I was pretty pleased with myself yesterday: I finally hit level 35 on Isotropic. It's a goal I never expected to reach, especially since only a little over a month ago a losing streak had taken me down to 25. I may well lose some more in the future, but I'm pretty sure I've learned a few interesting things over the last couple of months, and you might be interested in some of them?
I am writing with the perspective that playing Dominion skillfully and well is what's really important, but but having a good rating, well, that's nice too.
Dominion PlayEndgame ControlThe stronger I have become, the more games I have seen end in a deliberate three-pile ending. This can happen in a lot of ways, but the most important ones are where both players are setting up powerful engines or giant megaturns, but one player is able to deplete the piles and short-circuit the game. Here are a couple of examples:
In general, cards that give buys, cost-reducers, and cantrips should get your 3-pile senses tingling. Peddler, Bridge, Hamlet, Market, Highway, and Worker’s Village are likely suspects.
Of course, the PPR is another important endgame consideration. Most level 25 players should at least be familiar with the rule. More advanced players should know when to break it—for example, if based on what’s remaining in the decks, your next turn is likely to yield a Province and your opponent’s isn’t.
The Importance Of BuysNothing is sillier than having $25 and only one buy, but megaturns aside, there are many reasons why +Buys can be important. They can help prevent a deck that hits $11 or $12 from stalling out; they can help you pick up the little engine pieces when you need them; they can boost your Goons turn or help pile out a game. Sometimes the cards you are using anyway have +Buys and that’s great. Other times, though, you need to figure out how to squeeze them in. Maybe you pick up a Market instead of the third Lab, a Council Room instead of a Rabble, or a Nomad Camp instead of a Silver. Maybe you buy a Trade Route just for the +Buy because you’re eventually going to have a huge Apprentice-fueled turn.
Apprentice is probably the #1 suspect for a card that can really get along with +Buys but doesn’t provide them itself. Minion, Embassy, Stables, Bank, and big (Envoy/Smithy)/village chains are other likely candidates.
Deck AwarenessThe best Dominion masters talk about using cards like Apothecary to carefully control their deck composition and shuffling. I'm not that good, but knowing whether your important cards are in the deck or the discard can help you make smart plays that look like luck to the unaided eye. Examples:
- If I play this Moat, will I draw my Witch dead?
- Two cards in your deck, and you have a Moat in your hand and already $8 for a Province. Have you seen your Gold already? If so, draw those cards to get your junk out of the way. If not, save the good cards for next turn.
- Knowing where your opponent's big cards are is important too. For example, if your opponent opens Village-Militia, it's important to know if you've already seem the Masquerade this shuffle (in which case you can keep your three best cards) or not (in which case you'd better keep a bad one.)
Purchase OrderBy the mid-20 level, you should have a pretty solid idea of what cards are generally powerful and what combinations are powerful. What's not always so obvious is the order to buy these cards in. For example, you may be planning a Caravan/Conspirator chain with Remodel to pick up $4s and Militia to slow your opponent down. That's four Kingdom cards you need to think about gaining, not to mention money. A deck like this can succeed or fail based on the order you buy the cards in--the timeliness of the attacks, the cycling to shuffle more, the chances for terminals to collide. I am usually more of a BM-style player, so this is something I still need to learn a lot about; often I'm amazed to see my opponent pull together an engine I didn't think would work.
Isotropic ConsiderationsPlay More GamesYou can read all the strategy articles and discussions you want, but practice is the only way to solidify those ideas into experience and skill. In addition to making you a better player, playing more games reduces your uncertainty, which improves your ranking. Don’t have an infinite amount of time to fit Dominion games into? Well...
Play Against Strong OpponentsPlaying against strong opponents is important for a number of reasons. Most importantly, you will improve more; you will learn more about the game if you get beaten by a well-executed Lab/Market/Conspirator dynamo than if you clobber a novice who buys three Loans to clear out their Coppers really fast. Strong players also tend to be experienced and play quickly, so you can play more games in the same block of time. A low-attack, BM-ish game between strong players can be over in 3 minutes. Conversely, a game against an unranked player might be against a novice who still needs to read most of the cards.
Beating stronger players is good for your rating, and losing to weaker players is bad. Quite a few Dominion games are straightforward enough to be decided mostly by luck—the player who doesn’t hit $2P on a Familiar board is a strong favorite, or the player who gets $6/$6 instead of $8/$4 in the early game. On a boards like this, you want to be angling for the upset.
If you use automatch and tend to accept most of your games, reducing the ranking range will increase the strength of your opponents. This is because there are fewer players at higher ranks; if you are level 25, going from +/- 20 to +/- 15 will remove a large number of level 6-10 novices but only a handful of level 40-45 masters from the pool of potential opponents.
This is not to say that you should only play against higher-rated players, but your games should be against opponents that provide you a reasonable challenge. (I play automatch at +/- 15, although I am considering going to +/- 10.)
Veto RandomVeto mode is awesome. It means my auto-matches don’t get rejected because there’s a card or combo my would-be opponent is uncomfortable with, and there’s still leeway to not play that one card that dominated the game you just finished. I used to, basically, look at the cards and veto the one I was most afraid of. That was a losing strategy: I was vetoing the card whose power I respected! I have had more success since I started vetoing randomly. I do veto Smugglers in first seat (because I want to win), as well as Scrying Pool (because those games take forever) and Tournament (because I hate it).
End Your Session on a WinEven if you're having a bad session, the first-player advantage is too large to ignore. Try to schedule your sessions long enough that you can play a couple games until you win. If you're getting frustrated by repeated losses, though, quit after that win--frustrated games are less enjoyable and you probably won't win as much either.
