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51

Dominion General Discussion / Re: How good is Fishing Village really?

« on: December 08, 2017, 02:48:36 pm »

A thought about villages: They're a means to an end, and none of us would buy them at all if we didn't have to. I can't think of a single draw card that I wouldn't simply rather put the +action token on instead of fiddling with villages.

The fact that FV does the main thing Villages do (grant extra actions) essentially twice as well as a normal village is a big advantage during the building phase, which is the most critical phase of engine play; when you don't yet have control. It allows you to overload more terminal draw, which gets you to the deck-drawing phase more quickly. And the duration effect mitigates half the draw-back, as it were. In addition, I always give cards that grant extra economy a value bump, because if it allows you to get away without buying early Silver, then the non-drawing is entirely mitigated because you've thinned your deck by another stop card. I'm a big fan.

52

Dominion General Discussion / Re: "But it worked"

« on: December 01, 2017, 10:48:40 am »

I mean sort of, but it's different for multiple reasons that matter

Well, in this case, it was being touted as a source of economy. The player described playing enough Barons and discarding enough Estates to make $22 and buy double Colonies. If the trashing, draw and extra actions was good enough to get that many Barons and Estates in hand and play them all, my guess is that the engine could have been a LOT more efficient and a lot faster to build. I mean, there had to be Platinums, right? 3xPlatinum, 1xGold, 1 Baron + 1 Estate also gets $22 and double colonies, but with 6 cards instead of 12, requiring buying a LOT fewer actions/draw cards

Now, if the game had Battlefield and another marginally useful $2 or some other indicators that would support a rush, especially if the engine was weak, maybe it makes sense, but it sure seems like an inefficient payload to me.

53

Dominion General Discussion / "But it worked"

« on: November 30, 2017, 12:41:28 pm »

I hope this will be a fun can of worms to open.

What are some bad plays you've lost to?

Have you ever played a game, on-line or IRL, where you lost to someone who was using a suboptimal strategy (for whatever reason...shuffle luck, playing a weak engine vs. BM and just barely missing the tempo shift, etc.) and tried to be helpful by pointing out misplays, only to be told "but I won, so therefore it worked."

I thought about this because of a thread about Inheritance in which someone describes winning by Inheriting Baron, which I pointed out was just Delve with downside and didn't seem like a particularly effective play.

Some others:

Keeping Cursed Gold in a deck-drawing engine because you can reliably trash the Curse every turn. CG+Curse+Trasher is three cards generating $3. Seems like Copper the hard way to me.

Playing the first of two Pearl Divers and revealing a Victory card...and topdecking it, because then the NEXT Pearl Diver has a chance to reveal a GOOD card.

54

Dominion Articles / Re: Inheritance

« on: November 30, 2017, 12:22:08 pm »

That's not particularly impressive. 8 Silvers and a buy is also double-Province.

And there's the core principle. Baron isn't a single card that generates $4. It's a set of two cards that generate $2 each. That's Silver. Inheriting Baron is basically allow you to buy $2 Silvers that also give you a +buy but cost actions to play. Using up those extra actions is a steep price for a tiny upgrade over Silver.

Inheriting Baron is basically Delve with downside.

55

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

« on: November 30, 2017, 11:46:48 am »

Seems to me the Capital+Crypt deck, in reality, will be a little messier to set up than I described. I was just reducing it to the bare minimum apples-with-apples comparison to highlight the pretty substantial deck-thinning effect of leaving so many cards on the table between turns.

The reality is that you'll probably have one or two Silvers or $2 action or whatever for early economy as you're trashing. Even if you buy Capital first, a single Capital/Silver/Silver turn buys two Crypts and then you're in business, paying off the debt quickly and buying engine parts two at a time. If you buy Crypt/Capital first, a Capital/Silver/Silver/Crypt lets you get another Crypt/Capital with no debt, and every pair you buy adds two cards that won't increase your deck size because they're staying on the table every turn, eliminating the need to buy more draw along with it. By comparison, every time you buy Gold, you have to buy more actions/draw to get it in hand, slowing down the Gold version by comparison.

56

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Annoying and potentially harmful card anti-synergies

« on: November 29, 2017, 05:01:36 pm »

Faithful Hound and Quest are not a very strong synergy, if not an active anti-synergy.

Why, just because Gold is often bad? Seems to me once you have six cards in hand, including a Hound, you could discard your hand for a Gold as many turns in a row as you wanted. Not that one Gold per turn is all that exciting. Getting six cards and a Hound in hand could be accomplished simply with another Hound.

