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276

Dominion General Discussion / Re: When did you start playing Dominion

« on: April 14, 2016, 11:48:47 pm »

I've been playing less than a year. I'm a former MtG addict. It's been 642 days since my last game of Magic (sold my 20-year-old collection. cold turkey.) I tried Dominion while teaching a strategy games elective at a local high school and was immediately hooked. I had a brief "oh, no" moment, but realized that it was, in fact, possible to own the whole thing for a relatively modest investment, including custom storage solution and sleeves, and that it would not consume so much head space. Plus, it's a great family/friends game since there's no mechanism for picking on particular opponents.

I went and read the whole wiki early on and started practicing the principles. I always coach new players, and even not-so-new players who insist on doing, um, shall we say, sub-optimal things. Is it wrong to scold players who open Steward and then use it as coin on Steward/Estate/3xCopper hands so they can get that $5 they really want (and then complain later that they only draw the Steward with cards they don't want to trash?)

Great game. There's always something new to learn to improve your play, but without being overwhelming.

277

Dominion General Discussion / Re: How do you track your Duration cards?

« on: April 02, 2016, 08:27:53 pm »

When playing Duration cards, I always place them over to the left, next to the deck. At the beginning of the next turn, I slide them over to the right, next to the discard pile, making sure to point out to newbies for the hundredth time that they are NOT in the discard pile yet. Yes it matters. And keep your damn green cards in your hand until clean up! Yes, that also matters!! Don't get me started. Anyway, all other actions/treasures get played in the middle.

This makes sense to me because so many durations do something at the beginning of the turn, including many that draw cards, so putting them by the draw pile seems logical. Likewise, the ones near the discard pile are "on their way" to being discarded and will get cleaned up with everything else.

Of course, Hireling and Champion hang out ABOVE the draw pile.

It's interesting what players see as logical ways to play out cards. I always play things left-to-right, but I've known players that, when they play +action cards, play their other actions below them like a binary tree so that they can visually see which actions have been used up, rather than counting. Fascinating.

278

Let's Discuss ... / Re: Let's Discuss Adventures Events: Trade

« on: March 23, 2016, 10:49:24 am »

Not a fan.

You want to trash early and trash often, and this card lets you do neither. And keep in mind, it's not really a "trasher." It's an upgrader. It can't reduce your deck size and doesn't even give you the Silver in hand like Trading Post. Even using it to get rid of Estates is difficult, requiring a hand like Silver/Silver/Copper/Estate/Estate (or replace a Silver with a terminal silver action, etc.) So it's unlikely early without a lucky shuffle. Sure, it's "up to" two cards, but would you really pay 5 to turn one Estate into a Silver? Maybe if Harvest is the only 5 in the kingdom.

I feel like this should cost 4. At 3 it would be a broken opening, so I get that the price point is important. I just think it's nerfed into being almost unplayable.

279

Let's Discuss ... / Re: Let's Discuss Adventures Events: Scouting Party

« on: March 23, 2016, 10:12:19 am »

Setting up the next hand and controlling the reshuffle with a Counting House deck really is amazing. I recently played a Kingdom with Counting House, Beggar and Scouting Party. After the second reshuffle, every turn was CH, province, scouting party enough times to force the reshuffle before drawing (with all the copper still in play) and put the other CH on top.

But I do have to point out a couple of problem quotes:

3. Deck control for Chouse decks. Dump the coppers, setup Hamlet/ChouseX2

5. Being really mean after your last Possession turn (double Pillage for $2, joy; pretty much nothing but dead draw for $4).

Playing multiple Scouting Parties doesn't let you set up more than 2 cards on top of the deck. When you play the second one, you're looking at the top five cards, which include the two you just put back! You can't set up 3-card combos, and you can't stack 4 cards on a Possession turn.

