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1

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

« on: November 11, 2023, 09:18:19 am »

Treasury and Villa allows you to return all of your treasuries to the top deck when you gain the Villa allowing you to get a VP card after you Villa and still keep all your Treasuries topdecked.

I have not tried it, but Treasury/Cavalry looks like it might be very powerful. 5 Treasuries means that you can net $10 and draw a net of 20 cards while emptying a second pile for no loss of buys. If you get a 6:4 split that moves up to enough cash to pile any $2 coin pile and a single additional coin somewhere lets you have enough cash to buy ten $3. Obviously, buys are going to be constraining, but it takes very few turns to get 6 or 7 Treasuries.

In general, I think the bigger use of Villa/Cavalry with Treasury is not so much to keep plodding along with a fat stack of treasuries on top (at best villa eats three of them in purchas costs), but to replay the treasuries during a quick rush. It will need some sort of draw that you retain in hand, but you can get some very nice mutiplication going.

Ultimately the top decking of Treasuries really only has two major use cases: early during the build to increase your odds of hitting a price point every turn (e.g. needing to hit $5 for Bazaar/Rabble) and late to save up Treasuries until you can snag an $8, $11, or $5 turn in a deck that has been tanked. In most cases where you have $3 to burn on a Villa, you already are exceedingly likely to have the ability to draw through deck. And outside of some stuff like Tr or Storyteller, Treasury does little to help you draw through. And boards with Villa are extremely likely to be engine boards regardless; and the mostly likely way to not have a deck drawing engine would be lack of draw cards, but then you, at best have a 5:5 split and need to hit $11 to use the Villa trick which is $7 in 5 cards; or about the exact same as what you get on average if your deck is 25 cards or less.  And lest we forget, unless you have terminals that benefit from +actions or something that can use the price of the villa for benefit (e.g. Way of the Butterfly), Villas are just coppers. Paying $3 for a copper in order to get $5 more next turn can be worth it as a tactical play near game end, but I suspect that building a strat around this just is not going to be much, if any, better than just ignoring the Villa, or using Villa to speed build an engine before greening.

2

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Combo for two Tacticians in a turn

« on: October 18, 2023, 10:56:49 am »

There are several general options:
1. Queue up multiple cards to play at a time so you may discard and draw. Golem is the classic, throned (Kc, etc.), throned Vassals are another, turn start plays (e.g. some combination of wonky stuff like multiple Summons or Prince-of-draw), throned Overlords/Band-of-Misfits with a cost reduction token, throned Inspiring draw cards ... basically any setup that allows for the play of Tac with another drawing card banked can work. 
2. Discard something that allows for draw-on-discards like Trail, Weaver with appropriate Ways, or Village Green.
3. Playing the Tacs (and other cards) from a place other than your hand. For instance. if you have top-decking/Gamble you can stack your deck top with something like Pawn, copper, Tac, Pawn, copper, Tac. Other setups include complicated stuff like Innovation (e.g. I think buying a Trail should work that you can then use an Innovative Tactician to play, if not I know you can Villa/Tac).
4. Throne Tac with some modifier that allows for drawing after discarding. For example Rc/Way of the Owl allows you to play half of your Rc +1 for discarding multiple Tac plays. Similarly you can get a lot of mileage out of using a +1 card token on Tac.
5. Muck with phase changes. For example, Launch can let you draw something like a Wt to get a second play out. Cavalry can let you draw and play after the first Tac.
6. First Mate, as noted, is all but trivial.

End of the day we know have a lot of ways to draw after discarding everything. Most are too convoluted to see or even use when you see them. But if it is the only way on the board to draw bigger hands it can be exceedingly powerful (e.g. with Banks, HoPs, Priests, or other options to cash out on a megaturn).

3

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

« on: June 13, 2023, 09:35:37 pm »

An anti-synergy within the Loot pile: Sword makes Puzzle Box's ability a lot less useful.

Exactly the opposite many times. Puzzle box is vastly better when your opponent has Sword because you can topdeck Shield (or Moat or any of the dozens of other Sword counters should they be in the kingdom). Being able to top deck the appropriate reaction (be it Shield or Wt) is much more clutch when dealing with painful discarding attacks.

Abundance plays really poorly with Night gainers like Vampire

Works wonderfully with Cobbler. Gain and play, buy an action, get the coins. It makes a good target to gain with Dw. Changeling has downright synergy (buy a useless $3 to activate a few Abundances, gain an action to activate, return it for a Changeling, use that next turn for another abundance). Even Vamp is not that bad as any viable $3 (e.g. Village or Moat equivalents) can be paired up with a complementary $5 gain. And, of course, +buys are exceedingly handy on Vamp boards if you want to keep gaining through the late game. I mean, yes, you cannot stack them for later but in Vamp games you rarely need to stack them and instead should be using them as renewable Stockpiles.

NMF:

Inherited Royal Blacksmith - People don't buy this early for a reason. Watch out for misclicks.

No this is obnoxiously good. You just elect not to play it until you have some better cards, Literally completely 100% better than estate outside of the universal exceptions (e.g. Baron/Estate). The real bum option is Inherited Castles. Small castle brings your average card to $0.8 wonderful. Crumbling castle is NOT gained so you neither gain the silver (so your average cards is still $0.7) nor the VP point (so it literally starts at the same value as the estate it replaced).

Patient Swamp Shacks - Can actually be extremely useful with Prepare or Journey. But nothing to make you curse your deck order like seeing the option to play a dead card for little effect next turn.

Any sort of duration setup is quite useful as well. And even a Patient ruined village can be quite nice from time to time. I have done quite well with Astrolabes, for instance. Changeling has the same constraints with the added detriment that delayed play trashes the card for nothing barring the outs and can always be played during the Night if you can set it aside during cleanup.

Tireless Hireling etc.- Tireless can be meaningless. I really wanted to think of an anti-synergy - a card you want evenly spaced in your deck rather than clumped together (e.g. Throne Room and King's Court). But there's a lot of ways those cards benefit too. So useless Tireless it is.

I would suggest Shepherd. With a green deck, the end up clumped, not in your hand. Going with one or two to avoid clumping can be helpful, but only if you have green in hand when you draw it.

4

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

« on: January 19, 2023, 12:44:09 pm »

Spell Scroll + Treasurer -- instantly empties the Treasurer pile and gives you $30.

Spell Scroll trashes itself to gain & play a Treasurer, which can pull the Spell Scroll back out of the trash into your hand (and net $3 each time). Repeat until the Treasurer pile is empty.

