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201

Puzzles and Challenges / Re: Set up the longest sequence of known top-decked cards

« on: November 19, 2017, 03:20:02 pm »

Big money: Bonfire your starting Estates, buy all the Copper. Now you trivially know every card in your deck. (-8

As far as I'm aware, the only way to put Estates in play is to buy Inheritance. How are you going to do that with only Copper and Estates in your deck?

If you don't want to copy my Ratcatcher solution, what you could do is open Chapel, then Chapel any Estate it connects with, or Save it until it does. (If you have Chapel but no Estate, you have $4 which is enough to afford Save.) Once you have Chapel'd 3xEstate, play Chapel without trashing, then Bonfire it. Then buy 46 Coppers, for a 53-card deck. Eventually this hits a clean shuffle, at which point you know the 48 Coppers that aren't in your hand. If you want to get fancy, add Mandarin to the board and buy it after a clean shuffle. Then all your 53 Coppers are in your deck, your Mandarin is in your discard pile, and that's all your cards.

202

Puzzles and Challenges / Re: Set up the longest sequence of known top-decked cards

« on: November 19, 2017, 03:04:36 pm »

[kingdom:] Overlord, Crown, Mandarin, Herald, Lurker, Page, Peasant, Rats, Vault, Black Market, Vampire. Events/Landmarks: Bonfire, Travelling Fair.

For Overlord to be played as a self-trasher, there needs to be a self-trasher in the kingdom. Luckily, everything works if I put Herald in the Black Market deck and drain said deck (but for Herald) before the megaturn, and add e.g. Pillage. Watchtower needs to be in the Black Market deck.

Then, on the megaturn, I play Overlord1 as Crown, Overlord2 as Crown, Overlord3 as Crown, Overlord4 as Crown, Overlord5 as Crown, Overlord6 as Pillage, Overlord6 as Lurker (gaining Mandarin), Overlord5 as Lurker (gaining Overlord6), Overlord4 as Vault (discarding all Crowns and non-treasures except Watchtower), Overlord3 as Black Market, playing all your treasures, buying Herald and topdecking all the cards in your discard pile, revealing Watchtower to topdeck Herald, Overlord2 as Mandarin, topdecking Watchtower. Now you have no cards in hand.

Go to your buy phase, buy Travelling Fair and all the cards (topdecking them), finishing off with a Mandarin, topdecking all the treasures and that Mandarin.

Edits: Herald goes in the Black Market deck, Watchtower gets added there. Also, Young Witch had to be in the Black Market deck to have an 11-card Kingdom in the first place, but plenty of cards can be banes (Lurker, Peasant, Page, but not Black Market itself).

203

Puzzles and Challenges / Re: Set up the longest sequence of known top-decked cards

« on: November 19, 2017, 02:14:40 pm »

Well, if you use the Dominion Online rules, then any cards that require setup can't be in the Black Market deck.

Let's find four optimal solutions, then: paper vs. online rules, and 2 vs. 3+ players.

204

Puzzles and Challenges / Re: Set up the longest sequence of known top-decked cards

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

When it comes to gaining, I had this vague idea:

Play Overlord as Crown, crowning Overlord as Crown, about 10 times.
The last Overlord is played as a Ferry'd Artisan (or Altar trashing Fortress), gaining Mandarin, topdecking all your Overlords.
The remaining Overlords that were played as Crown the first time are played as Bridge the second time, reducing the cost of Colony into Artisan/Altar range.

Before this, put the +1 card token from Teacher on Overlord, such that you draw the Overlords back up.

Do this again, playing Overlord as a gainer (Ironworks seems nice) instead of Bridge the second time.

Fiddle like a maniac with getting the details right. Finish this off with playing Vault, then a Royal Seal, buying first Herald, topdecking everything, then Mandarin, topdecking and getting topdecked by the Royal Seal(s).

But then it occured to me: I can just stockpile a bunch of coin tokens, buy Travelling Fair a bunch of times, buy all the cards left in the supply, with Herald being the last card, and topdeck all the things.