In general, this is a pretty good event. Barring a power-2, it's almost always worth it with either an otherwise dead turn or some extra cash at the end of a buy. Virtually every deck archetype benefits from it. But I rarely go out of my way to play it; with 5, I'll almost always buy a 5 rather than Scounting Party/3. But because of that, unless it's the cornerstone of your strategy (see CH, Tunnel), it will often get skipped, pretty much getting played on exactly 2, or 10 (SP/Province), but SP/3 vs. a 5? SP/4 vs. a 6? SP/SP vs. a 4? SP/5 vs. a 7? (Maybe if it's Expand.) Maybe SP/5 vs. a 6. Maybe. Another thing that happens is if I hit a number that can only buy a terminal and I can't handle any more of them, this is a good alternative to making your deck worse.

280

Let's Discuss ... / Re: Let's Discuss Adventures Events: Raid

« on: March 12, 2016, 02:30:39 pm »

Heads up, newer players: This event is better than it looks. It's like Ironmonger. At first, you look at it and say "meh." Then you buy it a few times and suddenly you're winning out of nowhere.

Sure, I've played the insane Raid/Feodum rush against players who didn't believe in it and absolutely crushed Province players. But what really surprised me was the time Smithy-BM beat out a mediocre engine in a Colony game. Yes, Colonies! With just a couple of draw-3s and no treasure better than Silver. I couldn't believe it, either. But the engine player didn't want to buy Raid constantly and clog their deck with silver, so I never had to play 4-card hands. And I doubled a LOT of silver.

A couple of things about playing Raid/TD/BM: You might eventually need three or even four terminal draw cards. Raid decks can get enormous. But that also makes them resistant to greening. I don't know what the optimal tipping point is to go from gaining gobs of silver to greening; I'm sure it depends on the kingdom. And sometimes it won't be a good ideal to play this at all, but it's definitely a thing.

281

Let's Discuss ... / Re: Let's Discuss Adventures Events: Plan

« on: March 10, 2016, 12:40:34 pm »

Plan has some interesting opportunity-cost math.

Most trash-one instances are underwhelming (Raze, Trade Route, Forager) which don't tend to create lean, mean decks compared to the multi-trashers (Steward, Remake, Chapel) which can thin decks down to practically nothing. Plan is somewhere in between.

This event looks like a trash-one at first, but it compares surprisingly favorably to cards like Remake: You open Remake, [whatever] and then shuffle. You aren't playing Remake every turn, you're playing it roughly every OTHER turn, once per shuffle, so you're essentially alternating between trashing two (and maybe gaining one or having enough money left to buy something) and trashing none/buying one. So it averages out to be trash one/buy one every turn.

When you Plan, you're also buying one and trashing one every turn, provided you want a lot of whatever you're buying. It doesn't reduce your deck size, but if you're buying a cantrip, it's effectively reducing your deck size by one. Plus it starts trashing turn 2 instead of 3/4.

If you're not playing a one-card strategy, however, then you have to start buying other things and it stops working. Moving the Plan token usually isn't an efficient use of buys/turns. On the other hand, it also doesn't end up as a dead card in your hand as happens with many trashers once you start drawing it only with cards you want to keep.

So buy Plan if you're building something that doesn't require thinning your deck of all of your starting cards, but could benefit significantly from thinning as you build.

282

Let's Discuss ... / Re: Let's Discuss Adventures Cards: Port

« on: March 10, 2016, 12:11:57 pm »

I really hate having to contest Villages and will rarely open them. Just because my opponent(s) are being Village Idiots shouldn't force my hand into being one, too. I've watched it happen with Wandering Minstrels when it was the only source of +Actions and watched as players complained because they were skipping over their money and not accomplishing anything.

There are 6 port buys available vs. 10 buys of any other Village, so yeah, they can pile out quickly, but if your opponent(s) are hitting ports hard early, take a good look and see if you can get away with doing something else that punishes them for what will be a very slow start as they spin their wheels not buying cards that actually do something. Can you plan on losing the Port split intentionally?