I mean, as combos go, it seems right up there with Golem/Counting House. Cute, but probably not worth doing. I'm not sure that's an anti-synergy. It's only annoying and potentially harmful in the sense that you might get suckered into actually doing it.

I remember something similar happening when I saw that Druid came up with the Gift that draws two cards and discards two. The kingdom had Faithful Hound in it, so I started imagining how I might leverage the discard. Then I realized I was trying to figure out how to turn the Druid into a slightly worse version of Faithful Hound. Duh. I didn't need the +buy that bad.

57

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Empires cards I still don't get

« on: November 29, 2017, 04:52:48 pm »

Annex is a free 3VP for the player who ends the game with an extra buy, so it changes the endgame math slightly.

I've also used it once or twice in a really awful kingdom where terminal draw + money seemed like the best strategy. TD+BM suffers badly from greening, and if it's going to take three turns between shuffles, buying Annex just before a shuffle can turn the next shuffle from Duchy/Duchy/Duchy to Debt+Duchy/Province/Province. Kingdoms that bad are pretty rare, though. And it may be that I'm just not good at money kingdoms. I should probably buy more Gold and green slightly later.

58

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Homage to the Best Card

« on: November 29, 2017, 04:40:37 pm »

Yeah, maybe another one with axes like "fun" and "power"?

Help yourself. Feel free to modify the data points or add your own.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13g7cPY-Gu_uzPgQDFMPpEJ9f58XBz0plcvU8tvuki_Q/edit?usp=sharing

Now, if anyone can figure out how to make column A appear as data point labels, that would be ideal.

59

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

« on: November 29, 2017, 03:55:57 pm »

wouldn't it be simpler to buy 2*Gold than Capital+1*Crypt?

I had that exact same thought. Actually, it's Capital + 2*Crypt, because you need two crypts for each Capital if you're setting it aside every turn and drawing deck.

Wait, let's do the math.

6 Golds makes $18 for a double-Province and change. So you technically only need one additional card worth of draw (and a +buy. So one Margrave overdraws your deck by one card.)

3 Capitals makes $18 and gives you the buy. It would take 6 Crypts to set them aside. However, every turn STARTS with six cards on the table (three Capitals and three Crypts) and only 3 cards in the rest of your deck! Turn is play $18, buy Provinces, play three Crypts, set aside three Capitals, clean up the 3 Crypts from the previous turn.

It needs NO draw, and can even work with 100% reliability after the first double Province buy! The degree to which leaving cards on the table between turns helps a deck-drawing engine keeps surprising me, even though it shouldn't. Nod to Gear and Archive.

So the math says: 9 cards at $5 each is 45, 6 cards at $6 each is 36, plus Margrave or equivalent puts you at a similar cost, but with less reliability. The math looks good on this one. With decent draw it could be huge, though the Crypt split seems pretty important.

Now, the math on keeping Cursed Gold around just because you can reliably trash the curse every turn in your deck drawing engine, on the other hand... (yes, I saw someone do this. I pointed out that between the Cursed Gold, the Curse, and the trasher, they were using three cards to generate $3. That's Copper the hard way.)
 

60

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

« on: November 29, 2017, 03:37:28 pm »

Just had Changeling/Conquest in a game. Points and two more future Stables, please!

Ok, wait, let's just short-circuit this altogether.

Changeling / http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php/Gainer#Silver_gainers

Just go down the list and imagine how it works with Changeling. Usually pretty darn well. Ok, maybe not with Raid so much. And does Bureaucrat gain the Changeling to the top of your deck?

61

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Substrings in card names

« on: November 24, 2017, 12:07:07 pm »

Do you have a plain-text list of all of the card names? I could write a Python script in about ten minutes that would give you those answers.

62

Dominion General Discussion / Re: How carefully/slowly do you play?

« on: November 23, 2017, 11:48:24 am »

I've reached that tipping point where I'm starting to slow way down.

Even cards that only do one thing now make me hesitate. Will I be triggering a reshuffle I don't want? Will I be drawing key actions dead and making them skip the shuffle? Even if my engine is drawing deck, can I build up enough actions to play a gainer first and then draw cards? Should I use this sifter early to draw key components, or use it late to set up the next hand with extra draw components? And then there's the buy phase.