All that's left is discarding all the cards.

Playing a Vault will accomplish this, but that strands a Vault in play.

Another way of doing it is this: play Overlord-as-Crown, crowning Overlord-as-Crown, crowning Overlord-as-Crown, crowning Overlord first as a self-trasher, then a Mandarin-gainer, which topdecks the remaining three Overlords. The second play of Overlords 3 and 2 can be as something other than Crown—in particular, it can be Lurker to gain Overlord from the trash, followed by Vault. Note that Lurker is a Mandarin-gainer if there is a Mandarin in the trash, and Lurker (on an earlier turn) can put one there.

If you add Overlords you can add plays of actions costing up to $5, for example a Black Market or Storyteller which lets you play one or more potions, just in case you need to buy a potion-cost card in your buy phase.

The kingdom would then be Overlord, Crown, Mandarin, Herald, Lurker, Page, Peasant, Rats, Vault, Black Market, <a free slot>. Events/Landmarks: Bonfire, Travelling Fair.

Note that this works without using coin tokens: on the megaturn buy phase, you can have $(12*5+30*3+39*2+52*1+9*5) if you 2-pile Platinum and Gold and Crown 9xPlatinum, which is $324 total; Mandarin will put those back in an order you choose (and, hence, know). Since there's at most 22 piles to drain (4 Victory, 5 Treasure, Curse, Ruins, 11 Kingdom) and it takes at most $13 per pile ($2 for Travelling Fair, the most expensive pile is Colony at $11), then we have enough: 13*$22 = $286 < $324. All the gained cards are topdecked with Travelling Fair, and all the others are top-decked by overpaying for Herald; each card to be topdecked this way has provided us with $1 through Vault.

EDIT: in order to gain a Bat, you probably need to have Vampire in the kingdom, so that takes up the free slot. You also need to play the Vampire, which casts a Hex upon both their houses your opponents. If you steal all their cards first, the worst this can do is give them a Copper or a Curse. Each of these will happen at most once per Hex-shuffle, and we only need to play Vampire 10 times, so this won't 3-pile Platinum, Gold and Curse (or, less likely, Copper). In any case, if we 2-pile Copper and Curse first, then steal their decks, we lose $7 worth of payload, but had a slack of at least $38. So the solution still works.

205

Puzzles and Challenges / Re: Set up the longest sequence of known top-decked cards

« on: November 19, 2017, 01:07:34 pm »

The problem is that you have Baker, Lurker, Hireling, Vault and Herald taking up space from cards like Black Market, Rats, Hermit, etc. that increase the number of cards that you can have in your deck.

As you point out, they can go in the Black Market deck. Let's count cards—I think the kingdom piles which add the most cards are:

• Black Market: allthecards.jpg
• Exorcist adds 31 Spirits
• Page and Peasant: 30 each (10+5+5+5+5)
• Any one Potion-cost card adds 16 Potions
• Spoils-gainers: 25 (10 from itself plus 15 Spoils)
• Leprechaun: 22 (it lets you gain 12 Wishes without trashing Magic Lamp.)
• Rats: 20
• Vampire: 20 (it adds 10 Bats.)
• Young Witch: 18-22 (it adds a Bane pile, which can be a normal 10-card pile, or an 8- or 12-card victory pile.)
• Ruins-givers: ? — 10 from itself, plus 10 Ruins per opponent. (Marauder does both Ruins and Spoils.)
• Curses: 10 per opponent.
• Tournament: 15 (10 from itself plus 5 Prizes)
• Each Heirloom card adds one Heirloom to the game per player, and reorganizes which cards start where.
• Necromancer adds 3 Zombies.
• Victory piles have 12 cards in 3+ player games.

Did I miss anything? Of these, only Page, Peasant, Rats and Victory piles (in 3+ player games) need to be in the kingdom to add cards; the rest can be in the Black Market deck and add the same number of cards (minus 9 for being in the BM deck, but then some other card is in the kingdom).

