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Dominion General Discussion / Re: Epic Fails Thread
« on: October 04, 2019, 03:47:59 am »
There was the time when I absent-mindedly opened remake, with shelters, poor house, no decent 2ers, and Steward on the board.
I don't know magic well, but self-milling is discarding your own cards from the deck to get a powerful benefit, right?[. .]
Unlike discards in Dominion, discards in Magic are quite permanent.
If so, I think a better comparison might be trash-from-top-of-deck effects, which are some of the most polarising attacks in Dominion.
An analogue of self-milling would then be Leprechaun or Cursed village hitting War or Locusts, which while occasionally hilarious can lead to some negative experiences (I'm still trying to recover from the time I killed my own goat with locusts).
In addition, Magic has a ton of reasons why it's good to have more things in your own graveyard, such as cards that give you benefits based on what's in your graveyard and cards that can be played from your graveyard.
Being weaker than KC doesn't mean that it needs to cost less than it...I don't think you would skip Poacher in either situation, with Captain or KC in the Kingdom. So it is a sunk cost, a decision you made early in the game to improve your economy no matter what.This is not sound logic. In order to play KC-Poacher, you need to already have a Poacher, and connect the two. The cost of that is $11 and 2 buys and the cost of connecting.Yeah, I meant Poacher, the modern Peddler.I don't think that Captain is a $7. A simple heuristic is vanilla stuff (sure, there is other stuff like Captain being bad because it is a Duration and misses shuffles and being good because doing stuff at the start of your turn increases concistency). If you play around with it you can easily see that it is weaker than KC. For example Captain-Peddler has net effects of +1 Card, +1 Action, +2 Coins whereas KC-Peddler has net effects of +1 Card, +2 Actions, +3 Coins.
I mean. Sure. But you can't make Captain hit Peddler the second time, and the first is capital-T tricky because you'd need to hit it with a bunch of cost reduction first. Also can you talk through those numbers? I'm not seeing how you're getting them.
Captainer-Poacher is +1 Coin this turn and next turn it is what Poacher says: +1 Card, +1 Action, +1 Coin
The gross effect of KC-Poacher is triple everything. But you played two cards so you net draw only 1, you had to play an Action to play KC so you only net 2 Actions and you get all the 3 Coins.
Viewing at the net effects of the vanilla stuff never gets the entire picture as it ignores all the important subtleties. But it is a good way to start (in case it is still not clear, when you play a card you gotta do -1 Card and -1 Action to get to the net effects; a cantrip is thus neutral).
Anyway, I am totally aware that this vanilla thing is imprecise but it nonetheless illustrates that Captain is likely weaker than KC (impossible to compare Captain with Forge or Expand) and thus priced correctly.
The skill multiplier means that our ability to predict the outcome of a game with that card, based on the ratings of the players, is that much affected. There's a video by aku chi that explains all of the stats at length; it was way long and I haven't sat through it. markus made the charts and well on the discord you can ask questions about it in #skynet.
It seems clear that there are luck-based scenarios for Smithy, e.g. do you draw it with a village or not, that could affect its skill multiplier. However Laboratory also has a low skill multiplier. So probably a bigger factor is, these cards are so simple. They don't give you anything to finagle well.
QuoteI like it when Treasure-heavy strategies are occasionally competitive.
...
When people denounce Gold gainers on the grounds that Gold is a bad card to have in your deck, I find myself hoping they're wrong or, if they're right, that Donald does something to fix that. Money ought to stay relevant!
Of course Money is always relevant, particularly Gold: It's always in the kingdom!
QuotePhilosophers stone: your decks get pretty big, so this is a really good card.
Actually it's maybe the single worst card in Dominion, besides maybe Transmute.
Harvest begs to differ.1. Cornucopia : My love for cornucopia is a bit irrationnal. But this little set is very solid. With the exception of tournament, I like every single card in it.
Even Harvest?
Harvest!
No, Harvest is marginally better than Transmute and Phil Stone. Sometimes you just want terminal money, like in a Tac deck for example.
The Hexes are more hurtful than the Boons are beneficial, though. Or at least it seems that way to me.Yes, but the Hex-dealers suck (apart from Vampire), and the Boon-givers are all kinda good.
Skulk seems good enough.
Strictly better than the #1 Ruin, guys.
I can actually imagine a situation where I'd rather buy Ruined Market than Skulk.
QuotePhilosophers stone: your decks get pretty big, so this is a really good card.
Actually it's maybe the single worst card in Dominion, besides maybe Transmute.
1. Cornucopia : My love for cornucopia is a bit irrationnal. But this little set is very solid. With the exception of tournament, I like every single card in it.
The Hexes are more hurtful than the Boons are beneficial, though. Or at least it seems that way to me.Yes, but the Hex-dealers suck (apart from Vampire), and the Boon-givers are all kinda good.
Skulk seems good enough.
Asking for automatch to work with created tables would be a lot more feasible. I would totally agree with that.What does automatch with created tables mean? If there are two players at separate tables that want to play their next game with Black Market that they should get matched automatically? In practice, you would wait forever.
Sirlin is a terrible person. And sure, judge the person not his works, but his games are non grata because the reason he is a terrible person is because of his terrible actions involving his games. If Hannibal Lecter's board game existed solely because of his cannibalism, I wouldn't play it even if it was the most finely-designed deckbuilder of all time, because I would be encouraging and subsidizing terrible behavior.
But they also happen to be terrible games, though, which makes it all much easier. They fall into that particularly pernicious modern cluster of games designed by people who are excellent at marketing but not excellent at design. See, e.g., Secret Hitler.
Archive is not a whole lot better than Pearl Diver with Plan on it
this disease won't stop until the entirety of F.DS is consumed, will it?
Well there also Secret Chamber!Cursed Village / Torturer
Cursed Village / Torturer engines really don't do that much because CV is a superlative counter to discard attacks (probably the best).
Counter: This isn't really an antisynergy because any draw-to-X counters any discard attack - we knew this already.
Counter to the counter: This is a special case because CV is something you could use to build a torturer engine. Library might be a good defence against torturer chains but it won't let you play any yourself. Nobody builds a library / torturer deck. But because CV is a ruddy good village, it's a good candidate for building a torturer chain, and also a superb way to defend against one. For me, this counts as an AaPHCA-S.
Also I hexed myself war which trashed one of the two torturers I had and that's not an AaPHCA-S, just a risk of using CV, but it did anger me somewhat.
Cursed Village does not really play optimally with Torturer as in most cases all CV after the first might as well have been Necropoles. Also, both cards are competing for the $5 purchase slot. Of course theres a better chance to start the Torturer chain after the first CV play, but all in all I'd rather have good old Fishing Village to complement my Torturers.
Nice complements to CV are cards that supply what CV does not: Vaults, Storerooms or Horse Traders. They enable your hand to breathe in and out and generate $$$ in the process.