I just played a few games where certain turns did leave me thinking longer than I used to. I skipped playing a Hunting Grounds because I knew my Champion was still in the deck and I didn't want to skip it. I had a deck-drawing engine and kept hesitating to figure out if there was an action left in my deck I wanted to Ghost at the end of my turn rather than draw it and waste the Ghost. Just playing actions/draw/actions/draw/actions/draw/payload is no longer good enough.

In the 7-colonies-left game above, $26 coin is actually pretty tricky. Three GMs only gets you to $32, one lousy coin shy of triple-Colony. So, do you have enough draw for three GMs and a Copper (ick?) Two GMs and a Colony gives you a $30 for double-Colony/Province turns to finish out, which seems like a resonable compromise, since two Colonies and nothing is committing to full greening now and possibly squandering the leftover $4 each turn. It might be necessary to scroll up in the log and read the opponent's play carefully in order to decide how the rest of the game will play out. I've thought about it now for several minutes and I wasn't even playing. It also sounds like the state of the piles could make a big difference in that game.

63

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Payload first

« on: November 21, 2017, 05:28:25 pm »

To clarify: Treasure is payload. Even that Silver you open with for early economy, because even if you trash it later, it's usually pretty late when you do.

Conventional wisdom is that treasure, on its own, isn't a particularly good payload for an engine, and trying to build up to multiple Province buys in the absence of some kind of attack or alt+vp or token generator will usually lose to BM.

However, there are so many alt treasures now and so many treasure enablers they're frequently good engine components. I mean, if Fortune doesn't say "make a draw engine" I'm not sure which treasure does. Ok, HoP. Anyway.

I'm just saying that the voice in my head that used to look at non-drawing terminal X and say "draw deck first, buy X later" has become a voice that says "Hang on...get one copy of X now, because it will accelerate the build and/or slow your opponent. Don't wait to draw deck."

Looking at the reductionist case: The turn 3-4 Donate that goes down to two or three cards. Those are generally payload cards because you don't need draw, and you exponentially add draw and economy from there.

64

Dominion General Discussion / Payload first

« on: November 21, 2017, 01:01:26 pm »

In continuing to improve my engine-building skills, I have a question to pose to the community: How often do you buy payload first, or at least, as early as you can afford it?

I ask because players appreciate the value of strong trashing, drawing deck, and using gainers to acquire engine pieces. Where I've often found myself, however, is focusing on these elements too narrowly and waiting too long to get payload. We all know about the Village Idiot, but there are times when I feel like a Smithy idiot. Drawing a bunch of junk feels like spinning my wheels, and I will sometimes struggle to get an engine up to speed. Drawing three cards and having $4 to spend is a wake-up call.

At some point, I started asking myself things like "How am I going to hit $5 on the second shuffle" and the answer is often "buy at least one payload card before turning towards actions/draw cards."

In particular, terminal payload cards that give any of coin/buy/attack/gain. Militia and Swindler can be good openers, for example. Weak cards like Messenger less so, but if I know I want at least one Messenger for the +buy, I'm starting to feel like buying it early and using it to spike $5 often makes more sense than prioritizing draw and buying it later only when I'm drawing deck. A card like Bridge, even if your plan is to load up on extra actions and play as many as you can get, is a card you want just one of early in the building process for the economy, then turn to actions/draw, then turn back to all the Bridges you can eat.

Payload attacks, likewise, seem better to get as early as possible, particularly junkers. I'll try to at least buy one early, then switch to prioritizing buying enough draw to play it as many times as possible, only buying multiples if there is a benefit to playing multiples in a single turn.

The point is, I've been shifting my build order from trashing/draw/payload to trashing/payload/draw and finding that's better most of the time. (Did I say "trashing" yet? Trashing, trashing, trashing. I'll open double Lookout or double Ambassador or double Forager without blinking. I need no convincing on that front. I even get misty-eyed driving by the Goodwill with their "Donate" sign.) And yeah, sometimes the payload is treasure, but I don't have to like it. I'll hold my nose and open Chapel/Silver if I have to.

And I feel like there's another reason to buy a payload card as early as possible, and it's kind of the dirty secret of Dominion strategy: Your plan might not work. I know we all love the deck-drawing, pile-controlling, meat-grinding, rock-crushing engines that most of us are capable of. But sometimes, it's just not fast enough, or the opponents' attacks are more crippling than we expected, or something about the game state changes in such a way that it's clear that the engine just isn't going to explode; payload cards are going to be more likely to get you to an alternate win condition than superfluous action/draw cards that aren't able to do their one job. You may say "but by then you've already lost," but that's not always true in messy games and can depend on what the opponent buys and in what quantity. Or just plain luck.