Lurker is a more fun version - gain 10 Lurkers. Spend the rest of the game, Lurking back the scroll after every play (as only you have Lurkers). You can also mass regain Lurkers if you have any TfB to feed them into (e.g. Forge a province, play Scroll, and then gain back 4 lurkers and the Scroll). If you have the draw/actions to support it, You can also gain 10 cards per shuffle via Lurking.

Something like Apprentice/Jeweled Egg to thin/gain Scroll. (Scroll -> gain Lurk -> gain scroll) x 10. Then Scroll -> Gain Apprenctice -> Lurk Scroll -> Apprentice on themselves for 5 cards, and punch through.

5

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Neat card interactions that were useful in the game you found them in.

« on: January 17, 2023, 08:48:20 pm »

Nobody expects the piazza-tireless-lookout Cathedral

I am confused here. Is this good?  And how does cathedral play in here?

If you have a Tireless Outlook and you buy Piazza then you begin every turn where you did not draw after finishing last turn's cleanup (e.g. no Margave, Minion, Gov, or whatever) by playing Outlook. This is a forced trash (like Cathedral) though it is from deck top. Normally you would eventually just stop playing Outlook, but Piazza forces play.

There are a few outs (e.g. Improve) and even a few times when it is beneficial (e.g. I could see it if you had some way to topdeck Lich or Fortress every turn). But generally with a Tireless Outlook and Piazza you want to buy one xor the other, not both unless you want to play-3-card-Cathedral the rest of the game.

6

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Neat card interactions that were useful in the game you found them in.

« on: January 17, 2023, 08:41:29 pm »

I will most likely never see this combination again, but it was serendipitous to see it happen. You can't really plan and strategize for it.

There was Kings Court, Tournament, and Swindler in the kingdom.

I had gotten Princess as one of the prizes.

My hand had KC, KC, Princess, Swindler, copper.

Played KC, KC, Princess reducing the price of cards by 6, then Swindler and was able to trash 3 cards from my opponents turning them all into curses.
Would have been even crazier if I had an action with +$. I was able to buy 3 provinces and a duchy.

Your only need Kc/Swindler. Once the Province piles are gone, you can just Swindle them into nothing. You can win a small percentage of Swindler/Kc games you would otherwise lose (e.g. the opponent has 43 VP in a standard VP game) by gambling on 9 or 12 Swindles to trash all but one of the prov hits. This gets even stronger with Fleet or some other way to empty the last prov out before mass Swindling.

If the goal is merely cost reduction, this typically works better with Highways or Btrolls. Much easier to line up and reduce costs and can get things cheaper again. 

7

Let's Discuss ... / Re: I don't like Barbarian

« on: December 28, 2022, 10:12:09 am »

The problem with Barbarian is the swing. In the early game, going estate -> curse is normally a blessing thanks to cycling (as you are quite likely to trash either regardless). Hitting an opponent's $5 or greater card is typically brutal (e.g. hitting a Forge when it is the only trasher means not just downgrading to Barbarian or other $5, but also losing maybe three shuffles before thinning). And even without big disparities between card abilities, you still run into the imbalance issue where hitting a village means you also knock out a terminal while hitting a terminal means you still can do most of the work in your deck (obviously you can overbuy villages, but that often means piling and then games can be decided by who has enough villages to support draw and 2 or 3 barbs and who can only support 1)

And the effects are not even symmetric for the same hit. If I hit your province you downgrade 3 VP and take the last province. You hit my province and now I am out 5VP.

The same hit is wildly different depending on when in a shuffle it hits.

Which means that the effect of skill is muted while the impact from a wider standard deviation on luck is amplified.

8

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

« on: September 22, 2022, 10:36:14 am »

Devils Workshop and Cavalry.  Cavalry don't ride at night.  Only in buy phase.

salvager/trail.  trashing a trail only causes it to be played, and you get a buy from salvaged, but you don't get the 4 coins you were expecting for salvaging trail. Though TBH I'm not sure why you don't get the coins?

Devil's Workshop gets phenomenally better with any horse gainer as it provides a limitless target for Imps (barring, of course the use of Ways, Enchantress, and the like). Further, Cavalry come with a built-in buy and on most boards, functionally cost something like $2 during the buildout phase. That makes it much easier to gain Imps. And as something of a functional equivalent of a Moat; Cavalry work very well with Devil's workshop just gaining whatever village is out.

And then there is the chance to hit early double Dws turns. Going from 5 to 7 cards is a very big increase in odds of getting Cavalry/Village/Imp.

9

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Neat card interactions that were useful in the game you found them in.

« on: September 17, 2022, 03:38:42 pm »

To add another somewhat similar Souk interaction that was fun, I had a game recently with Pawn + Souk + Royal Carriage. The Pawn can really be any non-terminal action that you can play to reduce your hand size. I had a megaturn where I played the Pawns to reduce my handsize down to 1 Souk, and then I replayed the Souk several times and bought out the remaining provinces.

Pawn is actually not that impressive here. You either need good trashing to increase the odds of getting Souk powered up to $6 or more (where six plays will let you buy more than 4 provinces) or you need to wait a long time before you line up enough Pawns to make it viable to hit $6.

With trashing, you can manage quite well without the gravy from pawns. Chapel, for instance, can let hit a Rc every Souk play with ease. Then when you load out, you can play Souk for $6, call 5 Rcs, and cash out for $36 which is win against all but the fastest alternatives or most careful and intricate duchy dancers.

Without trashing, you are playing for a lot of luck to get enough Pawns in hand with Souk to actually make the megaturn. Pretty much anything that sifts with a penalty is wildly superior (e.g. Cellar, Dungeon, Warehouse) and even terminals can be worth using to fish for the megaturn (e.g. Vault, Storeroom).

Pawns are certainly nice, but generally if a board will manage to let Souk/Rc/Pawn dominate, it will do so with just Souk/Rc and that combo is strong enough to work even on a lot of boards with no non-terminal, no draw cash.

Collection + Crown
Get VP from Collection for buying Crown, use Crown to double play the Collections.

Ehh, that is pretty marginal. The VP is the same until you reach the point where you are drawing your deck regardless. And at that point, there is direct competition between Collections and Crowns that trades them off for only a couple of points. On most boards a cheap $3/$2 combo (like Village/Moat) or more efficient draw (like Stables) goes a lot further.

Capitalism/Collections is typically vastly stronger than whatever you can manage from double playing individual Collections.

10

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Neat card interactions that were useful in the game you found them in.

« on: September 16, 2022, 04:12:31 pm »

Soukophant is good quick fun.

Souk wants an empty hand but is just barely short of $8. Sycophant gives you $3 while removing 4 cards from your hand. If $10 to buys was not enough to bootstrap into a very quick engine build, Sycophant's favors typically goose out a bonus that is equal to saving a turn on the build out (e.g. playing on gain means you can buy an extra Souk a turn, bankers just get crazy, and market towns can make collisions more powerful) with an option to trash for more with Souk.