Together, Cutpurse, Masquerade and Thief move all your opponents' cards into your deck. (Against bad shuffle luck, you may need to Crown a Thief to get past 3xEstate and to a treasure.)

206

Puzzles and Challenges / Re: Set up the longest sequence of known top-decked cards

« on: November 19, 2017, 12:23:43 pm »

There's Baker, Expedition, Travelling Fair and Ghost Ship in the kingdom. [Use the first three to draw "everything", then put it back to your opponent's Ghost Ship.]

With Baker, Lurker, Hireling, Vault, Herald, Bonfire and Travelling Fair you can do at least 2 better:

Use Lurker/Hireling/Bonfire to set up an arbitrarily large number of "at the start of your turn, draw a card" effects, enough to draw your deck.
Use Baker to gain 4 6 coin tokens.
On the megaturn: discard everything to Vault, buy Travelling Fair, then topdeck everything with Herald's overpay effect; use Travelling Fair to topdeck Herald.

My solution strands a Vault in play where your solution strands 3 cards in hand; 3 - 1 = 2.

Open questions:

• If you get all the cards, how many is that?
• Can you do better than 2-piling? That is, can you play cards to gain cards in a way that's a net win?

EDIT: additions in italics, deletions in strikethrough. Thanks, navical.

207

Puzzles and Challenges / Set up the longest sequence of known top-decked cards

« on: November 19, 2017, 11:27:22 am »

Pick a kingdom of your choice. Make a sequence of plays, after which you know 0 or more of the cards on top of your deck. What's the longest sequence of known cards you can set up?

Example solution:

The kingdom is Baker, Vault, Native Village, Ratcatcher, Duchess.
Open Vault/Ratcatcher, and buy Native Village and Duchess later.
Trash all Estates and mat the Ratcatcher.
Put all but 5 cards on your NV mat.
On the megaturn, unmat all your cards with NV; discard 7xCopper to Vault; play Duchess, shuffle, look at a Copper and put it back.

Now your deck has seven known cards on top, all of which are Copper.

208

Dominion: Nocturne Previews / Re: Nocturne Initial Impressions

« on: November 19, 2017, 08:33:25 am »

Vampire : [...] at turn $3 or $4 [...] by turn $6/$7

As they say, time is money.

209

Dominion: Nocturne Previews / Re: Nocturne Initial Impressions

« on: November 19, 2017, 06:50:57 am »

Pixie revealing Flame's Gift, trashing itself and 0-2 cards from your hand, is strictly better than Bomb.

210

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Really bad card ideas

« on: November 18, 2017, 02:45:15 pm »

Lookscout
$4 — Action
+1 Action
Reveal the top 4 cards of your deck. Put the revealed victory cards into your hand.
Trash one of the remaining cards.
Discard one of the remaining cards.
Put the other remaining cards on top of your deck in any order.

211

Dominion: Nocturne Previews / Re: Nocturne Initial Impressions

« on: November 18, 2017, 05:55:36 am »

Night Watchman: Don't overbuy this. Otherwise, the sifting is really nice. Seems solid to me if you can't draw your entire deck.

I have a hard time being confident about anything to do with Night Watchman.

Obvious comparisons are Scouting Party and Cartographer.  Cartographer Qvist-ranks 74th out of 96 $5'ers, and Scouting Party ranks 25th out of 39 $2-costers. Note that both are below the middle in their respective brackets. Don't read too much into this, but do read more than nothing into it.

Unlike Cartographer, Night Watchman doesn't give +1 card. In your Night phase that's probably not a big issue, since it's all about setting up your next turn; in addition to improving your next turn, Cartographer (but not Scouting Party) can also set up your top-of-deck for later in the same action phase. Unlike Scouting Party and like Cartographer, Night Watchman can discard any set of cards, not some fixed amount.

