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3176

Dominion General Discussion / Re: THE Dominion Card List(s): $5 cards

« on: February 02, 2012, 05:57:30 pm »

+2VP in the endgame is "rarely significant"? Yikes man.

Farmland chains are indeed generally terrible, and certainly not how Farmland should generally be played. Overall, Farmland is a fine if slightly undewhelming card you often buy once or twice (in the right situations, hopefully). Adventurer, you pretty much never buy.

+2VP is not insignificant until you put it in the context of essentially needing 6$+Gold. If it's a BM deck with 2-3 Golds, you're making a mistake with an early gold trash in the first few provinces and you're either looking very good (because you have a superior deck) or very bad (because you got a bad shuffle) if you get 6+Gold after 4 provinces are gone.

 I'm not saying Farmlands can never be bought advantageously, but I would made the analogy that Adventurer:Farmland::Saboteur:Stash. Saboteur is a worse card head-to-head in most decks, but it can be crucial in certain situations. Stash, on the other hand, has Chancellor (analogous to BV for Farmland, I guess) which makes it great and is barely, barely better than a silver in other games.

3177

Dominion General Discussion / Re: THE Dominion Card List(s): $5 cards

« on: February 02, 2012, 01:43:59 pm »

Now, for the real drama.  Are we going to see a unanimous #1 vote, or perhaps a unanimous #14 vote, on the $6-plus list?  It strikes me as a real possibility, given how obvious (I think) the best and worst cards are, but even Chapel didn't earn that honor, so who knows!

#1 I seriously doubt. People will vote for GM. People will vote Goons. Last place... maybe. It's SO clear. But somehow I doubt it.

Am I missing something? I would rank Farmland as the worst 6$ card (though I didn't rank), but I know there's a ton of adventurer-hate on this forum (I would still rank it second worse even though I think it's underrated; it's frequently ignored when it's a better buy over gold).

Adventurer could be underrated and it'd still be the worst 6-plus by a huge, gaping margin.  Not only does this forum dislike Adventurer, isotropic at large hates it too, buying it less often than every card save Chancellor, Counting House, Navigator, Stash, and Harvest.  And its win stats really aren't any better than those cards either.  Okay, sometimes it's a better buy than Gold: those "sometimes" are like ten percent of the time.  Farmland is no great shakes either, but at least it's always something you need to watch ot for in the endgame.

http://councilroom.com/win_rate_diff_accum.html?cards=Cost%3D%3D6 is a pretty stark depiction of what I'm talking about.  By and large, Adventurer just doesn't belong in this cost tier.

When do you really need to watch out for it in the endgame? Most of the time: buy a farmland to trash for a province, and hey, you could have bought that Province anyways. a 9$ hand in late, late endgame with gold gives you +2VP over a province.. which is rarely significant. Farmland chains are really, really bad the vast majority of the time. So really the best use of Farmland is when you have a border village setup.

Adventurer works with: Moneylender/Spice Merchant with sufficient +actions, Fools Gold, Bank, to a lesser extent HOP, really any form of decent copper trashing. It is a soft counter top junking decks and allows you to green earlier. It Colony games, like most other money-centric cards, it becomes far better.

That being said, I probably buy farmland more frequently than adventurer, however infrequently I buy either. But in Farmland games I buy it mostly to be in correct form, it almost never decides a game. Adventurer, while certainly almost never dominant, can actually occasionally be the difference between a loss and a win. 

3178

Dominion General Discussion / Re: THE Dominion Card List(s): $5 cards

« on: February 02, 2012, 01:18:46 pm »

Now, for the real drama.  Are we going to see a unanimous #1 vote, or perhaps a unanimous #14 vote, on the $6-plus list?  It strikes me as a real possibility, given how obvious (I think) the best and worst cards are, but even Chapel didn't earn that honor, so who knows!

#1 I seriously doubt. People will vote for GM. People will vote Goons. Last place... maybe. It's SO clear. But somehow I doubt it.

Am I missing something? I would rank Farmland as the worst 6$ card (though I didn't rank), but I know there's a ton of adventurer-hate on this forum (I would still rank it second worse even though I think it's underrated; it's frequently ignored when it's a better buy over gold).