I am not sure that going BM/Soukophant is good enough of its own right, but only because there is so much engine potential.

11

Dominion Articles / Re: An analysis on Fisherman

« on: September 13, 2022, 10:22:38 am »

The bigger things to consider with Fisherman:

1. It skews the openings. 2/5 is wildly better than 5/2. As likewise you want 3/4 and not 4/3.

Thanks, I'll remember to consider this the next time I'm choosing what opening split to get in a Fisherman game.

More, the important thing is how does it skew your opening decisions. E.g. do you really want to compete with your opponent on a Peddler rush if they get a $2/5 and you get a $5/2 on a Market/Save board? Odds are, they will win the Peddler split something like 7:3. What is a viable strategy for you changes very heavily based on what your opponent gets. Sometimes the best option is to mirror and hope for the luck to equal out next shuffle. Sometimes you want to go for a strategy that has a lower expectation value, but a higher variance to increase your overall win chances.

Your mileage will obviously vary by board, but the trickiest decision I find with Fisherman is when do I open $4/Silver and when do I open Fisherman/$3. And which one of these wins out is heavily dependent on what my opponent manages if I am P2. Keeping in mind that Dominion is not a solitaire game and how Fisherman creates more asymmetry seems to work for me.

12

Dominion Articles / Re: An analysis on Fisherman

« on: September 12, 2022, 10:58:27 pm »

The bigger things to consider with Fisherman:

1. It skews the openings. 2/5 is wildly better than 5/2. As likewise you want 3/4 and not 4/3. Additionally Fisherman is +$1.7 on average for starting so you generally want to open it and a power 4 if possible.
2. It displaces a lot of early silver buys. Say your deck is going to be something like Iw/Hgrounds/Village. You clearly need cash to hit $6, but without trashing it might take a bit to get the engine running. Fisherman makes it a lot easier to bootstrap to expensive engines without (much) silver.
3. Its real synergy with the Remodel family is taking copper -> Fisherman. Yeah Butcher is the best of the lot due to flexibility, but being able to get good use out of a Remodel is worth a lot, particularly when it is the only trasher.
4. Top decking during the Buy phase is less than it is cracked up to be. $4 and 2 buys without nothing in discard is grand and all ... but terrible if the discard is nonetheless not empty. And once you get to $5 we are typically talking about forgoing a $5 for two Peddlers.
5. It provides some late game alternatives to Silver and Estate. Particularly when you have a faltering engine, a $2 peddler can increase your chances of (double) provinces enough to easily beat out silver or estate. And also tends to speed 3-piles by being a commonly bought pile with a low cost.

13

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Neat card interactions that were useful in the game you found them in.

« on: September 03, 2022, 08:40:12 am »

2/5 opening with Inheritance and Desperation - bought Inheritance on Turn 2! Even more useful, Ratcatcher happened to be in the kingdom, making the Curse very easy to deal with

My best was Baker/Borrow/Inheritance/Tournament. Opened Inherit/Province and managed to get a T3 Followers before they resigned.

Okay, this looks really cool but I’m not quite following. How did you open $7/$8?

They opened Margrave. I opened Inherit/Tournament. I think they bought Silver. I bought Prov. They played Margrave. I got lucky again.

14

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Neat card interactions that were useful in the game you found them in.

« on: August 30, 2022, 11:32:08 am »

2/5 opening with Inheritance and Desperation - bought Inheritance on Turn 2! Even more useful, Ratcatcher happened to be in the kingdom, making the Curse very easy to deal with

My best was Baker/Borrow/Inheritance/Tournament. Opened Inherit/Province and managed to get a T3 Followers before they resigned.

15

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

« on: August 28, 2022, 10:28:19 am »

I had a really interesting one with cathedral, lurker and cavalry. Trash the cavalry with cathedral and the use lurker to regain with the +2 cards +1 buy.

Also lackeys on villageless boards, and the interaction with swap, or way-of-the-horse!

Lurker and Cavalry work great together regardless. The draw allows you to convert a singleton lurker into a horse and a buy until the Cavalry pie runs down; with any village support it is a decent way to bootstrap an engine. Any other sort of trashing can then allow you to gain from the trash via Lurker and back out, generally netting you +2 cards plus whatever benefit (if any) you get from trashing. Lurker/Calvary/Junk dealer, for instance converts to two Labs and a Market.

In general, on-gain and on-trash effects make anything that gains or trashes much more powerful. The ability to create an infinite loop to get those on- abilities is naturally quite powerful. For instance, Villa/Collections gets crazy powerful with Way of the Butterfly/Horse or for a more complex example Groundskeeper/Swap/Inheritance also racks up near infinite VP.

16

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Prosperity 2E Preview 3

« on: June 30, 2022, 04:31:00 pm »

Awalcus:
I seem to be missing something here. I am saying that Stampede/Collections is just different in degree to other stalemate potentials. A higher percentage of its boards will stalemate at perfect play. Not all of them mind you, as some will be counterable (I have not enough experience to say exactly how small this percentage will be), some will have pile depleting enablers (e.g. Advance/Island is conceptually simple enough to grasp, I hope) that block the stalemate, and perhaps a majority will have a clear 6:4 Collections split thanks to some sort of P1 advantage.

But these are the same kind of things that happen Bish/Fort and the rest. The only difference I see is that the numbers are likely more extreme for Stampede/Collection.

Maybe Stamped/Collection will fall below your concern level, like all the rest. Maybe they will rise above. But fundamentally, the end state is functionally the same, the solutions are the same, and your analysis leaves me utterly unconvinced that this is somehow difference of kind. The fact that it is written on the card just makes it obvious that buying additional cards will lower your expected VP/turn enough to lose. The same dynamic can play out in other boards.

I mean consider something like Dismantle/Donate/Collections. You can open Dismantle/Donate, pop an estate for Copper/Gold, pop the other estate you kept for copper/Gold & pay off most of the debt, and then grab two Collections (one via Dismantle) the next turn. Turn after you can most likely grab 2 again and will certainly be able to do so the following turn if not. 7 Turns, 10 cards and you can Stampede twice per turn for the rest of the game. You need to kill 18 cards (16, if they mirrored on the Dismantle) and your deck supports gaining 6 estates and a Duchy on its final turn. You could gain a card or two instead of a second stampede each turn, but that costs 25 or 30 VP/turn. If your opponent is slow start (e.g. has 5/2 opening, bad shuffle on the post-debt turn) you may hit a 6:4 collection split and can safely build up a 1000 VP lead before you methodically destroy the piles to win. Or you might get an extra 75 VP from them being slow to setup. Can you pile everything out in 3 turns? Maybe

But the determining factors follow the same math. How many VP/turn do you expect to sacrifice to pile down? How many turns will it take you to pile all of that? The difference is that the numbers for Collections/Stamped are much, much bigger than for most other stalemate options. Which is pretty much the exact definition of the phrase "difference of degree".