So how big is the effect of Night Watchman being a card you need to draw (and the opportunity cost of not drawing some other card)? How big is it compared to the cost of $2 and on net not costing a buy only if you have at least one buy left?

Uh, if you drew a Silver instead of Night Watchman, you could buy Scouting Party where you would otherwise be able to play Night Watchman; but a Silver also helps you hit high(-ish) price points, which Night Watchman doesn't. But playing Night Watchman is always at least as good as and sometimes better than getting Scouting Party if the cost is the same (it can do all the same things and then some).

The effect of gaining Night Watchman to hand is similar to "Event: Do what Night Watchman does. Gain a Night Watchman." which makes the first half similar to a better Scouting Party.

There's this other card that clears at least some bad cards off the top of your deck. It's non-terminal and it doesn't draw; it doesn't let you discard coppers, curses or ruins, though, and it doesn't do any Party+ing.

Is Night Watchman the new Scout? I guess no, but it does have some features in common with the butt of everyone's favorite jokes. What would make it better than Scout, in decks where you don't draw deck, is that it can skip any card, not just green (and that your terminal draw can't draw it dead). What's the value of having one dead card now and lowering the risk of having dead cards next turn?

Vagrant can peel all the bad* cards off the top. Is Night Watchman comparable to playing a Navigator, always keeping, followed by a few Vagrants? (Ignore the $2 from Navigator.)

One last thing. Here's a move: get a good card on turn 1, get Night Watchman on turn 2, play the good card on turn 3. It's probably great with Chapel, but if trashing is slow and you want to hit $5, picking a Silver rather than a Night Watchman to go with your Moneylender might be better. Maybe? I dunno, but it's something to think about.

Tracker: Likely weak, but at least it costs $2, and hey you get to start the game with Pouch. +Buy is always nice to have around.

I haven't really tried out the effect, but while building an engine, getting to topdeck the Village and Smithy you just bought has to be great for reliability. Is it worth having a terminal copper around? Is that terminal copper only worth it if you have $2 and a spare buy, or would you ever get it on $3+ with 1 buy? Err derr merr hurr... *shrug*

212

Puzzles and Challenges / Re: Puzzle: Smuggler's Choice

« on: November 17, 2017, 08:47:07 pm »

Here's what I think is an analytically simple solution.

Get a Page, play a Champion.
Draw your deck, either with Lurker/Hireling/Bonfire (repeatedly) or Native Village (built-up one-shot).
On the megaturn, play 2xBridge and gain a copy of each thing (except Province) with mass Workshop, Ironworks and Armory. Don't buy anything.
Young Witch is on the board, and Page is the bane.
Cultist and Ruins are on the board.

There are 11 kingdom piles, 3 victory piles (but don't count Province), 1 curse pile, 1 ruins pile and 3 (basic) treasure piles. 4 if we put Black Market in the kingdom and a potion-cost card in the Black Market deck.

So we have to gain 18-19 cards; that's 7xWorkshop+6xIronworks+6xArmory, leaving 2xWorkshop for your opponent to gain one of.

Kingdom: Lurker, Page, Black Market, Smugglers, Workshop, Armory, Bridge, Ironworks, Young Witch, Cultist, Hireling — Events/Landmarks: Bonfire

EDIT: Oh derp, the two top ruins aren't necessarily the same. So we might have to gain 5 Ruins before the one on top of the pile is one we've gained, so we need to gain 23 cards. That's 8/8/7 copies of Workshop/Ironworks/Armory. That still leaves one of each for my opponent to gain (even 2xArmory). Heterogeneous piles nerf Smugglers.

213

Puzzles and Challenges / Re: PSA: loop: KC'd Overlord as Mining Village, Lurker and King's Court

« on: November 17, 2017, 08:09:38 pm »

• Play the same Overlord as Lurker, gaining itself back from the trash.
• Play the same Overlord as King's Court.

Does that work, though? Surely the third time you play the Overlord it's still a Lurker because it's not left play since then?