By contrast, since there are 12 of them, sometimes players will do the right thing and start out with building/trashing, knowing that there are actually plenty of Ports to go around for several decent engines and "losing the split" really isn't that big a deal. I will happily lose the split 8-4 if I also have 4 Torturer/Rabble/Goons/Smithy/whatever, and my opponent has no engine parts and all their starting cards.

That said, I did hit Ports hard early in a game recently...with Training.

283

Let's Discuss ... / Re: Let's Discuss Adventures Events: Inheritance

« on: March 10, 2016, 11:55:35 am »

Drool-worthy Inheritance targets: Ironmonger and Magpie. There are insufficient words to express the glory.

Sure, sometimes you just use Inheritance to get rid of your Estates. Heck, I've inherited Feast when I had spare actions (would you buy Feast at $2?) but it's so much more fun when Inheritance can be the cornerstone of your strategy.

An insane Inheritance story: 3p IRL game. Two of us start Ambassadoring Estates at the others. Player 3 (my wife) doesn't. She absorbs them all while buying a little bit of money and sifters and manages to spike 7 and Inherit Crossroads, which does a startling impression of Madman for the rest of the game and wins easily.

284

Let's Discuss ... / Re: Let's Discuss Adventures Events: Pathfinding

« on: March 07, 2016, 03:31:09 pm »

His first five buys that game were Silver, Trade Route, Worker's Village*2 and Mine. On turn 7, he drew them all together, and the Silver became a Talisman. Hey presto, eight Peddlers.

Awesome. I calculate the odds of the opening 5 buys colliding spontaneously on turn 7 to be about 0.5% (not including the two cards drawn by the villages.)

That beats my favorite luckout, which was roughly 3% odds, opening Tournament, Silver, and on turn 3, spiking 7 coin (requiring my opening buys in the top half of the deck and all three Estates in the bottom half.) With the 7 coin, I inherited Magpie. Magpie, Magpie, Magpie, Province. Oh, look! A Followers prize! I'll draw two cards, give everyone a curse, and gain another pseudo-Magpie. Hooray!

I do enjoy how game-warping some of the events can be. Pathfinding is certainly on that list.

285

Let's Discuss ... / Re: Let's Discuss Adventures Cards: Peasant (and etc.)

« on: March 07, 2016, 12:38:43 pm »

Noteworthy: This path starts with two stop cards. If you can get past those, the rest can be spectacular. That's a big "if."

If you can do something useful with the Peasant's +buy early, great. If the Soldier's terminal silver will help you get a 5-cost you really need, terrific. If it would be useful later to have the Peasant's +buy due to a lack of other +buy in the Kingdom, maybe you buy two or more so that if they collide it's not a tragedy since you were going to keep one anyway. The trick is that this traveller does almost nothing on his own; it's all about making other cards better. So you have to ask yourself: What other cards are you planning on using, and does Teaching them help enough to matter?

Sifting and cycling is just as important as with Page, but the only one that helps with that is Fugitive. Again, getting there quickly enough is the challenge.

A consideration: Teacher can't put multiple tokens on the same action card, and anyone who has played Lost Arts, Training and Pathfinding knows that Lost Arts on a big terminal draw is incredible, as is Pathfinding on a cantrip. But are you really going to buy a bunch of terminal draw cards to collide with Peasant and Soldier? Probably not. So most of the time, you'll be using Teacher for distributing the +1 Card token and then later the +1 Coin token. On a different action. Because there's nothing better to do with it at that point.

The big picture strategy, I think, has to be:

1. Use Peasant to buy multiple cheap engine pieces, maybe even multiple Peasants if you can handle colliding terminals.
2. Use Soldier to buy more expensive engine pieces.
3. Use Fugitive to cycle into buying more engine pieces and exchanging travelers.
4. Use Disciple to double your key engine piece and gain more copies of it.
5. Use Teacher to make the engine pieces better.

I'm sensing a pattern here. The question is, does a Traveller or two speed up the engine building process more than buying other pieces. Maybe, maybe not. It could be a classic "win more" card. Your engine is working beautifully; using Teacher on a key card turbocharges it to the point where it's way overdrawing, a waste of resources.