Again, I can totally buy that the other stalemates will not rise to your level of concern any time soon (if every), I just cannot see Collections/Stampede doing so if they do not.

17

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

« on: June 30, 2022, 10:34:55 am »

Highwayman and cursed gold.  Basically gives a free copper and they don't get the curse. And they get the option to +3 & curse if it helps them.  Probably won't stop u getting highwayman, but makes other strong attacks more sesirable and haunted haunted woods a no brainer.

Highway man is highly effective at mitigating the impacts of curse on your turn, though. The worst thing about the early curses is that they lower the odds that you will line up your trasher & curses, villages & terminals, cursed gold & remodel, or the rest. Highwayman does the drawing up front and trades off a shorthand for a big hand, which is wildly better for things like using Remake.

Yeah, the attack on Highwayman is less impressive, but the draw is much, much better when dealing with mid-efficiency trashers or attempting to fire off engines with low efficiency trashers with the extra curses from Cursed gold. Being able to open something like Remake/Highwayman is exceedingly powerful.

18

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Prosperity 2E Preview 3

« on: June 30, 2022, 10:29:04 am »

Why exactly people are unable to realize that this is literally nothing more than a specific case of a more general phenomena is beyond me.

Because we have played thousands of games and the general phenomenon really does not appear to exist to any substantial extent, and there are reasons to believe that Collection/Stampede is different.

Oh please, we have empirical evidence that thousands of games were woefully insufficient to find the utterly dominant Pin combos. Pins were viable with Seaside (2009 release), we only found them in 2011. And lest you want to make some silly comment about the number of games being played, the possible game space was orders upon orders of magnitude smaller back then.

It took 9 months for the community to find Hermit/Market square when they were in the same set and had, literally, all the important words like "Trash", "Gain a Gold", "+1 card per" and on the text of the cards. And famously, the championships had Kc/Goons/Masq and neither player even noticed.

Nor is this discussion doing anything to convince me that the community actually knows the game well enough. People are talking about stalemate without mentioning Possession. They do not even know all the ways the create ultra-lean decks. They have no idea about how to go about actually forcing an end game with fragile VP generating deck.

Multiple people have been wrong in this thread about basic stuff: Can Bish/Fort afford to buy and trash extra Bishops? Yes, outside of a mirror. Can you use Necromancer to create an ultra-lean deck with great flexibility (whether or not that is the dominant option, is it possible)? Yes. Will buying non-cantrip draw stall out a Kc/Mon deck? Yes.

But again I ask, how is Stampede/Collections different? A stalemate with Ride/Collections runs into the exact same sort of end state. Bish/Fort can easily have the same limitations where doing anything other than playing the precise combo results in a loss. It is a simpler case, but the difference is strictly of degree, not kind.

A deck which buys a Province per turn and play a Monument or tripled Monument easily beats your supposed golden deck. Until you actually got to that supposed brilliant, dominating, stale-mate inducing situation, the other dudes and dudettes will have likely build something far better.

A static analysis ignored all the interesting and relevant intricacies of the game like, how fast can I thin and does the ordinary draw deck not deal better with slow thinning?

You can set up a random game with KC, Monument and a disappearing trasher and put your mouth were your money is.

I see, you will have 7 provinces in your deck and you expect to hit a significant number of Kc/Monuments? What is your deck going to look like? Hitting a monument every turn requires over 20% of your deck be Monument. Hitting Kc/Monument with any regularity requires 20% to be Kc. Hitting $8 requires either treasures or hands of Kc x2/Mon x2. I will submit that the treasure option is easier. So you want at least 20% of your deck to be some sort of treasure. That is a lot of buys to support the density needed to buy 8 provinces.

Because at the end of the day, we are talking about some sort of Big Money setup with that much green. End of the day Monument is, at best a silver for buy purposes. Kc/Mon is, at best, a pair of golds. This suggests that your best performance will be something like Big Money, which takes ~17 turns to hit 4 provinces and, if you just flat ignore the duchies, gains a province every other turn thereafter. All told I should expect something like 23 turns for you to hit 8 provinces. You buy your first province around T13 and I can safely say I will setup the combo by then. That means I will generate 90 VP. You get 48 VP from the province pile and assuming we have similar VP on T13 (I am very likely to be ahead if you are buying treasures, but whatever), you need to average 4.2 VP/turn to tie. With a 6 VP/turn setup, and ignoring the fact that I can setup the combo sooner, you will still need to average 1.2 VP/turn from Monuments (you can, of course, buy duchies, but that tanks your deck even more and I gain yet another round of VP.

How fast can I realistically setup the combo? Well Donate is about as fast as it comes. I open Silv/Mon, I buy a silver, I play $4 (below expectation), then have a deck with MonSSC left. I spend a turn paying off $4 debt. I buy a Kc. Then Mon/Mon/Kc in some order. Donate away the treasures. Even if it gets delayed a turn, I have the combo in full T11.

If you play Kc/Mon every turn, you need to pile the provinces by turn 19. If you play an average of 2 Mons/turn, you need to pile the provinces by T18. If you play an average of 1.5 Mons/turn, you need to pile by T17 (again, ignoring the fact that I likely generated a couple of more VP on T3-T10).

As far as why I will not play you:
1. Anyone who offers this sort of thing clearly does not understand Dominion. A single game is not statistically significant. Bottom decking (e.g. T3/T7 Chapel) can flip the win without telling us jack about the strength of the combo or the stalemate.
2. Player skill is a much larger determinant of outcome than strategy strength. Knowing when to trigger reshuffles, how to time buys, and the like will often mean that a strictly inferior strategy in the hands of a skilled player is better than a superior strategy in the hands of a master.
3. I am not convinced that beating you, even repeatedly will do a lick to change your mind.

If you really want to "prove" something, give me an example deck of Kc/Mon/Moat without +buys or other gains that scores an average of 7.5 VP/turn with 5 provinces in deck. Should be easy for you, so how many of each card (Silver, gold, Kc, Mon, Moat) are in your deck?

19

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Prosperity 2E Preview 3

« on: June 29, 2022, 10:06:30 pm »

The notion that KC-Monument is a 2.5 card combo when you just pointed out that you need a trasher and an Event to get rid of the trasher is beyond ridiculous.
You need a trasher, a way to get rid of the trasher and no draw (respectively no gain/Buy options). The likelihood for that is smaller than that of 3 card combos.