The following two threads discuss scenarios that—as far as I can tell—don't differ substantially from mine:

if I Throne Room an Overlord, picking, say, Embargo as the first emulation, trashing Overlord, then picking Band of Misfits as the second emulation, can I then emulate Engineer? [...]

Throne BoM, picking embargo as the first action. Now BoM is in the trash, so a second choice may be made. Choose lurker. Can Lurker regain the trashed BoM?

214

Dominion: Nocturne Previews / Re: Nocturne Initial Impressions

« on: November 17, 2017, 07:55:12 pm »

Here's me talking out my ass a hot take: big money with Sheperd and Crypt is a thing, even more so with support from Monastery and/or Goat.

215

Puzzles and Challenges / Re: PSA: loop: KC'd Overlord as Mining Village, Lurker and King's Court

« on: November 17, 2017, 05:46:07 pm »

If you have sufficient (8 definitely works) other cards in hand, then using Tragic Hero instead of Mining Village gives you unlimited buys as well as allowing you to gain the entirety of every Treasure pile in the Supply.

Nice; I use a variant of majiponi's loop in the Empty the Supply solution, but I'll have to investigate setting up this loop instead. I think we can fit in Ferry without too much trouble.

Just because tooting my own horn is so much fun: have I mentioned that by virtue of only requiring 3 key cards and a usable self-trasher, plus a few ubiquitous effects, my loop is incredibly flexible?

Re: Ferry, if you can put together your own Black Market deck, Tournament/Princess is great cost reduction too. Tournament also gives you a village to play Princess before your other terminals.

216

Dominion: Nocturne Previews / Re: Nocturne Initial Impressions

« on: November 17, 2017, 01:39:25 pm »

Okay, some hot takes based on zero playing with the cards: [...] Monastery/Banquet will be a thing.

With Banquet on the board and three Coppers in hand, Monastery is approximately like an Altar with +1 action and -1 buy: on net it trashes one copper and gains a $5'er.

Altar is good*. Altar for $2 is real good. Spending basically your whole turn doing it, meh, maybe? But compared to most early turns, yay.

(* 15th out of 32 $6+'ers in Qvist's rankings. It's middling in a field of really strong cards.)

217

Puzzles and Challenges / Re: PSA: loop: KC'd Overlord as Mining Village, Lurker and King's Court

« on: November 17, 2017, 01:35:35 pm »

• Play the same Overlord as Lurker, gaining itself back from the trash.
• Play the same Overlord as King's Court.

Does that work, though? Surely the third time you play the Overlord it's still a Lurker because it's not left play since then?

As part of executing Majiponi's loop, when Qvist plays a Crown'd Overlord as Embargo and then Lurker (at 8:15), the Overlord isn't put back into play. I assume the same would be the case in my loop.

218

Puzzles and Challenges / PSA: loop: KC'd Overlord as Mining Village, Lurker and King's Court

« on: November 17, 2017, 12:44:40 pm »

Here's the simplest infinite money loop I'm aware of:

Setup:

• 2xOverlord in hand.
• 1xOverlord in your discard pile (and nothing else).
• 0 cards in your deck.
• You can play Overlord as King's Court, Mining Village and Lurker.

Play one Overlord as King's Court, then:

• Play Overlord as Mining Village (drawing Overlord), trashing it for $2.
• Play the same Overlord as Lurker, gaining itself back from the trash.
• Play the same Overlord as King's Court.

Repeat the loop with the Overlord you drew, drawing the first Overlord back.

With 3xOverlord in hand and an empty discard pile, one iteration of the loop—i.e. Overlord as King's Court, then Overlord as Minining Village, Lurker and King's Court—gets you to the right game state, so really the setup is one tripled action, one Overlord in hand and one Overlord in your discard pile.