Special mention goes to multi-purpose cards like Steward and Count who can trash early and pivot to providing economy later, and to cards that fill the payload/draw role all at once like Torturer and Wild Hunt, so there are some fuzzy boundaries.

It all comes down to balancing draw with something worth drawing.

Comments?

65

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Seprix's Tier Lists For Every Dominion Set

« on: November 21, 2017, 11:55:27 am »

would you consider (Picky Village) a Splitter even though it would never help you play two Bridges in one turn (and would proactively prevent such a thing for the rest of the turn)?

Wait, let's see if I can be a straw-Awaclus. Royal Carriage on the mat, Picky Village, Royal Blacksmith to draw, extra action from PV allows Throne Room on King's Court, call RC on King's Court, triple Highway, Bridge and Wine Merchant. Play a Counterfeit. $16, 8 buys, piledrive Provinces.

Looks like a splitter to me! Imp/Royal Blacksmith would have just made sadness.

P.S. Gives me more appreciation for how hard it is to write card text without rules issues. Would Picky Village prevent calling RC to re-play an action? A card like that would call for a clarified definition of what "play" means.

66

Dominion: Nocturne Previews / Re: Nocturne Initial Impressions

« on: November 19, 2017, 05:13:02 pm »

Shepherd kingdom: Rabble engine actually had a significant chance of improving other players' next turn. Mind blown.

That said, it's a little easy to get carried away. Playing a Shepherd and discarding one estate is equivalent to a do-nothing +1 card +1 action Pawn. Playing Shepherd and discarding two estates is equivalent to playing one Lab. Fine if you can't trash your starters, but if you're actually gaining additional Estates on purpose, there better be another good reason (Wild Hunt, Battlefield, Inheritance, Labyrinth, Alt+VP rush...)

Conclave isn't Conspirator on steroids because it doesn't draw cards. I always put a big, fat red flag on any card that doesn't draw, no matter how good it is. But jamming a couple of $4 Festivals in an engine deck sure has its uses. If you can buy one less Silver for your draw engine, then that's one less card you need to draw deck, so it mitigates its own drawback to some degree. Big fan.

I agree that Nocturne isn't super-enginey, but boy, does it ever make other engines explodey. So many gainers, economy accelerators and interesting payload cards. The accelerators really are tempting for money-leaning players, though. Had a Druid game with the trashing gift and the gold-gaining gift. One player went almost exclusively gain, the other almost exclusively trash. Classic money vs. engine. Money got a big lead, engine won in the end. Classic.

Also, Changeling loves gaining duration cards. Wharves for days.

67

Dominion: Nocturne Previews / Re: Nocturne Initial Impressions

« on: November 18, 2017, 08:26:58 pm »

Conclave is better than I expected.

It doesn't seem like much at first, but to review: We all know that opening with any sort of Village is bad because they do literally nothing in the first shuffle, but that eventually you'll need a bunch of them to get a terminal-based engine to kick off at all. Now we have a Village-variant that is absolutely worth opening. With one card, it gives you enough economy to hit $5, eliminates the possibility of colliding opening terminals, and provides you with extra terminal space you won't have to buy later. It's accelerates engine building by a full shuffle. It's very close to a $4 Festival.

It does like other villages, though. If you have to start an engine with Conclave/Draw, you'll want to be able to play Conclave/Village later for a unique, and the 3 actions you'll have as a result should be sufficient to play enough draw to dig for the rest of your payload.

I don't normally like non-drawing Villages, but so far this one's pretty sweet.

68

Dominion: Nocturne Previews / Re: Nocturne Initial Impressions

« on: November 17, 2017, 01:11:13 pm »

It's going to be a while before I stop snickering at the game log message:

"[player X] plays a Fool."

Boy, is Nocturne tricky. Love Pooka. Changeling is amazing with Lucky Coin, but really hard to play correctly. If you get it too early, you'll draw it dead by virtue of having nothing in play worth chucking it for. Just played a lovely Pooka/Changeling/Idol money deck, using free Changelings to get more Pooka's and Idols. The importance of Night cards being impossible to draw dead is hard to overstate.

The Boons keep being a little bit better than I expect them to be.

Also Goat. The only thing bad about Goat is that there can be only one. Possibly my favorite card in the set. One day I will get to crown my Goat, and he will be the king of Goats. Even the Prince of Stewards will be impressed.