It would be a three-card combo with something like Donate/Kc/Monument. Or Kc/Banish/Mon. Or Kc/Island/Mon. Or Kc/Necromancer/Mon. Or Kc/WotGoat/Mon. There are five different explicit three-card-combos that all equilibrate to the same end state if the game lasts long enough so it is definitely going to show up more commonly than a single three card combo. There are far too numerous to list four-card combos which also move up the number of boards where the 9 VP version of the combo is possible.

And you can get similar combos without the other pieces. E.g. Mastermind can substitute for Kc in some circumstances. Farmers' market/Necromancer/Kc can score ~7 VP turn.

The precise number is going to lie somewhere between a 2-card combo and a 3-card combo, and will be closer to three than two. But it is just a wee bit non-trivial to calculate out when each makes sense.

You ignored the 4th element, the absence of draw. Chances for those 4 elements to come together are virtually nil. I probably played dozens of games with KC and Monument and none led to a stalemate.

By the way, good luck with getting rid of 20 starting cards with 12 Islands.

That is total nonsense. You get enough Coins to buy whatever you want, like another KC. And chances are extremely high that you actually got a cantrip in your deck (as double splitter plus Lab with KC).

It is not as if the supposed stalemate-inducing golden deck falls from the sky, there is a game before that.

And even if both players mirror, Dominion is not a deterministic game. A small lead in a KC Kingdom easily undos any vague stalemate possibilities. You are ahead, KC enhances the engine potential massively and a normal deck with draw, VP generation and one or two Provinces per turn easily beats the 9VP thingy.

The only nonsense is your inability to realize that:
A. 6VP/turn will eventually outscore all but the most reliable of greening, non-engine decks.
B. A big part of the value in the combo is the reliability which matters a lot more than you think.
C. You have specified 3 cards already for Kc/Mon/draw. The odds that there is any additional +gains in the remaining 7 is below 50%.

Suppose you have Kc/Moat/Mon. You want to build out to maximal points per turn. Okay, your hands will have one of the following outcomes: You have at least Kc/Kc/Moat in hand, draw deck, and get scads of VP; you have Kc/Mon and other stuff in hand and score 3 VP, you have Mon/other stuff and score 1 VP, you have Kc/Moat and other stuff and score zero. Maximum VP/turn in a mirror is 15 VP turn on your good hands. But how big can your deck be and have your deck draw through on ~45% of hands?

Not that big. After all, Kc needs to make up at least 40% of your deck (otherwise you whiff too many turns with only 1 Kc in hand) with 5 Kc & 5 Mons (i.e. the mirror option), you run out of Kc density on the third Moat. As you add Moats, the odds of getting 3, 1, or 0 VP on a turn start going up. So say we both build out to 5 Kc, 5 Mon, and 3 Moats. One of us keeps playing without buying. The one who breaks their engine by having too low of a Kc density can easily lose the game as the other guy more reliably hits more points.

And note this applies even more to decks with a general trashing card in the mix. You can absolutely take 6 VP/turn and call it a day. You can build out to 5 Kc/5 Mon and then hit the wall of unreliable draws that limits 3-piling.

End of the day, draw is not enough to avoid the stalemate. It may make it worthwhile to build past Kc x2/Mon x3. But at some point it becomes zugzwang  where any move towards end state results in lower odds of winning. You need a source of +action.

Beating 9, or even 15 VP/turn is of course quite doable. Colonies, 3 provinces/turn, etc. But assuming that every board, even every Kc board will always have the draw, buys, and time needed for the deadlock to be avoided is just silly. But with that sort of analysis we may as well say that every engine should build toward double provinces - it is after all, the most common engine outcome and is possible more often than not.

Awaclus:
Ahh yes, been here, heard these errors before. The analysis of any card(s) in Dominion is worthless for anyone reading these posts. Most of us have too much noise in our ratings for a single combo to be more than a literal rounding error in our rankings. If you completely ignore Market square/Hermit and lose every time, it manages to drop your rating, what 0.02? The odds that it will determine your tournament standing are exceedingly small and you are far better off just spending the time playing to get a better "feel" for end game play or whatever rather than even bothering to think about any combo.

I am not following why on earth it is a problem for the Tournament organizer or the players. Scrub the game and replay. If you see a stalemateable combo, be it something quick and easy like Collections/Stampede or something convoluted (like Kc/Caption/Monument/Butterfly) any tournament level player should be able to recognize the stalemate and just redo the game.

I avoid the tournament circuit, but unless I missed some setup where everyone gets identical shuffling seeds and kingdoms, it literally just means scrub the kingdom and play again. Marginally annoying.

And the whole thing is most readily avoided by either nerfing all the Horse/Collection stalemates or by just adding in a 50 turn lead rule.

Why exactly people are unable to realize that this is literally nothing more than a specific case of a more general phenomena is beyond me.

20

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Prosperity 2E Preview 3

« on: June 29, 2022, 03:51:22 pm »

Way of the Butterfly Upgrades Actions and Bonfire cannot blow up Estates.
About the other point, as faust pointed out, with draw you want to build up your deck beyond two KCs and three Monuments.

Stalemates basically never occur in Dominion. Unless you play with some funky house rules that let you Butterfly your starting junk.

Butterfly works off any general trasher that costs <$4 or where you have a $6 action card. Similarly, Bonfire allows you to burn off the estates with some other trashing and then to get rid of the trasher. More esoteric options include Inheritance/Bonfire (pre-errata), Plan (preferably with a trasher as well), and Dame Anna (where you trash down to Kc/Kc/Anna/Mon, ditch Anna by trashing one of their Knights, and then buying Mon x2 to crank 9 VP/turn).

End of the day Kc/Mon for 9 VP is something like a 2.5 or 2.75 card combo.

Stalemates basically never occur in Dominion because people can only spot the most trivial of them, suck at understanding how to force a stalemate, and are very prone to resigning long before the opponent has a truly insurmountable lead.

People, even high-level players, spent years missing optimal strategies like Countinghouse/Travelling fair or Market square/Hermit or the aforementioned Pins.

And I always find it so odd that folks talk about 2-card combos being a problem (given that, you know the odds that any game will contain the combo rounds down to 0 out to three significant figures.

You can worry about Stampede/Collections as a stalemate. You can dismiss all the other stalemate setups as unlikely. You cannot do both.

I just never will understand people who are concerned about 1/400 events but do not care about ten 1/4000 events.