To bring King's Court into Overlord range, use Ferry or 2x(Overlord-as-)Highway. To have 0 cards in deck, use your favorite trasher, or Bonfire/Hireling/Lurker, or Native Village, or whatever else you like. You can payload other self-trashers than Mining Village, but be mindful that you need to draw the other Overlord. Teacher tokens can make a lot of things possible here. To make good use of $∞, add Travelling Fair to the board.

One weakness of this loop is that it's extremely restrictive; other loops let you play an arbitrary payload card of your choice infinitely often. The loop I'm presenting here needs to spend two out of three Overlord plays on Lurker and King's Court, so the first of the three has to be a self-trasher (or else all your cards eventually end up in play and the process stops).

Some loops without this restriction:

Kingdom: Overlord, Lurker, Raze, Watchtower, Crown, Mandarin

Kingdom, by cost:
2: Lurker
2p: Scrying Pool
3: Ambassador, Masquerade
4: Cutpurse, Thief, Pirate Ship, Villa
7: King's Court
Events/Landmarks: Bonfire, Travelling Fair

There are more loops in the same thread.

219

Dominion: Nocturne Previews / Re: Nocturne Initial Impressions

« on: November 16, 2017, 05:27:34 pm »

Secret Cave looks interesting—obvious comparisons are Mill (cantrip DfB) and the next-turn effect of Swamp Hag, i.e. +$3. Where Mill is good at hitting $5 early, Secret Cave looks good at spiking to $6 or sometimes $7. It probably plays well in a Minion stack that's either lightly trashed down, or trashed back up with green, or that just doesn't do enough with an even Minion split; there it probably plays about the same as Mill.

Obvious Nocturne synergy is Faithful Hound. I was waiting for doggie's other shoe to drop. In general, DfB and other action-phase payload plays well with draw-to-x, such as Cursed Village.

Den of Sin is a non-terminal Enchantress without the attack. Cards (and actions) are at their most precious at the start of your turn; I probably want it whenever I'm building an engine, 4 is good and 6 is better, but I probably don't want it to be my only draw.

Tragic Hero seems the... hardest to use for great effect. In BM it's a Smithy for $5, which is slower than a Smithy for $4. In an engine... meh, you'll want action phase payload because it'll play somewhat like a draw-to-x because you don't want more than x; gaining a treasure anti-(self-)synergizes with that kind of deck.

I'm notsureif Guardian passes the Lighthouse test or vice versa; I guess with good deck tracking, a tactically timed Guardian can help you hit $n+1.

Sacred Grove is a bigger and better Woodcutter. When that's your +buy you take it.

I have no idea about Tormentor.

Leprechaun: A Gold gainer for $3—eh, if only I knew how bad Hexes are on average. Opening double Gold gainer seems pretty okay if you're playing a money game.

220

Dominion: Nocturne Previews / Re: Nocturne Initial Impressions

« on: November 16, 2017, 03:36:41 pm »

I think with most Night cards the non-terminal nature is a big plus. [...] Do a big terminal draw and still trash stuff.

Oh hey, I still haven't quite internalized that Night cards are extra-super-special-non-terminal, in that you can't draw them dead.

I would get a Monastery in ~100% of my Smithy/BM games for this reason.

I'd mostly agree with your placement, although I think it could easily be on par or better than the weaker multi-trashers, depending on the kingdom of course.

So something like Chapel > Steward, Remake > Monastery > Temple, Trading Post?

Compared to Sentry, I think Monastery is... very different.

And the fact that you can trash a copper in play means you aren't forced into those awkward decisions of buying a better card earlier or trashing a copper or two.

True; something it has in common with Forager and trash-from-deck cards (Sentry, Lookout, Loan, Doctor). Of these, it's probably most similar to Forager.

221

Dominion: Nocturne Previews / Re: Nocturne Initial Impressions

« on: November 16, 2017, 03:18:52 pm »

I think Changeling has the potential to be pretty strong—King's Court for $3, <8>-cost or potion-cost cards for $3, seems pretty nice. I'm very unsure about how costly gain-via-Changeling is—it's $3 (and a buy), but it's also a card you have to draw in order to play with your other card (which takes luck), and it takes time before you draw the copy you gained. Probably it's something you aim to do when your engine is just about up and running and it's time to add payload?