I played this 4p Colony IRL recently, and my winning deck could only be described as bizarre. I had one Village-variant, a couple of Bakers, and Travellers. I bought as many Labs as possible. Other than the Travellers, I bought no other terminals or money; nothing that would slow the cycling. By the time I was finished, I had put +1 Card on Lab, I had a couple of Disciples who were reliably hitting Disciple-Lab (draw six cards, accumulate an extra +1 Action, gain a Lab. Nuts.) +1 Coin on Baker, which turned out to be more important than I thought it was going to be since I hadn't bought money, and I actually kept a Peasant and a Soldier deliberately un-exchanged since I was reliably drawing my entire deck with extra actions and needed the +buy, and the extra coin and mild discard attack was a nice bonus.

Was it fast to build all that? Not particularly. It worked great once it was done, but I was left feeling like there was probably a faster strategy available, and my guess is that, with this Traveller, you're going to feel that way a lot of the time.

Any synergies? Would a string of cantrip attacks (Spy, Urchin, Minion, Scrying Pool, Familiar,) + Soldier be interesting enough to just get a Soldier or two for a big wad of cash payload? Can you live the dream and use Teacher to put +1 action on Margrave or Rabble for the Soldier payload? is Fugitive/Tunnel a thing? It's easy to imagine all kinds of wild scenarios; making them work, and making them fast is the big issue.

286

Let's Discuss ... / Re: Let's Discuss Adventures Events: Pathfinding

« on: March 06, 2016, 06:07:37 pm »

I'll pedantly point out that after you buy something, you gain it.

I believe the word you're looking for is "pedantically."

(*ducking*)

287

Let's Discuss ... / Re: Let's Discuss Adventures Cards: Page (and etc.)

« on: March 06, 2016, 06:00:25 pm »

Warrior is definitely the second-coolest card in the Page line, and getting two Pages to be safe is probably right, but I challenge the view that buying lots of Pages is good because Warrior and then Warrior+Champion are awesome.

Agreed. The Attack of Warrior is only useful early before your opponent gets his Champ. After that, it's "just" a spare Lab. That is, not bad, but not a strategy on its own. Pipe dreams of trashing your opponents deck are a trap. Getting to Champ is the priority, and in the meantime, you have to stumble over terminals that give you treasure. Ick. But...

What if you plan ahead on this "unwanted" treasure appearing, you don't have to buy any and can focus more energy on trashing while your Travellers do their work, making things like Bonfire and Forager particularly good. Just throwing some numbers out there, Let's say you buy four Pages. You can quickly find yourself with a deck containing 4 silvers, 3 coppers, 1 Gold, a Champion on board, three Warriors, and let's say a terminal Silver+buy that you bought early, and a generic Smithy that you picked up along the way. That's exactly 14 cards in your deck (and one on the table!) and exactly 16 coin, two buys, and 9 cards of drawing power, which is enough to draw your whole deck starting with a high chance of having 2 draw cards in your starting hand. And you didn't have to buy any of that treasure.

The question is: Is it faster to buy other terminal draw cards or other non-Travelers rather than the 3-4 Pages knowing that you will also have to buy the treasure you need to get the double buy along the way somewhere?

I genuinely don't know the answer. How good are the simulators at answering this sort of question?

288

Let's Discuss ... / Re: Let's Discuss Adventures Events: Pathfinding

« on: March 06, 2016, 05:08:14 pm »

Imagine a game like the one where some guy gained eight peddlers on turn 7, and now think what he can do with Pathfinding.