I was a little sad when one of my Pookas ate my Goat, but there was no Goat food left, so it had to be done.

69

Dominion: Nocturne Previews / Re: Nocturne Initial Impressions

« on: November 17, 2017, 10:13:37 am »

I've always found it strange that there have only been 2 cards that just straight up nullify attacks.

Three. Moat, Lighthouse and Champion.

Two supply cards, though. So Champion has an asterisk. Also literally.

70

Dominion Articles / Re: Bard is not weak

« on: November 17, 2017, 09:34:13 am »

Agreed.

Opening with some way to get $2 with a single card in order to hit $5 after the first shuffle is so critical most of the time that it's usually the right call to open Silver (even in a kingdom that absolutely hates treasure) if the only other option are actions that only generate $1. Much of the time I'll trash that Silver at my first opportunity; the rest of the time it sits there like an ugly yellow lump mocking my weakness.

If there are power-5s, there's probably a decent engine, and probably ample terminal space to afford Bard as a piece of the payload.

And on balance, there are far more effects in the game that somehow combine with actions compared with effects that combine with treasure. How many events, landmarks, gainers or simply other action cards are there that do something with an action card, but would look at a Silver and shrug?

So far, Nocturne cards are surprising me with their speed after playing a few games on-line. In turns, that is. The amount of time it takes to figure out what to do, on the other hand...

71

Dominion: Nocturne Previews / Re: Nocturne Initial Impressions

« on: November 17, 2017, 09:13:38 am »

why Guardian? its too similar too Light house. So why?

Because there aren't enough reactions or other protection mechanisms in the previous sets to account for Hexes. It adds some balance. If a set adds attacks, it has to add defenses or the whole game tilts. No directed defense works for Hexes, so a universal attack neutralizer was the only option.

Plus, you can't draw a Night card dead, so it could be better when playing money or a slog that relies on a few big terminal draw cards, particularly if they're attacks. I'd think about throwing it in with Margrave or Torturer, especially if the engine was weak.

72

Dominion: Nocturne Previews / Re: Nocturne Initial Impressions

« on: November 16, 2017, 02:30:34 pm »

I suggested that Empires was the "eat your vegetables" expansion, providing many, many more ways to get points, including green cards that weren't even in your deck, and often damaging decks for the careless. On theme, Nocturne is the "patience is a virtue" expansion.

It seems to disproportionately dole out cards that do nothing on the current hand but set up for later. The night cards are obvious, giving no immediate benefit and mostly being used to set up the following turn or turns. But it's also gainer-heavy, and gainers generally give no benefit until after the next shuffle. And it has super-powered cards that are difficult to acquire, which are only going to be worth the trouble if they combine with the right pieces.

Because of this, my guess is that it will particularly reward players who have a well-thought-out detailed plan for their deck-building process, and severely punish those who don't. While that's generally the case in Dominion, it's been significantly amplified.

It's the kind of expansion that should make anyone who was thinking about building an adaptive Domonion bot algorithm throw up their hands and give up completely.

I predict having to repeatedly ask members of my IRL playgroup, "What were you thinking? What exactly was your plan?" after a Nocturne-card-related muddle of a deck goes utterly nowhere.

I love it! More skill-testers!

P.S. There will be many kingdoms where I ridicule players mercilessly if they use their wishes for Gold. I can already see it happening when it would be desperately foolish. I'm going to go write some canned insults to have on hand for the occasion right now...

73

Dominion: Nocturne Previews / Re: Don't be fooled, nothing for you here

« on: November 15, 2017, 06:37:00 pm »

On today's episode of "Gherald argues with himself..."

A:

(synergy) has a more useful and specific meaning, which is greater than the sum of its parts

Not A:

So, do Guide/Ghost Town have complementary uses? Sure, you can play your guide to skip past starting hands that have no terminals in them and then resolve your Ghost Town.

https://www.google.com/search?q=define:complementary

B:

I wouldn't say it doesn't exist

Not B:

Is this a 2-card "synergy"? Not really...

So playing that Guide didn't make that Ghost Town even a little, tiny bit better than it would have been otherwise? Clearly it did. So is it just a matter of degree? How much does it need to help before it crosses the magical Gherald binary on/off "now it has synergy" threshold? So "complementary" is a continuum but "synergistic" is binary?

A "useful application" of language is to communicate ideas and information. Reducing the degree to which cards work together to a binary yes/no proposition reduces the ability to communicate ideas and information about card relationships so significantly as to be utterly useless.