The strength of Changeling will obviously be highly kingdom-dependent, more so than your average card. I think it'll synergize well with Silver gainers—Lucky Coin and Masterpiece spring to mind.

222

Dominion: Nocturne Previews / Re: Nocturne Initial Impressions

« on: November 16, 2017, 02:41:01 pm »

I think Conclave seems really weak and not interesting at all, but maybe I'm missing something.

I think Conclave:Festival::Imp:Laboratory (except for missing +1 buy), approximately. Among the 96 $5'ers in the Qvist rankings, Laboratory is 23 and Festival is 58, so maybe this'll be a middling $4-coster?

To serve as the sole village of an engine, it needs multiple different cards that draw. The fact that it doesn't draw a card by itself restricts its use quite a bit. On the other hand, it provides economy while you build up; maybe that compensates for it being a... shall we say wonky village?

Monastery will obviously be really strong. It only costs 2; It is essentially non-terminal, and it can trash coppers that are IN PLAY. Obviously, this is not quite as good as chapel, but it can really do some work I think.

This is not obvious to me.

Trashing is most valuable early. Number of cards gained per turn is low early and high mid-to-late game. The effect of getting to play the copper you trash is roughly comparable to the +$1 from Forager, another non-terminal trasher—unless you can play and then trash multiple Coppers.

I think the best case is something like "play Ironworks to gain a card, buy a card for $3 and trash two Coppers". That's a pretty strong turn 12 to 15 3 or 4 turn, but it's also somewhat unlikely. More likely is something like Monastery, Estate, 3xCopper. Here you buy a card for $3 and trash an Estate; a Salvager or Moneylender would've let you hit $5 (but they also cost more).

I think it'll be a pretty decent trasher; probably somewhere between the better single-card trashers and the weaker multi-card trashers, which is... just exactly among the top ~25% of trashers? Maybe?

223

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

« on: November 16, 2017, 12:36:01 pm »

Gherald, is your definition of synergy subjective?

Festival+Library do synergize, because together they offset negatives/deficiencies of each other in a way that makes them behave in a way that's greater than the sum of what you can normally use them for.

How is Festival+Library different from Festival plus other draw-to-x? Are they all instances of synergy?
How is Festival+Library different from Library plus other disappearing village giving +$ and +buy (I can think of Villa)? Are they all instances of synergy?

Village/Smithy, Village/Patrol and Fortress/Catacombs are all very similar and slightly different. What's the difference between one set of differences and the other?

[Village/Smithy] do useful additive things that harmonize well, but are not "synergetic" in a way that distinguishes them from what they already bring to the table in other kingdoms.

So is your definition of synergy something like "In expectation it holds that Strength(X + Y in the context of 8 random cards) > Strength(X in the context of 9 random cards) + Strength(Y in the context of 9 random cards))"? I think this captures your notion of "what you can normally use [X and Y] for".

('8/9 random cards' is shorthand for 'in a kingdom chosen uniformly at random among those which have X/Y/both', and maybe the right hand side should be combined with 'average' rather than 'plus'.)

Something I think is true of this definitions: if we assume terminal draw is stronger (in expectation) on boards with villages, then smaller the probability of having a village on a random board, the more likely it is that each particular <terminal draw, that village> pair is an example of synergy, simply because "Strength(X in the context of 9 random cards)" gives a lower weight to the strength of <X, that village>.

So, with my proposed rigor-ification of your (Gherald's) definition, whether X+Y exhibits synergy is a function not only of X and Y—and maybe the other cards in the kingdom—but also the set of cards that are not in the kingdom but are in some other kingdoms. I think that's a bad feature for a definition of synergy to have; I think it should merely be about the interaction of X and Y.

My proposed formula might—I haven't really thought this through—be a good definition of what I would call "relative (magnitude of) synergy".