(@jomini, I think you're misusing the word "zugzwang". Zugzwang properly is a situation where all options available to you leave you in a worse position than doing nothing; but in Dominion doing nothing is almost always an available option. You're talking about a situation where ending the game leaves you in a worse position than prolonging it, but that's not zugzwang; it's just stalemate.)

Zugzwang is just a "compulsion to move" and refers to situations where any change in game state results in a detriment to the player instigating such a choice. It can be used with multiple levels of formalism and I am just using it as shorthand for any state in dominion where changing the game state results in significant (if not insurmountable) handicaps.

If we are going to be precise on the chess terms "stalemate" is incorrect as well as the refers specifically to a player who has not yet lost having no legal moves which never occurs in Dominion.

Awaclus:
Yes, I understand that all-sets, all-random is popular. I just do not understand why Dominion analysis that ever considers any other mode of play (including ones in the literal rulebooks) as illegitimate and worthy of only dismissal. It seems like saying Chess theory should not consider FIDE tournament matches because the overwhelming majority of games played are online Blitzes.

And regardless, it seems quite odd to me that the significance threshold for "too rare to care about" should be fixed right under 0.2% of games. We have what 400-odd cards now? The odds that any two of them happen in the same game are low enough as is that you can safely ignore every "overpowered" Collections setup and not have it impact your rating in a significant fashion.

21

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Prosperity 2E Preview 3

« on: June 29, 2022, 01:45:47 pm »

I don’t see how KC and Monument could every lead to a stalemate. First of all, unless you trashed with Raze, there is a sixth card in your deck which prevents a flat 9VP per turn. Second, building an engine around that combo seems like the natural way to go.
It is highly unlikely that even in a mirror, players will arrive at the same deck situation symmetrically and then whoever was faster has an incentive to, well, yeah actually win the game.

Banish, Butterfly, Bonfire ... and that is just the Bs, there are a lot of different ways to get to Kc/Monument. There are many ways to get a trasher out of your deck.

Building an engine requires some form of +cards. If you lack that, then the max per turn is 9 VP. And even if you have it, there is no assurance that greening is not a zugzwang move (e.g. Hireling can let you build out to 12 VP/turn when you play them, but at the risk of slowing your VP gain with bad shuffle luck).

Which is where the stalemate comes in. Even with a dead trasher, 6 VP/turn is dominant over going for greens with only one turn per hand. Big money monument runs will be hard pressed to score 7 VP all that many turns and even if you alternate with 4 VP using duchy, the 6 VP/turn golden deck wins out. If you have Kc/Mon/Banish, forget it, 9VP/turn will overtake provinces very shortly and once you have the setup, there is significant downside to buying more Kc, Mons, let alone something else.

Ending the game requires there to be piles that you can safely buy out before the opponent running the combo overtakes you. Which is not exactly easy. After all, say you get there 3 turns faster. Call it a 15 VP lead. How many turns does it take to pile out? Well, assuming 10 of 20 cards are bought for Kc/Mon, that only leaves you 20 more turns to pile down via three pile. Ending the game then requires you to average <1 VP lost per turn to shuffle concerns.

What stops this from showing up every time is:
1. Boards often have engine potential.
2. People often do not see utterly dominant combos
3. People tend to resign even when they are stalemated if they are unable to win.

Boards without engines are less common, but Stampede/Collections stalemates are not categorically different than something like Kc/Monument/Banish.

It's not a weird fascination, it's the established standard way to play.

Established by whom?

It is the most popular way to play and the norm for competitions ... but on the former category the overwhelming response I get when I play a stalemating combo is for people to just resign after the first few cycles as my lead grows. On the latter it seems rather trivial to adopt some tournament rule to break the stalemate (e.g. a player who maintains a lead for 50 turns wins the game, with P2 leading in the event of ties) or to prevent whichever combos are deemed too likely to stalemate (e.g. shuffle up a new kingdom if Collections/Stamped comes up, maybe for Stampede/Ride and Stampede/Supplies absent engine enablers).

I mean I could be wrong, and maybe somehow ultracompetitive play with Possession does not become a degenerate mess where you want to instantly tank your own deck and just mass Possess the other guy's deck, but I would suspect that Possession has far, far more stalemates than some once-in-blue-moon two card combo.

Holger:
Any two card combo is more common than any particular 3 card combo, but there are almost always more of the 3 card versions and the question is if there are enough more of the 3-card variety to nonetheless be the dominant possible stalemate trap.

And I am not convinced that perfect play would not find more of the three or more varieties.

After all, those are hard to spot. People here are having trouble even being exhaustive about how to setup a simple 9 VP Monument deck. Yet it can be done with both Kc and Mm (though the latter cannot hit 9 VP/turn in a perfect mirror), but you can also manage similar shots with things like Tr/Mon/Outpost or Tr/Mon/Mission, and of course, Tr can be replaced by Rg or Rc in some circumstances. Even when trying to be exhaustive about something as simple ditching a trasher, people are missing things like Necromancer who can trash the trasher and 3 Mon to setup the 9 VP/turn option.

End of the day, the point is that we have had a LOT of very powerful things that went unnoticed for months or years. Masq pins (pre-errata) were possible from day 1 for Seaside (Minion/Tr/Tr/Outpost/Masq), yet it was years before somebody put the pieces together for Goons/Kc/Masq. Have we found all the stalemates yet? I doubt it. We may well find out that at skilled enough play (maybe some sort of alpha-star-dominion), stalemate is the normal endgame as both players reach a point dancing where buying the Nth kingdom card lowers the odds of winning more than passing and letting the opponent buy it.

Which is my main contention here. The simple errata is to remove Horses from token gaining. The simple solution to stalemates, in general, is just to adopt a 50 turn rule where anyone who leads for 50 rounds (P2 "leading" during ties), wins the game.

Stampede/collections is "solved" by either and nowhere near unique in its function.

Segura:
Even adding in draw does not negate the stalemate. You need two Kc to start the chain absent +actions. This means that roughly 40% of your deck needs to be Kcs to have decent odds of hitting off a chain. That means your deck needs to be <12.5 cards. Maximal VP gain is 15 VP/turn. Kc and Mon take up 10 slots and leave you with ~3 for draw cards before your expected VP total drops. If your opponent goes for 9 VP/turn and you opt for engine, your game ending deck is 7 Kc, 7 Mon, and 10 Draw. Median hand is ~5 VP/turn at that point. And absent additional gains, that means you played for 19 turns after a mirror setup absent additional gains.

Maybe these things are rare on all random, but I would submit that playing them more often gives me a much better feel for how a particular set actually plays to stalemate.

What makes the engine more viable is (+action and +cards) or (+cards and +buy/gains).

