays an Action card, you may trash J-Dizzle. If you do, your opponent discards that Action card instead of playing it.

You may trash, uh, what exactly?

Ha, that was the original placeholder name I had, but I decided it was too stupid. In case it's not clear, you'd trash "Joker".

2472

Variants and Fan Cards / Making A Themed Fan Expansion for Friends

« on: March 08, 2015, 04:29:06 pm »

So, I'm working on a half-serious Dominion fan expansion for me and my friends to play. I'm essentially trying to make a small (12-13 card) expansion themed after my social group and all the dumb in-jokes we have with each other. Once I'm done with it, I'm going to make a reasonable attempt to print a physical copy of the expansion to give to my friends once I graduate college (May!) and move on with my life. Seems like a nice enough project.

While I'd like to make some basic attempts to balance cards and ensure nothing is TOO wacky, I'm more interested in making the cards thematically accurate, even if a bit overpowered, underpowered, or otherwise plainly ridiculous. I thought I could use an extra set of eyes or three on these card concepts before I print horribly unplayable Dominion fan cards.

I'm coming up with cards slowly, so I think I'm going to post one or two at a time, gather some feedback on those cards, then post 1 or 2 more as they're created, or as discussion dies down if any actually happens. Any tips / criticism would be appreciated.

Here's two to start off.

Card: Lounge
Type: Action
Cost: $3
Effect: +2 Actions, +$2, Discard a card.

The theme here is that the lounge is a useful place, where you can enable some fun things to happen, but it's a drain on your productivity, so it reduces your hand size. This is obviously really bad in kingdoms with hand size reduction attacks, really good with Draw-To-X, and decent in the beginning of the game when you still have Estates and junk. In general it's pretty tricky to use. Does this seem about right, thematically and balance wise? Would it be better bumped down to a $2 cost that gives +$1?

===

Card: Joker [Really the card's named after a specific person, but that wouldn't be a great thing to post online]
Type: Action / Reaction
Cost: $2
Effect [Action]: Trash a card from your hand. Gain 2 Coppers, putting them into your hand.
Effect [Reaction]: Whenever an opponent plays an Action card, you may trash Joker. If you do, your opponent discards that Action card instead of playing it.

This is a card named after a guy that we really don't like, so the card is complicated. The main effect is really bad in all but weird niche cases, and even then it's not great. Its Reaction looks just stupidly swingy - you get a one shot disruption of a specific opponent's turn? That's ridiculous. But if you stock up on too many of these cards, you end up regretting it, and the net effect of this card when everyone buys into it is that the game just slows down for awhile. It's really hard to use it to win.

I know that Dominion cards steer clear of targeting specific people, but I figured since this was fairly mild and not an attack itself, it's not the end of the world if it does something stupid. A possible alteration would be modifying the card so it says "Attack card" instead of "Action card". While the reaction targets a specific player, it prevents the attack for everyone, and its not nearly as good at fucking up engines / combos that way.

2473

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: crazy nerf

« on: March 08, 2015, 04:12:14 pm »

This hardly affects the card's strength at all. You don't trash Cultists very often anyway.

Exactly. The number of games where you buy cultist for the on trash bonus is zero. So why not make it a penalty?

I mean you probably never buy Cultist FOR the +3 Cards while trashing, but it makes certain other cards, like Apprentice, Forager, Salvager, Procession, etc. a lot better. Why take that away, it's not helping the card enough that it becomes overpowered, but it's still a neat thing to play with.

It would be a penalty that would basically never trigger. Only if you trash at the end of a big engine turn would it be a penalty. Most times your hand would be Trasher / Cultist / money / money / money anyway.

2474

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Rate the Expansions!

« on: March 08, 2015, 01:26:16 pm »

It's hard to rank them in order, so I grouped them into tiers. They're in a rough descending order of quality within the tiers, but they're more arguable.

• Prosperity, Seaside
• Guilds, Hinterlands, Cornucopia
• Dark Ages, Intrigue, Dominion
• Alchemy

Prosperity is the best expansion. It's just full of power cards, cards that work well together, cards that really define Dominion (King's Court, Mountebank, Bishop, Goons), and the set is pretty well balanced as a standalone or as part of the larger metagame. It's just the most polished set. Seaside is similarly up there; while it has more cards that I just hate (Ghost Ship, Sea Hag to an extent) and a few duds (Explorer), Duration cards are both really cool and incredibly strategic, and some of Dominion's best enablers are here, like Tactician, Wharf, Caravan, Fishing Village, Ambassador...

I like Guilds a lot, probably more than most people. Pretty much every Guilds card is one I'm happy to see in a random set, which says a lot. Lots of variants on existing themes with more choices and depth. It's just a really strategic / tactical set. Hinterlands wasn't initially one of my favorites, but its subtle power has grown on me. The game stays simple with Hinterlands but there's still plenty of neat tricks and variants. The attacks are a bit easier to swallow than other sets which I think helps for playing with less experienced players. Cornucopia is largely like Guilds - a small expansion where nearly every card adds some depth. It really plays well with other expansions, more than every other expansion I think.

Dark Ages is pretty good, it's just got so much going on. Rebuild isn't very fun, and the trash theme results in a lot of wasted potential when you don't have any Trashing cards to take advantage of it. Shelters are cool though and there's a lot of fun stuff. Intrigue has some cards that are absolutely essential (Masquerade, Bridge are the two biggest examples), and it's got some fun power cards (Torturer, Minion, Upgrade), but it's got a ton of niche gimmicks that don't work that often (Coppersmith, Scout) and it's just less consistent than other sets at being hella fun. Dominion itself (Base set) is alright, it's pretty tame and has some really awful cards, but as the first set someone plays with it's pretty important that its laid out the way it is, and it really is the best "starter pack" possible.

Alchemy isn't so bad it's not worth playing, it's got a lot of fun potential, but the Potion mechanics and Possession are both pretty unfortunate, and I don't like them that often.

2475

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Lack of quality posts

« on: March 08, 2015, 01:01:50 pm »

Thanks for all the helpful replies, everyone. Adding the filter to recent posts makes it a lot easier to navigate this website and participate.

I would just like to add that my comments were more intended as my initial perception of the forum, rather than what it accurately is. While I'm glad the forum isn't intimidating and welcomes posts like the ones I suggested, that's just kind of the initial vibe I got. Do with it what you will, just some thoughts.

Looking forward to some quality discussions about whatever niche card combo I bump into next.