I assume he bought 8 Peddlers on turn 7, because you don't get the discount with gainers other than HoP (Sorry, this is just me trying to fit into the Dominion Community of Pedants. It's hard to resist.) But anyway, Pathfinding Peddlers might be way more cards than you need. With a little trashing and a card like Hamlet, you can piledrive the Peddlers in no time. But: Do you have 16 coin in your deck (including the Peddlers?) If not, then you still have to buy more money, THEN you can start getting double-buys. If you skip two guaranteed Province buys (8 plain-old Peddlers will get you a Province a turn in their sleep) in order to build up to double-buys, then you would need THREE double-buys to make up for the lost tempo. If Pathfinding Peddlers is the plan, make sure you have 16 coin in your deck first, otherwise...

With Pathfinding: Turn 8:Pathfinding, 9:Money, 10:double Province, 11: double Province, 12: double Province
Without: Turn 8:Province, 9:Province, 10:Province, 11:Province, 12:Province

I've lost plenty of games where I've attempted to build up to double-buys and succeeded in doing so, but lost to plain, old single buys.

Like so many things, Pathfinding is only good when it's faster than the alternative.

For me, learning to play Dominion has been a long process of learning to do the most efficient thing rather than the coolest thing. Putting Pathfinding on just about anything is pretty high up the coolness scale.

289

Let's Discuss ... / Re: Let's Discuss Adventures Cards: Page (and etc.)

« on: March 06, 2016, 03:50:55 pm »

Warriors don't really help your Engine run...If the Warriors are contested, you may only get 2-3 of them. Hardly enough for a draw engine.

Well, they certainly help more than Treasure Hunters or Heroes! +2 cards is better than 0 (actually, -1 since they both gain treasure!) The point is, if you buy multiple Pages, upgrade one to Champ and the rest to Warrior, whatever that number is.

Sure, you could buy only one Page, planning on playing Champion + lots of terminal draw cards that are better than the +2 from Warrior, but if your opponent is buying Pages, you had better hope their Warrior doesn't hit your Treasure Hunter or Warrior or your game is completely over. Better to have a little bit of insurance that turns into a Lab than be dead in the water.

Are there other things you can do with the Page path? Sure, there are always edge cases. Treasure hunter/Feodum might be a thing, except for Warriors trashing...um...everything in your deck. Hero/Remodel might be a thing to gain Gold/Platinum and remodel to Province/Colony. But I submit that Champ/leftover Warriors should be the most common way to play this path barring something unusual.

I'm not buying the idea of upgrading all of the leftovers to Heroes. Sure, you can gain a lot of platinum, but even a hand of 4 platinum only buys one Colony, barring a Workshop/Nomad Camp/Messenger in the same hand, and if you're playing a bunch of Travellers too, should your luckiest possible hand be a hand with none of them in it? One Platinum is enough to buy a Colony a turn with halfway decent draw. If you want multiple buys, you need a reliable draw engine, not more big money.

One more thing: As great as Champ is with terminal draw, it's a delicate balancing act. You can't exactly buy four Smithies and just wait around for your Champ.

290

Let's Discuss ... / Re: Let's Discuss Adventures Cards: Page (and etc.)

« on: March 06, 2016, 12:44:44 pm »

Travellers are only efficient when you're cycling like a madman (or a Madman?) Warehouse FTW.

So, the most important thing is sifting and drawing. Only Warrior does that. Barring an edge-case like Feodum, you simply want to buy several pages, upgrade one of them to Champion, and the rest stop at Warriors. Period. Even then, you want some trashing or the engine will stall.

What you want is an engine, and a Laboratory engine (which is what Warriors do) will choke badly on too much treasure. Treasure hunter will gain some silvers on its way to Warrior, and Hero will gain one Gold/Platinum on its way to Champion, and that's plenty of cash. You're not playing Big Money or you wouldn't buy Travellers.

A terminal draw can also help, though you risk drawing a Traveller dead and missing a reshuffle, but even then, cycling the ones already in your discard is probably worth it, and it becomes non-terminal once you hit Champion. Track where your top Traveller is.

This Traveller is quite good. Just remember: There's no +buy in it, and all of the treasure-gaining is non-optional, meaning this chain will break itself if played carelessly.