And again, it is not like 6 VP/turn is precisely bad on a board with no +buy. It generally wins out against the province piler absent enablers as 7 greens makes for a lot of 5VP losses per round.

22

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Prosperity 2E Preview 3

« on: June 28, 2022, 10:18:43 pm »

This one might be more common and obvious, but it is simply not sui generis.

How many stalemates have you experienced? I have had exactly one in about 8–10k games so far and that was a 0 VP/turn Possession game.

Dozens, but IRL we either do a draft to start (alternating choices) or deal up 10 and then make alternating choices to keep 5 for sequential games. We often play a combo until we see something that is stronger or figure out some counter.

We got to the point where the majority of Possession games were stalemates (either that or games where no one would buy Possession at all).

We typically see Fort/Bish become a shuffle race with a sizeable minority going stalemate (this is why I know you can actually safely mill a Bish a turn if the other guy opts to try for an engine).

I realize there is this weird fascination with all random, all sets, but I do not recall that ever being part of the official rules.

In general, stalemates come where one player cannot force an endgame. They will likely become more common as folks get better at Dominion.

I fail to see how the precise point total matters for the dynamics. Exactly which decks can best 30 VP/turn but not 50/turn? I mean, I could be wrong, but Ride/Collections beats the entire Colony pile in 3 turns while Stampede does it in 2. Even Supplies wins out in 4.

And I am not at all convinced that 2-card combos represent the majority of potential stalemates. After all, Kc/Monument is the only "2-card" combo (ignoring the whole, needs trashing thing), but Mastermind/Monument/Cantrip results in the same dynamic (high points/turn, potential game loss if you break the combo). As does Kc/Farmer's market/trash diver (6 VP/turn on average, unless you build out with Necromancer and then get 9 VP/turn). As do a lot of Bish/trash diver options.

My experience is that most people just do not see the combos and fail to play them. We went years without finding the classic Masquerade pins and have yet to find an opponent who ever even considers building out a Cutpurse/Masquerade pin, yet it is possible on a sizeable minority of Masquerade/Cutpurse boards.

Stampede/Collections is quick and easy to spot, but it is categorically not all that different from Collections/Ride or even Collections/Supplies.

We are far from finding all the possible reciprocal zugzwang's and I submit it is far, far too early to note if the community can reliably say that this one particular combo is wildly overpowered compared to stuff that crops up nearly as commonly.

23

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Prosperity 2E Preview 3

« on: June 21, 2022, 04:43:39 pm »

Both of these depend on the state of the board. E.g. a Bish/Fort deck is the maximum VP possible on a board without any net draw. And if the Bish/Fort player sees any tricksy engine building, they can just mill a Bish or three from the pile and still make more than any possible setup.

The Bish/Fort player can't just mill a Bish or three from the pile without temporarily breaking the golden deck. Which is not a huge problem, but it slows down that process since you have to spend a turn trashing a Bishop every time your golden deck gets broken, unless you have good draws.

Not at all. Golden deck is 5 Forts, 4 Bish. You can buy a 5th Bish and lose out only in the event that you bottom deck 2 Forts (i.e. 25% of the time). Unless the other guy is racing you to a golden deck, you still win out.

You can most certainly force endgame by sacrificing expected VP and depleting the Bish pile until they cannot gain enough VP/turn to matter.

I suppose Possession is a significant pain in the ASS if you haven't banned it and get matched against someone who also hasn't banned it, which probably isn't too often. You can't score the VP, however, you can only nuke the Horses.

I don't play much Possession, but it does indeed counter.

Trashing is not absent, it's not a golden deck without trashing unless you open 5/2 and never buy anything besides Collections and Stampedes (you don't technically have to open 5/2 to do that, but opening nothing/nothing is almost certainly a bad idea). The fact that you have to play your trasher and therefore can only play 4 Collections that turn could be annoying, but it's a temporary annoyance at worst.

Nonsense, you can use draw instead of trashing. Way of the Horse, Experiment, and even a single card of dead draw (e.g. Hunting grounds) off a Star chart.

Militias will not drop the VP gain/turn, they just force the golden deck to be a bit thinner than it otherwise would have to be.

More they slow down the setup so you can do a megaturn or something else instead. Militia makes it quite painful to get the Collections, trash down, and draw through all while only ever playing 5 non-horse cards.

Barbarian and Swindler can eventually deplete the Horse pile and therefore get the game to end (probably still in the Collection/Stampede player's favor, but that's fine, at least the game will end), but Bandit probably just discards two Horses, unless you can play at least three of them per turn, which is a lot of Gold to deal with.

Depends on how much you play them. Kc/Bandit/Apprentice can hunt and kill the Collections.

I'm not very confident any of those will be present in a typical Collection/Stampede game, especially with Stampede (which is always present in a typical Collection/Stampede game, surprisingly enough) taking up half the landscape slots on its own.

The point is that we have many, many other combos that replicate all the major concerns of Collection/Stampede. Highest possible repeatable point total? Not even close. Unable to deplete piles without taking a knock on VP/turn? Not close again. Immune to a lot of attacks? There are far better. Each and every supposed flaw is present somewhere else with some combo of cards.

The fact that one some boards Fort/Bish is utterly dominant is not a sign that the combo is utterly broke.

The difference with Stampede/Collection is one of degree, not kind. There are many, many ways to setup recurring VP loops and many of those are both the most powerful source of points and fragile to buying more cards. What makes Stampede/Collections "unique" is that it is quick and simple.

But we see the exact same dynamics with Collection/Ride. Assuming a 5/5 collection split, your deck can support 7 non-Collections (provided you generate $12 and have no discards) and once you file those slots up you just endless loop or risk missing out on 30 VP/Turn. Supplies generate 25 VP/turn and eat up all your draw slots. They again will have a lot of boards where it cuts into the VP gain to move the game further towards an end state.

Stampede/Collection is not the highest VP/turn possible (that is the unbounded VP from Villa/Butterfly). It is not uniquely prone to seizing it. It is not the only 2 card combo that can degenerate.

Sure, but you need a way to play the Collections before the Paddocks, which is not usually present, and neither is Paddock.

2-card combos show up a lot more than 1/10k games. Collection/Stampede also needs a trasher, but that's pretty often there. I have already had a Collection/Stampede kingdom and I can't have played more than like a hundred games with Prosperity 2E yet, even that's probably an overestimation. Sure, people get it disproportionately often right now since you can automatch for extra 2E, but even under normal circumstances, 2-card combos happen. I just had a Hermit/Market Square game not too long ago, and that was while automatching for extra 2E.