74

Dominion General Discussion / Re: How to Win Less...

« on: November 15, 2017, 12:46:24 pm »

Knowledge is power. Don't make newbies struggle through "discovering" the process of deck-building. Spell it out for them. Teach them how to win, not just how to play.

I usually let players analyze the kingdom on their own first, then tell me what they see, just to give them practice. I then describe particular card interactions and rules clarifications. I then tell them all of the possible strategies that I can see, usually including money and engine, and occasionally a rush, especially if it's three or more players, which cards you should buy and how many.

My favorite way to handicap myself is to play a crappy engine in a money kingdom, doing stuff like trying to use Native Village, a sifter and deck tracking as a substitute for a proper trasher. I try to pick the most difficult approach, just to build my own skills. I also announce when I'm doing something odd just to see if it works.

Even when a complex strategy loses, it's an opportunity to get newbies to look at cards in a different way. If it succeeds, well, at least I'm getting them to lean away from money, which is usually the right call.

Story: I go on long tirades about horrible yellow cards when I'm teaching. Money is the root of all evil, especially in Dominion. Ugly stop cards is all I see. Sometimes I buy or gain them, but I always feel dirty.

I was playing a (yikes) 5-player game with family, and the randomized kingdom was perfect for multiplayer: No attacks, no big draw, and no spammable cards or even cheap cantrips that would threaten a 4-pile ending. And an amazing, but tricky, engine that wanted literally no treasure at all: City quarter(!), Junk Dealer, Altar, Artificer, Baker, Horse Traders, Vault and some other stuff. No big draw. I told everyone about the interesting interaction with Artificer/Vault and Horse Traders, in that HT does NOT say "if you do" so you get the $3/+buy even with an empty hand. And boy, does that engine run like blazes with no treasure. Two CQs will do it. It came together super fast.

So what do I open? Junk Dealer (with my Baker token)...and Silver. The whole table erupted with "WTF" after my emphatic anti-treasure rant. I explained that I MUST spike $5 after my first shuffle to buy Vault or I'm not going to be able to get Altar for a long time. Trust me, that Silver's days were numbered. (Some players opened $4/$4 for HT and Walled Village. Gross. Hey, I can't play the game for them.)

Oddly enough, this deck had so much discard-for-benefit that I started single-Provincing a little early during the build and then double-Provincing later, because I got very thin and did the math and realized that without any $2+ actions (Multiple HTs would be dumb) building to $16/turn was impractical, but each card effectively added $1 to my Vault or Artificer. The Baker smoothing helped that particular cause quite a bit. It was an odd build that way, in that I was killing the last few coppers (and the lone Silver!) with Altar as I was adding single Provinces and gaining Bakers. One of the few times I've seen a deck get better during greening.

75

Dominion: Nocturne Previews / Re: Don't be fooled, nothing for you here

« on: November 15, 2017, 12:02:19 pm »

Personally, I find threads like this fascinating and informative, much like the equally explosive and somewhat annoying deck archetype discussions. Not because the terminology part of the argument is important, but because many extremely subtle and difficult game mechanics issues are hashed out in defense of particular positions. I almost always read something that gives me a new perspective on some aspect of the game.

So, let me suggest a possible perspective on the issue of synergy. The so-called "trivial" cases are not, in fact, all that trivial. The degree to which elements synergize or not is (apparently) actually extremely subtle and worth grading on a continuum, not as a binary proposition.

In fact, I would suggest that all elements have a relationship to others that has two simultaneous measures: The amount of synergy they have, and they amount of anti-synergy they have. It's not a yes/no. It's a how much. And it's BOTH. Always.

Example: Tactician/treasure. There is some synergy, because Tac sets up large hands and a +buy, and treasure gives you lots of non-terminal cash to spend. There is some anti-synergy, because Tac makes you discard treasure on the turn you play it. The only possible debate is the degree to which those terms apply, not whether they apply.

And to bring it right back to the original Guide/Ghost Town question: Those cards have some synergy, in that you can use Guide to find a hand that has at least one terminal draw card in it, and Ghost Town allows you to play that hand knowing that you can draw first and keep going. They also have some anti-synergy, in that you have to call the Guide without knowing what the sixth card would have been if you hadn't called it, and because there's some redundancy.

Saying that the term "synergy" does not apply to the relationship between game elements is like saying you can't apply the term "weight" to a feather or a helium balloon just because it's small or even negative. You can say that the synergy between elements is large or small or negative or trivial, but you can't say it doesn't exist.