291

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Dominion Paintings

« on: March 06, 2016, 12:27:31 pm »

I hate to be that guy, but in my opinion, with very few exceptions, the card art in Dominion is really, really bad. Much looks like amateurs trying too hard, like art students who aren't quite making it. The detail is sloppy, the perspective is off, and the proportions and colors aren't sufficiently correct to qualify as impressionistic. The figures and faces are painful to behold. Even art trying to be "cartoonish" has to have correct minimal elements, and they rarely are. Of the card art posted, for example, only Noble Brigand looks like it was done by a professional.

Compare the cards to other professional commercial artists; anything from book covers to (modern) Magic cards. Dominion art is just not good.

And yes, faces and figures are very hard. For a wall mural, I would strongly recommend simply the logo and a landscape, which is much easier to pull off, such as the Hinterlands cover, Feodum, Island, etc. Calm, serene, and nothing to stare at you.

292

Let's Discuss ... / Re: Let's Discuss Adventures Events: Pathfinding

« on: March 06, 2016, 11:46:47 am »

I think the key element is to do some math to calculate how much benefit you're getting. This event is at its best with the cheapest cantrip possible. If you can open with some sort of +coin/+buy and piledrive Pearl Divers or Pawns, Pathfinding turns them all into Labs with upside; you go from a bunch of 2-cost cards to 5-cost+ cards and start drawing your deck much faster than buying village/terminal engine parts. Of course, the trouble there is that you're not helping your deck much in the meantime. Have a plan: Nomad Camp, Silver, Copper, Copper, Pawn for coin+card gets you to 8 if the card is a Copper. With 4-5 Pawns, you're in business (...maybe. It's shuffle 3: Do you know where your Estates are?)

By contrast, putting this on Lab or Stables is often gilding the lily. You've already spent gobs of turns and coin on premier one-card-engine cards that are probably already drawing your deck or close to it, and pathfinding them can result in you drawing more cards than are in your deck, which is a waste of resources. Spending time and turns to build an engine that draws twice as many cards as there are in your deck is kind of the flip side of the Village Idiot. (The Smithy Idiot? Or is that someone who buys too many terminal draw cards and complains every time there's a collision?)

And let's not forget the object of the game. If you skip your first province buy to do this, how sure are you that the result will be a post-pathfinding double-buy to make up for the loss of tempo to your opponent? Or, failing, that, a deck that buys a province a turn without stalling when your opponent is playing a strategy that is almost certain to stall after a reshuffle?

Yes, +card is amazing, and yes, it's almost always worth it, but at that price point, know when to ignore it.

293

Game Reports / Tactician Rube Goldberg

« on: February 17, 2016, 12:35:51 pm »

IRL 4P game. Kingdom: (Colony/Platinum)

Forge, Border Village, Goons, Tactician, Outpost, Herald, Scheme, Storeroom, Coin of the Realm, Pearl Diver

I have no idea what the optimal strategy would have been, but the cards supported this crazy machine. I had to try it. Once it set up, it did this:

(Tactician second turn, Coins of the Realm already on the Tavern mat)

Scheme, call CRs as necessary, Goons, Goons, Goons, Goons, Forge away junk, Outpost. Play CRs for later. Profit.

On cleanup, Scheme the Tactician back on the deck. On the Outpost turn, play Tactician, discarding two cards. Rinse and repeat.

Maybe double-Tac would also have worked, (maybe with Outpost allowing play of a 10-card hand followed by an 8-card hand?) but the importance of the Coin of the Realm to generate the actions needed to play all those terminals made that questionable. Border Villages are expensive (sharing a price point with Goons!) and tend to pile out 4P games, and getting the Goons going was top priority. It set up surprisingly quickly and ended on piles, naturally.

What a nutty game Dominion can be.

294

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Neat and potentially useful card interactions

« on: February 02, 2016, 02:36:11 pm »

Combo: Tactician + Mission (or Outpost?) (+ saver)

I did some searching and couldn't find this combo anywhere, so I present it here for consideration.