I am still not seeing why Supplies/Collections is so terribly different. On a strict trashing/BM board both Stampede and Supplies generate far more VP/turn than alternatives. Both have very limited card slots and both cannot afford to much around with extraneous cards lest the VP train derail.

It's also one of kind. Bishop/Fortress can do other things in addition to the Bishop/Fortressing, Stampede/Collection can't. Even if the "other things" doesn't involve building up to a bigger turn, it can e.g. involve a 3-pile ending with Fortresses and two other cheap cantrips which means you only have to be one full turn ahead of your opponent for the game to end.

How many boards have that? I mean you only need to buy one more Fort than your opponent to tank them instead. But same applies for Stampede, win the Collections split and call it a day.

The raw point total is not the concern, the concern is the stalemate. I don't see any reason why Paddock/Collection would lead to stalemates particularly often, since you can do it while you build an engine that buys VP and that will beat your opponent who is just playing Paddocks and Collections and whatever the thing is that lets them play the Paddocks after they have already played their Collections. I can see why Bishop/Fortress could theoretically lead to stalemates, but while I do remember people talking about this theoretical possibility a lot, I do not remember it ever happening to anyone in practice because the golden deck is far from unbeatable, and even in a mirror match, the player who gets ahead can almost always end it somehow.

I just did a quick search, skimming over posts that didn't look like reports, and found like a dozen game reports where a stalemate didn't happen, of which only a minority were golden deck mirrors at all, and the closest thing to a stalemate I found was this which was probably not a stalemate either because it doesn't mention being one, but it also doesn't say how it ended so I guess it could have been one. Not a very scientifically rigorous result obviously, but I would nonetheless expect stalemate reports to show up a lot more than they seem to if that was a thing that actually happened to a substantial degree.

You could argue that I'm just being theoretical about Collection/Stampede stalemates too and that it won't turn out to be a thing that happens in practice either, and I suppose that is true so far, but a lot of the reasons why Bishop/Fortress stalemates don't happen don't apply to Collection/Stampede or require the player who's ahead to be ahead by a lot more in order to happen.

There are many possible stalemates. Most people do not see them, ever. I mean many engine setups routinely reach a state where gaining anything useful risks a game end and both players would be better off waiting for someone else to buy anything.

This one might be more common and obvious, but it is simply not sui generis.

24

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Prosperity 2E Preview 3

« on: June 16, 2022, 05:55:01 pm »

What makes Collection + Stampede different than Fortress+Bishop, for example? Even if Collection gives far more points-per-turn, that shouldn't matter, should it? All that matters is that you've build a deck which generates any number of points per turn where you don't want to buy any card to add to the deck.

The difference is that you can beat Fortress+Bishop by building an engine that uses Fortress and Bishop to score points faster than the golden deck can, whereas Stampede's 5-card limit prevents you from incorporating it in an engine, and nothing can beat 50 VP/turn.

Both of these depend on the state of the board. E.g. a Bish/Fort deck is the maximum VP possible on a board without any net draw. And if the Bish/Fort player sees any tricksy engine building, they can just mill a Bish or three from the pile and still make more than any possible setup.

Beating 50 VP/turn is quite doable. The simplest shot being Possession. Even absent truly bonkers stuff like Masq or Amb, it takes exactly one play per turn to nuke their deck and score 50VP for you should they be so foolish as to leave you the opening.

Attacks also allow you leeway. Afterall, absent trashing, Stampede slowly dies once you start junking them. A Stampede hand only draws 15 total and if you dump the curse pile they will fall apart. Militias will at least drop the VP gain/turn. Things like Barbarian, Swindler, and Bandit can shut the whole works down permanently.

And getting into edge-case territory, there are many ways to score well over 50 points per turn. Collection/Villa/Butterfly/Seaway/cost reduction is unbounded points per turn (and needs only a single copy of everything except the cost reduction). Treasurer/Bishop can build out to 5 VP per combo with Plats which can go above 50 VP with things like Kc. Cost reduction/Grand Castle/trash diving (e.g. Graverobber), and gain 20 VP per trash & gain per cycle (e.g. Inheritance can easily put 20 VP cards into play/hand). And Kc/Treasurer/Cache/Tomb/Donate clocks in at 27 VP/turn without draw/+buys.

And I have already won a game by going Paddock/Collection instead of Stampede/Collection. Splitting the Collections results in 100 VP per turn if they don't contest the Paddocks at all.

The problem with Collection/Stampede is just that the combo is easy, obvious, and quick. There are many, many setups out there where you can generate truly insane amounts of VP repeatedly for turns. And many of those do not reward further engine building (e.g. at some point your deck caps out for Grand castle cycling). We don't care because they show up in something like 1/10,000 games once we account for alternative enablers.

Frankly, I think this will go the way of the pins, most likely by dropping errata onto Horse at some point, but with a bunch of weird edge cases floating out there (e.g. you can still pin your opponent with Masq/B-crat or Masq/Cutpurse if you get the exceedingly rare combos for enablers to do it before the game ends).

The difference with Bishop/Fort and Stamped/Collection is just one of degree. Many times there will be nothing that can beat the quick and dirty golden run, sometimes there will be something that can. While I grant there are many more times where Stampede/Collection is untouchable, I doubt that there are all that many more boards where the other cards could beat Bish/Fortress all that often and if the raw point total is the concern, Paddock/Collection is a far worse offender.

25

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Prosperity 2E Preview 3

« on: June 10, 2022, 10:07:38 pm »

It was a known issue, but what’s your suggested solution? Would it be better for Collection to have a confusing, hard-to-remember wording? It would be be great if the combo never came up in random sets online.

A possible solution could be to change the wording for Collection to "..., when you gain an Action card from the Supply, ...".

A far better solution would be just excluding horses. You can set up some version of Golden deck with just about any good horse gainer. Supplies, Paddock, Livery, and Ride all can generate golden setups without much trouble (e.g. Ride just sets up a turn or two slower and does the same thing as Stampede once you have 5 or more Collections). Sleigh and Cavalry just need some village support and they can also manage the endless golden deck.

All of them revolve around quickly getting a deck that uses horses to draw through and then getting as many Collections as one can before repeating ad infinitum. Livery is the only thing that requires a push toward game end, but any sort of trashing can make that an epic slog through the gold pile.

Stampede is the quickest and most fraught offender, but if this really is game breaking, may as well just house rule out horses.

Certainly, there are far worse edge cases. For instance, you can generate infinite points off a single Collection and a single Villa with Seaway, any cost reduction barring Princess, and Way of the Butterfly. Once you get villa to zero cost with the +buy token on it, just buy (return to Action phase), Butterfly it for every $5 left in the game, and then fail to gain $5s until you get bored of generating VP.