Village+Smithy [...] [both] do useful additive things

Do you think Village does something useful in the 1-card kingdom {Village}? How about {Village, Baker}? How about {Village, Baker, Harbinger, Warehouse, Minion, Highway, Ratcatcher, Rebuild, Forum, Chariot Race}, or any other kingdom with Village and 9 non-terminals? Do you think, like I think most people think, that Village only does something useful in combination with terminals?

Consider the following variant: flip three coins; if they're all heads, include Smithy in the kingdom, otherwise don't. Then add Village and random non-terminals to the kingdom. Play a normal game of Dominion in this kingdom. Do you think Village and Smithy have synergy in this game?  (If it's true only for some probabilities of including Smithy but not others, why does the probability matter?)

224

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

« on: November 15, 2017, 07:17:18 pm »

Synergy is [...] generally defined as [...] "greater than the sum of its parts".

[...] The very reason I am objecting to people's use of synergy with regard to things like Village+Smithy

I hope I'm not misrepresenting what you take synergy to mean. I certainly don't intend to.

I think Village+Smithy has synergy by the quoted definition.

As a baseline, imagine a deck with some treasures, including Counterfeit or Charm or some other treasure with +buy.
Then, add a bunch of Villages. With no other action cards, they do nothing.
If instead of Villages you add Smithies, you have your typical Smithy/BM deck.
If you add enough Smithies that you're quite overterminaled, adding the Villages (which did nothing on their own) will do more than nothing.

If Smithy/Village/"BM" is greater than just Smithy/BM but Village/BM is the same as BMU, I think that's "greater than the sum of their parts".

Maybe the disagreement here is over which baseline to use?

(I don't think the +buy is necessary for my example to work: Village/Smithy/treasures can hit $8 more reliably than Smithy/treasures and be better in that way.)

225

Dominion: Nocturne Previews / Re: Another awful thread about nothing

« on: November 15, 2017, 07:06:07 pm »

The definition of synergy being floated by many here is being called arbitrary by many others. It is not. A good definition of synergy is:

X and Y have synergy iff Strength of (X + Y) > Strength of X + Strength of Y.

The problem here is one of clarifying scope.

"Strength of X" all by itself? Strength of X on a typical board where you'd use X?

The latter is the one I'm interested in when I look for synergy. X typically brings a certain strength to the table, Y typically brings a certain strength. Those are fast priors I know from all my previous play experience. But here we have X+Y, so is that better or worse than what I typically use X and Y for?

If I usually use X and Y for different things than you use them for, could their interaction be synergy for you but not me (or vice versa)? Is 'synergy' defined subjectively?

If you usually use X and Y for their interaction with commonly occurring functions, e.g. you're using villages for their interactions with terminal draw and terminal draw for its interaction with payload, do those interactions fail to qualify as synergies merely because you've used them often?  If we don't have the same amount of experience, could an interaction be synergy for you but not for me (or vice versa)?

If I typically use Herbalist to topdeck Philosopher's Stone (and only that), is Herbalist+PhilStone not a synergy? Abstracted and generalized, if X+Y is the thing you use X (and maybe also Y) for, is it synergy?

For clarity's sake: your board analysis process is probably fine; that's not what I'm commenting on. But your board analysis process and everything you bring to it is a bad place to start an attempt at defining synergy. Maybe the thing you care about is "strategically important synergy" or "[other adjective] synergy", which is different from synergy proper.

You old farts had a thing that collected play data and calculated "win rate with" certain cards, I understand. Maybe win-rate-with-x-and-y > win-rate-with-x + win-rate-with-y is evidence that the player in question is exploiting some kind of synergy? (I think this is a bad definition of synergy, but plausible evidence for its existence.)

Maybe something like this could serve as a first draft of a rigorous definition of synergy: the impact on the probability of you winning one game when adding x and y to your deck is greater than the sum of the impacts of just adding x or y by themselves, assuming otherwise optimal play from everyone.