The issue with double-tac is that you have to accumulate virtual coin. This combo allows you to basically play double-tac with regular ol' treasure. Tactician already gives you a +buy, so after very little treasure upgrading, each buy phase is: Colony/Province, mission. On your mission turn, all you're doing is drawing your other Tactician and playing it, setting up a ten-card hand every "real" turn.

It works especially well with ways to guarantee the Tactician on the Mission turn (Haven, Gear, Save.) This can turn the deck into a 100% shuffle-luck-proof auto-buy machine.

Comments? Should the wiki article list Mission/Outpost as synergistic cards with Tactician since it gives you something extremely worthwhile to do on an otherwise suboptimal nerfed "extra turn?" Or does the combo rely too heavily on a saver or shuffle luck (or perhaps a stacker like Cartographer, or a sifter like workshop when your discard pile is empty and your other Tactician is already in your hand? Other ways to ensure a Tactician on the nerfed turn?) Or are Mission/Outpost more abusable than I'm imagining? Maybe it only works on non-engine boards?

This came up in a game and I had it absolutely in the bag, except that I lost count and trashed one too many coppers, leaving me with 14 coin each turn reliably. Oh, wait. Colony + Mission is 15. Can I go back two turns and get that copper back? Lost by one Colony when I had to use a buy to set back up. D'oh! To quote David St. Hubbins, "It's a fine line between clever and stupid."

295

Dominion Articles / Re: Combo: Transmogrify + Ambassador

« on: January 20, 2016, 07:00:02 pm »

Yes, multi-player Ambassador is very weird indeed. In this particular game, there were no other cursers. As expected, the estates pile did empty. There was also another cheap pile. Squire, I think? I opened Transmogrify/Ambassador, showed my trick which started a curse war and ultimately emptied the curse pile, and as everyone struggled to figure out a way to buy a Duchy or two with no trashing in the kingdom(!), I three-piled the Squire, having given away no Estates at all, and won on the strength of all those 1-pointers. It was a very strange, don't-try-this-at-home kind of win (7 points!)

I remember one other oddball Ambassador game where I got caught flat-footed. Again, multiplayer, and again, the inevitable rush to empty the Estate pile happened, at which point my wife, who had not even purchased an ambassador(!) had been sucking up the estates and maneuvering to try to exactly hit 7 with silver and a little bit of draw. Then she Inherited Crossroads. With a deck consisting of over 20 estates. I've never seen anything like the next few turns: Crossroads draw 2, Crossroads draw 5, Crossroads draw 8, buy a Province. I suppose I should have seen it coming.

I'm pretty good at two-player, but multi-player can be so unpredictable. How many people are going to go for Fools Gold? Enough to make it worthless? Will enough other players use that attack card with a marginal benefit against each other so that I can just sit back and defend and advance my position without having to buy any of them and pollute my deck? Which possible deck archetypes have the same couple of opening buys so that I can switch strategies after seeing how my opponents open? Will a pile empty fast enough to upgrade Cities? Will getting to a Province a turn as quickly as possible win a race, or will player B be so slow in getting his share that player C will have time to set up a couple of double-buys to pass me? I can see why it's so hard to simulate.

296

Dominion Articles / Combo: Transmogrify + Ambassador

« on: January 20, 2016, 01:26:06 pm »

This combo appeared in a multi-player game recently. I couldn't find any discussion about it, so I thought I'd post it here to see if it's worth thinking about. It certainly won the multi-player slog in this game.

I know ambassador is already fantastic and Transmogrify is "meh." I also know that every now and then an Ambassador player will buy a curse just so that the Ambassador can hand them out, provided you have a way to line them up, which can be difficult.

However, Transmogrify is "gain a card up to 1 more than the trashed card" and is also "put that card into your hand." And it just sits there waiting for you to draw Ambassador (with at least one copper.)

Sure, it's two cards, but how great is any turn which starts "Trash a copper" followed by "Everybody else gets a curse?"