3179

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Fan Card - Profiteer

« on: February 01, 2012, 11:49:27 pm »

I think the plus-action is really necessary for this card to work at all. Even then, there are many games where there are no price-based alterations in the Kingdom, and in those cases this card is terrible. At least highway is still a +1$ cantrip and Bridge is at minimum a possible terminal Gold.

Do you think it would be better with +1 card added, or is that too close to being strictly better than Highway (only disadvantage being that the cost modifier is one card instead of all cards)?

The reaction effect as is also is a bit brokenly powerful against certain trashes: Develop a King's Court and receive nothing instead of a Province/Gold. A hilarious counter against Swindler, though (a free Upgrade is always appreciated).

Being able to screw around with your opponent's trashers is the point, but do you think the reaction is too powerful as written?  Would it be better if the reaction affected only the individual trashed card, allowing you to Develop it back into another copy of the same card?

I'm not quite sure what would balance it as a 5$. +1$ has a chance of doing the trick-- it seems similar to minion in that it's a disappearing +2$ (effectively) with advantages at times (minion is still probably better in most games, but that's a high bar anyways)

As to the reaction: Possibly restrict the reaction to only when your card is trashed? Still counters swindler, saboteur, Bishop (softly), Governor (assuming the price manipulation comes before the gain, you get the same benefit as your opponent), thief/PS/Noble Brigand (softly, like any of these need countering)

3180

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Fan Card - Profiteer

« on: February 01, 2012, 07:49:42 pm »

Got $7 and can't decide between Border Village and Gold?  Make Border Village cost $7, buy it, and use its on-gain ability to pick up a Gold at the same time.

More effectively, make the gold cost one less when you have $6 and gain both 

I think the plus-action is really necessary for this card to work at all. Even then, there are many games where there are no price-based alterations in the Kingdom, and in those cases this card is terrible. At least highway is still a +1$ cantrip and Bridge is at minimum a possible terminal Gold.

The reaction effect as is also is a bit brokenly powerful against certain trashes: Develop a King's Court and receive nothing instead of a Province/Gold. A hilarious counter against Swindler, though (a free Upgrade is always appreciated).

3181

Dominion Articles / Re: Seaside: Treasure Map

« on: January 30, 2012, 07:31:08 pm »

Missing from the article is Chancellor/TM. Not as good of an enabler as Warehouse is, but proper use of discard is significantly quicker than TM alone and allows for ridiculousness such as this turn 4 TM trashing.

http://councilroom.com/game?game_id=game-20120125-140652-1d307640.html

3182

Dominion General Discussion / Combo: Highway/Saboteur

« on: January 28, 2012, 05:33:55 pm »

First post on these forums... so hi! Feel free to move or something if I post this incorrectly/it's already been posted somewhere.

Many of the problems surrounding Saboteur relate to it's high variance-- if you hit a province 3x in a row, great. If you hit 3 silvers, you might just be trashing a card that's not even that helpful to your opponent outside of the opening. Highway eliminates that risk entirely if you have decent enough trashing: play one before Saboteur, and you're guaranteed to miss his lowly cantrips and silvers. Play 2 or more, and you've assured yourself of hitting cards that are most likely vital to their engine or important to their BM deck (gold/plat). 4 highways than a saboteur is a guaranteed province-hit in province games, though this may be too difficult to set up for it to be worth it. If you can execute this on a reasonable ratio of the turns (as is done in the below game), your opponent most likely will be unable to catch up quickly enough.

If you play way too many, you're going to hit nothing (6 highways and province- is @ 2). But if you're doing that consistently anyways, you've most likely won in the next turn or two regardless.

This also works to a lesser extent with bridge, but highway is far easier to set up due to its cantrip abilities.



http://councilroom.com/game?game_id=game-20120121-172826-f42da6d6.html

I lost this game by a considerable margin, partially because of poor play, partially because he drew torturer, KC, apprentice, fishing village, lab, saboteur, and highway (which was ironically vetoed by him at the start of the game).

I spent much of the game raging against his BM luck (which was justified) and his Saboteur luck (which obviously wasn't). It wasn't until near the end that I realized that the lack of desirable 4-costs and his order of HWY-Saboteur was guaranteed to take out a bazaar/council room every turn.